The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

“Yes, you did,” Vi said. “Everyone knows you did.”

  “Am I the squirrel whisperer?”

  “It’s not cool,” Vi said. “You’ve been waking people up, you’re damaging stuff we like, that we use. We all have issues, dude. Get over yourself.”

  “I thought learning was a game,” David said. “Why is no one having fun but me?”

  Vi shook their head and took Janelle’s hand. The two of them stood up.

  “I’ll see you at home,” Janelle said, and it was pointedly to Stevie only.

  “Sometimes I don’t think people like me,” David said, watching them go.

  “You know why,” she said.

  “A return to responsibility,” he said, lifting his eyebrows rakishly. “You know who loves that?”

  “A lot of people,” Stevie said. “Just because . . .”

  It seemed too dangerous to say your dad out loud. Stevie could feel Germaine’s eyes on them, boring into the back of her head.

  “I think I might go too,” she said. “Want to come?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  Germaine kept her head down as they passed, but Stevie saw her stealing a sideways glance at them.

  “It was only, like, forty squirrels,” David said when they were outside.

  “How did you even get forty squirrels?”

  “No magician reveals his secrets,” he said. “You didn’t find anything else, did you?”

  His change of conversation was so sudden that Stevie lost the thread for a second.

  “Look,” Stevie said. “What are you suggesting happened to Ellie? You’re saying you don’t think she could have made it out? So you think she’s here?”

  “I’m saying . . .” He lowered his voice. “I don’t see how she made it away from here that night, or the next few days. I don’t know how she got out.”

  “But let’s say she did, because that’s probably what happened,” Stevie said. “Do you know where she’d go?”

  “She could have gone anywhere,” he said. “Ellie grew up on a commune, she lived in France. I guess she’s in a . . . I don’t know, in a café basement in Berlin or something.”

  “Kind of hard for her to get out of the country.”

  “Okay. So . . . in an Airstream trailer in Austin selling designer tacos or a tree house in Oregon . . .”

  “I get the idea,” Stevie said. “She’s not from anywhere, so if she’s nowhere, it’s like she’s home.”

  David regarded her for a moment.

  “Right,” he said. “If she’s nowhere, she’s home. Yeah.”

  “Or she can just be in someone’s apartment in Burlington,” Stevie said.

  “I think she would want to get out. If she could get to Burlington she could get in someone’s car and go. I don’t think she’d stick around.”

  “But why run?” Stevie said. “Why run if you did nothing?”

  “Fear,” David said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of being accused of murder.”

  “I never said she did it,” Stevie shot back. “I said she wrote the script for The End of It All and took Hayes’s computer, which she did.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know. Calm down.”

  “Do not tell me to calm down,” Stevie replied. “I’m the one who started this. I know what I’m saying. It’s just . . . if not her . . .”

  “Look,” David said. “Maybe . . . maybe he did take the dry ice? Maybe Beth Brave was wrong about when she thought they were talking?”

  “There’s a call record.”

  “I know, but . . . what if it was wrong somehow?”

  “Or what if Ellie did do it?” Stevie said. “She had motive. She had the ability. She could have done it as a goof, to mess with the video. She doesn’t seem like someone who would know all the science. Why would she think that would hurt him?”

  “Because that’s not how she was,” David said. “She wouldn’t move hundreds of pounds of dry ice to mess up someone else’s art.”

  For the first time, she heard his voice take on a raw edge.

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  “Look, I get what you did and it makes sense. I’m just telling you. She wouldn’t do that. The one thing Ellie would never do is mess up someone else’s art. That was like her religion. I know things ended kind of weird with us and maybe you don’t trust me, but you have to trust me.”

  It was a sudden twist.

  “You mean how your dad isn’t dead and is Edward King?” she asked.

  “I mean, if you want to get super specific about it. Just so you know, I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you right away. But there were two reasons I didn’t. One, because my dad is Edward King, which means you would hate me. And two, my dad is Edward King, which means everyone would hate me.”

  “I didn’t even know he had kids,” Stevie said. “I didn’t know he could mate with humans.”

  “Yeah,” David said. “Nature finds a way.”

  Had he moved closer? It seemed like he might have. Stevie’s mouth had gone dry. The thing about David was that he was very beautiful—long and lean and damaged and twisted, smiling at her. She saw Edward King’s silhouette in David’s features again. In his smile.

  Good job, Stevie. That’s right. Kiss him. That will make him happy.

  Stevie stepped back a few feet, repelled by the thought. Her brain could not handle this conflict of input. There was something there, something that pulsed between her and David. And now there was Edward King hanging overhead, almost literally. He even had cameras on them. The thought made her queasy.

  “I should have told Nate I was going,” she said. “I’m going to go back . . . tell him.”

  David lifted his chin an inch.

  “Sure,” he said, with the slightest trace of a smile. “Nate. Yeah. I’ll see you at home.”

  He turned and started walking back toward Minerva, his hands in his pockets.

  Stevie stood on the path, trying to take in all the new information that shaped her life. She had always wondered how people got to lead interesting lives. Maybe this was how—you set up the conditions, and then you get the events. And maybe those events took you by surprise even if you wanted them to happen, even if you prepared. She had wished so much to work on this case, and now here she was, doing deals with the devil.

  Maybe, she wondered, that was what it was like to plan a murder. Maybe you make successive bad deals with yourself that you can’t back out of, until you make one that can never be reversed.

  April 14, 1936, 6:00 a.m.

  AT THE START, THERE WAS MUCH FRANCIS CRANE ADMIRED ABOUT Albert Ellingham. She was inclined to like a man who built tunnels for no apparent reason. He encouraged her love of chemistry. He instructed the librarian to order whatever crime magazines she wanted to read. Boys and girls took exercise together, took class together, shared meals. He told the staff to turn the other way when students were caught drinking. He liked to play games, and he and Francis had gone toe-to-toe in Monopoly several times.

  Her appreciation for the man peaked when he took her on a walk of the property and showed her where they had blasted away the mountain with dynamite. He even took Francis to where the explosives were stored and let her hold a stick in her hands. She tried not to show her excitement, but it must have come through.

  “You seem interested,” he said with a laugh. “Go on. Tell me about dynamite.”

  “It’s simply nitroglycerine, stabilized and absorbed by diatomaceous earth and sodium carbonate,” Francis said. “Unless you’re using TNT, which is . . .”

  “Well!” he said, laughing. “I wasn’t expecting an answer that quickly!”

  He reached out to take the stick back, and Francis’s fingers reflexively coiled around it before she told them to release.

  “It’s a good thing you’ll never need this,” he said. “You could be dangerous!”

  “I might be,” she said.

  Albert Ellingham roared with laughter.
<
br />   “I have to be careful what we’re teaching you,” he said, laughing again. “Your father would murder me if I made you too dangerous to marry.”

  That was the moment it all broke for Francis. He had given her dynamite and he had laughed in her face. It was a joke to him, something he would never think of again. But it would be all Francis would think of.

  She decided that if he liked games so much, she would play one of her own. It would be a good game too. Edward liked her idea of fun, so they made their great plan together.

  The letter hadn’t even been important to the plan. It had been, in Eddie’s words, “a bit of art.” She’d gotten the idea from the true-crime magazines that she loved so much. People in those magazines were always getting kidnapped, and the kidnappers always sent the messages with the cut-out letters.

  She assumed this was a made-up thing, but one day she was sitting on the lawn reading Real Detective when she saw the man who was always hanging around, the one everyone knew was a cop. His name was George Marsh. He’d been all over the papers when he stopped a bomb from going off in Albert Ellingham’s car—Frankie always read stories about bombs. Now he seemed to be Ellingham’s private bodyguard. He was walking toward the Great House when she called out to him, making sure to use the purest form of her tony New York voice.

  “Aren’t you a policeman?” she asked.

  Mr. Marsh had come over to her, looking bemused.

  “I am,” he said. “Or, I used to be. I work for the FBI.”

  “Oh, that must be so exciting! You must have seen all sorts of things. Tell me, do real criminals send notes like this?”

  She held up her magazine, open to a page that showed such a note. He smiled.

  “I’m surprised you read this kind of thing. Doesn’t seem very Ellingham Academy.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I love it. This story is about a kidnapping. Have you ever worked on a kidnapping?”

  “Once,” he said. “They’re not all that common.”

  “What was it?”

  “A banker’s wife,” he said. “Kidnapped while leaving her bridge club.”

  “Was there a ransom letter?”

  “A call,” he said. “Not a letter. They wanted fifty thousand dollars.”

  “What happened?” Frankie said, making sure to widen her eyes and look as innocent as possible.

  “The banker paid. She never came home. Turns out she’d run off with her tennis instructor and the fifty grand was for them. We tracked them down in Miami.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette on the ground.

  “Crank letters are often pretty dull,” he said. “Once in a while you get a live one. One like that, with all those cut-out letters? You’d remember one like that. But I’ll get in trouble with the management if I stand here talking about crime when you’re supposed to be studying. Looks like you’ve got a serious book under that magazine.”

  He was correct. Francis had a textbook under the magazine. She was doing both.

  “Organic chemistry,” she replied.

  “Better you than me, kid. I never had the brains for that.”

  He grinned and tipped his hat to her and continued on to the house. Frankie chewed the end of her pencil.

  You’d remember one like that.

  The idea came into her head at that moment. What if they sent him a letter? It was a joke at first. They’d never really send Albert Ellingham a note like this. But the longer she turned the idea over, the more it gained mass and form. The thing could be done—it just had to be done carefully and with style. Why not rattle the old boy’s chain? Why not give him a little taste of her spark?

  When she told Edward the idea that night, he loved it at once. He called it Dadaesque. And being Edward, he elaborated on it. Made it a poem.

  “Poetic justice,” he said, before kissing her.

  Edward showed her a poem by Dorothy Parker that they modeled their work on. There were so many lovely ways to describe fiendish things. Edward added a ha ha at the end. It had to be signed, and this was the final flourish.

  “It has to be truly devious,” Frankie said.

  “Perfect!” Edward added this to the draft. Truly, Devious.

  For the actual construction of the letter, they lay together on the floor of the empty, newly constructed swimming pool, smoking and picking out letters. The paper was from a notepad Frankie brought from New York—basic, household stuff. They wore gloves and used tweezers, applying each letter carefully, tilting some, spacing them irregularly.

  When the letter was complete, Frankie finished off the plan. She paid one of the day laborers to dump a pile of her mail into a Burlington postbox, saying they were personal letters and that the staff at the school went through their mail. For a dollar, her mail got the right postmark on the right date, placing them nowhere near the scene.

  A beautiful piece of criminal art.

  But now that letter had been swept into something else, something that had taken Iris and Alice Ellingham. And what about Dottie Epstein? These were the things Francis wondered about as she spent a sleepless night on the sofa. Would it be seen as a joke? Would it be traced?

  The man with the shotgun sat by the door all night. He did not sleep. Neither did Miss Nelson, who spent the night moving around silently, bringing things down from her room in bags, going through paperwork. She cast only the occasional look at Francis, who gave up and nodded off.

  At daybreak the other girls were awoken and told to dress.

  “What’s happening?” said Gertie, scuffing out in her heeled slippers.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Miss Nelson said stiffly. “A bomb threat was made. Nothing will happen, but for safety’s sake you’re all being sent away from campus.”

  There were cries and shouts and excitement about this change in routine. There was a rush for the bathroom and dresses and coats. What would they bring? Would there be breakfast? In the melee, Francis stole down to her room and slipped inside. There were things she would need, things that were concealed in her room, things she could not leave behind. She got next to her bureau and began to push. When she had moved it about a foot, she got down on the floor with a nail file and was about to start working the skirting loose, when Miss Nelson was in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” Miss Nelson said.

  “I dropped an earring,” Francis replied coolly.

  “Come back into the common room.”

  “I need to change.”

  Miss Nelson went to Francis’s closet, grabbed a dress, and handed it to her, then pointed to Francis’s decorative screen.

  “Change, then.”

  Francis took the dress and stepped behind the screen.

  “I’ll just say this,” Miss Nelson said. “What is happening here is very serious. Talking too much could get people hurt. Do you understand me?”

  Francis stopped with her dress halfway over her head.

  “I don’t care what you think you know,” Miss Nelson went on. “There are lives at stake. I know you like your games, Francis, but this is real. People could die. And one of your own housemates could be in danger.”

  Francis gulped in some air, pulled the dress down, and stepped out from behind the screen. Miss Nelson was no longer the gentle and meek head of Minerva. She was a woman standing like a wall in her doorway. And for the first time that whole night and morning, Francis was afraid. She looked down at the spot in the skirting board. What was behind that board could cause more trouble than she wanted. Her secrets were sealed in that wall.

  “Could I just . . . have a moment?” she asked as meekly as she could.

  “No,” Miss Nelson said. “I will pack your things. You will go.”

  Francis Josephine Crane walked out of her room, having no idea it was for the last time.

  9

  THERE WAS THE MOOSE SIGN AGAIN.

  There would never be a moose.

  The Ellingham coach was going on its Sunday run to Burlington. Only a few people were on tod
ay—not people Stevie knew well. Everyone had headphones on or was reading or playing something. Stevie was reading her tablet, where she had a copy of Truly Devious: The Ellingham Murders by Dr. Irene Fenton open. It was one of the first books she had ever gotten on the subject. She had flipped to the part about the discovery of Dottie Epstein:

  May 16, 1936, was a soft day with hints of an early summer. It was five thirty in the morning, and Joseph Vance had started his milk run from Archer’s Dairy Farm. He had thirty-five deliveries of milk, cream, and butter in the back of his truck and a vacuum flask of coffee for his journey. He had just made the first ten deliveries to houses outside of Jericho, Vermont, and it was a good time to pull off to the side of the road and have a mug of coffee and his breakfast roll. He parked on a bit of rough grass across from Babbett’s Farm, drank and ate, and when he was finished, he went to relieve himself by a tree some twenty feet back from the road.

  Joseph would later say he had no idea what moved him to go so far from the truck; this was a quiet area; no one was around for miles. Still, he moved back to the privacy of the tree, and while he was going about his business, he saw what appeared to be a sack on the ground. He moved closer. This is when he realized there were two legs coming from the sack—or, at least, parts of legs. They were discolored, ravaged by weather and wildlife. The rest of the body was still under a bit of dirt and some loose bits of wood. When Joseph moved these away, he saw the girl’s curly hair, the remains of her face, and even a pair of glasses.

  He ran several feet away and was violently ill. Then he got in his truck and drove directly to the police station. Little Dolores Epstein, the brilliant young student from the Ellingham Academy, had finally been found. When the body was removed and examined, a massive fracture would be found on the right side of her skull.

  At that point, the Ellingham kidnapping became the Ellingham murder. In all of the publicity around the missing mogul’s wife and his daughter, many would forget that the first known victim was a student, a poor little girl from New York City—a girl who taught herself five languages and showed a prodigious gift for translating ancient texts, a girl who did college-level chemistry and physics, who had a near-photographic memory of everything she ever read.