The Hand on the Wall(85)

“What are you doing?” said a voice.

Nate, of course. He approached cautiously, his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his beaten khakis. She had been waiting for him. She knew he would come and find her in her thinking spot.

“Studying,” she said. “I have a quiz on the limbic system.”

Nate cast an eye on the article open on the tablet.

“That’s some bullshit, huh?”

“Nah,” she said, setting the tablet aside.

“Nah?”

“Nah.”

“Are you folksy now?” he said, sitting down next to her. “Nah? The DNA on that body didn’t match and you’re . . . okay?”

Stevie tucked her knees to her chest and looked over at her friend.

“Because I knew it wasn’t going to,” she said, smiling.

“Wait . . . are you saying you knew that wasn’t Alice?”

“Oh, it’s her,” Stevie said. “It’s Alice.”

“Not according to the tests.”

“There’s always been speculation that Alice was adopted,” Stevie said. “There’s no proof, but there was always a rumor.”

“A rumor won’t help you get millions of dollars.”

“Nope,” she said, smiling a bit.

“Now you’re smiling?” he said. “Are you trying to scare me?”

“See, here’s the thing that was bothering me,” Stevie said. “Once I knew Alice was back on the grounds, I kept wondering why. Alice didn’t die here. She died somewhere else. And the person responsible for her death was George Marsh. That much, I know. But why, if she died, would he do something so insane—bring her body back to her home and put it right under her father’s nose? I had to be missing something. So I went to the library. The Ellinghams had this thing called a clipping service—it’s like a human Google alert. Every time they were mentioned in an article in the news, the service would cut it out and send it to them. There’s boxes and boxes and boxes of this stuff in the library here. It hasn’t been digitized because no one really thought it was interesting or worth it. I had to read a lot of stuff—society reports and stuff about hats and dances and people sailing together. Did you know they used to report who was on famous ocean liners? Like, that was a whole news story. Anyway, it took me a few weeks, but I finally found this.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a copy of a clipping from a Burlington newspaper dated December 18, 1932.

“Read it out loud,” she said, handing it to Nate.

Nate took the paper cautiously and began to read.

“‘Wife to Albert Ellingham’—that’s nice, she’s not her own person or anything—‘gives birth in Switzerland. Businessman and philanthropist Albert Ellingham and his wife, Mrs. Iris Ellingham, welcomed a baby girl on Thursday, December 15, in a private hospital outside the city of Zermatt, in the Swiss Alps. Both mother and daughter are doing well, according to Robert Mackenzie, personal secretary to Mr. Ellingham. The child has been named Alice.’ Why am I reading this?”

“Keep going.”

“‘Mr. Ellingham is of course known locally for his property on Mount Morgan, where he intends to open a school. The Ellinghams chose a different snowy mountain setting for the birth to avoid publicity, according to Mr. Mackenzie. They were accompanied on their trip abroad by Miss Flora Robinson, a friend to—’”

“There it is,” she said.

“There what is?”

“I already knew that Alice was born in Switzerland,” she said, her eyes glistening. “But I didn’t know they went with a friend. One friend. Flora Robinson. Iris’s best friend.”

“Makes sense, I guess? Take your friend if you’re going on a long trip to give birth?”

“Or,” Stevie said, “they went away to the Alps, to a super private place, so that Flora could give birth and they could arrange the adoption. Adoptions are personal things. If it had happened here, the press could have leaked it. Maybe they didn’t want Alice to know, or they wanted to be the ones to tell her, on their own time. People have a right to privacy, especially when it comes to their kids.”

“Just because Flora went to Switzerland with them doesn’t mean she gave birth to Alice, does it?” Nate asked.

Stevie closed the DNA article on her tablet and brought up a digital notebook of scans, all of long pages with neat, elaborate handwriting.

“Charles was nice enough to give me the house records, probably to keep me busy. I made copies of them for myself because I like to make my own fun. The Ellingham house was the kind of place where everything got written down, all the visitors, all the menus. So let’s go back to March 1932. Who’s here? Flora Robinson. So let’s see what she’s doing. . . .”

Stevie triumphantly showed the next pages of scans. These were of menus, daily lists of what was served at the main table and to all the guests.

“Look at Flora Robinson in March. This is her normal breakfast.”

She held up one of the menu pages.

Guest, Miss Flora Robinson, breakfast tray service: coffee with milk and sugar, tomato juice, toast and marmalade, scrambled egg, sliced ham, orange slices.

“You’ll see, she gets this almost every day, same thing. She loves her tomato juice and scrambled eggs and orange slices. But then, we get to mid-May, and it all changes.”