The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  This gesture suddenly made a lot more sense.

  There was music blasting inside, so Stevie had to knock for almost a full minute on the peeling green door before it opened. Fenton answered, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. Today she wore an old pair of mom jeans and a baggy black sweater.

  “Hey,” she said, shooing a big orange cat back inside with her bare foot. “Come in.”

  Somehow, Fenton’s house was everything Stevie knew it would be, and yet it still surprised her. The house smelled like cigarette smoke and cat and trash and a single scented candle that was probably supposed to cover all that but only made it worse. They had entered a living room that was mostly composed of books. Books on shelves. Books in stacks along the wall. Books all over a round table in the middle of the room. Books scattered on seats. There was a large television, and a cabinet full of DVDs. There were glasses and mugs everywhere, things in tinfoil that she could not identify. There were also some things that were likely Hunter’s—a coat, some sneakers, some books on the environment. As she scanned the room, she spotted two more cats hiding out in the scenery. The smell hung over it all. Stevie tried not to show it, but she couldn’t help but shield her nose.

  “Something wrong?” Fenton said over the music.

  “No, it’s . . .”

  Fenton turned off the music and the silence was abrupt.

  “You like the Rolling Stones?” she asked.

  “I . . .”

  “Best band in the world. Exile on Main Street. Best album in the world. No arguments. Does something stink? Hunter tells me that all the time. I lost my sense of smell years ago. Open a window if something smells off. Come into my office.”

  Fenton put the unlit cigarette behind her ear and waved Stevie through a set of French doors covered in bamboo blinds. This room took things to a new level. The majority of the room was taken up by a massive walnut desk with a shaded green lamp. There was a much-used leather chair in the corner. There were books in here as well, kept in low, orderly stacks. These were interspersed with large cardboard file boxes and metal file cabinets. But it was the walls that really captured her attention. One wall was full of black-and-white photographs of people known to be in the house on the day of the kidnapping. There was a whole section of photos of Vorachek. Then photos of the house and grounds. Then maps, new and old. The one closest to Stevie was made of thin, frail paper but was in very good condition, showing the highways of Vermont in blocky blue ink. Several pushpins were in this map.

  “Original road map printed in 1935,” Fenton said.

  It was a conspiracy wall. A true, real conspiracy wall. The only things missing were the bits of string that connected the various points.

  “So,” Fenton said, “how did we do?”

  Stevie pushed over the notepad.

  “I have two hundred and ninety out of three hundred and seven,” Stevie said. “A few things were missing. I couldn’t find the one china pattern you wanted.”

  Fenton hmmed and flipped through the pad, rolling one of her gray spiral curls around her finger.

  “Let me read through this,” she said. “Go and get yourself a Coke or something in the kitchen.”

  Fenton waved Stevie off. Stevie went back through the living room, stopping to pet a big ginger cat on one of the sofas. The sofa was thick with cat hair, almost to the point where the color of the sofa was obscured. There were traces of cat litter around the floor, along with ash and specks of paper. Every exposed surface had water rings on it. She had a feeling that the kitchen would not be a pleasant experience, but some effort had been made. There were many dirty glasses, but they were clustered together by the sink. There were some empty wine bottles and a pizza box on the floor by the trash. Nothing good would come of opening the refrigerator. Stevie came from an uptight family, where the slightest smell or stain or smudge in the kitchen was unacceptable, and she just knew that there would be a smell in this fridge from something incorrectly sealed and outdated.

  There were, however, some warm Cokes in a box on the floor. Stevie took one, opened it, and wiped the top of the can with her sleeve before sipping. She glanced through the pile of books on the table, and had just opened one about the Yorkshire Ripper when she heard the door open.

  “Hey!” called a voice.

  She leaned over to look and saw Hunter coming in the door, leaning his crutch against the wall and dropping his backpack to remove his puffer coat. Stevie leaned back in, feeling weird about being in his house, drinking his warm Coke, even though she was allowed to be here.

  “I couldn’t get any limes,” he said. “But I bought some lunch meat . . .”

  He came into the kitchen and blinked in surprise.

  “Hey!” he said. “Oh. Hey. Sorry. Hi.”

  “Hunter?” Fenton yelled.

  “Yeah!”

  “Get Stevie a Coke!”

  Hunter smirked in gentle embarrassment and nodded at the Coke Stevie was holding.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s kind of a mess in here. Are you . . . working?”

  “Your aunt is going through some stuff I did.”

  “Oh. Cool.” Hunter looked around, as if he was sorry for intruding in his own house. There was something sunny about Hunter. He had light hair. The cut was a little too short, probably a cheap and fast one, or maybe a home job. His smattering of freckles made him look younger than he was.

  “So,” he said, sitting down. “What’s Ellingham like?”

  “Intense,” she said. “Really good. A lot.”

  “So how did you get in?”

  “I just wrote about how I was obsessed with the case,” she said. “I didn’t think they’d take me. Someone liked me, though.”

  “I guess you have the something,” he said. “Actually, I applied. I didn’t get my letter from Hogwarts.”

  She realized for the first time that she was an insider to others who might have wanted to go there, wanted to have this magic. She was to be envied. It was weird, and not entirely comfortable, and she wanted to say something to make Hunter feel better, but she knew that if someone had said something to her in that position, she would have taken it as being patronizing.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I wasn’t hanging on it or anything. I just knew about it because of my aunt and I took a shot.”

  He smirked and glanced around, as if embarrassed by everything he was saying.

  “I still think I was a mistake,” Stevie said.

  “Everyone must say that.”

  “No one says that,” Stevie said. “But me. It may be true. My friend Janelle is a genius. My friend Nate is an author. Everyone’s something there.”

  “And you’re something,” he said.

  “I like crime,” she said.

  “Who doesn’t?” he said, smiling.

  “Lots of people.”

  “Stupid people,” he said.

  This made her smile.

  “Good work.” Fenton was standing in the doorway. “You did this a lot faster than I expected. My lazy-ass grad students would have taken all semester. Come on.”

  Hunter grimaced just a bit, and Stevie got up to follow Fenton back to her office. Once inside, Fenton shut the double doors and then sat and looked Stevie over.

  “You’re serious,” she said. “I like that. I thought we were going to be screwing around, but all right. Maybe we can do some real work together.”

  Stevie wondered what she had just spent a week doing if it was not real work.

  “First rule,” Fenton said, pointing at the wall of document boxes. “Don’t put your stuff on the internet. Once you put it online, it’s worthless. It’s not yours.”

  She took the cigarette from behind her ear and lit it with a lighter from her desk.

  “I assume you’ve read the Vorachek court transcript?”

  “Of course,” Stevie said. That was one of the first things anyone interested in the case did. Fenton pulled out a bound copy with what looked like a hundred Post-it notes flaggi
ng from the side. She licked her thumb and opened it to a blue-noted page.

  “Here,” she said. “Read from the highlighted lines.”

  It was the testimony of Marion Nelson, the housemistress of Minerva. These were the lines Fenton had highlighted:

  PROSECUTION: Miss Nelson, can you tell us when you first realized Dolores Epstein was missing?

  MARION NELSON: It was right after nine that night.

  PROSECUTION: Nine at night? Isn’t that late for a young girl to be out?

  MN: Well, no, not at Ellingham. One of the precepts of the school is that the children have freedom to learn and explore. The school is—the school seemed—and generally is very safe. So they can read, play, experiment, study. Dottie was a voracious reader, and she would often hide away somewhere with a book. But generally, she would appear for supper.

  PROSECUTION: And she did not?

  MN: No.

  PROSECUTION: When did you first learn that she was missing?

  MN: When Mr. Ellingham’s men came to the door at dawn and told us to get the children packed and ready to leave.

  “Now,” Fenton said, taking the transcript back and turning to a later page, to testimony from July 22, 1938, from Margo Fields, the local telephone operator who connected the ransom calls. Fenton had highlighted more lines:

  PROSECUTION: Miss Fields, you were working at the telephone exchange in Burlington on April 13, 1936. Is this correct?

  MARGO FIELDS: Yes. I was. Yes. At work. Yes.

  PROSECUTION: How long have you been a telephone operator, Miss Fields?

  MF: Six years this June. I started as soon as I left high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but there was an opening and I applied for it, and I got it and I’ve been doing it ever since.

  PROSECUTION: What can you tell us about the telephone lines going to Ellingham Academy?

  MF: Oh, there are a lot of them. There are seven lines going into the house, and then a lot of the buildings have their own telephones. There are sixteen lines going to the property in total.

  PROSECUTION: Seven lines go into the main house?

  MF: Yes. I didn’t know a house could have seven phone lines until Mr. Ellingham came along! Imagine, seven telephones in one house!

  PROSECUTION: Can you tell us where the lines go?

  MF: Well, one goes to Mr. Montgomery. He’s the butler. There’s one to the kitchen. There’s one to Mr. Mackenzie—he’s Mr. Ellingham’s secretary, one to Mrs. Ellingham, there’s a guest telephone, and a housekeeper’s telephone, and then, of course, there’s Mr. Ellingham’s telephone. Most of the calls to the house or going out of it go to Mr. Montgomery or Mr. Mackenzie or Mrs. Ellingham, unless there’s a party up there, then the calls come and go from all the phones all day. And the calls that go into Mr. Ellingham’s telephone—they come and go from all over!

  PROSECUTION: Let’s go to the afternoon of April 13, Miss Fields. When do you get to work?

  MF: Well, that day I was doing a shift starting at five p.m. I have lunch at Henry’s before I do that shift. So I sat down at my station at five p.m. and took over from Helen. Helen Woolman.

  PROSECUTION: I’m entering into evidence exhibit 56A, Your Honor. Miss Fields, is this the logbook you use to record calls?

  MF: It is.

  PROSECUTION: Can you tell us about the telephone call you connected at seven fifteen that evening?

  MF: Yes, I can. That phone call came from a telephone booth on College and Church Streets. They called Mr. Montgomery’s telephone. I don’t see many calls coming from telephone booths going to the Ellingham house, but that’s right by the market, so I thought it might be a delivery or some such. But I was curious, you know?

  PROSECUTION: Can you describe the voice on the line?

  MF: Rough. Very rough. With a strange way of speaking. He sounded like he was speaking through a tube or something. That telephone can have a funny connection, though.

  PROSECUTION: Was there anything else about the voice? How was it strange?

  MF: Oh, it had an accent.

  PROSECUTION: What kind of accent?

  MF: Not American. European, I think. My neighbor, Mrs. Czarnecki, from down the street, she’s from Warsaw, in Poland, and it sounded a bit like her, but not quite? I stayed on the line just long enough to hear Mr. Montgomery answer. I wish I’d hung on, but we don’t do that. Oh, I wish I had. You don’t know how I wish I had. I don’t know what I would have done.

  PROSECUTION: How long did that call last?

  MF: Five or six minutes.

  PROSECUTION: What happened after that?

  MF: The next call was outgoing. This was at seven forty-five. Mr. Mackenzie telephoned out and asked to be connected to . . . that would be George Marsh. That’s another common call. After that, Mr. Mackenzie called me back and asked me to make a special note of where all calls coming in and out of the house came from that evening. He sounded a bit funny, but he said something about Mr. Ellingham just needing to know for some business reason. And he asked where the previous call had come from, and I told him. I usually go on a half hour dinner break at seven in the evening, but I ate my sandwich at my station because Mr. Mackenzie had asked me to pay special attention, and we always take care of the Ellingham lines. He’s done so much for those children. I remember I had a cheese and tomato jam sandwich, and a call came in as soon as I took a bite.

  PROSECUTION: What can you tell us about the other calls?

  MF: All right. I’ve recorded here that at 8:03 p.m., there was an incoming call from New York City that went to Mrs. Ellingham’s personal telephone. That was unanswered. I didn’t know why then, but I do now, of course. That was from a Manhattan exchange—a line I saw often. I think it’s a friend of hers.

  PROSECUTION: That call was identified as being from Mrs. Rose Peabody, and she was a friend of Mrs. Ellingham.

  MF: Yes, there was nothing really new about that call. Now, the next call, that was incoming from another telephone booth, which was odd. This was at 8:47. This was a telephone by the gasoline station as you go out on Route Two. Do you know the one? That call was to Mr. Mackenzie’s line. Now, this was the same strange voice as the first call, I’m sure of it. Very rough. I stayed on long enough to hear Mr. Mackenzie pick it up. There was another call at 9:50 to Mrs. Ellingham’s line, the same number from New York City, Mrs. Peabody, and it went unanswered. I went off duty at midnight and I called Mr. Mackenzie to tell him so and I read off the information to him.

  PROSECUTION: Those were the only calls?

  MF: Yes.

  PROSECUTION: Coming in, going out, even between the buildings?

  MF: Some days the Ellingham lines are very busy, but the evenings are generally quieter, and I think Mr. Ellingham was in town that day, so his phones were quieter. So it wasn’t that odd.

  PROSECUTION: The voice you heard. Could you identify it if you heard it again?

  MF: I . . . think I could? I might. It was a strange voice. There was something wrong with it.

  PROSECUTION: Something wrong?

  MF: I can’t explain it.

  PROSECUTION: But you think you would know it?

  MF: I think I might?

  PROSECUTION: Your Honor, I’d like to ask the defendant, Mr. Anton Vorachek, to read something out loud.

  DEFENSE: Objection, Your Honor.

  JUDGE LADSKY: I’ll allow it.

  PROSECUTION: Mr. Vorachek, I’ve written something on this piece of paper. I’d just like you to read it in your normal speaking voice.

  ANTON VORACHEK: I am not an actor. I won’t be in your play.

  JUDGE LADSKY: You are out of order, Mr. . . .

  ANTON VORACHEK: This court is a farce! You are all puppets of the capitalist state!

  JUDGE LADSKY: Mr. Vorachek! I am on the verge of having you removed from the courtroom.

  PROSECUTION: Your Honor, that may be enough for my purposes. Miss Fields, you’ve just heard Mr. Vorachek’s voice. Was that the voice you heard?

&nbs
p; MF: Oh, voices are strange. You hear so many of them down the lines and you pick up little things and you think you can pick them apart, but then they all go back together again. I just got the feeling that this person . . . didn’t want to be understood? It was such a terrible night. I didn’t know that then, of course, but after. But . . . yes. I think, maybe yes.

  PROSECUTION: No further questions, Your Honor.

  Stevie knew better than to say, “What about it?” She looked to Fenton for a clue as to where this was going.

  “She says that there were no other calls from nine fifty to midnight,” Fenton said. “And Miss Nelson says that she found out about the kidnapping in the morning. So, I did a little checking.”

  There was a pile of yellow legal pads on the corner of the desk. She sorted through the stack until she got the one she wanted.

  “I told you I had some new information,” Fenton said. “I talked to a lot of people. I got some very interesting, very important information. One of the people I found was Gertie van Coevorden. Gertie van Coevorden was—”

  “A student from Minerva,” she said.

  “Right. A very rich one, one who liked to talk about that night to anyone who would listen. I interviewed her and recorded it and transcribed it. Here’s what she said: ‘It was a terrible night, so foggy. We were all of us gathered in the common room. We were all such good friends in Minerva, and we cared about each other so much. Dottie hadn’t come home and we were all so worried about her. Dottie was one of my dearest friends. Something was wrong, and I kept saying to Miss Nelson, our housemistress, that someone should be looking for her. I was thinking about doing it myself, but then the phone rang upstairs. Miss Nelson went to answer it. It was right before ten in the evening because there was a radio program we liked to listen to that came on at ten o’clock. But Miss Nelson made us all go to bed, and she started acting very strange.’”