The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  Even without context as to their meaning, the words hypnotized Stevie. Ghosts breathing dreams like air, a figure of ash moving forward with, if Stevie was following along, a gun. The person seeking meaning in the past ended up dead.

  Stevie looked at her teacher, swathed in designer clothes and pedigree. She was a woman who knew a lot of important people, had been offered jobs in presidential administrations—and here she was, teaching The Great Gatsby on a mountain. Why turn those things down to teach, to work under Charles, a man she appeared to dislike?

  Was Dr. Quinn warning her—sending her a message? Or was Stevie losing her marbles, one by one?

  “Read the book next time,” Dr. Quinn said, “or you’ll be penalized.”

  Stevie could almost feel the ashen figure at her back.

  April 20, 1936

  FLORA ROBINSON AND LEONARD HOLMES NAIR STOOD ON THE stone patio outside the ballroom and Albert’s office. It had been a week since the phone rang and the world shattered. Albert had spent most of the week in his office with Mackenzie, manning the phones, waiting for news. Nothing had come since the night when he lowered a bag of money off Rock Point, and each day’s silence was more ominous.

  No one was forcing them to stay, but the outside world was wild and dangerous and full of people who would want to question them, to pick every bit of meat off the bone of the story. So they wandered around the house, smoking and nibbling at the endless platters of sandwiches the kitchen produced for the crowds. Waiting for something to happen. Anything. The police were roaming the grounds, poking the hollows with sticks, putting in phone lines, shooing off the press and the curious.

  This evening, they walked along the patio, watching the sun set against the mountains. Leo had grown tired of the silence.

  “Iris asked me about the father,” he said, drawing his finger along the stone railing. He looked over to Flora, who took a long, anxious drag on her cigarette.

  “Obviously, I had nothing to tell her,” he went on. “But I’ve been thinking, Flo, dear . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It didn’t matter before,” Leo said. “But things . . . could develop.”

  “Nothing is going to develop. They’ll be found. That’s it.”

  Leonard let out a long sigh and snuffed out his cigarette under his shoe. He came close to his friend and sat on the rail.

  “There will be a lot of talk about young Alice,” he said in a low voice. “It’s going to start soon. They’re getting tired of writing the same thing day after day. They’ll want more. Her photo is in every newspaper in the world. And people may note that she doesn’t look much like Albert or Iris.”

  “Sometimes small children don’t look like their parents.”

  “Then they’ll start asking why Iris went to Switzerland to give birth. . . .”

  “To avoid the press, that was the story. . . .”

  “And then some intrepid reporter will go to the clinic and start asking questions. No matter how well everyone there was paid—someone will want to sell a story.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with adopting a child.”

  “Of course there’s nothing wrong with adopting a child,” Leo said. “This isn’t about right and wrong. This is about a world that’s hungry for a story. She’s the most famous child in the world. And since you and I are in this mess together, perhaps you do want to share this one piece of information with me. This is to protect you, and Iris, and Alice. This isn’t the world’s business. I want to know in case there is someone out there who might also want to make a quick buck off this story. Tell me, because I only want this for you and for Alice. You know this about me. You know I keep everyone’s secrets.”

  Two policemen walked close by, and the pair stopped speaking for a moment.

  “It was always all right,” Flora said when they had passed, “because here, she would have the best home possible. She would be rich. She would be safe. She would have the best of everything. Albert will pay. Albert will pay and they’ll come home. They’ll . . .”

  Something transfixed Flora’s attention below. Leo followed the line of vision. Below them, Robert Mackenzie and George Marsh were walking around the ornamental pond and in their direction. Now Leo saw it. The line of Alice’s jaw. Her blue eyes.

  So like George Marsh’s.

  “So he’s the one,” Leo said quietly. “How did I not see it before?”

  “It didn’t last very long,” Flora replied. “A few weeks. You know how boring it can get up here when the weather turns.”

  “Does he know?” Leo said.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “He hasn’t got a clue.”

  “Good,” Leo replied. “At least he’s not likely to sell his story to anyone, but better he has no idea.”

  “Alice will come home,” Flora said, mostly to herself. “She’ll come home safe and sound and they’ll take her back to New York, away from here, and nothing like this will ever happen again. She’s safe. I know she is. She has to be. I’d know if she wasn’t. I’d know.”

  The sun dropped over the line of the horizon, and the mountain birds made their final circles across the sky for the day. Leo put his hand on Flora’s shoulder. He wanted to say that everything would be fine, but that would be a lie. Leo was many things, but a liar was not among them.

  “We’ll have a cup of tea,” he said, hooking his arm through hers. “Maybe something stronger. Let’s go inside. It’s far too crowded out here.”

  8

  WHEN STEVIE RETURNED TO MINERVA, THERE WERE BAGS IN THE COMMON room, including the one she had gotten in Burlington.

  “And you’re sure you’re okay with the staircase to get to the bathroom?” Pix was saying. “I want to make sure everything is accessible.”

  “It’s no problem,” a voice replied. “I can do stairs. Thanks.”

  There was a single arm crutch leaning against the hallway wall. A moment later, Hunter emerged from the room that was once Ellie’s, the one next to Stevie’s.

  Hunter bore little resemblance to his aunt except for his blue eyes. There was something sunny about him, maybe the light sandiness of his hair, or his smatter of freckles. When he saw Stevie he smiled, taking up his crutch in his left arm and coming into the common room.

  “Hey,” Stevie said.

  “I didn’t see this coming,” he said. “Moving in. Surprise?”

  “Your room is next to mine,” she said. It was a simple fact, but it sounded weird saying it out loud. “Do you need help? Setting up or unpacking or . . . ?”

  “Sure.”

  She followed him back into the room, number three, at the end of the hall by the turreted bathroom. The room was no longer filled with peacock feathers, colorful clothes and tapestries, paints and colored pencils, art books and cabaret costumes. The bits of French poetry that had been illicitly painted on the walls were still in evidence; the maintenance crew had yet to repaint. One thing Stevie clearly remembered about Ellie’s room—she threw her underwear on the floor, proudly. Dirty panties. She could toss them around as easily as a dude threw his boxers on the floor. Where they had been, there were now shopping bags, the new sheets still with the folds from the package.

  “I heard you got me some of this stuff,” he said.

  “Well, the school did. I picked it out.”

  Hunter picked up the heavy puffer coat Stevie had purchased for him and slipped it on.

  “Thanks,” he said. “This is a serious coat. We don’t have coats like this in Florida. I feel like I’m wearing a mattress. In a good way.”

  He examined his arms in the coat, then looked around at his scattered belongings. There were not many to speak of. It’s easy to pack when everything you have goes up in flames.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “About your aunt. And you. With the fire. Are you . . . okay?”

  The words tumbled out of her mouth clunkily, like wooden blocks.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sore. I have a
few burns, but they aren’t too bad. My throat hurt a lot at first, but that’s getting better too. I’m supposed to rest this week, so I’ll be your neighbor who lies around a lot. I get to live here, at least until the end of the semester. Then the university should be able to get me a place on campus. They’re waiving my room and board, and they’re letting me keep the tuition discount, which is nice. And in the meantime, I get to live in a place that is super cool that I’ve always wanted to see. I’m actually kind of making out. . . .”

  He pulled off the coat and placed it carefully on the bed.

  “That didn’t come out right,” he said. “Nothing comes out right. I sound like an asshole.”

  “It’s fine,” Stevie said, shaking her head.

  “No, it’s not. . . .” Hunter sat on the edge of his new bed and looked around at the spare, empty room. “I didn’t know my aunt very well. I didn’t . . . like living there? It was dirty and it smelled bad, and I couldn’t help her. I was thinking about going home. The tuition discount wasn’t worth it. Obviously, what happened was horrible, but I can’t act like we were close. Just so you know, this is where I’m at.”

  This was the kind of sentiment that Stevie could understand completely.

  “You’ll like it here,” she said. “Pix is nice.”

  “She’s an archaeologist?”

  “And anthropologist. She collects teeth.”

  “Who doesn’t?” he said.

  “And Nate is a writer, and Janelle makes machines. She’s doing a demonstration tonight. You should come.”

  “I’m staying here,” he said. “I don’t go here. I don’t know if I’m supposed to go to stuff.”

  “You can definitely come,” she said. “See something normal for once.”

  “For once?”

  That was probably an odd thing to say. But this was Ellingham, after all.

  “Sure,” he said. “Okay. Might as well meet my new housemates and their machines.”

  He smiled at her, and for a moment, Stevie felt like maybe life here could be normal. A balanced, happy guy with reasonable reactions to things—that could make for a nice change. Maybe this was the moment everything would change for her. Maybe now the school year was beginning in earnest.

  That was perhaps burdening the moment with more expectation than it could bear, but, Stevie figured, something about this year had to give.

  It was a good turnout in the art barn.

  Along with Stevie, Vi, Nate, and Hunter, a solid group of around thirty students had shown up to watch, which was impressive, considering that was about 30 percent of Ellingham’s student body. Ellingham was the kind of place where, if your classmate was going to an engineering competition, a certain number of people would stop composing music, writing books, singing operas, and doing advanced mathematics to come have a look.

  Kaz was there, of course. As the head of the student union, he offered his support to every project and smiled his astonishing smile, the one like an open-plan kitchen full of white cabinets from a home improvement show.

  (After months of being here, Stevie had little idea of what the student union did or even if it was a real thing. This either said something about the student union or about Stevie. She suspected it was both. She had been similarly clueless about the student council in her old school. She knew that elections had taken place and that the winners were four people with good hair. Their campaign promises had something to do with recycling, parking, and vending machines. They got an exemption from daytime phone jail because of their positions; Stevie sometimes saw them walking the halls at a good clip, typing importantly into their phones. Nothing ever changed with the parking or recycling or vending machines, so it seemed like the student elections were a popularity contest draped with the thinnest veil of legitimacy. Perhaps Stevie was just suspicious of politics in general because of her parents. It was an aspect of her own psychological makeup she would explore at some other time, when she had figured out all her anxiety triggers and when she wasn’t trying to solve multiple murders. People have limits.)

  Maris stretched out on the floor, deep in conversation with Dash. She was, Stevie noticed, fluttering her eyelashes in Kaz’s direction. Next to them was Suda from Stevie’s anatomy class, wearing a brilliant blue hijab. Mudge was also there, leaning into the corner of the room.

  “This is the kind of stuff you guys do?” Hunter said, looking around at the pipes and dishes and tables. “I mean, my high school was fine, but it wasn’t like this.”

  “Neither was mine,” Stevie said.

  “This is your school.”

  “My old one,” she said, a little more sharply than she intended. “I mean, before. I guess there was stuff, but I didn’t know about it. I didn’t . . . go to things.”

  “You must have done something right,” he replied. “You ended up here.”

  This was not a thought Stevie had ever assembled for herself.

  When she thought of old Stevie, the one in Pittsburgh, she had two separate ideas that never met up. The first Stevie was antisocial and underachieving. She didn’t participate in any clubs, except for one semester in freshman year when she joined glee club and didn’t sing. She did not like her own voice, so she mouthed the words. She joined glee club only because of the general pressure to have something to put on an application someday. She didn’t do sports; she didn’t play an instrument. She could perhaps have joined a publication, but yearbook was about knowing people, and the magazine was about poetry, so both of those were out. She went to one meeting for the newspaper to see if that would work, but it was less about hard-hitting investigative journalism and more about going to sporting events and writing about how many balls went where and who put the balls there. No club seemed to suit her, so it was twelve weeks of pretending to sing along to a melody of Disney songs until her spirit broke and her parents gave her a long lecture about how she was letting them down. That Stevie was the worst.

  And yet, there was another, bigger Stevie. This Stevie spent her time online reading everything about murder. She studied criminology textbooks. She believed, really believed, that she could solve the crime of the century. And she had.

  Stevie had never put these Stevies together to assemble a portrait of herself—her choices had not been failures. They had been choices. It was all one Stevie, and that Stevie was worthwhile.

  All of this information entered her head at once. Hunter was still looking at her. She became aware that her mouth was hanging open a little bit, as if this profound fusion of identities wanted to make itself known to the world for the first time. She could be like other people—like Janelle, who made things and had interests and also had a relationship with Vi that was romantic and real. Maybe Stevie could be a real person too. Maybe she could express herself and this new, fully aware Stevie could be born, right now.

  “Whatever,” she heard herself saying in a low voice. “I mean, yeah.”

  Maybe not.

  Behind them, Germaine Batt made her silent, ever-watchful way into the room. She was wearing her semiprofessional-looking clothes again—the black pants and blazer. She had pulled her long hair into a low ponytail that hung down her back. She looked around, saw Hunter and Stevie, and sat down next to them. She had her phone out, with the recording function on.

  “You going to report on this?” Stevie asked.

  “No. I hate human-interest stories. You’re the nephew of that woman who died, right? You were in the fire.”

  Hunter blinked in surprise.

  “Oh my God,” Stevie said. “Really?”

  “I was,” Hunter said.

  “Would you consider being interviewed?” Germaine asked.

  “I . . . guess?”

  Stevie wanted to stop this slow-motion train wreck, but Janelle was stepping to the front of her machine and looked about ready to start. She was wearing her lemon-patterned dress with her hair wrapped up in a cheerful yellow scarf. She always wore her lemons for luck.

  “So,” she
began, “thank you for coming out to see my machine! Let me tell you about Rube Goldberg. He was an engineer who became a cartoonist . . .”

  Stevie’s thoughts began to drift, following the twists and turns of the tubes and dishes and plates. They were taking an unexpected course. David was gone. David could never really be gone, because he kept coming into her mind over and over. Maybe she needed something to push him out. Was that something Hunter? Was that what people did? Got interested in someone new? She didn’t know how she and David had gotten together in the first place.

  “. . . so he made a character called Professor Butts, who . . .”

  It had been like magnetism. It could honestly not be explained. But once Stevie was around David, something in her became wobbly. The lines and edges blurred. Even now, she wrapped her fingers around her phone. Maybe he would call again.

  “So,” Janelle said, “here’s the Danger Diner!”

  She reached down and depressed the lever on the toaster. The balls began their journey around the cups and saucers and plates, down the half-pipes, over the little chef. The room responded well, with noises of appreciation and some laughs. Janelle stood to the side, her hands tightly wound together. She nodded as each part of the process functioned exactly as she had designed it, as each weight, each stack, each tube did its part. The last ball was coming to the end. The soda dispenser was triggered. The three plastic pitchers began to fill. This time, Stevie would be ready when the gun went off and the egg was shot down by a series of paintballs. She focused.

  Except . . .

  What happened next happened so fast that Stevie barely had a chance to register it. There was a loud clanking, a hissing. Something was moving, flying. There was an earsplitting shattering as the plates fell all at once, and some object was rocketing toward them. She fell back on someone as a scream broke out throughout the room.

  When the clanking finally stopped, Stevie looked up from the pile of people she had landed in. A small canister was rolling on the floor. Aside from that, there was a heavy, confused quiet. Parts of Janelle’s machine lay in ruins, piles of glued-together plates and cups were shattered. From across the room, once voice cried out in pain. Then a few more gasped in alarm.