The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  But she couldn’t leave him like this either. So she took his hand and squeezed it. She tried to make the squeeze speak for everything inside her, everything she couldn’t say. He squeezed back, then he fell against her in heaving sobs.

  Stevie bolted herself to the wall, unable to move. This outpouring of emotion was making her panic. After a few minutes, he leaned back, wiped his eyes, and caught his breath.

  “Fuck,” he said. “I’m tired of sitting up here. Let’s go to the yurt of sadness.”

  He was entirely unembarrassed by what had happened. Not that he should have been. It’s just that Stevie would have been. David was free with the way he expressed himself. He stood and offered his hand to help her up, then continued holding it. They were simply together now.

  Out at the end of the aisle, along the balcony, the counselor was consulting with Call Me Charles, who had been called to the scene. He had stripped the Charlie Chaplin mustache and hat and was wrapped in his normal black coat, but the strange pants and shoes were still visible underneath. Halloween was a weird night.

  “How are you both doing?” he said as they emerged. She saw him take note of their clasped hands.

  “About how you’d expect,” David said.

  Charles nodded solemnly.

  “Can we go to the yurt now?” David said. “Do they need me for anything else?”

  “I think they’re done for now,” Charles said. “There may be some more questions later, but for now, you should be with your friends and get some rest. I’ll get someone to walk you over.”

  “Can we skip that?” David said. “Can we just go? It’s not like you won’t know where we are.”

  “I think that will be fine,” Charles said. “The two of you can go together.”

  David started to go, Stevie trailing along, linked to him.

  “Don’t worry, Stevie,” Charles said quietly as they left. “Everything will be all right. We’ll speak to your parents.”

  David turned at this, taking note, and then the two of them went down the iron staircase and out into the cold night.

  The stars were bright overhead. On nights with no clouds, the star fields over Ellingham were like nothing Stevie had ever seen—so many of them, so many more than she knew. There was a half moon, low and buttery yellow, casting a bit of light over the lawn and the Great House.

  They were approaching one of the pathway lights, where a security camera perched above them. He stopped and stared at the camera.

  “The school seems to be very understanding,” David said after a moment.

  “About what?”

  “About your parents,” he replied. “Making sure they don’t get freaked out. It must be hard to keep everyone calm when your students keep dying.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “You must have given your parents a really good speech to convince them to let you come back,” he said. “What did you say to them?”

  There was thunder in her ears.

  “I . . . I don’t know what motivates my parents.”

  It was a nonanswer, and it did not work on David the way it had on Nate.

  “I was on the roof when you got back,” he said. “I saw you come home. It was late. I mean, I was pretty high at the time, but I know it was late on a Friday night.”

  It wasn’t a question, and that was terrifying.

  “You guys must have been driving for a long time,” he said.

  “I flew,” she said.

  “Oh. Sweet. Didn’t you drive up the first time?”

  She had to open her mouth and answer, because every passing second told the tale for her. But how? Because the truth now was a confession, not a gift.

  The blue eye of the camera observed them coolly.

  “The plane is nice,” he said. “Did he try to get you to eat the chips?”

  Several seconds ticked by. Or was it a minute? Time was starting to stretch and bleed over the landscape. The stars crowded to hear her answer.

  “Listen . . .”

  Such a terrible word to start with, listen. So defensive.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  She wanted to go back, rewind, back to the tunnel, back to the kissing. Back to the laughing. Back to the dark. She could have told him then. He would have understood. But you can’t go back. You can’t re-create the conditions.

  David sat down on one of the benches along the path and stretched his legs out long in front of him. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited.

  “How did I not work this out before?” he said. “It was so obvious.” He smirked and shook his head.

  “He came to my house,” Stevie said. “He was there when I got home from school on Friday. He was talking to my parents. He brought information about all of this security. He convinced them I should be able to come back.”

  “That was nice of him,” David said. “And he said, ‘Come on my plane’?”

  “I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to be with him.”

  “But you took the ride,” he said.

  “Of course I took the ride,” she shot back. “I needed to get back. I knew he doesn’t do stuff just to be nice. I asked him what he wanted and he said . . . nothing . . . I just needed to be here, because . . .”

  Stevie couldn’t find her foothold. She’d made her lunge, and now there was nothing—just a smooth, slippery surface. David was doing what good interrogators do: when someone is confessing, you let them talk. And the impulse was there. She had to talk.

  “He wanted me to, just, talk to you. Because he said you were freaking out. And that was it, and I . . . Would you say something?”

  “Like what?” he said. His voice was cool. There was still a trace of thickness from when he had been crying, but all other emotion was gone.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “What I want from you? Yeah, you’ve been hanging with my dad. Even you. He even got you.”

  A few more tears trickled from his eyes, but he laughed, hoarse and miserable, his every last suspicion of the world confirmed.

  So Stevie did what guilty people do when confronted. She ran. It was a ridiculous impulse, but it was the only one that made sense at the moment. She took off down the path, her feet thudding against the brick. But it seemed absurd to be running away in full view of David, so she turned to go across the relative dark of the green. Running is one of the most human responses of all. Fight or flight. Like her therapist said, once you start the circuit of response, you have to complete it. If you feel like you have to fly, you fly until your body tells you to stop or until you are stopped by an outside force.

  Stevie, not being a regular runner, stopped when she got to the tree cover on the other side and heaved a bit, her throat raw. She slowed just enough to hear if David was following her. Of course, he wasn’t. David wouldn’t be behind her anymore.

  She continued on to the circle of statue heads, the gossipy stone chorus that gathered eternally between Minerva and the yurt. She held on to one of the plinths and caught her breath. She had to get herself together. Think. Her friends would be at the yurt, waiting for her. That was where she was expected. But she couldn’t face them, couldn’t risk another encounter with David.

  She circled a bit under the dark sky and hated it for being so wide.

  Maybe she should call her parents and leave.

  No. That was fear talking. She had to get a grip. She needed . . .

  She spun her bag and opened the front pocket, feeling around until her fingers hit a small metal tumbler, about half the size of her thumb. She twisted it open and dumped the contents into her palm.

  One small white pill. The emergency Ativan that she carried “just in case.” The one she never really expected to take. It was not a large pill, so she put it on her tongue and tossed her head back and force swallowed a few times until it went down dry. It would take a little while to work, but at least she knew it was heading for her stomach,
where it would be picked apart and sent to her bloodstream.

  She felt the need to sleep. Just put her head down somewhere, anywhere, and sleep. If not home and not the yurt, then . . .

  She pointed herself in the direction of the art barn, taking broad, fast steps. Upon reaching the barn, she tapped herself in and pulled the door closed behind her.

  She walked along at a clip to the yoga studio—a high-ceilinged, bare room with a mirrored wall and a bamboo floor. She pulled that door closed tight as well and then, for no reason she could understand, grabbed one of the yoga straps and ran it around the door handle, lashing it to a barre. It wasn’t the tightest security, but it was something. Then she switched on the light, assured herself that the room was utterly vacant, then turned it off again.

  Once you start doing something weird and you fully embrace it, it’s much easier to get on with it. Stevie proceeded to build herself a tiny bunker in the alcove where the yoga supplies were stored. She made herself a thick bed of mats, which she covered in several blankets for padding and for warmth. She folded another blanket as a pillow. Then she stacked the rest of the supplies next to this nest, making a short protective wall around herself so that anyone peering into the room would see nothing but a small pile of yoga blankets and mats. She climbed into the bed she had made for herself, pulling several blankets over her. It was quiet and dark and she was very alone. The wind whistled alongside the building and the trees scraped the art barn roof. The yoga blankets were a little stinky and scratchy, but they were warm and soft enough. She took out her phone and wrote a text to Janelle and Nate.

  I am fine. Going to bed.

  Nate’s reply came quick: Sleeping where?

  Janelle’s followed a minute later: You okay? Where are you?

  She replied to both: Fine going to sleep see you at breakfast

  Maybe she would stay here forever.

  Ellie . . .

  Ellie was a missing person, now found. Someone who had blown into the wind, and now the wind had blown her back.

  And David . . .

  She had destroyed whatever was there. She had killed it. She had murdered her feelings and his, but now all was exposed. She closed her eyes. She was so tired.

  Larry would know where she was—her whole, embarrassing path would have been visible. She would not be lost, like Ellie. It was as if Larry alone was watching over her slumber, and that was the only thought that consoled her.

  17

  STEVIE WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, WHICH WAS A GOOD START. WHEN things are bad, give yourself a point for everything.

  She sat up. (Another point.) She was stiff and sore, her mouth dry, her hair definitely sticking up on one side. She felt a waffle pattern of yoga blanket on the right side of her face and the faint smell of lavender and patchouli permeating her being. It was like she had been run over by a boulder made of hippies.

  She reached around, trying to find her phone in her belongings. It was stuck between some of the yoga mats she had been sleeping on. It informed her that it was 9:50 in the morning.

  “Crap,” she said.

  When she took an Ativan, she tended to sleep hard and a lot. People could have been trying to access the yoga studio and she would have had no idea. She peeked over the short wall of blankets and mats to see if there were any angry yoga fiends waiting at the door to get their chakras on. No one in sight. She crawled out of her nest. You were supposed to roll your mat and fold your blanket at the end of class and say namaste and things like that, but this was not class, so Stevie shoved everything back into something resembling the right position and unwound the strap that was holding the door closed. Outside, she saw gray skies and there was slanting rain smacking into the windows.

  “That checks out,” she mumbled.

  She reached up and rubbed her hand roughly over her short hair, taming it as best she could. She rubbed any sleep out of her eyes and away from her mouth. She had slept in her vinyl coat, so now it had a weird flipped-up bend in the bottom. This was not a good look or a good feel, but this was something detectives had to do. She might have to spend the night in a car, or an abandoned building on a stakeout. Detectives were always rough and sleepless. Of course, she thought, as she pushed open the studio door, not all of them slept in yoga studios by choice, but she would build up to it.

  Outside, the mountain morning slapped her in the face in the form of the rain and wet wind. It wasn’t pouring, but it was steady and cold. The sky was colorless, and even the brightness of the trees was dimmed. The day subtracted from life. The rain helped flatten her sticking-up hair and slicked her coat. Stevie marched on away from the art barn. As she approached the Great House and the green, there were a few police cars and vans, but the presence was subdued.

  “Hey,” someone said.

  Stevie turned to see Maris coming up behind her on the path. She was dressed in a massive shaggy black coat with black tights and red boots, and was huddled under a large umbrella that was black on the top and had a print of a blue sky and clouds underneath. Her red lipstick was the most vivid thing in miles.

  Stevie stopped and waited for her, even as the rain intensified. When Maris reached her, she tipped her umbrella at Stevie in an attempt to be helpful, but Stevie only got the edge, which made it worse.

  “How are you?” Maris said.

  Stevie shrugged.

  “Holy shit, this is horrible,” Maris said, producing a vape pen from the depths of her shaggy coat. “I can’t believe . . . well . . . I guess I can.”

  That summed up the experience pretty well. You can’t believe until you can. Then it just is.

  Stevie didn’t want to walk with Maris, really. They had never exactly bonded. But to be fair, Maris was the only person who seemed genuinely, properly hurt by Hayes’s death. They had not been a couple long (not that they had even been much of a couple), but she had cared about Hayes. Maris had been friendly with Ellie as well; they were both art people. Maris deserved some sympathy.

  “I haven’t talked to you much since you got back,” Maris said. “And now . . . I don’t know. Maybe the whole place will close down? But they can’t let that happen, right? Do you know what happened? How she got down there?”

  Stevie shook her head.

  “I guess she and Hayes tunneled a lot,” Maris went on. “They seemed to have a lot of secrets together. Do you . . . Did you really think Ellie did it? Killed Hayes? I mean, honestly? I thought you were wrong. But now . . .”

  That’s how it should have been. Stevie’s idea must have looked farfetched at first, until Ellie ran and hid in a tunnel for so long that she ended up dying in it. But as Stevie turned and looked in the direction of the Great House, which was now a looming bulk on a dark day, her conviction was starting to evaporate. Maybe it was David’s belief in Ellie. Or maybe it was guilt.

  Something was crooked in the landscape. She couldn’t see what it was, but the edges did not line up correctly.

  Maris was still waiting for an answer.

  “I just know about the script,” Stevie said. “That she wrote The End of It All. That she took his computer.”

  Maris puffed for a moment and blew out a trail of smoke.

  “If she killed Hayes and died down there,” she said, “good.”

  That seemed a bit harsh. Actually, that seemed a lot harsh. But there was a solidity to it.

  Stevie’s phone started ringing. She pulled it out. The number came up as unknown, which was the first bad sign.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said to Maris. Stevie jogged off a few paces toward the portico to answer the call.

  “Sorry to call at a time like this,” said a familiar voice. “I understand there was some trouble last night.”

  Senator King sounded like he was in a hallway, with people chattering all around him.

  “Element Walker was found,” he went on. “By David, if I understand things correctly. Do I?”

  “Yes,” Stevie said. She was surprised that she did not shake upon hea
ring his voice.

  “Well,” he said. “I suppose that answers the question of where she went. Very sad, of course. Terrible. The poor girl.”

  Edward King sounded about as sad about Ellie being found as someone who had just seen someone else drop half a doughnut on the ground. Stevie waited. David had obviously called his father. Whatever was coming, she could and would deal with it. She could unload all of her anger, all of her confusion, everything. It was time. It would feel good. Everything here would end, but . . .

  “How do you think he took this?” Edward King said. “Finding the body. How did he seem? He won’t tell me how he is, so I have to ask someone else.”

  This was not the question she was expecting.

  “Upset,” she said.

  “Well, at least that’s normal. That’s good. He seems to be doing much better. I think you’re having a very good influence on him, whatever you’re doing. I’ll make sure to put in a call to your parents today, make sure whatever comes of this is smoothed out. Really, when you think about it, it means there’s less to be concerned about. All right. We’ll talk soon.”

  With that, he was gone.

  Well, Edward King didn’t appear to know that Stevie had blurted everything out. Not yet, anyway. Stevie twitched a bit, thought of turning back, and then remembered there was no back to turn to. Home was still a crime scene—or, not a crime scene, but a scene. Off limits. She had promised Janelle and Nate she would meet them, and she needed them right now.

  She continued on to the dining hall. The moment she went through the doors, it was clear that everyone knew what had happened the night before. For a start, everyone was there, which was weird on the night after the Halloween party. There was a low, electric chatter. Maris was with a group of people by the fireplace and chairs just inside the door. She wasn’t sitting, though—she was standing on one of the chairs. Squatting, actually. Like a chicken. It was a weird move, like something Ellie would do.