The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  “This isn’t on me,” she snapped.

  “I didn’t say it was,” he replied. “It’s just that time is passing.”

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “I didn’t say it—”

  “Well, you’re acting like it,” she said, walking off.

  It was amazingly easy to work herself into a state of indignation. She had to repel herself—not see David, not feel what she always felt around him. She had to drive the desire out of her. An argument was as good a way as any of distracting herself. But it only worked to a point.

  Also, she had to wonder: Did David blame her for what happened? Did everyone?

  11

  “‘ANATOMY,’” PIX SAID, WRITING THE WORD ON THE WHITEBOARD, “comes from the Greek. The prefix, ana, means apart. The root word, tome, is ‘cutting.’ ‘Dissection’ is Latin in origin. Dis means apart as well, and secare is the root word for cutting. So anatomy and dissection are linked in language and in practice. To understand how bodies work, you need to get in there and have a look.”

  Monday morning brought Stevie back to her first class, which was anatomy and physiology, taught by Pix. Anatomy was one of the things Stevie had looked most forward to studying at Ellingham—it was the kind of thing she would need to know. They had reached the dissection part of the program, which meant that they had moved into a lab. She had a new partner as well—Mudge, he of the colored contact lenses.

  “On that note,” Pix said, “come down here and get a dissection kit for each of your stations, along with a sheep heart.”

  Stevie reluctantly went down and got one of the trays, which was preset with scalpels, scissors, and probes. She reached into the cooler and removed one vacuum-packed sheep heart, which was a deep red, almost black.

  “You want to cut or diagram?” Mudge asked.

  Stevie looked at the heart. It looked like shrink-wrapped cooked beets. As much as she liked wearing the gloves, she was not enthused about this.

  “Draw,” she said.

  “Cool.”

  They both put on lab gloves, and Mudge picked up the heart and cut the package open.

  “You like anatomy?” she asked.

  “I love it,” Mudge said quietly.

  “You want to be a doctor?”

  “I want to work at Disney World,” Mudge said.

  Stevie looked up at her lab partner, all six and a half feet of him, with the dyed jet-black hair, the purple snake-eye contact lenses, and the spiked rings and bracelets.

  “What?” he said.

  “Disney World?” she asked.

  “I love Disney World. Look.”

  He leaned down and pulled on the collar of his Slipknot T-shirt with his gloved fingers. There was a small object pinned to it. It was a Mickey Mouse enamel pin.

  “This is a retired one-year-service pin,” he said. “I collect them. I have about a hundred.”

  He stood back up.

  “It’s why I don’t have any tattoos,” he said. “Cast members can’t have visible tattoos.”

  “You want to be a cast member?” Stevie said. “Like, play Mickey?”

  “All staff are called cast members,” he said. “I mean, eventually I want to be an Imagineer, but I’d like to start by working the park at the visitor level. What’s the first incision?”

  As Stevie stepped out of the building, still smelling of dissection, she found David sitting, waiting for her, wearing a pair of sunglasses and looking smug.

  “Hello, Scooby,” he said. “Have you had any brain waves?”

  Stevie had conferred with him the night before, saying that she had looked in the basement. The basement hadn’t really advanced her knowledge.

  “I told you,” she said. “It seems clear she went down through the passage, grabbed some stuff to get up to the window, and then climbed out.”

  “Which we know,” he said. “I guess I’m just surprised she didn’t tell me there was an escape panel in the wall over at the Great House. We shared that kind of thing.”

  “Do you know other places?” Stevie asked.

  “I know all kinds of things,” he said with a smile. “Maybe, if you’re good, I’ll share. But the point is, how does she go out the window and then vanish into thin air? For all the reasons I said?”

  “So what do you think?” Stevie said. “If you were her?”

  “Maybe she hid that night,” he said. “That’s been my feeling all along. I think she hid until she could figure out what to do. Lots of places she could have hid. But they locked shit down after that, that’s what keeps getting me. No coat, no phone. I don’t know. She used a phone somewhere. I just don’t get it and can’t get it. But . . . I guess I should go to calc.”

  “You’re going to calc?” Stevie said.

  “I make the occasional appearance,” he replied. “Keeps Shorty on his toes. Dr. Short loves me. Everyone loves me. I’m lovable.”

  He lifted his sunglasses and winked at her, then spun to head to class.

  What the hell did that mean? Clearly, they were friends again. Or David felt they were.

  She shook off her confusion and headed to the Great House. She had work to do.

  The Ellingham attic was a place of true magic. It was perhaps the most private location on campus, this cavern above it all, its expanse as large as the footprint of the Great House. It was shrouded in half-light through the blinds. This is where the detritus of Ellingham life had ended up, here on all of these metal shelving racks. Stevie walked among them again, letting the quiet seep over her. It smelled faintly of dust, but this was a fine, storied dust, gently trapped in velvets, resting like new snow on mirrors. Everything here was trapped in time.

  A lot of it, Stevie remembered as she walked around to reacclimatize herself, was junk, really. Good junk, but junk. There were boxes of doorknobs. Stacks of plates. Boxes of old uniforms. Some things she had been wanting to revisit, like the aisle that contained the old items from Albert Ellingham’s office—the things that hadn’t really mattered enough to send on to any museum or archive. There were some telephones and cords, unused papers and slips. She dug into one of the boxes, where she had found the Western Union slip with the riddle that Albert Ellingham had written on the day he died:

  Where do you look for someone who’s never really there?

  Always on a staircase but never on a stair

  She dug around in this box again, eying her notepad to see if anything Fenton wanted might be in here. The box contained things like paperweights, staples, old letterhead, some little boxes marked in Smith Corona typewriter ribbon, F. B. Bridges finest-quality pen tips, Webster-Chicago Recording Wire, paper rolls for a Borough’s Adding Machine . . . all these products that must have been something once, something you’d find everywhere, that meant nothing now. They were obsolete.

  She sat down on the floor and read through the notepad that Fenton had given her. There were 307 items she wanted Stevie to check. Some would be relatively easy and quick—checking which rooms had connecting doors, confirming colors and materials and patterns. Some would require reading through the many volumes of household records. What struck Stevie was how mundane, even stupid, these details were. Or, at least, that’s how they seemed. But detection, and maybe book writing, required research, and details mattered.

  She opened a document on her laptop and worked out a rough plan of attack, bundling the items into groups that she could search for at the same time. With a little effort, she got them into seven lists, grouped by type. This kind of work soothed her and got her out of her head. Break it down, put it in order, make a list. Soon, Fenton’s sloppy notes were in a clean format. She decided to start on the first list right then and there, and pulled down several volumes of household records.

  The records contained all the daily workings of the Ellingham house: groceries and supplies ordered, meals served, tasks accomplished. Meat came on Mondays and Thursdays, fish four times a week, and the dairy made massive deliveries every day. Oranges and le
mons were special ordered from Florida in the winter. Groceries, vegetables, and household goods came in sometimes three times a day. Cleaning was a massive, ongoing process. Aside from the regular house staff, local people came in by the truckload to scrub windows and patios, to polish the miles of rosewood, to dust the mountains of marble, to clean out fireplaces and cut and stack wood, to pack the icehouses, to repair anything that needed mending. There was the outdoor staff as well—a small army of gardeners to plant and weed and water and coax life out of the side of the mountain. All of this, plus the hundreds more who were working to finish the school. It became crystal clear just how much Ellingham Academy must have meant to the local people. Everyone must have worked there at one time or another. Everyone sold them things. Businesses depended on this strange man and his school in the middle of nowhere. It was so much effort for so few people, and at the same time, Albert Ellingham became the source of so much. An attack on him would have been an attack on everyone.

  It certainly made a kind of sense that someone would have wanted Anton Vorachek dead. People would have known the family, depended on them. And so many people would have had a look at at least part of the grounds. They would not have known the tunnels, but the ice man would have known the basement, the deliveryman the kitchen, the cleaners would have seen the interior of the house. People talked.

  Stevie shut her computer and closed her eyes. A feather. A bit of beaded cloth. A lipstick. A pair of would-be gangsters. What did it all mean? Did Francis and Edward talk to someone? Did they work with someone from the outside?

  The answers were not available yet.

  She dusted herself off and glanced around again. There were old friends to visit. Somewhere around here was a box of newspapers that Albert Ellingham had buried in the tunnel—it had just been excavated. They might contain something useful. She could not find it. She went on to the end of the room, to the attic’s greatest treasure. It was a massive mound, about eight feet across, covered in a sheet. She pulled this off gingerly.

  Underneath was another Great House, an exact copy. This had been made for Alice Ellingham after her disappearance. It sat here, gathering dust, waiting for her return. She reached around to find the latch and swung it open, examining the rooms inside as they had existed in the 1930s. There were cooks in the kitchen, working with tiny pots. Iris’s bedroom was there, her bed made in small satin bed linens, her dresser set with little brushes and perfume bottles. Stevie looked down on the scene like a goddess, examining the old bedrooms, the rustic bathrooms with their tiny tiles. And there was Albert Ellingham’s office, with copies of his chairs, his desks, his rugs, and even some of the very things she had just been looking at.

  There was even a doll of him. Stevie picked him up. The jointed china bent to her will. His face was painted with a benevolent smile. There was something profoundly disturbing about the dollhouse. Perhaps that was why it had never been displayed.

  It was getting darker now. The attic had fallen into shadow. It was probably time to go to dinner. She replaced the doll. On her way out, she looked out the west-facing window toward the maintenance shed and the small faculty parking lot. There were just two very expensive cars down there. Doctor Quinn was walking toward one of them, a red sports car of some kind, switching out her glasses. It seemed fitting that she would drive something that looked like it should be zipping along some European mountain road, or perhaps the coastline of Nice. But the parking lot was not the real view. From here, she could see into the far distance, the mountains. What had it taken to build this place? To take an unbroken mountaintop that no one could live on and build a tiny empire? Albert Ellingham was obsessed with gods and goddesses. Was he trying to make his own Olympus, to own a piece of earth and sky?

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out. It was a text from an unknown number.

  Hope things are going well. —EK

  Edward King, just letting her know that he was here. That he was keeping tabs. The text felt as palpable as a hand on the shoulder. She had not given him her number, but that was the whole point—he was telling her he did not need to ask for this information. It was his to take.

  “You want to play?” she asked the phone.

  But she had no move to make against him. The only thing she could do was work down this list, keep working her leads. He didn’t own her—he had simply borrowed a part of her.

  That was what she was going to keep telling herself.

  12

  HALLOWEEN, THE SEASON AND THEN THE DATE, CREPT SLOWLY UP ON the Ellingham campus. The scenery was repainted each evening, the leaves more gold than green. Some of the vines that snaked up the buildings turned a shocking red. Pumpkins began to appear in windows and doorways and nooks. The nights reached into the days with long fingers, dragging back time. Stevie fell back into the ways of Ellingham, and Ellingham fell back into her. Her room felt more snug. It smelled more familiar, of her comforter and Ellingham laundry detergent (they had a service—your laundry went out dirty in a bag and came back clean and folded), like the old smoke from the fire in the common room.

  She tried to catch up with her classes, and for maybe a week she believed that she might even be able to do it. This confidence largely came from a one-night sprint doing Spanish modules until three in the morning. The burst left her feeling academic, maybe brilliant, maybe an unsung genius of her time. The euphoria came crashing down when she realized she was missing entire systems in anatomy, was four novels behind in English, and her history paper on the Harding presidency was something that would never really be written. Its existence was a little concept joke.

  She had, however, made progress with Fenton’s requests. She had been doing long hours in the attic, going over the tedium of the list. Stevie did not know she could be bored by details about the Ellingham case, but Fenton had accomplished it.

  Now, on Halloween morning, she was on the coach again, returning with the first properly completed piece of work she had done at her entire time at Ellingham. It was good to do something right.

  Before going to Burlington, Stevie had to assure Janelle that she would be back in time for that night’s Halloween party. Stevie had always been Halloween ambivalent. There were many positive things about Halloween—true-crime shows always got an extra bump, other shows pulled out their murder-mystery episodes, and slinking around in the dark was generally more acceptable. But she could never get on board with the costumes. There was the first problem: being “cute.” That had been the message her whole life. As a child, Halloween was that day Stevie was stuffed into a Disney princess outfit against her will. “You look so cute,” her mom would say, as she safety-pinned the thin polyester Belle dress to the layer of warm clothes she had on underneath. “Don’t you want to be a princess?”

  Stevie did not want to be a princess. She was not sure what princesses were, or what they did. She asked to be a different princess, like Princess Leia, but this was rejected. The reason was never given. Stevie pointed to every costume in the store—a ghost, a pirate, a banana. It was no use. It was the Disney princess every time, the same costumes pulled out over and over.

  It was an understood thing that Janelle Franklin took Halloween very seriously. She had organized and planned for it with the same precision and attention to detail that she applied to everything in her life. Stevie had watched her construct a Wonder Woman costume piece by piece for a week, sewing, applying, cutting foam, spray painting, and hot-gluing. More than once she had called Stevie in for help, and during these times she had grilled Stevie on what she was going to be. She did not accept Stevie’s answer of someone who stays at home and does not wear a costume.

  “Halloween is a chance to be whatever you want to be,” Janelle said as Stevie hot-glued a foam piece in the form of a gold W to a corset that Janelle was wearing. “It doesn’t have to be all sexy, sexy. That’s patriarchal bullshit. I’m Wonder Woman because I love Wonder Woman. Who do you love?”

  “The people who work at
DNA databases?” Stevie said, checking to make sure the W was secure.

  “Okay. How about detectives? What about Sherlock Holmes?”

  Stevie rolled her eyes.

  “What’s wrong with Sherlock Holmes?” Janelle asked.

  “Nothing is wrong with Sherlock Holmes,” Stevie said. “But he’s not a costume. He’s . . .”

  Stevie waved her hands in the air to try to convey that you didn’t just dress up like the world’s greatest fictional detective, the one upon whom real-world detection techniques were based, and no, it wasn’t about the hat or the coat. Janelle guided her hand back carefully, because Stevie was still holding a hot-glue gun.

  “Name another one,” Janelle said.

  “I don’t know . . . Hercule Poirot.”

  “Good!” Janelle said. “Fine. Do that.”

  Stevie’s costume budget was basically ten dollars, and less if she could manage it. The school permitted students to use the costumes at the theater. There, Stevie had found a suit that—if not entirely up to the exacting standards of Belgium’s neatest detective—was good enough. She would slick back her hair and wear a hat. Vi had a can of dark spray that they would let Stevie use. She had bought the mustache online. She set all these things out on her bed on Saturday morning before getting on the coach to go to her meeting. Tonight, she had to play the part of detective. Now, she had to go to try to be one.

  Fenton lived in the middle of Burlington, in the university area. The street she lived on was full of big Victorian houses that were likely once the homes of rich families. They had big wraparound porches that faced toward Lake Champlain. The university had taken over some of the fine brick buildings and made them into university property. The others—the big, rambling ones painted all kinds of colors—had been divided up into apartments for students, who put coolers and rocking chairs and hammocks on the porches and hung banners and tapestries in the windows.

  Her house was a tiny sage-green one between a fraternity and a deli. It had a big screened-in front porch. This was filled with piles of newspapers, milk crates, and a lot of recycling. There was a theme in the recycling, Stevie noted. There were a lot of bottles in it. Many wine bottles, two whiskey bottles, a vodka bottle. She remembered Hunter picking up Fenton’s mug and examining it.