The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  She could see Hayes or Ellie getting the science of it wrong. Neither one of them were big on science, as far as she knew. She could see Ellie messing around to create something for effect, but . . .

  It never really made sense. Unless Hayes thought he could do some big fog scene or Ellie thought she would mess up his filming. . . .

  But why make a big special effect when you don’t have anyone down there to film it? And there were easier ways to mess up his filming that would actually work.

  If not Ellie, who?

  She leaned her head against the cold of the window and the word thrummed in time with the moving coach: murder, murder, murder, murder . . .

  Why did Hayes have to die? He was annoying. He cheated and used people. But in the end, he wasn’t worth killing.

  But neither was Dottie, until she saw something she shouldn’t have.

  Could Hayes have seen something? What was there even to see?

  Her business was working on the Ellingham case, and the world had dropped the biggest, best opportunity right in her lap. Working with an author on a book about the case. This was her dream.

  But Ellie was dancing in her peripheral vision.

  They were turning onto the school grounds now, taking the treacherous path, the one with the trees so thick and low that they scraped the sides of the coach, and the steep slope that caused the gears to grind. There was the rushing river with the tiny wooden bridge. David had a point—getting through here was tough. It would be possible, she supposed, to go through the woods. But it would not be easy. And it would be terrifying in the dark. There was no way you could get through them without falling down the slope, tripping over the roots and fallen branches, falling into holes, knocking into rocks. And the only way over the river was the bridge. This was all as Albert Ellingham intended. The place was like a fortress. So if the bridge was watched and the back road was watched . . . how did Ellie magic her way out? Getting out of the locked room was almost nothing compared to this.

  They were cresting now, passing between the dual sphinx statues. The coach stopped under the Great House portico and she stepped out into a slap of mountain breeze. Would it hurt just to have a look? Just a little look around, to satisfy whatever it was that was eating at her thoughts?

  Stevie walked around the perimeter of the Great House. The back of the building was walled off, enclosing the sunken garden. She wasn’t sure which basement window Ellie was supposed to have escaped from, but there were only a few possibilities. The basement-leading windows had deep window wells, and these were covered over by grates. Stevie squatted down and pulled on one. It was firmly closed.

  Forget where Ellie went—how did she even get out of the basement? Stevie couldn’t answer the first question until she answered the second. And there was someone who would know that answer. She found him in his usual place, at the big wooden desk right by the entrance door to the Great House.

  “Just saying hi,” she said as she stepped into the massive vestibule.

  Larry looked up from something he was writing on a clipboard.

  “Hi,” he said. “Also, no.”

  “I didn’t ask anything.”

  “You didn’t have to. Whatever it is, no.”

  She pulled over a folding chair that was by the door and sat across from him.

  “I went to Burlington today,” she said.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “To meet with Dr. Fenton, who wrote Truly Devious. Did you read that one?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said, still reading down whatever it was on the clipboard.

  There was a smell in the Great Hall that was unlike anything else at Ellingham. Ellingham was all outdoorsy and wood smoke. The Great Hall smelled of polish, of leather, of cigarettes last smoked in 1938 whose molecules had infested the wood and crystal and marble and produced some new, ancient smell. It smelled of wealth. Not money—wealth. It was not like the pong of Fenton’s cigarettes, which was stuck in Stevie’s hair and her hat. Her vinyl coat was impervious. All hail the vinyl.

  “Okay,” she said when Larry refused to look up. “I was going to ask something.”

  Larry clicked his pen in warning.

  “I wanted to know if you would show me where Ellie got out.”

  “I think I’ve answered that,” he said.

  “Isn’t it better that I come to you and ask?”

  “Yes. The answer is still no.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning down over the desk a bit. “Don’t I deserve to see?”

  Larry’s face suggested that she did not.

  “Come on,” Stevie tried again, this time with a hint of sadness. “I feel . . . responsible. I mean, I brought her here, and if a bear ate her . . .”

  Nothing. Larry was like the mountain rock they stood upon. She tried to look distraught, but didn’t know how to make that happen. She ended up sticking out her lower lip a bit. Larry rolled his eyes and cast a look around the empty Great Hall.

  “I’ll get you plain coffee K-Cups.”

  “Go, Stevie,” he said.

  “All I’m asking is to see where it happened. That’s all. It . . . freaks me out. I brought her here. Or, what I said did. I just want to see it.”

  Larry clicked his pen a few more times.

  “If I show you, will you stop?” he asked.

  “Definitely,” she said.

  Larry tipped his chair back a few inches, lowered his chin, and looked back into the half-open security office door next to him.

  “Jill,” he said, “take over for a few minutes. I have to go down to the basement.”

  “Yup,” came a voice from within.

  He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a set of keys.

  “Come on,” he said, getting up. Stevie fell in step behind him.

  “My uncle used to say to me, ‘You’re a pain, but I can’t see through you,’” Stevie said.

  “Your uncle had a point,” he replied.

  “It’s my persistence that made me an Ellingham student.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The Great House basement was accessed through a door in the kitchen, and the way to the kitchen was a wooden door under the grand staircase, which led to a half-set of steps to a partly subterranean space. The kitchen was a cavernous room with a white-and-black tile floor and white walls. Though the old appliances had long been removed and replaced with modern ones, there was still an air of the 1930s here—the wide wooden counters, a much-marked marble-topped table where pastries would have been rolled. There were massive cabinets and pantries, all with whitewashed wooden doors, slightly warped and cracking with age. The windows started only halfway up the wall, making the room slightly darker. Massive globe lights hung from the ceiling. Though it smelled slightly of the faculty’s microwaved lunches and dirty coffee mugs, there was still a feeling of authenticity here. Stevie could imagine the house cook and her assistant working away.

  “This way,” Larry said, taking Stevie to an unmarked white door toward the far side of the room. “Watch the steps. They’re warped.”

  Here, the Great House got a bit more real. The basement had a strong basement funk even from the entrance—a pungent, acrid smell that Stevie could feel on the back of her throat. The steps were saggy and made a noise like a scream when she stepped on them.

  “You were always going to show me,” Stevie said as they went down. “Weren’t you?”

  “If I didn’t, you’d find your way down here some other way.”

  Stevie glowed with pride.

  “It’s a warren down here, so stay with me,” he said.

  Larry turned to the right, where they were immediately confronted with a wall. There was a small opening to the right side of that, which led to a space just a few feet square. This led to another chamber that was maybe ten feet square, that opened on either side to more little chambers. Each one was dark and had to be lit by a small pull-bulb.

  Stevie had been in
the recently excavated tunnel with Hayes the fateful week before he died. She had already been in some claustrophobic spaces. Though this basement was much larger, it had been cut into random little spaces with walls of old brown brick. It was a labyrinth.

  “What is this?” Stevie asked as they twisted and turned through many tiny hovel-spaces.

  “Albert Ellingham was a weird man,” Larry said. “People always forget that. He was weird. He and his friends used to play games down here. Some of these doors . . .”

  They had, in fact, reached a door. He opened it to reveal a bit of brick wall.

  “Are jokes. And just so people would never learn the layout, he’d regularly have the inner walls knocked down and moved.”

  “That’s awesome,” Stevie said. “Why is this not in any books?”

  “Because no one is allowed down here,” Larry said. “And all these pointless walls aren’t on any plans. They’re entirely cosmetic. I’d knock them down, myself, and make this space more useful.”

  Some of the middle areas were more full of objects—bigger, heavier ones. Large boxes, old appliances, piles of chairs and bits of old furniture. They had to squeeze through some of these. There were some heavy metal hatches in the floor as well. Stevie shone her phone light down on them.

  “What are these?” she asked.

  “Old storage areas. They used to keep supplies down here—apples, potatoes, preserved food. Those down there were some of the icehouse storage. They’d cut ice in the winter and pack it in with straw. Before there were freezers, there were icehouses. Now . . .”

  They had reached one of the larger parts of the basement—a space maybe twenty feet long and half as wide across. It went all the way to the window. Larry pulled his phone from his pocket and turned on the flashlight function.

  “Right now,” he said, “we’re just under Ellingham’s office. This wall”—he tapped his hand on the wall to their right—“is permanent and load-bearing. And right here . . .”

  He shone his light along the wall for a moment, then felt along with his hand until he located what he was after. He pressed hard into one of the bricks, and there was a dull sprong. He pushed against a bit of wall, and it gave way, revealing a narrow doorway on a hinge. Stevie instantly made a move for the opening, but he blocked her with his arm. “You can look in, not that there is much to see.”

  Stevie craned her head into the pitch-black opening. Here, the stench of dust and mold was truly terrible and she immediately sneezed. She got out her phone and shone it into the darkness. She could faintly make out a passageway, barely two feet wide, with a set of stairs at the end.

  “That’s how Ellie got out?” Stevie asked. “She took a hidden door from the office?”

  “That’s how she got out. She came down the steps, out through this doorway. Over here . . .”

  He indicated the window. There were a few boxes shoved up against the wall.

  “There were boxes just under the window. It was partially propped open.”

  Stevie stood for a moment, looking at the tiny window, caked in old dirt and cobwebs. It was covered by a grate on the outside.

  “How?” she said. “How did she know?”

  “I don’t know,” Larry said. “We’ve had people get into the basement, but no one, to my knowledge, ever found this passage before.”

  “So she got out the window,” Stevie said, looking up. “How did she get through that grate?”

  “They’re hooked closed down here,” he said, pointing to a latch. “You undo the latch, push up. That’s how we found it.”

  “So she gets through the passage, comes downstairs, stacks some stuff, opens the window and the grate, and climbs out. She did this all in, what, five minutes?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So she had a five-minute lead on you. And all of this must have taken a few minutes, so she only had a minute or two to run from the building before you went after her.”

  “Give or take,” Larry said. “We went to the basement first, we had to scramble people. So yes, she had about a five-minute head start.”

  “Where do you think she went?” Stevie said. “She didn’t have anything with her. I mean, she had her coat. But she had no money. I guess she had her phone?”

  “No calls were made, and there’s no trace of the phone. She turned it off or ditched it somewhere.”

  “What do you think she did?” Stevie asked.

  “Best guess, she made her way down to the road. We went down there right away, but she must have cut through the woods. The police looked at the rest stops on the highway, had eyes on the buses. Somehow, she got past. I think she knows people in Burlington. Maybe one of them came and got her. That’s my guess.”

  “Not eaten by a bear?” Stevie asked.

  “It’s not impossible that she ran into a bear, but bear fatalities are rare, and we would have found some remains, most likely.”

  He said that a little too nonchalantly for Stevie’s comfort.

  “I think she’ll turn up,” he said. “Element’s family had a history of living in communes. I think there are ways she could have gotten to one of those places and she’s lying low. Loads of places like that up and around here. But eventually, people come out. No one wants to stay hidden forever. It’s not human nature.”

  No one wants to stay hidden forever.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  Larry indicated that she had been doing this all along and might as well just keep going.

  “How do guilty people act?” Stevie asked.

  “They lie, generally,” Larry said. “Some fall apart right away, but some can keep lying to your face, cold as ice, and never stop.”

  “But is there something they do? Is there some kind of tell?”

  “Yes and no,” Larry said. “It’s not them. It’s you. Once you’re around it enough, you learn how to spot it. But you can’t rely on that. You have to go on the evidence. Even if you have the best instinct in the world, it’s the facts that matter.”

  “You can’t rely on your gut,” she said.

  “Not in determining guilt. But your gut can help you in other ways. It can keep you from getting hurt.”

  There was something just a little bit pointed in how he said it.

  “Did Ellie seem guilty to you?” she asked.

  “She seemed . . . scared,” he said. “But she would have been.”

  A silence fell between them for a moment, filled with the remains of Ellie’s fear.

  “Look,” Larry said. “We don’t know what happened. But I tend to believe it was an accident, a prank gone wrong, or something like that. For all I know, they worked on it together, got the dry ice together. I think Element and Hayes were both kids who got into things they shouldn’t. Whatever she did, whatever happened, I don’t think she meant to do it. If she did it. She doesn’t strike me as a dangerous person. You don’t have to be afraid. And this place is wired now. There are perimeter lights, cameras. All the stuff I’ve been wanting for years. She’s not going to come near you. I won’t let her.”

  Stevie looked at Larry now and felt the sudden urge to cry. Something in her melted a bit. Was it gratitude? Pent-up fear? She balled her hands and turned back toward the dark side of the room, back at the dank basement labyrinth she was in. There were so many places to get lost in here, up here. In life. So many dark corners.

  Stevie turned back to the small window once more. It was just wide enough to wiggle through. The whole escape would have required such . . . bravado. Ellie had kept her shit together.

  Larry indicated that she should return the way they had come, down the little path of lights. He pulled the cord, and the chamber went dark. Only a bit of light came in through that window, like a dim, heavily lidded eye.

  As Stevie stepped out of the Great House, she noticed there was something in the Neptune fountain that had not been there when she went in. David sat in it, the streams of water pouring from the open mouths of Neptun
e’s mighty fish friends dumping onto his head, flattening his hair.

  “This is what they call attention-seeking behavior,” she said, approaching him.

  “They’re going to turn it off for the winter soon,” David replied, opening his mouth for a gulp of fountain water.

  “Is that clean?” she said. “Should you be drinking it?”

  He shrugged. Then he stood, his clothes dripping, and climbed out of the fountain. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts and walked along beside her as if there was nothing unusual about what he had just done.

  “Therapy,” she said. “It works.”

  “I’ve tried it. They always end up crying. I think I’ve helped them have some real breakthrough moments. You were in there a while. What were you up to?”

  “Were you following me?”

  “Not following,” he said. “I just take an interest. What were you doing?”

  “Just looking,” she said.

  “At what?”

  “The basement.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A maze,” she replied. “The basement is weird. But it’s clear how Ellie got out. She went through the passage, and then out the basement window.”

  “We know that,” he said. “My question is, what happened then?”

  “I don’t know the answer,” she said. “I’m trying. You asked me to look. I’m looking.”

  David shivered a bit in his wet hoodie. It wasn’t proper fall weather yet, but it was definitely not the kind of day to be walking around in sopping wet clothes. Stevie couldn’t help but take note of the fact that he was keeping track of her, and the fountain was done to impress her. And it was making an impression. It was bizarre—and he looked good wet.

  “Well, look faster,” he said.

  Polite conversation isn’t hard, Edward King had said.

  Even David’s voice was a little like his father’s. The words were different, but the timbre was the same. The King poison touched everything.