The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  “I don’t. He got beaten up, and now he’s gone, and no one really knows where. Here, that can mean something. The last person who just went away ended up dead in the tunnel. So where is he? Do you know?”

  “No idea,” Stevie said.

  “And he was friends with Ellie. Do you think David could be in a tunnel too?”

  Stevie tapped her ID on the door panel and pushed her way into the art barn silently, leaving Germaine in the dark.

  The workroom in the art barn was now home to a large, strange contraption. Vi was hanging a wooden sign that read “RUBE’S DINER,” while Janelle moved around, checking things with a level. Janelle had taken the budget the school had granted her and also raided the castaways from the dining hall to create her machine. The poles had been put into place to make a frame that held gently tipped shelving, on which stacks of plates and cups and been glued into carefully calculated arrangements. There were small tables, deliberately angled chairs with more piles of plates and cups balanced on them. There were several old toasters and a board painted to represent a soda dispenser. Everything was connected by some plastic tubing that looked like the circulatory system of this diner version of a Frankenstein’s monster.

  Nate looked up from his computer.

  “That was a long talk you had,” he said.

  “I went to Burlington.”

  “How? They cut off the coaches since David did his beatdown and run.”

  “Okay!” Janelle said. “I’m ready to start.”

  Vi came over and sat next to Nate and Stevie. Nate looked at Stevie anxiously, but Stevie turned her attention straight ahead.

  “Okay,” Janelle said, nervously knotting her hands together. “So I’m going to do my speech and then I’ll run the machine. So. Here we go. The point of engineering is to make something complex into something simple. The point of a Rube Goldberg machine is to make something simple into something complex . . .”

  “Why?” Nate said.

  “For fun,” Janelle replied. “Because you can. Don’t interrupt. I have to do this. The point of engineering is to make something complex into something simple. The point of a Rube Goldberg machine is to make something simple into something complex. The Rube Goldberg machine started as a comic. Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who was also an engineer. He created a character called Professor Butts . . . someone’s going to laugh at that, right?”

  Vi gave a thumbs-up.

  “Okay, I’ll pause for laughter. A character called Professor Butts, who made ridiculous machines to do things like wipe his mouth with a napkin. People liked the comics so much that Rube Goldberg machines became a feature in his comics and then, later, a regular competition. . . .”

  Stevie’s mind was already drifting. Was this what murder was? Something simple that became complex?

  “. . . the dimensions cannot exceed ten feet by ten feet and can use only one hydraulic . . .”

  Who put that message on the wall? What was the point of it? Just to mess with her? If Hayes or David had done it and Ellie knew about it, why hadn’t she told Stevie?

  “. . . and this year’s challenge is to break an egg.”

  Janelle delicately placed an egg in a small egg cup on a table by the far wall where a white plastic sheet had been strung up.

  “So,” Janelle said, returning to the front of the long and winding machine. “Here we go!”

  She depressed the lever on one of the toasters, and it popped up a second later, shooting out a piece of plastic bread. This tipped a wooden lever above, which sent a little metal ball rolling down a series of small half-pipes attached to a menu board. The ball kept rolling, continuing over a tray in the hand of a chef figurine. It fell from there, plopping into a bowl on one side of a scale. This raised the opposite side, which triggered the release of another ball.

  The machine made so much sense. A seemingly pointless trigger set off the series of events. The ball rolled, knocking each strange little piece into play. Hayes making a video about the Ellingham case. Janelle’s pass being stolen to get the dry ice. The message on the wall. Hayes turning at the last moment on the day they were shooting, saying he had to go back for a minute to do something and never coming back again. Stevie realizing that Ellie had written the show. Ellie running into the walls, then getting into the tunnel and never coming out.

  Another ball was triggered, running down the rims of a stack of cups, which tumbled into the soda dispenser. This began pouring liquid into three plastic pitchers. These weighed something down and . . .

  Stevie blinked into alertness as three paintball guns fired off at the same time, all pointing at the egg, which exploded in a blast of red, blue, yellow, and albumen.

  Vi screamed in delight and jumped up to embrace Janelle.

  “That was pretty good,” Nate said.

  Stevie nodded absently. Of course, she had missed the event that triggered the gun. She was looking right at something but she couldn’t see it. Where do you look for someone who’s never really there. . . .

  At some point, the gun placed in act one goes off, usually in the third act.

  That was one of the most important parts of being a detective: keep your eye on the gun.

  April 4, 1936

  DOTTIE EPSTEIN DID NOT MEAN TO START WATCHING FRANCIS AND Eddie that day. She had been minding her business up in the high crook of a tree, bundled in a big brown sweater knitted for her by her aunt Gilda, a book open on her leg. The April weather meant that it was not warm, but the mountain was no longer frozen. You could be free in the space again, and it was good to be in the woods, out in the air. The tree was a perfect place to read, to spend some time with Jason and the Argonauts.

  That’s where she happened to be, quiet and out of sight, when Francis and Eddie came by. They were close, tight, their heads almost together as they walked. (How did people walk like that, heads so close? It was fascinating to see, like something from the circus.) And there was something in the way they were walking—silent, smiling, quickly but not fast. It was a walk that suggested they did not want to be noticed.

  Unlike the other rich girls, Francis was nice to Dottie. She wasn’t like Gertie van Coevorden, who looked at Dottie like she was a walking bag of rags, her eyes lingering on every patch in her clothes. (Dottie’s mother had worked so hard on sewing those patches in her coat. “Look, Dot, you can barely see the stitches! Look how good this thread matches up. I got it at Woolworth. Isn’t that a good match? I spent all night on it.”) Gertie unpicked Dottie’s mother’s seams, judging her whole family, her entire reason for being in one sweeping glance of her small, blue eyes. “Oh dear, Dottie!” she would say. “You must be so cold in that thing. Wool isn’t quite as warm as fur. I have an old one I can lend you.”

  It might have been different if Gertie had actually lent her the fur. But that was part of it. They mentioned things, and they forgot. It was a tease.

  Francis, however, was the real kind of nice—she left Dottie alone. That was all Dottie really wanted. When they did talk, which wasn’t often, it was about something good, like detective stories. Francis loved to read, almost as much as Dottie did, and her passion was crime. That was, in Dottie’s opinion, a noble interest. Francis also liked to sneak about. Dottie heard her moving around at night and would peek out her door to see Francis creeping down the hall, or sometimes going out the window.

  It was this quality that caused Dottie to slip out of the tree, almost automatically, and loosely trail them. Perhaps, she thought, it was because of her uncle the policeman. “Sometimes, Dot,” he said, “you just know. Follow your instincts.”

  Francis and Eddie went back, to the raw, wild part of the grounds, where thick tree cover was cut through with only the roughest paths. They wended back to the place where the rocks were still being worked off the face of the mountain. There were massive piles of stone, some of which looked like it was in the process of being broken down into smaller pieces for building materials. The path was extremely uneven, cutting
up sharply. Dottie followed, as silently as she could, using the trees to pull herself up the rocky steps. Francis and Eddie were two flashes of color in the landscape, and then—they were gone.

  Just like that. Gone. Gone in the trees and the rock and the brush.

  Clearly, they had disappeared into one of Mr. Ellingham’s little hidey-holes, one Dottie herself had not yet found. She was filled with fear of discovery and the thrill of the mystery in equal measure. She considered going back to her reading spot, but she knew she would not be able to do it. So she backed up a few steps, to a point she knew they could not have vanished into, and tucked herself behind a tree.

  She waited there for over two hours. She had actually gotten back into her book when she heard the crunch of their steps and ducked down just in time. They came out, whispering, laughing, hurrying. Francis had a book under her arm.

  “Oh God, we’re so late,” Dottie heard Francis say.

  “Once more, up against the tree, like an animal . . .”

  “Eddie . . .” Francis pushed him off with a laugh and hurried on. In their sport, a few things fell from Francis’s book, small, the size of leaves. Once they had gone, Dottie went to the spot and picked them up. They were photographs. One was of Francis and Eddie posing. Dottie knew what they were doing at once—everyone had seen this pose before. It was like that famous photo of Bonnie and Clyde, the gangsters. Dottie was posed as Bonnie, holding what must have been a toy shotgun (or maybe it was a real shotgun from one of the crew?) directly at Eddie’s chest. Her arm was extended toward him, her fingertips not quite touching his shirt. Eddie had a strange half smile and wore a hat tipped back on his head, looking at her with longing. It was so much like the real photograph that the tiny differences stood out in deep relief. They were not Bonnie and Clyde but wanted to be so much that Dottie could feel it.

  The other photograph was of Leonard Holmes Nair, the painter, standing on the green, brush in hand, looking perhaps a bit annoyed at the interruption. A painting of the Great House was on the easel in front of him. The photos were a bit sticky. Some glue seemed to be on the edges.

  Dottie leaned against the tree and studied the images for several minutes, drinking them in. These shimmering clues into other people’s lives—they pointed the way for her. To where, she did not know.

  It was time to go. It would be dinner soon. She put the photos in her pocket and hurried home to Minerva. Once inside, she considered slipping them under Francis’s door. They belonged to her.

  But no. It would be odd to do that. It would give everything away. And for some reason—she needed these for her collection. She went into her room and shut the door, then got down on the floor and pulled back the baseboard.

  Francis had told Dottie about using the walls to hide things she didn’t want anyone else to see. The molding came back easily. This was where the rich girls kept their gin and cigarettes. Dottie stored her tin there—her collection of the wonderful things she had found. She tucked them away and stashed the tin back into its space.

  She would return the photos at some point, she decided. Soon. Maybe before the end of school.

  There would always be time.

  6

  LAY IT OUT. PUT IT DOWN ON PAPER. WORK IT OUT. WRITE WHAT you remember. Write your first impression, before your memory gets a chance to play with it and switch it around, putting a leg where an arm used to be.

  Stevie opened her desk drawer and pulled out a handful of off-brand sticky notes (that she’d nabbed from the Edward King campaign supplies in her parents’ home office). Her wall was currently in use—she had attached several stick-on hooks, so her coat and clothes hung there. She took these down and started putting up the notes. The victims from the 1930s, on yellow ones:

  Dottie Epstein: head trauma

  Iris Ellingham: gunshot

  Alice Ellingham: condition unknown

  And then, on the other side, people from the present, in light blue:

  Hayes Major: CO2 poisoning/dry ice

  Ellie Walker: exposure/dehydration/immurement

  Dr. Irene Fenton: house fire

  She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the six squares, letting her mind go blank and her eyes blurry.

  There was a pattern here, something that she wasn’t seeing. She got up and looked at the spines of her mystery books. She pulled one from the shelf—Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was a notorious book when it came out, featuring Hercule Poirot as the detective. Poirot’s method was to use his “little gray cells” to solve the crime—to sit and think, to contemplate the psychology of the murderer. . . .

  Stevie turned back to the wall and looked from note to note, repeating the information in order, lingering on the ones from the present. Dry ice, immurement. Fire. Dry ice had that echo of a locked room mystery, where the weapon is ice and the murderer is never there. Immurement—walling in. Another locked room. Fire, where the weapon is the building itself.

  Stevie began to see a line running through these things; it was almost literally visible, like a piece of string on a conspiracy wall. The psychology of the murderer. That was what she was seeing. These two sides weren’t just separated by time—they were separated by separation itself. Dottie’s death had been brutal and direct. Iris had been shot. These were hands-on weapons, with blood, where the assailant had to be there, to stand over the victim. But Hayes, Ellie, and Fenton had all died in contained spaces, where someone could set the trap and walk away. Hayes walked into an underground room full of carbon dioxide. Ellie went into a tunnel and the exit was blocked. Dr. Fenton—well, maybe she did forget the gas and lit a cigarette. But maybe someone had been there with her, talking. Someone turned on the gas and shut the door behind them. Then, Dr. Fenton, nose blind and a confirmed smoker, lit up.

  Wind it up and let it go, like Janelle’s machine. Depress the toaster lever, and in the end, the gun goes off.

  This was someone smart. Someone who planned. Someone who perhaps didn’t want to get their hands dirty. And all these things, they were deniable, almost. Hayes walked into that room on his own, not knowing about the sublimated dry ice that had poisoned the space. Ellie crawled into that tunnel on her own. And Fenton lit the fuse that set her own house ablaze. Three things that seemed like accidents, that happened when someone else was nowhere around.

  Who was smart? David.

  Who played tricks? David.

  Who would be able to lift Janelle’s pass and get the dry ice? Who knew about tunnels and secret places? Who was in Burlington on the night of the fire? David.

  But there was no reason at all that Stevie could see for him to do these things. None. He had no strong feelings about Hayes. Ellie was his friend. Her death devastated him. He had broken down in uncontrollable sobs when he found her. He didn’t even know Fenton at all. Unless David was some kind of serial killer who killed for sport, there was no way he did this.

  Then who?

  And the note on the wall? How did that fit?

  What was more frustrating was the fact that Stevie had barely gotten a look at that message on the wall that night. It appeared as she slept. She heard a noise, looked up from her bed, and saw a glowing message. She hadn’t written it down because she had first gone to the window to try to see who did it. Then she’d experienced a massive panic attack and gone to Janelle’s room. After that, she assumed it was a dream—or tried to convince herself it was, because the truth was too creepy. That was a lot of time for her mind to work, to make things up, but maybe she could recover some of it.

  She closed her eyes and let her breathing go even and steady. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. She let thoughts come and go and kept setting her attention back on the breathing. After several minutes, she opened her eyes a bit and focused on the wall where the message had been, where the sticky notes now were. This blank, unassuming stretch. What had been there?

  She resisted the urge to get up and move around. Breathe. In and out. What had she seen t
hat night? It was there, hints of it, somewhere in her mind, like a trace of perfume on the wind. What had it looked like?

  Cutout letters, ransom-note style, like the Truly Devious letter.

  Be more specific, Stevie. How did they look?

  Glowing. Large. Some in focus, some not. The light in the window was coming in from an angle, stretching itself, landing on that bit of wall next to the fireplace.

  Riddle, riddle, on the wall . . .

  Yes, that was the first line. It was easy to remember. This much, she was sure of.

  But what happened from there? It had rhymed. It was something with murder. Something murder.

  There were images in the message. Bodies. Something about a body in a field. That made sense. A reference to Dottie, who was found half-buried in a bit of farmland. A body in a field . . .

  Her mind made noises, tried to lure her this way and that, but she stayed with the bodies. There had been another. A second body. It had to be Iris’s, as Iris was the only other body. Yes . . . a lake. A mention of Iris. Something about a lady in a lake.

  Now the picture began to assemble itself a bit more clearly. Those cutout letters took on a bit more definition. Murder. Bodies. The message was eerily playful. Something about playing.

  Alice, Alice . . .

  Alice?

  Alice. It had mentioned Alice. By name. What about Alice, she could not recall. But Alice’s name was there.

  Stevie let her eyes come back into focus and let the meditation go. The light made halos around all the objects in the room as her pupils adjusted. She tucked up her knees and, in doing so, took a better look at herself. She really did need to change. She couldn’t go on like this, grabbing clothes off the floor. Maybe a shower would jog her mind into action. She grabbed her bath caddy and dragged herself across the hall, where she slumped against the queasy salmon-colored tiles and let the water run over her, flattening her short hair to her head. She remembered meeting Ellie in the shower once. Ellie walked around proudly naked.

  Ellie. Ellie, I’m sorry.