The Hand on the Wall(76)
Stevie began to move around the room, carefully avoiding stepping on the heads of the trophy rugs.
“ . . . it’s so much money. I mean, what would anyone do if they were handed a chance to get seventy million dollars? The codicil was clear—you couldn’t collect. But what if you had a partner, someone who could locate the body and technically get the money? You could arrange to split it. You needed someone who could plausibly find something buried on the grounds, someone you could manipulate. And you found her. Dr. Irene Fenton, someone obsessed with the Ellingham case. Someone with a drinking problem. You’d arrange it so that she would find the body. She’d collect the money and you’d divide it up. Hunter, you said your aunt was talking to someone up at Ellingham, but you didn’t know who.”
“She was,” Hunter said. “She wouldn’t talk about it.”
“We’ll get into Fenton later. First, there’s Hayes.”
Stevie stopped by the mantel and looked into the face of the clock.
“Hayes was mad,” Stevie said. “He was complaining all the time about not being able to go to California, about how you wouldn’t let him come and go and get credit for it. All of a sudden, Hayes was all smiles. You said that Hayes could have a flexible schedule and go to California if he completed a project about the Ellingham kidnapping. What made you change your mind?”
“The fact that he was driving me nuts,” Charles said. “He kept coming to my office to complain.”
Stevie turned around to face him.
“Which means he must have seen or heard something he shouldn’t have. Whatever happened, you worked out a deal with him—he could do a project and then he could go to Hollywood. But that wasn’t enough. Did he threaten you? Did he look into things more? Something happened, because you decided that Hayes had to die. So you gave him access to the tunnel.”
“Something I’ll never forgive myself for.”
“So here’s how it worked,” Stevie said. “The day before Hayes’s death, you took the first necessary step. You knew Janelle’s pass opened the maintenance building. When we were in yoga, you came into the art barn and slipped it out of her bag. No one would pay any attention to you walking around the art barn. No one was going to think you were going to take a pass. You made sure that at some point that day, Hayes touched the pass. Maybe called him to your office, handed him something, whatever. You had to make sure his fingerprints were on it. That night, you used the pass to access the dry ice and you put it in the room at the end of the tunnel and shut the door. The dry ice sublimated that night, filling the room with enough carbon dioxide to cause anyone to drop within a minute. The trap was set and locked. You just needed the bait.”
Again, Stevie’s mind traveled to the moment that night, when everyone making the video was walking to dinner, and Hayes turned back toward the sunken garden alone.
“After we had completed filming up in the garden that day,” Stevie said, “Hayes said he had to do something. He wouldn’t say what. What he had to do was meet with you. He went into the tunnel and he didn’t come out. You made it look like Hayes died as a result of his own stupidity. Everyone assumed it was an accident, except me. But you had thought about that too.”
“Thank you for thinking I did all of this well. If you’re going to be in a murder mystery, you don’t want to be a dud.”
For the first time, his smile had a brittle, forced quality.
“You—correctly—assumed I would take an interest. I mean, it only makes sense. I was the detective. I’m interested in crime. So you made your first big mistake. The night before all of this happened, you snuck outside my window and projected an image on my wall, a version of the Truly Devious letter. When the police came, if I started rambling about messages on my wall, I’d seem like someone who was making things up for attention, like I was a little crazy. The Hayes matter was settled, and you could move on and take care of finding the body. But then, there was another problem, on the night of the Silent Party, the night I confronted Ellie about The End of It All. That night we all came here to this room. Ellie sat right there . . .”
She pointed at the low leather chair that Hunter was currently occupying.
“Did you have any idea that Hayes hadn’t written the show by himself?” she asked Charles. “Were you shocked when Ellie starting crying and saying things like . . .”
She couldn’t remember the exact words for a second.
“Why did I pay attention to him?” David chimed in. “That’s what she said. Hayes and his stupid ideas. That’s what got him killed.”
“It must have freaked you out,” Stevie said, “to find out that Hayes didn’t work alone, that he may have told Ellie something about what he’d seen or heard, and now Ellie was on the verge of talking. You had to think fast. So you brought the whole thing to a halt and said you had to call the school’s lawyer. This seemed like the nice, responsible thing to do. When we were all leaving the room, did you whisper to her? Tell her there was a way out in the wall? Maybe you said that she should run, and wait in a place in the basement, and you would help her. She was terrified, and she bolted. She went down to the basement, down into the passageway. All you had to do was push something over the opening. Again. Impersonal. Clean. Just another accident. Ellie wouldn’t even know what happened.”