Truly Devious

by Maureen Johnson

  There was no lower insult than this, and having to say she didn’t like Edward King was even worse. Edward King was famously disgusting—rich, corrupt, vain. He was the root of a lot of the trouble in Stevie’s life. In less than thirty seconds, David had made two successful digs in the softest parts of her psyche.

  “I’m not a fan,” she said in a low voice.

  “Oh. I was going to say, it sounds like your parents—”

  “I don’t know why they like him,” she snapped. “I try to work that one out all the time. I kind of want to get away from it here, so . . .”

  “Sure,” he said, loping along. “You can’t control your parents. I mean, my mother is a beekeeper and my father invented the smorgasbord.”

  They had reached the blue door of Minerva. He tapped his ID to the panel to admit them.

  “We have time to get to know each other,” he said. “So much time. See you around.”

  He turned and went back the way they had come. He didn’t even go inside. Stevie was left to wonder what the hell had just happened to her.

  This would not be Stevie’s only strange encounter that day. The next would come an hour or two later, in the form of Hayes Major leaning in her doorway as she was trying to read.

  “Hey,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”

  He was wearing a tight white T-shirt. A fresh one. Possibly never worn before. (Stevie didn’t buy white T-shirts. Their shelf life was too short.)

  “Do you mind if I come in?” he asked.

  “Sure?” she said.

  He left the door wide open and came inside with his easy, comfortable way. She indicated that the floor was his, if he wanted to stay. He didn’t sit; he squatted. It didn’t look even remotely comfortable; it just showed off the tone of his leg muscles and the outline of his patellae. (Anatomy word! Kneecaps. She was already using her knowledge.)

  “I had an idea,” he said as he balanced on his little invisible stool. “You mentioned the other day that you needed a project. So do I. I was thinking, what if we worked together on something?”

  Dust motes danced in the air between Hayes and Stevie. In the bright, late-afternoon light, his hair had an actual glow, like it was spun of golden thread. He could have been a statue model in Greece or Rome. The light was so rich that he seemed like a statue now, an otherworldly nature made of light and shade, with a southern accent and a formfitting shirt. Stevie wasn’t sure if the wooziness she felt around him was attraction, or just numb confusion as her brain tried to work out his exact species. “Looks human,” it was saying to itself, “but cannot be. Cheekbones not possible. Is simulation. Origin unknown.”

  “Together?” she said, pulling herself out of her mental wanderings.

  “See, my agent . . .” He dug a neatly manicured fingernail coyly into the wooden floor as he said this word. “. . . thinks I should make another series. I’ve been thinking about what to do, and I thought . . . what about the stuff that happened here? The crimes. The kidnapping thing. You know about that.”

  “About?” Hayes was super distracting to talk to in close quarters, and now he was talking about making a series. None of this made sense.

  “The crimes,” he said again. “You know about the crimes, right? The crime here? Crimes?”

  “Crimes,” she repeated. “Yeah. I do. But . . . what?”

  She was not coming off well.

  “You’d be, like, the technical director. The expert. I even had an idea for a trailer. We could shoot it in that tunnel, the one under the sunken garden.”

  Everything came into sharp focus in a second.

  “The tunnel?” she said. “You mean the one the kidnappers used?”

  “Under the sunken garden,” he repeated.

  “That tunnel has been filled in since 1938,” Stevie said.

  “They dug it out in the spring,” Hayes said, his smile widening. “For construction. They started at the end of last school year. I’ve already been in it.”

  “You were in the tunnel?” Stevie said. She was leaning forward and she made no effort to hide the urgency in her voice.

  “Once,” he said. “Last year, when they first excavated it.”

  The idea of the tunnel being open again had never occurred to Stevie. She really did not believe in fate, but the timing of this was incredible.

  “I was just thinking how it would be a good place to make something. And you’re here now, and you know all the stuff about the crimes. People would like that. We’d be the first ones to show what the tunnel looks like.”

  Stevie’s heart was pounding hard.

  “Are we allowed in there?”

  “Well . . .” Hayes unfurled his smile slowly. “Technically, we don’t know about it. They tried to hide the fact that they opened it up, but I was back there one day and we saw that they were taking out tons of dirt.”

  “And you actually went in?”

  “Actually went in,” Hayes said. “But it’s just an idea. If you’re too busy, I understand. . . .”

  “I’ll do it,” Stevie said. “Write. Or, whatever. I’ll do it.”

  “Great!” Hayes replied. “So, you’ll get Nate. And you guys can write something over the weekend? By Monday?”

  “Wait, what?”

  “It doesn’t have to be long,” Hayes said. “Five pages or something. Ten. Just something about the crime, something that happens in the tunnel. Didn’t some student die? Or the thing with the ransom? Wasn’t there a thing with the ransom? With a boat or something? In the sunken garden?”

  Stevie nodded.

  “So that,” Hayes said. “Do that. Write something with the tunnel and something about the ransom in the sunken garden. We can do that. This is going to be great.”

  Minutes later, he was gone, and Stevie wondered how you made a script. It was a minor point. She was going into the tunnel. That was all that mattered.

  Strange conversation three was instigated by Stevie.

  “Think about it,” Stevie said, sitting in Nate’s desk chair later that evening. “I could give you all the facts. There are transcripts. There are files. It’s practically written. You’d barely need to do anything.”

  “I don’t know anything about writing scripts,” Nate said.

  “But you write!”

  “Scripts are totally different,” Nate said. “Scripts are . . . they’re like an X-ray of a book. Just the bones. The words people say and the things they do. Books are . . . everything. What the characters see and feel and how everything is told.”

  “It sounds easier,” Stevie pointed out.

  “It’s a different thing,” Nate said. “I’m supposed to show Dr. Quinn outlines for the next three chapters of my book, plus all this reading . . .”

  “Maybe,” Stevie said, “if you wrote this, Dr. Quinn would let you have more time on the book. You could write this instead of that for a while? They love group projects here.”

  Much like Stevie had been lured in by the tunnel, Nate could not resist the offer of skipping out on his book.

  “So I take this stuff and make it into some scripts,” he said. “And you do what?”

  “I advise on technical matters.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I explain what happened,” she said. “I help you. We could call it Truly Devious.”

  Nate exhaled long through his nose.

  “Fine,” he said. “Anything is better than doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  April 14, 1936, 3:00 p.m.

  ROBERT MACKENZIE WAS SUPERVISING THE DELIVERY OF LARGE SUMS of cash from New York. Two hundred thousand dollars was piled on the floor throughout the day. As he and George Marsh sorted the money, Ellingham removed two small blue bottles from a cabinet, along with a fine brush.

  “What’s that?” Marsh asked.

  “A solution that Nair brewed up that we use for our games,” Ellingham said. “It dries completely clear. To see it, you need to use a solution and a special light. This stuff is so good that I’
ve often suggested to Nair that he sell it to the government. If for some reason things don’t go as they should tonight, I want to be able to track these bills.”

  The bills were marked down the side with a slash of the paint. Ellingham took the further measure of marking the bundle wrappers with his fingerprint. Fans were placed around the room to dry everything quickly, and then the money was packed into four bags.

  “I got some people out watching street corners tonight,” Marsh said. “Didn’t tell them why or what for—just to mark down license plates and anything unusual. I gave them fifty cents each if they give me good info.”

  “Give them five dollars each,” Ellingham said. “Give them whatever they want!”

  “For five dollars,” Marsh replied, “they’ll know this is big and they might start coming up with stories. Fifty cents keeps them honest and the profile low.”

  Robert Mackenzie watched this all nervously.

  The call with instructions came at 7:07 that evening. The instructions said to move the money into Burlington and wait by a selected telephone booth for a call. Ellingham himself drove the car, with Robert Mackenzie and George Marsh riding along. Each man brought a revolver. They arrived just before 8:00 p.m., when the phone rang. From there, they were instructed to drive toward Rock Point.

  Rock Point is very much what it sounds like—a rocky point off the side of Burlington, jutting into Lake Champlain. The point was largely uninhabited and the terrain rough. Once they arrived, they found an arrow chalked on the ground, pointing to the narrow dirt-and-rock path toward the water.

  “Robert,” Ellingham said, “you stay here with the car.”

  Robert looked at the pitch-black path into the rocky wooded point.

  “Mr. Ellingham, this is . . .”

  “You heard me, Robert. Stay here. If you see or hear nothing from us in an hour, turn around and drive back into town and get help.”

  Ellingham switched on his flashlight. His shoes slipped a bit against the slick rocks as he began the walk into the dark.

  “There’s a light ahead,” he said.

  The path was marked by a series of impromptu lanterns made out of tin cans that would later be traced back to a diner in town. The diner appeared to have nothing to do with the crime—they had simply put out their garbage the night before. The garbagemen on their route reported that their trash was empty in the morning. Someone had stolen the garbage.

  Even with the tiny tin-can lights, the path was treacherous and blind, and it got more so as the lights spread out and led to the cliff face. Finally, at one rocky ledge, they found three cans and a coiled rope. Below, a lantern flashed.

  “There’s a boat down there,” Marsh said, looking over carefully, his gun ready.

  “Use the rope,” called up a voice. “Lower the money.”

  “Not until you show us Mrs. Ellingham and Alice,” Marsh called back.

  “Look next to you.”

  Ellingham scrabbled around and called for his wife, but found on the ground a handbag and a child’s shoe.

  “We need a better sign,” Marsh said. “Proof of life.”

  Ellingham dropped his bag to the ground and tied the end of the rope to the handles. Marsh sighed and helped him secure it.

  “I’m putting the money on the rope,” Ellingham yelled. “Please, get my wife and child to a safe place so we can collect them. We have no interest in you, only them.”

  The money went over the rock face, all four bags of it. Ellingham tossed the rope end over the side.

  “That’s everything!” Ellingham yelled.

  Below, the lantern began to flicker in a strange pattern.

  “What are they doing?” Ellingham said. “What is that? It’s not Morse.”

  “I have no idea,” Marsh said, cocking his revolver.

  “Don’t shoot at that boat! They could be in there!”

  The lantern went out. For a solid minute, there was no sound but the gentle lapping of the water and the wind.

  “What’s happening?” Ellingham asked. For the first time that night, he sounded truly vulnerable and afraid.

  “I don’t know,” Marsh said.

  “Hello!” Ellingham yelled. “I gave you the money! What now? Where are they?”

  The tiny boat sailed into oblivion, along with any chance of recovering Iris or Alice.

  12

  THE PROCESS OF WRITING TRULY DEVIOUS, THE VIDEO SERIES, WAS not as smooth as Stevie had promised.

  On the first day, Nate greeted Stevie in the morning with a huge smile. “I drafted two chapters of the new book last night!” he said. “I mean, they’re drafts. I was writing so fast, Stevie. I swear to you I wrote like fifteen thousand words last night.”

  “Is that . . . good?” she asked.

  “I don’t know!” he said. “But it turns out that making me write this screenplay made me want to write anything else, which meant I worked on my book!”

  “Wait,” Stevie said, “wait, does that mean you didn’t write the script?”

  Nate shook his head happily.

  “Yep!” he said.

  By dinner, the story had changed.

  “Everything I wrote last night is terrible,” he said. “And we have no script. Let’s write this thing. Show me that stuff again.”

  This pattern repeated several times. Stevie would produce copied transcripts of the police interviews. These were all readily available online. Nate would go off to write. Nate would do something else. Finally, Stevie sat down with Nate at the farm table for five hours and side by side, passing the computer back and forth, they assembled ten pages of script.

  The scene opened in the tunnel, with Hayes reading the Truly Devious letter. Then it went to the scene of the ransom drop, with Hayes playing Albert Ellingham. How Hayes was going to play Albert Ellingham, a man thirty years his senior, was not their problem. Nor was the fact that this scene involved Albert Ellingham rowing a boat across a lake that was no longer there. What mattered was that it all took place in the sunken garden, because maybe if they shot there, Stevie could get into the observatory.

  Priorities.

  All in all, she was pleased with what they had done. The result looked script-like, with people saying words and doing things.

  On Monday evening, as it thundered outside, Stevie and Nate presented the script to a small team who assembled in the art barn. Along with her and Nate, there was Maris, who looked every inch the vixen in a tight, black, fuzzy sweater that was far too heavy for the weather. Her lips were a luminous poppy red. She had on semi-sheer black stockings with a seam running up the back, which she showed off by stretching her legs along the floor and rotating her feet, exposing her calves. She had a mug of smoky tea; its steam perfumed the space.

  “I think you guys know Maris,” Hayes said. “She’s going to help with the filming and direction.”

  There was also someone Stevie had seen before—in the yurt that first night. His face was long, with a high forehead and a lantern jaw and premature worry wrinkles in his forehead. He wore a long black coat and a scarlet scarf swung over his shoulders.

  “This is Dash,” Hayes said. “He’s going to be our stage manager. Dash is the best.”

  Hayes read out the script from his computer, with Maris filling in the set directions. It was rough in spots, and most of it was just verbatim from the various case documents, but Nate had given it enough of a shape. Stevie had chosen the best parts of the transcripts. And to his credit, Hayes did a good job of playing Albert Ellingham. Somehow, they had actually made something that felt like a show.

  “This is amazing,” Hayes said as he finished. “Hey, Maris, would you take a few pictures? Just to document the working process.”

  “Sure,” she said, pulling out her phone and taking a few photos of Hayes studying his computer.

  “I need more detail,” Dash said. “What was it like that night?”

  “It was foggy,” Stevie said.

  “We can do fog,” Dash said, p
ulling out his phone. “You want fog? We can for sure do fog.”

  “Lots of fog,” Hayes said.

  “Ooh, yeah.” Dash nodded. “I can rig a few T-90s all over the sunken garden. That chemical fog hangs low. We can make it look like the lake is full of fog.”

  “Great,” Hayes said. “Fog.”

  “I’m going to need fog machines, some poles to rig lights. We can make this work.”

  The next steps involved making it all work, and Stevie and Nate were not off the hook yet. There were costumes to assemble and props to prepare.

  For the costumes, Maris and Stevie went to the Ellingham Academy theater. It was a small, dedicated space that looked like a tiny Greek temple from the outside. The theater space had a long, low stage room for about a hundred people, and black walls. The costume area was accessed by climbing a ladder in the corner of the lobby, which led to an attic that was composed of two long rooms separated by a hallway only two feet wide.

  The costume closet was on one side, with a sharply sloped roof Stevie kept hitting her head on. It was crammed completely with clothes racks overstuffed with random clothing items that seemed to be loosely grouped by type. There was a rack thickly packed with men’s suiting of all kinds, a rack of coats, a rack of dresses from every era, racks of fuzzy things, plaster and plastic armor, amorphous items that probably made sense in some context like a giant foam French fry container and a brown sack covered in felt eyeballs.

  The floor was a sea of shoes and boots, and the racks above were hats, helmets, purses, shields, feathers (just feathers? Just feathers. Why?) and items of no known nature or provenance. The whole thing smelled like a thrift shop that had been baked in a low oven and felt like a too-tight and too-long hug by a rejected Muppet.

  Eventually, two suits were chosen, along with a hat and an overcoat. The prop closet, which was just as oppressive and even more loosely organized, produced a canvas bag and an oar for the fake boat.

  Wednesday evening brought something unexpected—construction. The group gathered in the workshop, a barn structure off to the side of the maintenance area. It was open and cold and contained things that didn’t feature much in Stevie’s daily life: tables with circular saws, racks of tools, large industrial bins. This was where the students of Ellingham came to make things that required space and tools and fire. This didn’t include too many people, but it did include Janelle, who had a welding mask over her face and was staring down two pieces of metal. She lifted the mask as Stevie came in, and waved.