“Stevie!”
Pix—Dr. Nell Pixwell, the faculty resident of Minerva—was wrapped in a massive plaid flannel robe. She had allowed her shaved head to grow to the point where there was a faint brown fuzz showing—a winter cut, for warmth. She raised her arms in the air in a cheerful greeting.
“I only got the call an hour ago! I’m so glad, I’m so glad. We missed you so much. Get in here!”
The common room of Minerva was swelteringly warm. There was a fire crackling away in the fireplace, where two smiling pumpkins stood at attention at either end of the mantelpiece. The moose head over the fireplace had been decorated in orange and black winking lights. Enough time had passed since she left that they had started preparing for Halloween.
“Janelle probably has her headphones on or she would have already come out,” Pix said. “She’s going to faint from shock. Go on. Go say hello.”
Stevie walked slowly to the hallway where the downstairs rooms were and knocked on Janelle’s door. When there was no reply, she knocked louder. After a moment, Janelle appeared in blue flannel pajamas covered in pictures of cat heads, and her crafting tool belt at her waist—a handmade blue canvas wraparound with deep pockets full of wire cutters and a variety of tools Stevie could not identify. She had put her hair up in two bunches, and her headphones were around her neck, still playing music loudly. She stood in her doorway for a moment, unmoving. Then . . .
“Ohmygodwhatishappeningwhydidn’tyoutellmewhendidthishappenohmygod.”
Stevie was wrapped in a massive hug that smelled of orange blossom perfume, coconut oil, pumpkin, and a tiny bit of industrial solvent.
“How, how . . .” Janelle stepped back and felt Stevie by her shoulders to take a good look at her. “How . . .”
“It happened fast,” Stevie said. “Like, today fast. They changed their minds.”
“What? WHAT. Oh my God. . . .”
In the next moment, she had Stevie by the wrist and was pulling her along to the tight circular stairs at the end of the hall. Stevie had a moment of remembrance here—on the day she arrived at Ellingham Academy, the first person she met in Minerva was Hayes Major. He recruited her into carrying his stuff up these cramped, twisting steps. She had been profusely sweating, and he looked so cool and crisp. He kept talking about phone calls he was getting or making to people in LA. And Stevie had no idea why he was telling her about his phone calls because she had not asked and did not care. But that was Hayes all over. All talk about his movie deal and how popular he was, getting people to do his work.
These stairs would always make her think of Hayes.
When Janelle and Stevie knocked on Nate’s upstairs door, all was quiet for a moment. Janelle knocked louder, and eventually the door creaked open.
Nate had pushed all the furniture and all of his belongings up against the walls. His desk chair was upside down on his desk, the bed tipped up to make floor space. On the wooden floor, there was some kind of pattern, a spidery form of blobs and lines made from carefully sliced black masking tape. Nate sat in the center of the web, dressed in faded blue flannel pajama bottoms and a saggy green T-shirt that said I’M HERE BECAUSE MY GRANDKIDS AREN’T GOING TO SPOIL THEMSELVES. His room smelled of a spicy clove supermarket air freshener and a general, light boy stink. It was a warm, strangely welcoming smell.
“Look,” Janelle said, pointing to Stevie. “Look. Look! Look.”
Nate blinked at Stevie, then slowly unfolded his long frame from the ground. His hair had not been cut since his arrival at school, so it was hanging low over his forehead and scraping his neck. He was a few hours behind on a shave, and he scratched at the shadow along his chin. Nate had the same expression Stevie had come to love—vaguely annoyed by everything, except maybe Stevie and Janelle. But for sure everything else.
“Is this a trick?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Not a trick, not a trick,” Janelle said. “She just showed up.”
“Poof,” Stevie added.
“And . . . you’re back?”
“From outer space,” Stevie said.
“What’s it like out there?”
“You don’t want to know,” Stevie replied.
“Nate, she is back—what are you doing?” Janelle said. “She’s back!”
Janelle bounced on the balls of her feet a bit.
“I’m hugging you with my mind,” he replied.
“I’m awkwardly accepting your hug in my mind,” Stevie said. “And what are you doing?”
She pointed to the tape creation on the floor.
“Writing,” he replied.
“With tape? On the floor?”
“It’s a map,” he said, gazing around.
“Of Moonbright?”
“No.”
It was best not to make further inquiries.
Stevie looked down the dark hall to David’s room. There was no light coming from under the door, and no sound at all.
“He’s not home,” Nate said. “Or, I don’t know. Maybe he is. I wouldn’t bother.”
“Come on,” Janelle said. “Let’s get her stuff in.”
As Janelle headed for the stairs, Nate slipped Stevie one of his rare smiles.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
Stevie’s mind flickered back to Edward King and her promise not to speak. It would not help her. It wouldn’t help anyone.
“Magic happens,” she said.
Stevie’s sad pile of belongings had turned up in the common room. Pix gave Stevie the key to her room. As she unlocked the door, Stevie was at first shocked by the dark and the cold of this once-familiar space. When she switched on the light, she heard a moth start bumping confusedly against the shade. The walls were bare, the drawers still half-open from when she had dumped the contents so sadly and unceremoniously the other week. The closet door was half-open as well. It looked like exactly what it was—the scene of a person leaving in a hurry, tears in her eyes.
Between the three of them, they made short work of getting the boxes and bags inside. Stevie opened a garbage bag full of clothes and dumped them out, which made Janelle recoil and run for hangers and a fabric steamer. Nate unpacked her books—something Stevie would never have allowed anyone else to do. Tonight was special, though, and Nate was careful with them, putting them into sensible stacks by genre and type.
“So,” Stevie said, testing the waters again. “Where’s David? You made it seem like he’s out, or something?”
Janelle paused, her hand in the pile of Stevie’s crumpled sheets. She and Nate shared a look.
“Oh, he’s here,” Janelle said.
She let that remark hang in the air for a second.
“Okay?” Stevie said, looking at the two of them. “What does that mean?”
“She means,” Nate said, turning away from the books, “that David has gone full weird.”
“He was always that way,” Janelle said in a low voice.
“Yeah, but now he’s completed his journey. Our little caterpillar has turned into a freaky butterfly.”
“Tell her about the screaming,” Janelle said. “Because I can’t.”
“The screaming?” Stevie repeated.
“The other morning he started something called ‘screaming meditation,’” Nate said. “Guess what happens in screaming meditation? Did you guess screaming? For fifteen minutes? Because that’s what happens in screaming meditation. Fifteen. Minutes. Outside. At five in the morning. Do you know what happens when someone screams outside for fifteen minutes at five in the morning at a remote location in the mountains, especially after a . . .”
The implied dot dot dot was “student dies in a terrible accident or maybe murder and another one goes missing.”
“When security got to him he claimed it was his new religion and that it is something he needs to do every morning now as a way to talk to the sun.”
So this is what Edward King had been referring to.
“Sometimes,” Nate went on, tapping the books i
nto place so that the spines lined up perfectly, “he sleeps on the roof. Or somewhere else. Sometimes the green.”
“Naked,” Janelle added. “He sleeps on the green naked.”
“Or in classrooms,” Nate said. “Someone said they went into differential equations and he was asleep in the corner of the room under a Pokémon comforter.”
“Your boy has not been well,” Janelle said. “Nothing was right here without you. But now you’re back! Everything will be okay again.”
Nate left not long afterward so that Janelle and Stevie could talk. Stevie found she was exhausted, though. Earlier that evening, she had been at the Funky Munkee. Now she was back at Ellingham. Everything that happened in between made no sense. Sensing that Stevie needed to sleep, Janelle made up the bed to her personal satisfaction and watched as Stevie drank a full bottle of water to help her readjust to the altitude. Then she put a second bottle by Stevie’s bedside.
“Vi’s going to meet us at brunch tomorrow,” she said. “Get some rest. I’m right next door if you need me.”
Janelle knew that Stevie sometimes had panic attacks at night.
“Thanks,” Stevie said, “for everything.”
When Janelle was gone, Stevie stood at her window for a long time, looking out at the dark and her own reflection. Like the stairs, the window came with a memory. The night before Hayes died, she had a dream. At least, she was pretty sure it was a dream. She remembered light, and looking at her wall, and seeing words on her wall, like the Truly Devious lettering. She had not been able to make them all out and the message was scrambled in her mind. Stevie had awakened with a jolt and rolled out of bed, crawled along the floor to this very window. She had pushed a heavy textbook out of it, hoping to strike anyone who was lurking underneath, but no one was.
It never made any sense that anyone would project a message like that on her wall. It was too much work, making the image, getting something to project it, hiding in the dark. People did complicated things at Ellingham, but there was no one she could think of who would do something that elaborate to her. . . .
Except maybe David. David was probably capable of an elaborate joke. But he liked her, as it turned out, so why do it?
And this had happened right before Hayes died. What were the chances?
Janelle had spoken to her that night, talked her through it, about dreams that were so vivid they completely mimicked reality. It was why some people think they see ghosts in the night, or figures by their bed. The space between sleep and consciousness can be thin. And Stevie had been fully immersed in the Ellingham story on that day, and had actually gone into the tunnel where the kidnappers had been. Her brain was full of the crime and was projecting it back at her.
Stevie turned back and looked at the place on the wall where the message had been, even if only in her mind. What had it said? Riddle, riddle on the wall . . . something murder. Something about a body in a field . . . something Alice.
This was the wall that she had shared with Ellie. Minerva was so empty, so doomed. Dottie Epstein and Hayes Major were dead, and Element Walker was on the run.
Was it Ellie? Was the note some kind of art thing? Did it have something to do with the trick she played on Hayes with the dry ice? Did Ellie have a broken sense of humor, or did she secretly hate everyone?
Ellie didn’t seem like the hating kind, but you never knew.
Stevie crossed the room and went to her bag, which was resting on the floor in the corner of the room, and removed the tin. When she reached inside this time, she wanted only one of the objects—the photographs. One in particular. It was thicker than the others, because it was actually stuck to another photo. What was between the photos was the key.
It was a word.
A single word, cut out of a magazine. The word US.
This word, these two letters stuck between some old photos, was the reason Stevie had to be here, because this word was the first clue in eighty years. The Ellingham case was often called the Truly Devious case, because the family had received a letter that week, informing of the crime to come. It was composed of cut-out letters from magazines and newspapers. Stevie, like any person devoted to the case, could recite it by heart:
What she had found in Ellie’s room was proof that there were students on the campus who loved gangsters, who wrote poetry about taking down the king on the hill who liked to play games, and who were cutting words out of magazines and gluing them into things. In short, she had found that Truly Devious could have been a student here at Ellingham. And if Truly Devious could have been a student, then a student could take them down, even all these years later.
That is, if this student could deal with the person who was somewhere above her now . . . someone she longed to go up and see, someone whose presence thrummed through the floorboards. She felt her body growing warm just knowing David was so close. She recalled every sense, every touch. The soft curl of his hair, the curve of his neck, his kiss.
Edward King’s voice was in her head, making a mockery of everything she had ever felt about David. She could not go upstairs. She could not look for him. Maybe she had to avoid him forever. Avoid the feeling. Avoid all contact. That was the only way.
She clutched her comforter and pulled it over her face, blotting out the scene and calling down the night.
CRIMESTUFF.COM
FIVE LEGENDS OF ELLINGHAM ACADEMY
You know the story of Ellingham Academy and the famous kidnapping/murder plot. But did you know these twists in the tale?
1. ALICE IN THE ATTIC: According to one story, Albert Ellingham engineered the kidnapping himself as part of a game. When the game went wrong and two people died, he had to cover up what he had done. He took his daughter, Alice, back to the house and raised her there in the attic. Servants were told not to go there, even when they heard her footsteps above them. Eventually, Alice became too old for the attic, and when she could not escape, took her own life. Her ghost walks the floors there, and some people say you can hear her playing with her toys.
2. THE SECRET OF THE LAKE: Another story claims that Iris and Alice Ellingham were not kidnapped at all. In this version, Iris had a breakdown and murdered Alice by drowning her in the lake on the property. This event was witnessed by a student named Dottie Epstein. In order to keep this secret, Dottie was killed and the kidnapping story was invented. Iris was kept hidden, but she eventually escaped and killed herself. In despair over what had transpired, Albert Ellingham later drained the lake. Naturally, the ghosts of Iris, Alice, and Dottie still appear on the edge of where the lake once was. So. Many. Ghosts.
3. THE SUNKEN TREASURE: Pirates, rejoice! Is there a sunken treasure to be had? This story claims that after his wife’s body was found, Albert Ellingham collected her jewels and dropped them into Lake Champlain in a weighted box. So if you have scuba gear and some time on your hands, you might want to have a look. No ghosts, but treasure is better anyway.
4. THE HEIR TO THE THRONE: If you thought that last one sounded good, this story will blow you away. This report claims that after the kidnapping and murders, Albert Ellingham rewrote his will, leaving his fortune to anyone who could find his daughter, dead or alive, provided they were not responsible for the crimes. The Ellingham estate and businesses are worth in excess of two billion dollars today. Get hunting!
5. THE KIDNAPPING THAT NEVER WAS: No ghosts or fortunes here, just a damn good game. This story claims that the kidnapping and murders at Ellingham Academy never happened at all. The entire affair—the search, the investigation, the bodies—all of it was part of Albert Ellingham’s greatest game. The student who died, Dottie Epstein, was an actor. The game concluded when he faked his own death in an explosion two years later. In this happy-ending version, all the players were alive and lived together in complete anonymity, leaving fortune and fame behind. Or at least fame. They probably took the fortune.
So which one do you like? The ghosts? The treasure? Or the happy ever after?
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nbsp; “I WANT TO JUMP IN THOSE,” JANELLE SAID, HOPPING AHEAD ON THE way to breakfast. “But I don’t want to mess up what they’ve done. It’s so tempting.”
The next morning, Janelle, Stevie, and Nate were heading toward the dining hall. On weekends, the school offered brunch. Stevie had usually slept through this before, but the excitement of being back had woken her early. Even Nate emerged and came downstairs. They were now making their way to the green on an aggressively beautiful fall morning. The sky was a vibrant royal blue, a throbbing blue. Some of the maintenance crew were blowing leaves into gigantic mounds.
Janelle was dressed for the occasion in a burnished orange sweater and jeans and a chunky black scarf, with a spicy autumnal perfume that smelled of bergamot and clove. Stevie was wearing the least wrinkled and most likely to be clean clothes from the trash bag—a black hoodie and some stretched out gray leggings. This was not surprising, as 90 percent of Stevie’s clothes were black or gray or stretched out and her tops were more likely to be hooded than not. She marveled at Janelle, who moved through the patches of sun that came through the leaves, with her perfect style. It wasn’t fancy, but it made every moment feel like an occasion. Many people existed; Janelle lived.
Stevie looked up at the thick canopy of leaves over her head as she wound her way down the paths that snaked toward the Great House. These were the early changing leaves, the prime ones, the burnished golds and the meaty reds. As she reached the green, the view widened. Up here, on the mountain, she had one of the best views of the bright halo of color that overtook the land. The view was hallucinatory, with oceans of gold and orange all around the horizon, marbled with red that looked like rivers of lava coming down from the mountaintops.
The Vanishing Stair Page 5