The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  She had never been an autumn person; the shortening of the days gave her the jitters, possibly because she had been prone to anxiety attacks at night, and the more night, the more possible anxiety. But it didn’t have to be that way, and she decided she was going to become an autumn person here. Flannel was okay. Apples were fine. Pumpkins were the watermelons of fall. Were these the thoughts autumn people had?

  Was this even real? Last night, with Edward King in the living room and the plane ride and the bargain, and now this almost-psychedelic view? Had she lost her mind some time ago?

  “This one,” Janelle said, stepping up to one of the massive leaf piles. “I’m going in.”

  Nate turned and regarded one of the piles with a scientific air.

  “Lot of animal feces in there,” he said.

  “Nate,” Janelle said.

  “I’m just saying. Leaves are like a big litter box. Lots of animals up here. Foxes. Deer. Raccoons. Moose.”

  “No moose,” Stevie said.

  “Birds,” Nate went on. “So much bird shit. Bat shit. Lots of bats. Bat shit is very valuable, you know. It’s called guano.”

  “I know what guano is,” Janelle said in a warning tone. “But I don’t want to hear about poop. I want crispy leaf fun.”

  “Squirrels still have to poop,” Nate continued.

  “Squirrels have to poop,” Stevie repeated sagely.

  “Why are you ruining my perfect fall morning?” Janelle asked.

  “We all have a calling,” Nate said. “This is mine.”

  Janelle made a low sound under her breath. Stevie got the feeling her friends were putting on a bit of a show for her—Janelle was extra perky, Nate a bit more dour. They were showing her it was all fine and normal and just like before. Except, as they walked, Stevie was noting little objects on the trees, on light poles, on corners of buildings—discreet little orbs.

  The eyes of Edward King.

  “There’s a lot of new security,” she said.

  “Oh yeah,” Janelle said. “They did that last week.”

  “I, for one, hail our new security overlords,” Nate said, loudly, at the nearest orb.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Janelle added. “We’re pretty remote here, and . . . things happened.”

  They were coming up on the cupola, where a makeshift memorial to Hayes was sitting in a state of minor decay. What shocked Stevie the most was the sheer quantity of . . . sad. There were flowers, not scattered here or there in single roses, but bunches. Bunches sitting on dried and desiccated bunches, filling the entire floor. There were drawings and notes and pictures. There were small electronic candles, because real candles would have made the whole thing go up in a giant blaze.

  “They keep coming,” Janelle said. “I guess they’re slowing a little, but every day the deliveries come and maintenance puts them here.”

  The wind stirred some of the now-dying flowers on the memorial.

  “This is cheerful,” Nate said. “Can we eat? Let’s be morbid over food.”

  The Ellingham dining hall was a large space that looked like a ski chalet. It had a high, peaked ceiling with exposed beams that crossed the space. These were now occupied by a line of jack-o’-lanterns, looking down judgmentally over the assembled. The cafeteria at Stevie’s old school was a festival of linoleum, with hot metal trays full of tacos and tater tots and oversteamed broccoli. The Ellingham dining hall had been given more money to feed fewer people, and it did it with some style. It had automatic sensing dispensers that filled your bottle with still or sparkling water. The menus were written on blackboards in colored chalk. Brunch was a serious affair, with an omelet station (with tofu, if you didn’t eat eggs). There were fresh pancakes and waffles, made with all kinds of berries, or bananas, or chocolate chips. Every breakfast meat was represented, along with their vegetarian counterparts. There was a make-your-own smoothie station, fresh bread, local honey, a whole shelf of teas, different coffee blends with every kind of milk. And, of course, there was maple syrup, the very lifeblood of Vermont. It was this warm syrup smell, along with the wood smoke on the breeze, that said Ellingham to Stevie.

  Stevie got a custom waffle with chocolate chips, and a full ramekin of warm syrup. As she turned with her tray, she saw that she had been noticed. Assembled in front of her was all of Ellingham. Or, most of Ellingham. On the left, sitting with a few people from Juno, was Gretchen, Hayes’s ex-girlfriend, the pianist. She had lent Hayes five hundred dollars and finally dumped him when she got tired of his user ways. Stevie had seen Gretchen and Hayes arguing on the day Hayes died. It was Gretchen who told Stevie how Hayes recruited other people to do his work. Gretchen was hard to miss, with her mighty crown of fiery red hair.

  Two tables down were Maris and Dash, the other two people who had worked on Hayes’s video. Maris was a singer. She had jet-black hair and tended to dress like she was always about to go perform a set at some smoky little cabaret. Today she wore a snug black sweater and a pair of jeans with high boots. She was fully made up, even though it was still pretty early on a Sunday. Maris always had a smoky eye. Dash was a stage manager who wore large, floppy clothes. He was the one who really ran the video production. They saw Stevie, and Maris waved. This drew more attention, and got Kazim Bazir, the head of the student union, up on his feet and hurrying over.

  “Stevie!” he called. “Oh my God! When did you get back? This is amazing!”

  “Last night,” Stevie replied, suddenly feeling shy.

  It was a nice greeting, even though Stevie and Kaz didn’t really know each other very well. Kaz was always enthusiastic. His special interest was the environment, and he spent a lot of time getting Ellingham to convert over to composting toilets. Kaz cared a lot about composting toilets.

  There was someone else watching closely—a small person with large, luminous eyes. She was wearing a brown sweater and peering at Stevie over the top of her tablet.

  Germaine Batt.

  Technically, Germaine had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t her fault that her story was the thing that made Stevie’s parents pull her out. But the feeling was still there.

  David was not in the dining hall.

  “How do you feel?” Nate asked as they walked to a table.

  “Like the prettiest girl on syrup mountain,” Stevie replied.

  They took a table by the window. Janelle’s head was on a swivel. She was watching for Vi, of course. The three of them settled in to have their brunch. Stevie sliced into the crisp chocolate-chip waffle and dipped it into the warm syrup.

  Vi Harper-Tomo came bursting into the dining hall. Stevie had never really seen anyone burst into anywhere before, but that’s what they did—sending the door flying back, rushing in with arms flailing. Vi was dressed in their favorite outfit—wide white overalls and a gray sweatshirt, silver-blond hair spiked high.

  Vi greeted Stevie much as Janelle had, with an incomprehensible string of affection.

  “I can’t believe it,” they said.

  They turned to Janelle. There were greeting kisses at breakfast now, like a couple from TV. Nate tore his waffle slowly as the pair leaned cozily into one another.

  “You know we’re cute,” Janelle said to him.

  “Cuteness is my favorite,” he said.

  “It’s good for when you write romances in your book, right?” Stevie said.

  “I don’t write romance. I write about finding dragons and breaking magic rocks in half.”

  “The real magic rocks are the friends we make along the way,” Stevie replied. “Right?”

  “He’s happy for us,” Janelle said. “This is how he shows it.”

  Nate looked up at all of them, dark shadows under his eyes.

  “This is why I prefer books to people.”

  “We love you too,” Janelle said.

  Even though Janelle had food, she accompanied Vi up to the food line. Nate centered his scrambled eggs on his plate.

  “So,” he said. “What changed your par
ents’ minds?”

  Stevie dunked her waffle nervously into the syrup pool.

  “Who knows?”

  “They just said, ‘We’re sending you back’?”

  “I mean . . .” Stevie nervously rubbed under her eye. “We talked about it a little, but . . .”

  She was dancing on the edge of the truth, telling a lie of omission. One step could send her into falsehood.

  “I don’t know what motivates my parents,” she said.

  There. She lied. So simple. It fell out of her mouth. Plop.

  “You guys ever hear anything about Ellie?” Stevie said, changing the conversation. “What’s going on with that?”

  Nate was still studying Stevie’s expression, but then he seemed to give up and returned to his eggs.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I mean, they looked. There were police around for a few days. Low-key, but they were around. I think they may have had dogs, even. She must have gone to Burlington. She knows a lot of people there.”

  Stevie sipped at her coffee and looked out the window. They were facing toward the back, to the thick line of trees that bordered the property. During the day, they were a bright, bold wall. At night, they loomed and contained multitudes. The area where the school was was flat, but it dipped down dramatically as it went toward the road, and there was a river that bordered it on two sides. The other way out was up, toward jagged rocks and higher peaks and thicker woods.

  Getting out would not have been easy. Stevie wasn’t even sure Ellie had a coat on when she vanished that night.

  “It’s not your fault,” Nate said.

  “What?”

  “It’s not your fault,” he repeated. “Whatever Ellie has done—why she ran—that’s not on you.”

  “I know that,” she said, concentrating on the squares in her waffles. “Are people saying this is my fault?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “No. Just . . . no. Forget I said anything. I think Vi and Janelle are about to make out on top of those mugs.”

  Stevie turned and saw Vi and Janelle locked in an intense embrace by the coffee station.

  “It’s been a long week,” Nate said. “Don’t leave again. Don’t leave me with these people.”

  “Which people?”

  “Any people.”

  “I don’t count as people?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “It’s been all feelings and love. I want to go back to numbness and avoidance. You’re great at that stuff.”

  She smiled and tapped her phone to check the time.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Meeting with Call Me Charles.”

  “Go forth and learn or whatever, I’ll see you at home.”

  Home.

  Yes. This was home. This home welcomed her as she was, which was unusual in her experience. It was also, and more familiarly, the place where she had to tell the biggest lies.

  April 14, 1936, 3:00 a.m.

  “WE HAVE TO READ THE SIGNS,” EDDIE SAID. “THE DARK STARS MAY have aligned for us. It’s time for us to go.”

  Eddie was squatting on the floor of the gymnasium, bobbing lightly on the balls of his feet like a broken jack-in-the-box. Francis did not believe in Eddie’s astrological fascinations, but she usually entertained them. Not tonight. Everything was coming unspooled.

  “Let’s run. Let’s start the plan.”

  “No,” Francis heard herself say. Her voice was like stone. “No. Not now. We’ll never make it now. Don’t you know what this means?”

  “It means the dark star . . .”

  Edward was about to go on one of his poetic nonsense trips about the dark star and the silver princess and all these characters he had in his head. He took his poetry too far sometimes, got caught up in symbols. Francis cut this off.

  “Whatever is going on,” she said, “our letter is mixed up in it. There will be cops, Eddie. Lots of cops.”

  “So what? We’re going to be outlaws!”

  “If we go now,” Francis said, “we’ll get caught in the first hour. We need to wait. Be cool about it.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Edward said, moving close to her, his breath on her lips.

  “The fun,” she said, pushing him back gently, “is making our escape and getting out. When we go, we go forever. We need to be smart.”

  This is where it always fell apart with Eddie. He was so wild, he had the imagination, the dreams. But he didn’t think about practicalities, like G-men, police dogs, and roadblocks. He wanted to be an outlaw without the discipline or practice of being an outlaw. It was up to her to keep him in line. That’s why she had done so much of her own preparations. She had to get back to Minerva, back to her room. The things she needed were there.

  “They’re making us leave anyway,” he said.

  “Maybe for a day or two. Maybe only for a few hours. You need to trust me. Keep your cool. Go home.”

  She pressed her lips hard against his and left the gymnasium. She couldn’t risk using the tunnel. Miss Nelson might be in it, and the hatch on the other end would likely be bolted. She would have to go above ground.

  There was one advantage tonight, a blue sulfuric fog. This would likely be her only protection against the men with the shotguns. The air was bitingly cold now and the fog went into her nose and mouth, tangling its way down into her lungs. She was up by the library, and in theory she only had to make a straight shot across the top of the green to get home. But the door would obviously be guarded and the entire area exposed. She would have to take the long route around, all the way through the far end of the campus, through the half-finished sites down near the road.

  She stayed low, moving from one tree to the next. She tripped over the roots and branches, and the leaves crunched under her feet. She saw the first gunmen in their overalls and coats, their shotguns slung over their shoulders. There were three of them, talking together, by the cupola. She got down, her heart beating fast. They would shoot tonight. They would not hesitate. For one second, she tried to imagine the hot bullet sinking into her chest, the impact. It made her heart race painfully and her hands grew slick. She considered calling out, asking them for help. They would take her home to Minerva. She would get in trouble, but she wouldn’t get shot.

  No. She pressed to the ground. She would be a cat. They loved cats here. “Cats know best,” Albert Ellingham would say. She would slink and slide. It was a big campus. She had the courage. Tonight, she would prove herself.

  The hardest part would be crossing the road. That was the most open area. She would have to climb down the decline into the woods and cross somewhere in the dark. Francis made her way down the steep slope. Her expensive coat caught on brambles and made her trip, so she tucked it up and crab-walked her way down several feet. If she tried to stand, she was likely to tumble and hit every tree and rock all the way to the river. The rock cut her hands as she grabbed at the ground. Everything smelled of dirt and decaying leaves.

  “What’s that?” one of the men said.

  She froze.

  A light shone through the trees.

  “Probably an animal,” another replied.

  Francis was very close to being sick. She swallowed hard and waited, not moving an inch. She froze. It must have been fifteen or twenty minutes later before she moved again. Once she had made it a good distance from the statues and the men, she crept to the road’s edge and, taking a deep breath, she ran across. It was a very slender road, so it was just a few steps. She fell into the culvert on the other side and bashed her face. But she did not cry out. She crawled on her belly into the dark.

  Then, she went back up the hill. This was much harder. Her breath was labored now. Cops and robbers. G-men and guns, sneaking in the dark. And she was doing it. Francis Josephine Crane, the flour princess of Fifth Avenue, was crawling through the dirt and the night. She dug her nails into the ground with determination, not caring about breaking them. She didn’t care about her clothes or her shoes. This was life.

  She crested the to
p of the incline and emerged on the other side of the road. Now she had to wind her way back up to Minerva. She moved slowly, working her way from building to tree to statue. The fog wrapped around her like a fur coat. It was easy.

  By the time she reached Minerva, she no longer worried about how she would get back inside. She would simply find a way. The door would be locked, but the window of her room was not. She went around the back of the building, then peered around the corner. No one was outside. She crept along and made her way to room two. She tested the window first, trying to push it open. It did not give.

  Dottie’s room? Dottie was a sneak too. Did Dottie leave her window propped? She sometimes talked about liking to have it open a bit, how it reminded her of home, with the open window by the fire escape.

  She crept over to room three and looked at the window of the dark room. There was a tiny, tiny gap, only as wide as Francis’s finger, but it was enough. She got a stick and levered it up, ever so carefully, then pushed it, working slow and silent. Then she hoisted herself inside and closed it, inch by precious inch. She was inside Dottie’s room, which, while technically like her own, was so much shabbier. There were no fur throws, no special furniture, no skis, no trunks of extra clothes, no radio or phonograph. Just what the school provided, and books. Piles of books. Neat, and all over.

  Francis went to the door, and seeing no one, stepped out into the hallway and . . .

  “Francis Crane!”

  The overhead light came on, and Miss Nelson stood there, looking flushed and furious.

  Francis Crane, the flour princess of Fifth Avenue and future outlaw, was busted cold just footsteps from her door. She opened her mouth to speak, though she was not sure what she would say. Something would come out. Miss Nelson, though she was in charge, was generally passive. She would say she was sorry and . . .

  Miss Nelson was not passive tonight. Her rounded features looked sharper, and there was something in her face that suggested she knew exactly where Francis had been.

  “In here,” Miss Nelson said coldly, pointing to the common room. Behind her, a figure appeared. A man in overalls and a flat cap, holding a shotgun.