The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  Could these two students have kidnapped Iris and Alice Ellingham and Dottie Epstein? That would have been impossible, surely? Someone would have noticed that two students were missing on the day of the kidnapping, right? How would they have gotten off campus? They probably didn’t have cars. Why would two students kidnap Iris and Alice Ellingham? And they wouldn’t have been able to also beat up George Marsh, Albert Ellingham’s FBI agent friend, in the middle of the night, or make the ransom calls, or have a boat on Lake Champlain two days later to collect the additional ransom money. Not alone. Could they have been working with other people?

  Did any of this make sense?

  Dottie Epstein turned up in the photos as well, and she did not look rich. Her clothes were plain, and she wore the same ones in most of the photos. But she looked much happier than Edward or Francis. Her smile was always wide, and she usually had a book in her hands or under her arm.

  “Can I scan these?” she asked Kyoko.

  “Sure.”

  She allowed Stevie into the back again and pointed her to the scanner.

  “When I first got here,” she said to Kyoko, “you showed me some old library records, things the students requested.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could I see it again?”

  “You really are jumping back in,” Kyoko said with a smile. “I’ll go and get it.”

  When Stevie had first looked at this list, it was to see the many materials Dottie Epstein had requested. Her initials, DE, were next to her items. But someone else had requested pulp magazines: Gun Molls Magazine, Vice Squad Detective, Dime Detective, All True Facts Detective Stories. The initials next to most of these were FC. Francis Crane.

  “Do you have any of these?” Stevie said.

  “I’ve looked for them,” Kyoko said. “I’d love to find them. But they must have disappeared a long time ago. The students who asked for them probably took them and never gave them back.”

  The students who took them, Stevie thought, probably took them and cut them apart. If she could find these magazines online, she could look at the letters. She could compare the typeface of those magazines to the photographs of the Truly Devious letter. Or someone could. The FBI. Someone.

  She didn’t have all the answers, but she had something. Now she had to do some of the drudge work and scan all of this to add to her files. She put on her headphones, turned on My Favorite Murder, and started with the student guide. Page by page, photo by photo, she got each image.

  After an hour or so of this, she returned to the main study room and opened her computer. Time for a basic search. Very little turned up about Francis Josephine Crane. It looked like there were a few references to her in social registers, some notes about her debutante ball, but nothing that seemed to go past around 1940, and not in much detail.

  Edward Pierce Davenport, however, did turn up several things. Wikipedia had a brief entry:

  Edward Pierce Davenport (1918–1940) was an American poet. His only published work was the 1939 collection Milk Moon. Davenport was best known for his relationships with other American expatriate writers and poets in France in the late 1930s, and for his reckless lifestyle. He committed suicide in Paris on June 15, 1940, the day the Nazis entered the city.

  There was a little footnote there, so Stevie clicked it. It led her to a small excerpt from a longer book.

  On June 15, 1940, the day after the Nazis entered Paris, Edward Pierce Davenport spent the day consuming opium and violet champagne. At sunset, as loudspeakers in the street announced the night’s curfew, he donned a gold dressing gown and climbed to the rooftop of his Parisian apartment on the Rue de Rennes in Saint Germain. After toasting the city and the setting sun, he downed a last glass of champagne and swan-dived from the building into the street below. His body landed on a Nazi vehicle, denting the roof.

  “A fourth-rate poet,” said a friend, “but a first-rate death.”

  “Your friends are real dicks,” Stevie said.

  “I know,” replied a voice, “but they’re the only ones I have.”

  This is when the screaming started.

  7

  SQUIRRELS, IN STEVIE’S EXPERIENCE, WERE NOT OBEDIENT CREATURES, prone to forming themselves into well-regulated groups that moved as one. These squirrels were far too coordinated to her liking. They were streaming through the library, perhaps a hundred of them. They were coming down the wrought-iron steps, skittering along the edges of railings, all in an unbroken flow.

  This was only slightly more distracting than the sight in front of her. Spread out on the table was a pair of familiar hands—long, elegant hands. There was the worn-out T-shirt; strong, wiry arms. She followed these up to find brown eyes flecked with gold looking at her.

  Stevie yanked her legs up as squirrels began running under the tables.

  “That’s weird,” David said, observing the chaos. “So, when did you get back?”

  Stevie fought the urge to hit him with her laptop, largely because she did not want to damage it.

  “What did you do?” she hissed.

  “Me?”

  “Don’t be a dick,” she said.

  “That ship has sailed. Hang on. We can’t fight yet. Where’s my hug?”

  “Out!” Kyoko said, pointing at David. “Everyone out.”

  “Well, that’s not conducive to learning,” David said under his breath.

  Stevie grabbed her stuff, sweeping one or two photos from the collection into her bag, and hurried out as Kyoko started running around the library, checking windows and closing doors.

  The light outside seemed overly bright after the thoughtful shade of the library. David grabbed at his neck and rubbed the stubble that had accumulated there.

  David Eastman, or David Eastman King, was a shade under six feet, his build wiry, like he had been made of bundles of snapping electrical cables that had wound themselves together into a person, sparks still coming from the ends. His clothes were always tattered, and not fashionably tattered. His jeans had not been ripped by professionals. The holes and marks on his surfer T-shirt—he had made those himself through wear and carelessness. He wore a Rolex with a shattered face on his freckled arm, along with several string bracelets. Everything on his face was too narrow, too fine. The lines sharp. His eyes always looked half closed, but they had more life behind them than most. It’s the creature that pretends to be asleep that you need to watch out for.

  Even in his roughest state, he was beautiful to look at. In fact, if she was being honest, he was more beautiful in this state. Except in his jaw she saw Edward King. And his smile. And everything that had made him and supported him. It was a taste she would never be able to get out of her mouth.

  “What the hell did you do?” she said.

  “I’m excited you think I’m so powerful, but I don’t control the local wildlife. God. So jumpy.”

  I am your mandatory friend, she thought.

  For a second, she considered giving up, right then and there. No way. No way could she carry on with whatever weird pretense.

  The case. The tin. The evidence. Her one chance.

  Pix was hurrying across the green with some kind of box or carrier in her hand. She cast a look at David as she went, but did not come over to them or stop moving.

  “Did you know,” he said as Pix hurried on, “that Dr. Nell Pixwell is a trained wildlife conservator? One of her many skills.”

  “What are you doing?” Stevie said. “Why did you send Pix to pick squirrels out of the library?”

  “I need your help,” he said. “Now. We’ve got maybe an hour?”

  “For what?”

  “Ellie’s room,” he said. “I need you to do the thing you do. Look through it.”

  Stevie rubbed her face in disbelief.

  “It’s what you do,” he said.

  She was about to snap back that it wasn’t what she did, except it was what she did. She had gone through David’s room once, when left alone in there, just to try to find out what
he was hiding from her. It turned out he was hiding a lot, so that was fair enough. And she went through Hayes’s room after his death when she’d had the idea that something wasn’t right, and it turned out something wasn’t right, and Hayes was gone, so no harm, no foul.

  “No,” he said. “It’s a good thing.” He was being serious, and his entire expression and bearing changed. “Let me ask you a question. Does Ellie seem outdoorsy to you?”

  “Outdoorsy?”

  “She’s the only smoker I know who can’t light a match, Stevie. I saw her try. It was amazing. She uses a lighter because matches are too complicated. Last winter, I seriously thought she would kill herself trying to deal with the snow. She doesn’t own boots. She has zero sense of self-preservation. She can’t drive. She’s made to live in cities and make art stuff. Now, think about what it would take to get down off this mountain by yourself. The answer is: a lot. I’ve tried it.”

  “I thought she snuck off all the time to go to Burlington,” she said.

  “With me. She had friends down there with the cars. I helped get them on campus by messing with the camera at the entry gate. Ellie has a lot of talents, but she’s not handy. So you’re telling me that she ran away from here on no notice, carrying nothing, with no phone, no one waiting on the back drive . . . that she got herself across the river. She didn’t use the bridge. As soon as she took off, Larry had someone on the road. That river is about ten feet deep, rapid, and cold. So she runs, alone, for miles, through the woods in the dark, downhill, over a mountain river, to the road, which is now being watched. . . .”

  “Okay,” Stevie said. “Okay. So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying something doesn’t make sense and I want you to do the thing you do and look through her stuff before it’s gone, because you are really good at that and I can’t think of anything else. She’s my friend. And I don’t know where she is. If anyone could figure out where she’s gone or if she’s okay, maybe it’s you.”

  Was this a trap? Because it seemed like a trap.

  Yet he said it plainly enough that Stevie felt it was probably the truth. David and Ellie had always been close friends. When Stevie had first arrived at Ellingham, she had watched the way they fell all over each other. Stevie thought they were dating. They weren’t. They really were just friends.

  Also, David was not stupid. He knew that once this idea was introduced to Stevie’s brain, it could only take root and grow. The vines would twist around her every waking thought until all other brain activity would be squeezed out and all that would be left would be the leafy jungle of desire to search.

  And the tin had come from Ellie’s room.

  “You know you want to,” he said. “Janelle is over in the maintenance shed working on her project, and Nate won’t notice.”

  They had been reunited for all of ten minutes, and already the library was infested with squirrels and he was calling on her to break into a room.

  This was home. It all checked out.

  Minerva was quieter than normal when David and Stevie walked into the common room. The moose head on the wall was the only witness, and for a moment, Stevie wondered if it had been mounted with cameras. Moose eye cameras. Did Edward King want to watch and see when his son got back to his dorm?

  A stupid thought. A nervous thought. Her palms were sweating. David was just behind her, and she could feel his shadow on her back like it was made of fingers.

  “Janelle?” she called.

  Nothing.

  “Nate. You here?”

  The moose just stared ahead.

  “Told you,” David said. “All ours. Nice and cozy.”

  Just her and David alone in the house—the whole house. Alone.

  “Is the door locked . . . ?”

  David produced a key from his pocket.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  Even in the bright midday sun, the hallway in Minerva was very dark, lit only by a very tiny stained-glass window by the stairs at the end of the hall. There was a wall sconce, but no one ever turned it on during the day. Stevie walked gently past Janelle’s room and her own, down to the end, where room three lay waiting.

  Ellie’s room was just a little bit different from Janelle’s and Stevie’s. It was a touch larger, with a little alcove nook. There were three small boxes piled there, so some of her stuff was still here, but by no means all. When Stevie had last been in this room, the bed was piled in colorful blankets and spreads. There was stuff everywhere—art supplies, paints and pastels and pencils, boas, piles of dirty but colorful clothes, books, prints and drawings and melted-down candles and wine bottles with peacock feathers coming out of them. Those things were all gone. The bed now looked like what it was—a small, wooden, institutional frame with a plastic-covered mattress. The poems and drawings Ellie had put on the wall were still there, like ancient graffiti. Quotes, song lyrics, snatches of poetry in French and English, slashes of color, crude and bright drawings, splatters . . . Ellie’s mind was an active and colorful place and she decorated her world with its contents.

  The way to handle a scene was to start wide and work your way in, so that’s what Stevie did. She walked around the edge of the room first, looking at the writings and drawings, checking in the drawers and closets to see if anything had been left behind. The bureau top still had a thick covering of makeup dust and wax, as did the bedside stand.

  Stevie opened the closet door. There was nothing but a crumpled plastic shopping bag. When she had satisfied herself that the room itself had nothing to tell her, she went to the boxes and had a careful look-through. The top one contained clothes, as David said—Ellie’s thrift-store finds and Parisian punk. Balled-up vintage T-shirts, flowing hippie pants covered in paint, objects that defied definition. The next box contained what appeared to be the used bedding stripped off the bed, and the box below that, towels and bath supplies. Stevie looked through Ellie’s mix of store-brand shower gels and shampoos and her French body oils before putting everything back in the boxes.

  “Anything?” David said from the window. “How are the little gray cells?”

  She waved him off.

  This room had contained everything of Ellie’s here at Ellingham. She’d had the magic tin in this room. Stevie had to try harder. What did this space tell her about Element Walker?

  Stevie got down on the floor on her stomach and rested her chin in her hands. Old glitter still sparkled from the floorboards, and bits of feather were snagged on splintered pieces of the wood. Down here, she could smell Ellie’s incense, the endless incense she burned against the school rules.

  “No fires, Ellie,” Stevie said out loud.

  “What?” David said from the window.

  “The first thing I heard about Ellie on the first day, before you got here. You were late and we were having the orientation talk thing . . .”

  Stevie scanned the room from her vantage point—a vista of dust bunnies.

  “Pix said to her, ‘No fires, Ellie.’ Ellie must have caused a fire?”

  “Oh, yeah. Last year. She knocked a candle over.”

  “In here?”

  “Yeah. In here.”

  “And yet she can’t light a match,” Stevie said, mostly to herself. She pushed herself back up to her knees. Where do you look for Ellie, the smoker who can’t light a match? Albert Ellingham was trying to find people too—he was always looking for his lost daughter. All of this was about his lost daughter. And now there was another lost daughter on the mountain.

  Against a box by the door, Stevie saw Roota, Ellie’s beloved saxophone. Ellie could not play the saxophone, but that never stopped her. She had purchased Roota with the money Hayes gave her to write The End of It All, and that money came from Hayes’s ex-girlfriend Gretchen. The day Stevie met Ellie, she was playing Roota in the tub at the end of the hall while dying her dress, and herself, pink. It was there that Stevie discovered the bits of metal under the tub
, the ones that had marked Hayes’s computer when Ellie stashed it there.

  So much of this came down to Roota.

  Stevie went over and picked up the saxophone. That’s when she saw it—a scorch mark leading up to the wall. The mark had been scrubbed over, painted away. And, something else. Something wasn’t right in that little patch of the room.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird about the matches?” Stevie said, getting down to look at the wall.

  “That’s why I said it.”

  “No,” Stevie said. “You said it to explain to me why you didn’t think she would do well alone in the woods. Don’t you think that’s odd? Ellie’s an artist. She’s good with her hands.”

  It looked like something had fallen—there was one dark mark that stretched out. But the weird thing was that something about the wall was . . . uneven? She got right up to it and ran her hand along it to the molding between the wall and the floor. There was a gap. A tiny, tiny gap, a few millimeters.

  “Pass me my bag,” she said to David.

  He pushed her bag in her direction. She yanked it over and shuffled through it until she found a pen. She pulled off the cap and used it to pry into the space. David made his way over to her and perched next to her, sitting on his heels.

  “Turn on your phone flashlight,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said impatiently. “Flashlight.”

  He turned on the flashlight function. By now, Stevie had wiggled the board free. It gave rather easily. It had been pulled loose before, clearly. Behind it was a hole in the base of the wall, about the size of a fist.

  David had no snark now. He silently handed her the flashlight. Before she took it, she reached into the front pocket of her bag and pulled out a pair of blue nitrile gloves and snapped them on.

  “Really?” he said. “You carry crime-scene gloves?”