The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  Francis forgot to look surprised at this, and Miss Nelson’s eyes grew narrow. Francis had given it all away. She did as she was told, going into the common room, where one lamp was lit. The man with the shotgun went to the front window to look out.

  “You will sit there,” Miss Nelson said, pointing to the couch. “And you will not move. At all. You will sleep there.”

  She turned to the man by the door.

  “She doesn’t move from that spot,” Miss Nelson said.

  6

  THE GREAT HOUSE WOULD NEVER FAIL TO IMPRESS STEVIE. THIS WAS exactly the effect it was intended to have. It was Albert Ellingham’s palace, designed by several of the most famous architects and designers of the era, to be a showstopper. The wood was rosewood, imported from India. The pink marble, the Austrian crystal, the Scottish stained glass . . . everything in sight had been brought from some corner of the world for the express purpose of being part of this room, just to be seen, to be admired by Albert Ellingham and all he chose to invite.

  Right next to the front door, there was a head of steel-colored closely cropped hair, and under it was Larry, as dependable as a grandfather clock, sitting at his large wooden desk. He was staring grimly into an Ellingham mug.

  “Hey, Larry,” Stevie said. “What’s wrong with your coffee?”

  “Some jackass bought pumpkin-flavored K-Cups for the machine. If I wanted to ruin my day like that I’d go ahead and eat a candle.”

  “Not a PSL fan?”

  “A what?”

  The door to the small security room behind him was tipped open. This had originally been one of the Ellingham receiving parlors. When Stevie had last seen it, it had some desks and a few monitors. Now the furniture had been removed on two walls and replaced by narrow control desks that faced walls of large mounted screens, stacked two high, showing every angle of Ellingham Academy, with the views switching every ten seconds or so.

  “That looks . . . complete,” she said.

  “Let me give you the tour,” he replied, standing up. “Come in.”

  Stevie followed cautiously. If Larry was showing her the security system, it was for a reason. He took a seat and typed something on a keyboard. Stevie’s name came up on one of the screens, then he began to see her morning’s journey told in reverse. There she was at the Great House door. There she was approaching the Great House. There she was walking down a pathway, alone. She stopped to stare at one of the cameras. She was scowling at it. There she was leaving breakfast. There was a close-up of Nate, Janelle, and Stevie going in to breakfast. . . .

  “How is it doing this?” she said. “Facial recognition?”

  “Sometimes it gets it wrong, and it’s not very useful at night, but overall, it’s not bad. There are also sensors in different locations that can read your ID at six feet. They call them ‘listening posts.’ There are over eight hundred of them.”

  He hit return and her images were cleared.

  “Here’s the thing,” Larry said. “People don’t tend to change their behavior without reason. But make people see why they should . . .”

  “Point made,” Stevie said. “I get it. You see it all.”

  Larry did the thing where he pointed two fingers toward his own eyes and then to her.

  “And you leave any further inquiries to the appropriate authorities. Not that there will be any further inquiries.”

  “Appropriate,” Stevie said. “Authorities. Yes.”

  “Good. They’re waiting for you upstairs. You know the office.”

  Stevie backed into the main hall, then headed up the grand, sweeping staircase. On the landing, there was the painting of the Ellingham family, done by their friend Leonard Holmes Nair. You couldn’t just walk by the painting. It demanded to be seen. It wasn’t overly large, maybe four feet high, which was nothing in proportion to the space. It was the color that gripped you first—the blue and yellow that swirled through the sky and slipped into the figures of the family. The bodies were almost an afterthought; the faces were the focus, and they blended in with the moon and the trees. It was like the landscape and the skyline were absorbing them, pulling them apart from each other and away from the world.

  It was a frightening painting.

  “Yes,” a voice said. “But we have that. We don’t need it. We’ll get it in a year or two.”

  The voice belonged to Dr. Jenny Quinn, the assistant head of the school, the one who looked like she drank student tears and ate lesser academics.

  “He wants to have a say, Jenny.”

  That was Dr. Charles Scott. They were having a discussion directly above her, on the third-floor landing. They were not speaking loudly, but the acoustics in the hall were better than most theaters, and Stevie was directly under them.

  “He shouldn’t have a say. Do you really want to be part of his narrative? Do you want him to be able to say he made Ellingham ‘safe’?”

  That had to be a reference to Edward King. Stevie backed up a bit, to make sure she was not visible. But there was no hiding from Larry, who saw her lingering.

  “No,” Dr. Scott said. “I don’t like him any more than you do. But wouldn’t you rather have him do this? At least it’s useful. He feels like he’s done something and then he’ll go away, hopefully.”

  “He’s not going to go away. The man is a disease and his son isn’t much better.”

  “I think that’s unfair,” Dr. Scott said. “Isn’t it worth trying to make him into someone who could do some good, rather than become a copy of his father at some prep school somewhere?”

  “I think you’re fooling yourself. I want to have a board meeting.”

  “And I’m fine with that.”

  “Right upstairs, Stevie,” Larry said, his voice booming up the steps.

  The conversation above her stopped abruptly, and a few seconds later, Dr. Scott appeared next to her, having come down the back steps, the ones the servants used.

  Dr. Charles Scott, aka Call Me Charles, was the head of the school and Stevie’s adviser. Out of all the Ellingham faculty, he had the most bouncy personality, the one that said “Learning is Fun!” in giant Comic Sans. He tended to dress in expensive geek chic—superhero T-shirts with designer jeans. His hair was somewhere between blond and the earliest hints of gray. Today he wore a fitted black cashmere V-neck and gray wool pants, looking every inch the aged version of the perfect New England preppy guy. He sproinged up to her like a cartoon tiger.

  “Hey!” he said. “Look who it is! I’m so glad your parents changed their minds.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  “Come on. Let’s talk.”

  Charles’s office was along the right-hand corridor. All of the upper floors of the Great House were open to the main foyer, except for the attic. The dark wooden doors were all very serious and handsome, but for Dr. Scott’s, which had a message board full of stickers and signs that said things like CHALLENGE ME and STAND BACK, I’M GOING TO TRY SCIENCE. His office had been Iris Ellingham’s dressing room, the famous dressing room that Flora Robinson disappeared into the night of the kidnappings. Many of the original features were still there. The pale silver wallpaper glowed bright in the autumn morning light. That was the real thing; Stevie recognized it from the photos. Some of the shelves and wall fittings were still there. Now, of course, the room was also full of bookshelves, a desk, chairs, file cabinets, a printer. Any open space on the wall was covered in Dr. Scott’s diplomas and certificates. He had a lot.

  He waved Stevie into a chair and sat behind his desk, where he clasped his hands together.

  “How are you, Stevie?” he asked.

  “Fine?”

  He nodded and examined her for a moment, taking in her expression and body language. She straightened up.

  “I can’t tell you how happy I was to hear you were coming back,” he said. “It’s very brave what you’re doing, after all that’s happened.”

  “It’s fine,” Stevie said.

  He made a noise of satisfact
ion.

  “You may have noticed we have some new security around here,” he said.

  “I saw.”

  “It may provide you with an additional layer of reassurance. Nothing is going to happen here. We had some tragic events this semester, but that’s behind us.”

  Both Larry and Call Me Charles had now brought up the security system. Both had their reasons, but were they also telling her they knew Edward King brought her back? If so, why not just say it? Maybe no one knew. It was possible.

  Whatever the case, it was making her paranoid.

  “Do you feel ready to get back to work?” he asked.

  Stevie felt very ready to get back to her work, which was dealing with the fact that she had made the first major breakthrough in the Ellingham case in eighty years. But he probably meant schoolwork, and the answer to that was no, she was not ready for that.

  “Definitely,” she lied.

  “I’ve messaged all your teachers, so we’ll get you back up to speed. There may be some bumps along the way, but we’ll work it out.”

  There was a clock ticking somewhere in the room, loud, like a bomb. She glanced around for where the noise was coming from and saw a heavy green marble clock on the mantel, surrounded by books and framed photographs.

  “Was that clock there before?” she asked.

  “No,” Charles said. “We were rearranging some things from Albert Ellingham’s office and I brought it up here. Isn’t that a beauty? The story is that it belonged to Marie Antoinette. I don’t know if that was ever proven. I heard there was a piece of Marie Antoinette’s porcelain here at some point. . . .”

  “A shepherdess,” Stevie said.

  Charles blinked behind his Warby Parkers.

  “Iris collected antique French porcelain,” Stevie said.

  “Of course you would know about that,” he said. “Anyway, it seemed so sad to have something so beautiful in a room no one really goes in. It should be looked at. But, let’s keep to the subject at hand. Do you know this book?”

  He pulled a copy of Truly Devious: The Ellingham Murders by Dr. Irene Fenton from a stack of books on his desk. Stevie had worn this book through. It was the first read many people did on the subject.

  Stevie nodded.

  “I assumed so. I got a call from the author. Dr. Fenton teaches at the University of Vermont, in Burlington. She’s working on an updated version and she’s looking for a research assistant. We’ve placed several students at the university as research assistants. In your case, I don’t think we’ve ever had such a good fit for a project. How would you feel about doing that?”

  Stevie tried not to actually bounce in the seat, but this was unsuccessful. Her spine became a spring, and she bolted up. Life had handed her a gift, a beautiful, unexpected gift.

  “What would I have to do?” she asked.

  “Organize research, check facts.” Charles said it all casually, as if this wasn’t the greatest thing in the world. “I can give you some credit for English and history for the work, as well as credit toward your individual project. And because of all the work you’ve done on this subject already, I can advance you a little time and credit to make up for anything you’ve lost.”

  She was already nodding.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You never have to thank me for work you’ve done yourself. And I figured you would say yes, so I’ve set up your first meeting for tomorrow. Take the Burlington coach in the morning. She’ll meet you at the Skinny Pancake at noon. It’s a coffee and crepe place on the waterfront. You’ll like it. Very popular. Sound all right?”

  It sounded better than all right.

  “Now . . .” He opened his laptop. “Let’s get you updated on all your units for your classes as well. I don’t know if you happened to continue any work on your reading or your language learning modules . . .”

  Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

  A half hour later, with a new schedule and an alarming set of “personal academic benchmarks” to meet, Stevie was released back into the wild, feeling a confusing blend of joy and terror, which was often a ticket to a ride on the anxiety roller coaster. There were people around, and she could have spoken to any of them. She could find Janelle and Nate and Vi. They would be happy to talk to her.

  Stevie was not going to do any of those things. She often found that when everything felt a little too much, she could not talk to anyone, even if she actually wanted to. She had a tendency to go where other people were not, to step into shadows when people walked toward her. She had a fondness for headphones and screens and ducking away, even as part of her wanted to be with friends. Which meant she was going to the library to find some people who were probably dead. Namely, she was going to find Frankie and Edward, and Frankie and Edward were most likely to be found in the materials she had been hoping to get from Kyoko Obi, the school librarian.

  The library, called Asteria, was one of the campus’s most magnificent buildings. Albert Ellingham thought libraries were holy spaces of learning, so he designed it to look like a small Gothic church, with a turret. On the inside, it had a wild quality—because of some architectural peculiarity, when you opened the door, it sent in a channel of air that swirled up through the open space, up and up around the balconies with their intricate spun-steel metalwork that was like petrified lace. Colored light poured in from the stained-glass windows that portrayed Greek titans: Helios, Selene, Metis, Eos, Leto, Pallas, and Perseus.

  Kyoko sat at a stool at a monumental desk, looking like a judge on high. Except, in this case, the judge wore a fleece and still had the marks from a bike helmet in her hair. Kyoko also ran the school’s biking club and actually went up and down the entrance path on her bike every day, a feat that should easily have qualified her for the Olympics. The library was sparsely populated—a few people sat at the massive working tables, and they all had headphones on, so it seemed okay to speak.

  “You don’t waste time,” Kyoko said, greeting her. “I only just got the message that you were back.”

  Stevie meant to smile and nod, but she ended up enacting the shrug emoticon.

  “I need some research material,” Stevie said. “On here, on the school. I need to see anything about the first class. Lists of students for sure. Do you have those?”

  Kyoko nodded and took a swig from her Ellingham water bottle. She put a little sign out that said: THE LIBRARIAN WILL BE BACK and waved Stevie through the dark wooden door with the words Library Office written in gold.

  The front part of the Ellingham library was a grand place, with its iron and glass and dark, carved wood, and the glorious selection of books. Many of the books had been around since the school opened in 1935—fine, handpicked volumes, many bound in leather, silent witnesses to the events that unfolded there. But it was the back office of the library that got Stevie excited. The back office contained the large metal shelving units of document boxes.

  If you loved crime, a document box was a beautiful thing. Anything could be in it. Files. Clues. Evidence. The document box was the thing to pick through, to find the lead, to find the single sentence on the single piece of paper that made you stand so suddenly that your head spun and then you’d know that you cracked the case.

  That’s how it happened in Stevie’s head, anyway.

  “The early archive is back here,” Kyoko said, indicating one of the shelving units. “You want . . .”

  “The first year. 1935–36.”

  “Right,” Kyoko said, heading to the end of the first row of shelves. “The 1935–1936 school year at Ellingham Academy was incomplete because of the kidnappings. The school’s first full academic year started in the fall of 1938. You know all that.”

  Stevie nodded.

  “It was also a very small class. It was the experiment year. So the records aren’t as extensive. There was no full yearbook. However, the school had produced a guide for the first class.”

  She opened a folio box and removed a small clothbound b
ook. On the front it read: ELLINGHAM ACADEMY. The paper was thick and brownish, and the ink was a brownish red. The lettering looked hand-drawn.

  “There is a box of photographs as well,” Kyoko said, handing Stevie a flat storage box. From the rattle of the contents and the weight, it didn’t sound like it contained a tremendous amount. “You can take those out into the main study room.”

  Stevie lifted the box and followed Kyoko back out, then settled herself at one of the big wooden tables and switched on a work lamp. She tried to contain herself as she opened the book. The first page contained an elaborate map of the campus, indicating buildings that were complete and buildings to come. There was a letter from Albert Ellingham welcoming everyone, a list of teachers and faculty . . . Stevie kept flipping until she got to the students. Each one got a third of a page. Frankie was staring up at her from the bottom of the very first page of entries. There was the girl who had dressed as Bonnie Parker. Stevie read the entry underneath.

  Francis Josephine Crane, New York City

  Birthday: February 15, 1919

  Interests: Chemistry, films, ballet

  “Got you,” Stevie said under her breath.

  A few pages later, she found the next person she was searching for.

  Edward Pierce Davenport, Boston

  Birthday: November 12, 1918

  Interests: Literature, opera, art

  In his school photo, Edward had a rakish grin, like he knew something the others did not.

  A bit like David.

  Stevie dug through the box of photographs. Many were of the buildings or the construction sites. Some were shots of the mountain view. There were pictures of the students sitting at desks and worktables in stilted poses. One pose was a dead ringer for an ad for an ambulance-chasing legal firm with about ten people gathered around, smiling at one open book. Many of the furnishings were exactly the same as they were now, including pictures in this very library. She easily found Francis and Edward in a few of these photos. One thing jumped out at her: Francis and Edward looked rich. Francis was wearing two different fur coats in the photos—one short white jacket and a longer, dark one. Edward also had a long fur coat, and he stood with the casual ease of a rich guy—the lean, the half smile.