Stevie resisted the urge to say, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I called you all here.” But then she realized that the reason people said that was that once you called people into one room, they were probably wondering why you had called them all there. So Stevie found herself vacillating between possible phrases and heard herself saying, “So, um, the reason . . . well . . .” No. Start over. Start as you mean to go on.
“People have died up here,” she said, “and they didn’t die in accidents.”
“Okay, Stevie,” Dr. Quinn said, “what is—”
“I’m serious,” she said. The words came out so strongly that even Dr. Quinn was taken aback. Stevie regretted them at once, because Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes never had to snap about how serious they were.
Call Me Charles, who always invited a challenge, nodded.
“We have nothing else to do,” he said. “Let’s hear her out.”
Stevie took a deep breath, ignored the bright sparks of panic that danced on the tips of her synapses, and continued.
“They didn’t die in accidents,” she said again. “’They were murdered.”
Nothing from the assembled. They made it look so easy in detective books—like you could just call up the suspects and expect everyone to sit on the edge of their chairs, waiting to be accused so they could walk through the motions of denial before the detective revealed that they weren’t guilty. Those were the rules. The reality was that your friends looked at you with hope bordering on embarrassment, while your teachers and school staff questioned every choice they’d made in their lives to get them to this point. But even Hercule Poirot had to do this for a first time, and everyone made fun of the little Belgian detective for his fastidious ways until he smacked them down with the hammer of deductive truth, so . . .
“Stevie?” Nate said.
Her mouth was hanging open. She snapped her jaw closed and walked with purpose to the fireplace.
“Hayes Major,” she said. “Right from the second I met him, all he talked about was Hollywood. He wanted to leave school and get out there as soon as possible. When all of this started, when Hayes died, when Ellie ran—I thought it was about the show, about The End of It All. It made sense. Why else would Hayes die? It made so much sense. Hayes was someone who took stuff that didn’t belong to him. Someone looking for an easy way out. Someone who used other people to do his work. He used Gretchen, his ex-girlfriend, to write his papers. He used us to do the bulk of the work on his video project. He used someone else to write the show.”
The words were putting themselves in order as fast as Stevie was saying them.
“Only one person had any motive to kill Hayes because of the show,” Stevie said. “That was Ellie. But Ellie didn’t care about the money. She’d been paid—five hundred dollars—which she used to buy her saxophone. She didn’t care what happened to the show because she was busy making her own art.”
“Ellie ran,” Vi said.
“Because she was scared,” Stevie said. “She ran because I had accused her of something. But she knew something else was going on. I don’t even know if she understood the extent of it, just that Hayes had gotten into something a little out of his depth. There was always a rumor that there was a codicil in Albert Ellingham’s will that left a lot of money to anyone who found Alice. Most people didn’t think it was real, but it was a popular theory, a grassy-knoll kind of a thing. But Dr. Fenton believed in it. She was sure it was real. She had interviewed Robert Mackenzie, Albert Ellingham’s secretary, before he died. Mackenzie said it was real. And it is real.”
She pulled out her phone and read the text of the codicil: “‘In addition to all other bequests, the amount of ten million dollars shall be held in trust for my daughter, Alice Madeline Ellingham. Should my daughter no longer be among the living, any person, persons, or organization that locates her earthly remains—provided it is established that they were in no way connected to her disappearance—shall receive this sum. If she is not located by her ninetieth birthday, these funds shall be released to be used for the Ellingham Academy in any way the board sees fit.
“‘It is further stipulated that no member of the faculty or administration of Ellingham Academy may claim this sum as their own.’”
Stevie looked at Charles.
“I asked you about it,” Stevie said. “If it existed. And you lied to me and said it didn’t.”
Charles shrugged his cashmere-sweatered shoulders.
“Of course I said it wasn’t real,” he said. “That’s what we tell anyone who asks. We didn’t even know about the codicil until a few years ago. You know the clock I have in my office? The green marble one? We were having it cleaned and repaired, and in the process, they discovered a small drawer in the base. It was folded up in there. Clearly someone wanted it hidden away to keep the school from being overrun with treasure hunters. We felt the same way.”
“That’s true,” Dr. Quinn said from the other side of the room. “We’d have some reality television show trying to get in here to make some kind of find-Alice-and-get-a-fortune thing.”
“So the school gets the money?” Stevie asked.
“That’s why we started work on the art barn,” Dr. Quinn said.
“So you think someone was trying to find Alice to get all the money?” Charles said.
“It makes the most sense,” Stevie went on. “We’re talking about a massive fortune, worth . . . what today?”
“It’s currently just under seventy million,” Dr. Quinn said. “It will fund us for many years.”
“Seventy million dollars is a good reason to commit a murder,” Stevie said. “But there are restrictions. No faculty member can have it. Only someone outside, or a student . . . Someone like Hayes. Or Ellie. Or Dr. Irene Fenton.”
Hunter looked up.
“All three of them died in ways that were different but shared a similar aspect—their deaths seemed to be accidents where they were trapped. Hayes was trapped in a room. Ellie in a tunnel. Dr. Fenton in a house on fire. It wasn’t personal or passionate. It was clinical. It could all be explained away. Somehow, Hayes, Ellie, and Dr. Fenton were all connected to getting the money. Nothing made sense until I put three things together—Janelle’s pass, the message on my wall, and what Dr. Fenton said on the phone. I’ll start with that last one. The night she died, Dr. Fenton was being strange when I called her. She said she couldn’t talk right then, and then she said, ‘The kid is there.’ What if she meant Alice? That Alice was here at Ellingham. If that’s true, everything starts to make sense. I had to go backward to make it all work out. Your aunt . . .”
She turned to Hunter. “She had a drinking problem,” she said.
“Yes.”
“She had no sense of smell.”
“Yes?” Hunter replied.
“She had vulnerabilities, but how much would you say she cared about the Ellingham case, deep down, really?”
“It was everything to her,” Hunter replied. “Everything.”
“Everything,” Stevie repeated. “On the night of her death, she stood up for the case. She stood up for Alice. And that’s why she died. Because she stopped going along with the plan. She knew that the money was real, and she knew where Alice was. That last bit, she’d just found out . . .”
The scene was incredibly clear in Stevie’s head—Fenton at her table, listening, deciding, picking up her cigarettes . . .
“It all started with the art barn construction,” Stevie said. “The money was coming in, and the building was being expanded. So they had to excavate the tunnel. The crew found Alice, but they didn’t know it. They found a trunk. The person who opened that trunk had a problem. They had opened something that they knew was worth about seventy million dollars. Seventy million, sitting there, free to take. Except he couldn’t have it.”
She turned and looked at Call Me Charles.
24
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THE BIG FOAM FINGER OF JUSTICE POINTS itself at you?
&nbs
p; In books, the accused laughs, or mutters angrily, or knocks over their chair and starts running. That’s what Ellie had done, even though she was innocent. Charles regarded Stevie with the same expression one might have upon finding a particularly bright and beautiful butterfly sitting on the tip of their nose. He almost looked delighted by this turn of events, which was weird. It made Stevie rock back on her heels anxiously.
“I saw the trunk,” Stevie said to him. “You made a point of showing it to me when you took me up to the attic. You had filled it with old newspapers.”
“I did show you a trunk of old newspapers,” Charles said, smiling and nodding. “Yes.”
Stevie walked to the window and looked out at the sunken garden, white with snow. Don’t panic. Keep going.
“The workers pulled the trunk out of the ground and brought it to you,” Stevie said, touching a finger to the frosted glass. “They probably found all kinds of things in there—junk the workmen threw in as they went. You opened it up, expecting nothing, and instead, you found a body. It was old, in bad condition. You knew it could only be one person—Alice Ellingham.”
“It was a trunk full of newspapers,” Charles said, “but all right.”
“Maybe, before, you never thought much about the Ellingham case,” she said. “Maybe you were thinking of the school at first. The school was about to get all that money. If the workmen found the body, they’d get it, and the school couldn’t expand. So maybe at first you just wanted to tuck the body somewhere, bury it, let the matter go away. You take the body out of the trunk and you fill the trunk with some old newspapers. From there, you had to put the body aside until you could work out what to do next. But . . .”
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.”
“Stevie,” he said, “your murder mysteries are showing.”
Charles’s smile had slipped out of position. He tried to keep it up, but it was as if it was suspended by two nails at the corners and one of them had come loose.
“So now two students are dead,” Stevie said, “and bonus! I’m gone. My parents yanked me out of school. But no matter how clean and clinical you want things to be, life happens. People walk in when they aren’t supposed to. Things get left behind. Every contact leaves a trace. In this case, Edward King stepped in. He was upset because David was being an asshole and he wanted me to calm him the hell down. Edward King doesn’t care that you’re in charge of the school. He’s an even bigger asshole.”
“Fact,” David said.
“He comes in with his cheap security system and flies me back on his plane and drops me right in your lap. So now you have to deal with me again. Fine. You continue with the plan of having Dr. Fenton as my adviser. When I was working with her, she had really specific things she wa
nted me to look into—she wanted me to find a tunnel under Minerva. I did. That’s where I found Ellie. That had to be part of the plan. . . .”
This, Stevie was arranging in her head as she spoke. She gestured, assembling the picture in the air with her hand.
“I think,” she said, “you realized it would be better if Ellie’s body was found. The school needed to seem unsafe. It was easier if the school shut. You wouldn’t have students around getting in the way anymore. You could hide the body more easily, and no one would stumble on to it accidentally. But the school rallied. Nothing was going right for you, especially since I found something that got Dr. Fenton’s interest. I showed her this.”
Stevie put her backpack down on a chair and removed the tin.
“You found tea?” Charles asked.
“This shows who composed the Truly Devious letter . . .”
“Stevie, how many stories—”
“It’s all one story,” Stevie said, and the confidence in her voice surprised her. “It was about money then, and it’s about money now. They took Alice in 1936 and used her to try to get money. You had Alice now and were trying to get the fortune her father left behind. And you were almost there. You told Dr. Fenton about Alice, and she couldn’t contain herself anymore. She wasn’t playing along. Again, in your normal way, you set it up so that things would just happen. You turned the knob on the gas and left. Eventually there would be enough gas in that room that when she lit up, everything would go up in flames. It’s smart. It’s impersonal. It’s not even your fault, is it? It’s not a crime to bump into the knob on a stove. Anyone who messed up your plan was simply moved out of the way. Did each one get easier when you saw that you didn’t get caught? You were in so deep now, you had to finish it. And thanks to Germaine, the last move was obvious.”
“Thanks to me?” Germaine said, looking up from her notes.
“When Hunter got the invitation to come live here, Germaine asked why someone who wasn’t a student was getting to live here, and I said because the school felt bad. She was right. Schools don’t feel bad. You still needed a person unconnected with the school to collect the money for you. This time, you wanted to make sure the school was shut down. All you needed was for one more thing to happen. Again, you used something of Janelle’s. You changed the pressure setting on her tank to make it shoot away from the machine. I don’t think you cared who got hurt as long as something happened. A nice big accident. You like accidents. Plus, there was the storm. Clear out the school. But Hunter could stay.”
The Hand on the Wall Page 23