“Need anything, boss?” one of the pilots leaned back and asked.
“Anything, Stevie?” Edward King said. “We have sodas, snacks. Would you like a Coke? We have some really nice chips. I love these. I can’t eat them—cholesterol, but . . .”
Stevie would have liked a Coke and also some of the fancy potato chips that were being passed back in a basket. They were the fancy, thick-cut, small-batch kind in all sorts of flavors—the ones that always cost a buck or more. But she wasn’t taking one more thing from Edward King. Follow the Wonderland rule: Don’t eat or drink anything.
Seeing that Stevie was going to resist his basket of fancy chips, Edward King shrugged and shoved it back behind him.
“I think we’re ready to go,” he said.
And that was that. No safety demonstration. No one telling her to put on her seat belt, even. The tiny plane moved forward, turned onto a runway, and then it started to speed. Pittsburgh was going by in a blur, and Edward King was sitting politely on his creamy white leather throne, using his phone. Using his phone. On a plane.
No rules mattered.
Stevie felt her stomach lurch as the plane lifted gently from the ground.
“We’re going to bump a bit,” one of the pilots leaned back and said. “Bit of cloud cover. Should pass after ten minutes or so. We might get a bit more once we get into Vermont. Weather’s been rough there, and we may hit some pockets over the mountains. Nothing to worry about.”
Little planes always crashed, didn’t they? The tiny craft bobbed gently in the air, and Stevie at once realized how ridiculous life was. She was flitting in the wind, next to the worst person she could conjure. If this went down, Edward King went down too. Was she prepared for that? If she had the choice, would she will this plane to go thundering down on some field if she could wipe out Edward King? Was she willing to fall from the sky to save America? Her brain was spitting out weird ideas.
“Why are you doing this?” she said. It was odd to hear her voice coming out in this quiet, polite plane.
“You speak! I’m glad. I thought you might be sick. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a Coke?”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked again.
“You mean taking you back to Ellingham Academy on a private plane?”
Of course that’s what I meant, you sanctimonious asshole.
“Well,” Edward King said, putting his phone back into the inner pocket of his jacket, “I think that’s where you belong.”
“So this is a service you provide to everyone?” she said.
“No,” he said, smiling a bit. “No, of course not. No, and you’re very smart, Stevie, I know that. I appreciate that. You know what? I am going to have a bag of these chips. I only eat them on planes. I don’t know why. But one bag . . .”
Stevie watched him pull the basket back up and carefully go through it. It was the practiced happy interest of a politician who had to look invested in whatever people brought his way—cakes and potluck dinners, presentations by children and senior citizens, ceremonies for people he never knew. It was a professional smile, a way of knowing when to pause and break someone else’s conversational flow to put the focus back on himself, to make it oh so very casual that when the poison came out everyone would say, “But what a nice, ordinary guy. He likes chips like the rest of us.”
So she would wait. She would say nothing. She pressed back farther into the seat, and the seat took her, because the seat was expensive and made to take whatever the sitter wanted to inflict on it.
“Sounds strange,” Edward King said, yanking a green bag from the basket. “Dill-pickle flavor. It’s really good.”
He opened the bag and pulled out a chip with his long fingers. His hands were so like David’s, it made Stevie’s skin crawl. Long and elegant. Hands that would fit around a neck.
“The first reason,” he said, popping the chip into his mouth and then talking through the chew, “that I am personally taking you back to Ellingham has to do with the exceptional work you did in finding out what happened to Hayes Major. I am a parent, Stevie. My son is at your school. And I was as concerned as anyone.”
So concerned that your son said you were dead rather than claim you as a parent.
“So there’s that,” he said. “But, as you’ve worked out, there is something I would like from you. I need your help.”
There was cool air coming from one of the discreet little vents in the wall. Stevie pulled in her breath, sucking in the flow.
“I know, I know. You don’t want to help me. I heard about some of the stunts you pulled with the local volunteer office. You changed all those volunteer lists, had everyone calling SeaWorld and the American Girl store with all the dolls. That was pretty funny, to tell you the truth. I don’t mind things like that. Livens things up. But I know you wouldn’t want to do anything that would further my political interests because our interests don’t . . . align.”
He was still polite, being casual and charming and studied in his delivery. But he looked up at her, and she saw in his face that same darkly playful look that David had. Stevie had done those things, but she never thought it would actually get back to him. This senator—this man who wanted to be president—knew Stevie had played with his campaign. It was not a comfortable thought.
“What I need from you,” he said, “is something I think you’d be very agreeable to. It doesn’t conflict with your views.”
He put another chip in his mouth and the air dropped out from under the plane for a moment. Stevie clutched at her seat.
“You know David,” he said, unaffected by the loss of altitude, “my son. He’s a friend of yours. I know he thinks very highly of you. The way I know that is because he said nothing about you, even when I asked about you several times. I wanted to know about this housemate of his who had solved the case, the one he was standing with when I arrived at your school so early in the morning, before anyone should have been awake. And he said not a word. Which means he doesn’t want you to have anything to do with me. Which means he likes you. It’s not a sophisticated code.”
Stevie felt herself relax a bit, and something warm came over her in this cold, strange plane. David had put up a shield. David liked her.
“David,” he said, putting the bag of chips down on the seat opposite, “is a bit hard to manage. Do you have any idea how many schools he’s been to?”
He shook his head as if she had replied.
“I think six? Maybe seven? He has an uncanny way of expressing his dislike of a place. Once he doesn’t like it there anymore, things go wrong. I’d like things to stop going wrong. He’s almost out of high school. This is his last year. He just has to make it to June. And he’s doing well at Ellingham. When you left, he started making trouble. Not going to class. Being disruptive. It won’t be long now before the school will be forced to kick him out. I think if you return to Ellingham, he’ll settle down. So I’m taking you back there. You get to go back to a place I think you very much want to be, and you have a very simple job—make sure David stays there too.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Stevie said.
“I think he likes having you there. You seem to be a reassuring presence. I am, in no way, suggesting you should do anything . . . personal. That is entirely none of my business and it would be completely inappropriate on all levels for me to suggest it. I just think he considers you a friend, and he may be more inclined to stay if you were at the school. That’s all.”
“What if I don’t want to talk to him?”
“A little polite conversation isn’t hard. As long as David is there, you’re there. I’ll see to it. And if you have any problems with that deal, I can turn the plane around and take you right back home. It’s no trouble at all. Think it over.”
I can turn the plane around. It was parent talk, but with real power, and Edward King knew it. Stevie fell silent and watched the lights appear on the ground below through the patchwork of clouds. She felt the outline of an object
in her bag—the one truly precious, irreplaceable item. The tea tin. The clue. Solving the case had been such a dream before, but now it was a real possibility. She had something no one else had. This was her chance.
Stevie was quiet for some time, feeling the cold coming from the window of the plane, watching her own reflection, her short blond hair sticking up. Who was she? Who could she be?
“What do you say, Stevie?” Edward King asked. “Have we got a deal?”
“Yeah,” Stevie said, turning away from her reflection. “We have a deal.”
4
SOMETIMES, IN MOMENTS OF CONFUSION OR BOREDOM, STEVIE BELL ran through the scenes of famous murder novels or shows in her mind. As she sat in another SUV making its way along the rock-lined mountain roads of I-89, away from Burlington and toward Ellingham, her brain decided to run through the opening of And Then There Were None, arguably Agatha Christie’s finest work, and maybe the most perfect mystery ever written. Ten strangers find themselves on their way to a remote private island, accessible only by a small boat. All have been invited there under different pretenses, by someone they can’t quite remember meeting. All have been made good offers, so they all go. It’s not long after they arrive that they realize none of the stories quite tally, and then . . . then the bodies start dropping.
Going to Ellingham was a little bit like that.
It was remote. You could only get to it by the official shuttle. The letters came and invited you and maybe you never fully understood why. Stevie was returning because of an offer—an offer she could not refuse.
Oh, and there had been a dead body.
Hayes Major could not be forgotten in all of this. Hayes—he of the blond hair and beefy calves and even tan, with his honeyed voice and good cheekbones. Stevie had soon discovered that Hayes’s greatest talent was getting other people to do his work for him—his homework, his papers, his projects, his video series. Hayes had loads of people working for him. He was kind of a jerk.
He had not deserved to die, no matter how it happened. And Stevie wasn’t really sure of that herself. All she knew for sure was that Hayes hadn’t written his own show. She had figured out that Ellie had written it in exchange for five hundred dollars and she had hidden the fact. Stevie had also worked out that Hayes was on Skype with his girlfriend, Beth Brave, at the time he was supposed to have been across campus taking the dry ice that killed him. So, someone took that dry ice. And the most likely person to have done that would have been someone who held something against him, like, say, having written a show for him thinking it would go nowhere and then finding it was going to be made into a movie and maybe worth millions. . . .
But loads of people had things against Hayes. And Ellie grew up on a commune and wore garbage as clothes and didn’t seem to care about money. . . .
Thump, thump. Her heart was going faster. There was no reason to go down this mental road, no reason to revisit the guilt. She had pointed out a fact and Ellie had run away and now the crisis was over and she was going back to Ellingham to finish the job she had started.
Edward King had not accompanied her on this leg of the journey. He’d gotten back in his plane and gone off who-knew-where. The last thing he said to her was “It’s up to you, but it’s probably easier if you don’t mention you came back on my plane. All the school knows is that your parents gave you the green light to return. Your mode of transport might not be popular. Probably best to say you flew and leave it at that.” The minivan that met her at the airport was from a local cab service, and the driver paid her no attention, leaving her alone with her thoughts in the dark. She put in her earbuds and tried to listen to music, then to a true crime show, but she couldn’t concentrate on anything. So she let it go silent.
She knew she should call Janelle and Nate, or at least text them to say she was coming, but she found she was paralyzed. They would have questions and she had no answers yet. She barely understood it herself. So she ran mystery plots through her mind and looked at the rock walls that lined the highway.
The minivan pulled into the rest stop and the driver turned off the engine while they waited for someone from Ellingham to arrive. A blue Toyota soon pulled up beside them. Stevie saw the familiar head of steel-gray hair. Security Larry wasn’t wearing his normal uniform—he was off duty, dressed in jeans and a very Vermonty red-and-black-checked jacket.
“Well,” he said as Stevie stepped out of the minivan. “You made it back.”
“Did you miss me?”
“You’re all I could think about,” he said. There was enough of a soft growl in his voice that told her it was in some part true. While she had caused Larry some headaches (going tunneling, interfering with the investigation into Hayes’s death, doing her own independent investigation, little things like that, no need to dwell on them) she had also won him over with her serious study of the Ellingham case and the fact that she had . . .
Well, she’d led him to Hayes’s dead body. And then led him to the person who may have been responsible.
Larry picked up one of the lumpy bags of Stevie’s dirty clothes and put it in the trunk of the car. Her belongings had been transferred several times now, and they didn’t look any less shabby going into the Toyota. This appeared to be Larry’s personal car—her arrival was too late to send out the Ellingham shuttle.
“What’s been going on since I left?” Stevie said once they were both inside the car. Larry lowered the already muted country music he had playing.
“Everything stopped. School shut down.”
“I knew it,” she said.
Larry pulled out onto the road. It was so much darker here. The suburbs of Pittsburgh had more shops and strip malls, more gas stations, more light in general. Out here, the dark settled over the land until it met the rock or the trees, and then the dark fell over everything. The sky above was dotted with stars. Stevie felt a warm familiarity for the signs along the road, the billboards for ski lodges and maple candy and glassblowing. And there were the road signs along I-89 that she loved the most, the ones that just read MOOSE. She had noticed these when she rode up to Ellingham for the first time, the constant moose, moose, moose signs and yet . . .
No moose.
“Ever see a moose?” she asked.
“Yup,” he said.
“What was it like?”
“Big.”
This was a satisfactory reply. At least the moose was not a lie.
“So now that you’re back,” Larry said, “I assume you’re going to be following the rules a bit more.”
“I always did,” Stevie said. “Maybe just . . .”
“You went into sealed tunnels, where someone died. You cornered a possible murder suspect in your house. . . .”
Stevie blushed in pride, which was probably not the reaction Larry wanted.
“I’m saying, this time will be different, right?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I’d like to hear you say it,” he said.
“Rules,” she said. “Follow them. I will. Promise. All of them.”
“Good. Because I like you, and it would pain me to bust your ass and send you packing. You want to solve crimes, Stevie? You can’t act like you’re smarter than everyone around you and do it all on your own. That’s how people get hurt.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not about being sorry,” he said.
Stevie slunk down in her seat at this and stayed that way, folded in over her waist, letting the seat belt cut into her neck as punishment. The car made the geometrically questionable turn up the treacherous path to the school. She had first come up this path in the morning, in the oversized school coach. There were a smattering of lights along the path, providing enough illumination to show the deep, shadowy crowd of forest, the narrowness of the passage, the dramatic dip over the stream at the base, then the climb, the climb . . .
The car crested the hill and two sphinxes appeared in the glow of two focused spotlights. There
was a dark curtain of trees, and then it all opened up. There was a bright circle of light around the green, lights on in almost every window, lights pointed at the Neptune fountain, and the Great House sitting above it all. Bright. Ready.
Act Two was about to begin.
Larry let Stevie off on the circular drive.
“Come by the Great House in the morning,” he said. “Dr. Scott wants to talk with you to get you set up. Ten o’clock.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Ten. I’ll be there.”
“Right then. Good night. I’ll see your stuff is delivered.”
Stevie walked toward Minerva House. The air was biting and cold, her footsteps loud and crisp on the stone pathways. Overhead, the trees made an unbroken canopy that blocked out the moon. She tightened her arms around herself as her head swam a bit. Anxiety again, percolating. So much of anxiety was anxiety about having anxiety. Would it come tonight? Would it suddenly wrap its fingers around her neck and warp the world, now, at the moment when she should be happiest? Would the universe crunch itself into a ball and ping itself right between her eyes?
There was a pleasant smell of wood smoke. There was a fire somewhere. The smell should have warmed her and made her happy, but it reminded her how far this place was, and different, and how much had been loaded on her today. She stopped and took a long breath through the nose and held it. Long exhale through the mouth in a steady plume of frost. She had been doing her breathing exercises every night for half an hour, religiously. They helped her take back some control, helped her body complete the cycle and reset itself. After a minute or so of this, the wood smoke became pleasant again. Or, at least, not as scary. She was going home, to her friends, to the place she loved. There was nothing to be frightened of.
She continued down the path. The tree cover was breaking, and there was a building ahead of her. In the dark, the tower on the end loomed a bit, and the Virginia creeper looked a bit creepier than in the daytime. The blue door was just as welcoming, and there were lights on in the common room and Janelle’s room. Upstairs, all the lights were off but one on the end. Nate’s room. Stevie reached to her pocket for her pass to tap herself in before she remembered that she no longer had one. She stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. She was about to go over to Janelle’s window, when the door opened.
The Vanishing Stair Page 4