Truly Devious

by Maureen Johnson

  “She does criminology and things like that,” Janelle said, maybe a little defensively. “And she knows everything about the Ellingham case. That’s why she’s here.”

  “What, are you here to solve it?” he asked.

  Stevie gulped in some air.

  Yes, that was kind of the plan. But no one else was supposed to say it, and they really weren’t supposed to say it like that. It was like he had just taken her dreams, which had been floating so gently and rising so high this whole day, and with one prick of a pin, popped them, exploded them. Rubbery dream pieces all over the yurt.

  “You weren’t going to say that, were you?” he said. His eyes were so bright, so piercing.

  There was an awkward pause in their corner. To end it, Ellie tipped herself off the edge of the sofa into David’s lap.

  “I thought that was solved,” she said to Stevie. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t someone confess?”

  “Someone was found guilty,” Stevie said. “He probably didn’t do it. He confessed because . . .”

  A burst of laughter from behind, and Ellie looked up to see what was going on. No one wanted to hear why Anton Vorachek, the local anarchist who was arrested and tried for the crime, confessed.

  “He confessed because he was on the stand . . .” Stevie tried to continue.

  Unlike before, when everyone was listening, now there was a dance breaking out and David was doing this weird smirk and Janelle, Vi, and Nate looked vaguely uncomfortable.

  You know when your moment is over.

  A flask appeared from somewhere. Ellie had some. David passed. It was waved in Janelle, Nate, and Stevie’s direction, and they all shook their heads. Stevie thought drinking from containers other people drank from was gross. She embraced Locard’s exchange principle: every contact leaves a trace, meaning in this case, backwash.

  Ellie and David went away to talk to some other second years, leaving the first years on their own.

  “He seems fun,” Janelle said with forced brightness.

  Nate was unable to bring himself to lie.

  “I feel kind of better,” he said to Stevie. “I think you’re even more screwed than I am.”

  Nights always brought the worry. Night was hard.

  It was three in the morning and Stevie was wide awake. If she was going to have a panic attack, it would likely be tonight. New school, new start, new friends, new home up here on the mountain when she’d never been away from home and her parents for more than a few days. The night brought cooler air, but still, the room felt a bit crowded. When she opened the window, a giant moth blew in. It beat a hasty path to the ceiling light and landed against it with a thunk.

  “I know the feeling,” Stevie said to it.

  The panic attacks had started when she was twelve years old. No one knew why. Her parents tried to help but were largely confused by them. Medication took care of some of it, but Stevie had worked out the rest with some assistance from the school counselor and by reading more or less the entire internet.

  It had been a year and three months since Stevie stopped having the panic attacks all the time, and at least six months since she’d had a big one. But the nights still worried her. She still paced before she slept, eyeing her bed, wondering if this was going to be one of the nights she was dragged out of sleep by a heart racing like a car with no driver and a board pressed up against the gas pedal.

  She sat on the floor beneath the window, closed her eyes, and let the breeze play on the back of her neck. Breathe in. Breathe out. Count. One. Breathe in. Breathe out. Two. Just let the thoughts come and go.

  You weren’t going to say that, were you?

  Let it go.

  You can always come home.

  Let it go, for real. Go full Frozen.

  You’re even more screwed than I am.

  She opened her eyes and looked over at her bureau. She could take an Ativan and knock herself out, but she would be groggy tomorrow.

  No. She was going to do this. It was going to be fine.

  So she turned to her other medicine—her mysteries. Stevie had always loved mysteries from the time she was small. When the attacks hit, she found that mysteries were her salvation. If she was awake at night, she had her mystery novels, her true-crime books, her shows, her podcasts. Maybe most people wouldn’t be soothed by reading about the acid bath murders, about Lizzy Borden or H. H. Holmes, about highway murders, about the quiet neighbor with the dark secret, about bodies in walls and latent fingerprints, about thirteen guests at dinner when you know they can’t all live. . . . These things were problems for her mind to work on, and when her mind worked on the mystery, it couldn’t panic.

  So Stevie became a mystery machine, with true crime playing in her ears between classes at school and while she filled bean containers at the coffee shop at the mall. She couldn’t get enough. She got into the Websleuths world online. There, she found people like herself, people who spent their time looking into cold cases. It was there that she became transfixed by the Ellingham case.

  Yes, the idea of her solving this case sounded improbable. She was a sixteen-year-old from Pittsburgh. This case was decades old. Everyone had tried to solve it. The FBI hadn’t been able to do it. The scores of serious (and not serious) investigators had not been able to do it. Thousands of people obsessed over it all the time. Ellingham himself, a genius, had tried to find out what happened and the search had killed him.

  You didn’t just solve the Ellingham Affair.

  She stared at the walls with their thick paint and their possible secrets.

  She wasn’t screwed. She was Stevie Bell, and she had gotten into Ellingham Academy on her own. They didn’t exactly admit people by mistake.

  Unless it was a mistake.

  What if they’d made a mistake? What if they’d made the first mistake they’d ever made? Why had they done this to her?

  Nope nope nope nope.

  Stevie put on a podcast and pushed across the floor and opened up a still-sealed box. She pulled out several thick folders full of perfectly organized printouts and copies, a roll of heavy-duty tape and a pair of heavy-duty scissors. Once the box was empty, she set about breaking it down into flat pieces, trimming off the flaps to make the rectangles nice and even. She worked quickly, her mind split between the podcast and her task.

  In police procedurals, there was always a case board—a place to store the images of victims and suspects, maps and diagrams. A visual reference when you needed to think it all through. The box would serve as a board.

  At the top, she put three photos: Iris Ellingham, Alice Ellingham, and Dottie Epstein. Here were the floor plans of the Great House at the time of the kidnapping. The case board began to take shape as it filled.

  In the center of her board, Stevie put the most notorious piece of evidence of all, the one people always talked about: the Truly Devious letter:

  Look! A riddle! Time for fun!

  Should we use a rope or gun?

  Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty

  Poison’s slow, which is a pity

  Fire is festive, drowning’s slow

  Hanging’s a ropy way to go

  A broken head, a nasty fall

  A car colliding with a wall

  Bombs make a very jolly noise

  Such ways to punish naughty boys!

  What shall we use? We can’t decide.

  Just like you cannot run or hide.

  Ha ha.

  Truly,

  Devious

  The physical letter was lost in the mess of the investigation, so it could never be tested or fingerprinted. Only a photo remained—a stark, terrifying communication that arrived at the Ellingham house a week before the kidnapping. It had been composed with words cut out of magazines and newspapers, that creepy, classic style of hiding your handwriting.

  Of the many intriguing aspects of the Ellingham Affair, this was the one she always came back to—this strange declaration from an unknown person that said, “I am bad. I in
tend to do harm. I’m harming you now by inspiring fear. I am the knife. I am Truly Devious.”

  It was like trolling, kind of. Except so complicated. It took more effort to get under the skin of a famous person in the 1930s. They had to get a collection of magazines and newspapers, find the words they needed, clip them delicately and glue them with a crooked precision, then send it off in the mail, never knowing what effect it would cause.

  Why announce yourself, Truly Devious? Why tell them you’re coming?

  Stevie added another photo to the board—Anton Vorachek. It was the Truly Devious letter that always convinced Stevie (and other people) that Vorachek was innocent. Vorachek could barely speak English—he probably wouldn’t have written a poem in English, a poem modeled on the style of Dorothy Parker, no less. No one ever thought it made sense, but they found the marked bills on Vorachek, no one liked him, and he confessed on the stand.

  Truly Devious hung over the case like a ghoul.

  Over the next hour, Stevie assembled the images, organized the files. There were floor plans, copies of interviews, police reports. It had taken a very long time, a helpful librarian, and the assistance of other Websleuths to collect it all. She had run through two toner cartridges and a box of paper that belonged to the Edward King campaign (good) to print out this mass of information. And it was a mass. It was heavy. Stevie liked to hold the files and bundles of paper, to pore over it again and again until it all ran through her head like an ancient stream. Surely other people had come to Ellingham with an interest in the case. Some of those people came before the internet existed, so they wouldn’t have had access to all Stevie did. And the others . . .

  No. None had her passion. You know when you’re the top fan—the one who knows the words and feels the gaps and senses the disruptions. You know when you are the one who gets it.

  It was dawn when Stevie finished assembling her board and putting all of her documents in order on her desk and in the bookcase. She went to the window and found a soft, friendly morning with a light, sweet breeze. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  The critical scene of the mystery is when the detective enters. The action shifts to Sherlock’s sitting room. The little Belgian man with the waxed moustache appears in the lobby of the grand hotel. The gentle old woman with the bag of knitting comes to visit her niece when the poison pen letters start going around the village. The private detective comes back to the office after a night of drinking and finds the woman with the cigarette and the veiled hat. This is when things will change.

  The detective had arrived at Ellingham Academy.

  April 14, 1936, 4:00 a.m.

  WHEN GEORGE MARSH PULLED UP TO THE FRONT GATES OF THE Ellingham estate, two men in overalls holding shotguns greeted him. They waved him along, and he steered his Model B along the perilous Ellingham road for the second time in only a few hours.

  Albert Ellingham and Robert Mackenzie were waiting for him on the drive. Mackenzie huddled in his coat, but Ellingham didn’t appear to feel the chill at all. He rushed to the car door and was taken aback at the sight.

  “What happened? Where are they? Your face! What happened?”

  He was referring to the trail of bruises along Marsh’s jaw and around to his eye, and to a gash in his left cheek. His left eye was almost swollen shut.

  “They weren’t there,” Marsh said, getting out of the car.

  “What do you mean they weren’t there? You didn’t see them?”

  “When I made the turn toward West Bolton, I got about a mile down before they blocked the road with a car. I got out and they ambushed me. They want two hundred thousand more. There was no sign of Iris or Alice.”

  Robert let out a hissing sigh.

  “You were right, Robert,” Ellingham said. “They want more. So we will get them more. How long do we have?”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Marsh replied. “There’ll be another phone call. They said to have someone wait by the phone box on Church Street at eleven p.m. tonight. They wanted you to deliver it, but I got them to accept me as the deliveryman.”

  “Surely now we call in the police and FBI,” Robert said to Marsh. “We can have someone wake J. Edgar Hoover. We can’t go on like this.”

  “They said the increase in ransom was because you involved the police,” Marsh said. “Meaning, me.”

  “They don’t want the police involved,” Ellingham said. “I can give them whatever they want.”

  “This will go on,” Robert replied, his voice cracking with urgency. “You are an endless source of funds. Don’t you see?”

  An owl cut across the sky with a screech.

  “We should talk about this inside,” Marsh said quietly. “Voices carry.”

  The Great House was quiet now, but it was not still. The electricity on the mountaintop was often erratic. The lights in the main hall flickered and dimmed. The house itself seemed to pulse. Two more men in overalls waited directly inside the door, guns at the ready. They looked confused, jumpy, and seeing Marsh’s damaged face did not reassure them. Montgomery, the butler, was still awake and attending.

  “Should I bring water and bandages, sir?” he asked.

  “What?” Ellingham said. Then, remembering Marsh’s injuries, he waved his hand. “Yes, yes. Bring them.”

  Inside the office, Ellingham walked restlessly to his drinks table and poured some whiskeys with a shaking hand, giving one to the detective and keeping one for himself.

  “What have you told everyone in the house?” Marsh asked. “They must have noticed that Mrs. Ellingham and Alice have not returned.”

  “We said we had a threat of the usual type,” Robert said. “Anarchists. Mrs. Ellingham was told to spend the night in Burlington with a friend until we sorted it out.”

  “Do you think they believe it?” Marsh asked.

  “Unlikely.”

  The three descended into silence for several minutes. Marsh lowered himself into a chair. Ellingham stood at the fire, his hand gripping the mantle. Mackenzie sat and examined the letter again. Montgomery appeared with the water and bandages. Marsh wiped the blood from his face.

  “We’ll get them back,” Ellingham suddenly snapped. “We’ll give them whatever they want. Iris is strong and resourceful. She will be able to handle herself and Alice.”

  “With respect,” Robert said, “I must speak frankly in this circumstance—Mrs. Ellingham is resourceful. She is also strong-willed and athletic. She’s a champion swimmer and skier. Do you think she would allow herself and her daughter to be taken without a fight? She will struggle. This has already gone wrong in several ways. Every moment we delay reaching out to the police at large is a moment she’s in danger.”

  “They’re already upset that someone else is involved. Look what they did to Marsh! We can do this. We can get them what they want without further attention.”

  “We may have no choice in that matter,” Robert replied. “Even if we wanted to—do you think this is going to stay quiet? We have about twenty people in the house, we’ve got the school, and in a few hours, we’re going to have a hundred men more show up for work. How does this stay out of the press?”

  “Have work for this week canceled and arrange for the men to be paid anyway.”

  “That’s not going to stop people from talking,” Robert said. “This will be all over Burlington by dawn.”

  Ellingham looked to Marsh, who was sipping his whiskey carefully through swollen lips.

  “Can you get that kind of money by tomorrow?” Marsh asked.

  “The Burlington bank won’t be able to handle a withdrawal of that size on no notice,” Ellingham said. “Robert, wake someone up in New York and have them at the bank the moment it opens and you have it flown here. Get our contacts together. Money, pilots. I want people awake now. I’m going to make sure the property has been secured.”

  When Ellingham was gone, the policeman and the secretary regarded each other by the light of the fire.

  “I understand yo
ur disapproval, Mackenzie,” Marsh said. “I don’t like this either. But I think this is how we have to play it right now.”

  “That letter . . . should we use a rope or gun? Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty. Truly, Devious. The person who wrote that note is talking about murder, not kidnapping.”

  “We do it this way for twenty-four hours,” Marsh said. “Whoever did this—they know this place well. Assume we have eyes on us. If this estate is flooded with FBI, they could panic and act rashly. We stay cool, we do as they say.”

  Ellingham reappeared at the doorway of the office.

  “Word has just come that one of the students is missing—a girl named Dolores Epstein. We need to have the grounds searched. This has to be connected. She’s a good girl. She wouldn’t run off. My God, we need to protect the students. We can’t give the game away. We’ll need to get them all out of here on some excuse.”

  Robert Mackenzie wearily closed his eyes. He felt that he was watching a disaster in the making and could do nothing to stop it.

  8

  STEVIE AWOKE WITH A JOLT THE NEXT MORNING, IN THE UNFAMILIAR bed. Her work of the night before was there on the floor. The faces of the Ellinghams stared up at her as she sorted her bath supplies into the blue plastic caddy she had so carefully chosen, shuffling the shampoo to one side, pushing over the shower gel, looking for the right place to stand the razor. She pulled on her pajama bottoms and a robe, put on her flip-flops, picked up the caddy, and stood in front of the closed door for a full two minutes working up the courage to go out into the hallway.

  This was weird. Why was it so weird? She knew this was a dorm. She’d stayed over at friends’ houses before. But this was different—these were the people she would be living with, and some of them were guys. Half of them were guys.

  So what. She was wearing a robe and . . . so what?

  She opened the door. No one was in the hall. Feeling victorious, she took measured, leisurely steps down to the bathroom. There was another bathroom upstairs; it was unlikely that everyone in the house would be crowded into this one. It wasn’t very big, though, and it was already very steamy and the one shower stall was in use.