Truly Devious

by Maureen Johnson

  That was anxiety talking. Janelle did like her. All she did was ask Vi to sit with them, and that was because she wanted to flirt with Vi. And Nate, he was there. He was just a tough nut to crack.

  Things righted themselves for a moment, until David came out of the dining hall, his unruly hair sticking up at odd angles. He still hadn’t changed out of the clothes from the night before. Stevie had that same quiver of recognition, like he was someone she knew well. But there was no way they could have met before.

  “Hello,” he said much too loudly as he sat down. “You love looking at me. I get it. You didn’t drink that, did you?”

  He pointed at the bottle of soda in front of Stevie.

  “I got it for you,” Stevie said, pushing the bottle his way.

  Ellie smiled and stretched out on the bench, putting her bare feet in David’s lap.

  “Bad news, Hayes,” he said. “Someone was watching you last night.”

  He passed his phone down the table.

  “Looks like we have our own personal TMZ,” David said. “Someone named Germaine Batt?”

  As he spoke, Stevie felt a ripple in the air around them. People had been looking, and now there was an undercurrent of chatter.

  “Your girlfriend is going to be pissed,” David observed.

  Hayes looked at the screen but didn’t seem disturbed by what he saw.

  “Oh well,” he said, passing it back to David.

  “Guess that’s what happens when you’re famous,” David said. “Eyes everywhere.”

  For no reason Stevie could determine, Ellie put her foot in David’s face, and he bit it. She screamed with laughter. It just happened, out of the blue—something that weird and familiar. Stevie felt her insides flex and twist a bit, and a flush of anxiety run through her system.

  Vi and Janelle exchanged looks. Nate stubbornly refused to look up. Hayes didn’t feel like he was really part of the group at all, somehow.

  Stevie felt very alone, except for a bee that had decided to linger by her ear and buzz furiously. Stevie was all right with being alone, generally, but this felt like she was being severed from the group bit by bit.

  You can always come home . . .

  When she got back to her room, Stevie sat on the floor for a bit, looking at her research board.

  What if this place wasn’t different? What if it was, as Ellie said, all bunnies on a hillside? She had come here because it was supposed to be different. What had she expected?

  She drummed her fingers on the floor for a moment and stared at the faces of the Ellingham family. Then she pulled her computer out of her bag. She couldn’t sit there entertaining these kinds of thoughts. If she could learn some more about the people around her, maybe that would help.

  First, David. What was his deal? His last name, she knew from the student registry, was Eastman. David Eastman was a fairly common name, so there was a lot to sort through, dozens and dozens of search results. She added Ellingham. She added California. She looked up and down through every social media platform. An hour passed, and her butt grew numb as she sat in the same scrunched position, her computer pressed between her chest and her knees. The more she looked, the less David seemed to exist. No profiles anywhere.

  “Where the hell are you?” she mumbled to herself.

  There was a knock on her door and a gentle push. Janelle appeared in the space.

  “Hey,” she said. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” Stevie slapped the computer shut.

  Janelle fluttered in. She had a delicate way of walking on the balls of her feet, lifting the hem of her long sundress from the ground. Unlike Stevie, who was once again in black shorts (there had been a three-for-two deal and she got three pairs, all black), Janelle looked like a summer picnic. A faint scent of orangey perfume wafted from her as she moved. Her braided hair was coiled precisely on the top of her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, coming and sitting on the floor opposite Stevie.

  “For what?”

  “I ignored you at lunch. I didn’t mean to.”

  “It’s okay,” Stevie said. “You were . . .”

  “Yeah,” Janelle said, unable to contain a smile. She tucked her long floral dress around her knees and pulled the material taut. “You know I broke up with my girlfriend in the spring.”

  “You told me.”

  “And I didn’t think . . . but Vi? I don’t know. I just . . . I don’t want to be that person who gets obsessed and ignores their friends.”

  Stevie felt a warm sensation all over, and something in her released that she didn’t know she’d been holding.

  “You like her?”

  “I like them,” Janelle corrected her.

  “Sorry. Well, they seem to like you too.”

  “I just have to take a breath,” Janelle said, plucking a lip gloss from the side of her bra, blindly and perfectly applying a coat, and tucking it back in place. “We just got here. Maybe this is some kind of . . . I don’t know. Gotta keep my head in the game. I have a machine to make, and this schedule I got this morning is nuts. I love math, but this scares me. Differential equations in the morning, calc in the afternoon, physics in the middle.”

  “That’s nothing for you,” Stevie said.

  “I like your board,” Janelle said.

  “Everyone needs a conspiracy wall,” Stevie said.

  “No,” Janelle said, pointing. “You came here to do this. I’ve heard you talk about this. You got me interested, and I don’t care about this stuff. You and me, we have this. And no matter what, we’re going to stick together this year. I’m going to make my machines and you’re going to solve a crime.”

  When Janelle left, Stevie eased down onto her back and looked up at the ceiling.

  She had Janelle. And yes, she would solve her case. But now she had another one. Who was David? There was something there. She could feel it under her skin.

  Stevie had no fears of the dead. The living, however, sometimes gave her the creeps.

  11

  THE NEXT MORNING STEVIE SHUFFLED TO THE WINDOW, WIPING SLEEP out of her eyes, and peeled back the edge of the curtain to look out on a green sky. Had she believed in omens, she might well have taken this as a bad sign for the first morning of classes. But Stevie did not believe in omens. A green sky was a meteorological oddity, and maybe something for Instagram. Not a sign.

  Stevie brought an umbrella.

  Her first class, anatomy, was in the unsubtly named Genius Hall. There were only six people in the class. It helped that Pix was the teacher—at least something felt familiar.

  “Welcome to Anatomy and Physiology,” she said. “We are going to talk about the human body without any skin, about the body of muscle and bone and organs. Over here . . .”

  She walked over to the skeleton hanging at the side of the whiteboard and picked up its hand.

  “. . . are the two hundred and six bones of the human body, fully articulated. One of the first questions I get about the skeleton is . . . is it real? Usually they’re plastic, but this one is the real deal. It was a private donation to the academy, and every year, someone attempts to steal it. It is alarmed. Don’t steal the skeleton. His name is Mr. Nelson. Be nice to Mr. Nelson. He’s here to teach you about what’s inside of you, inside of all of us.”

  Mr. Nelson, the real skeleton, grimaced at them with his big, empty eyes.

  “The bones themselves have their own geography, peaks and valleys where they associate with muscle and tissue. You are going to learn the relationship of these things, all of these systems—skeletal to muscular, nervous and endocrine, digestive, reproductive, excretory, integumentary, cardiovascular, respiratory. Once you learn what these things are, you will learn how they work.”

  There was talk of quizzes and tests (there were a lot), labs (twice a week), and dissections (far too many for Stevie’s comfort). Teacher Pix was a lot more hardcore than house Pix.

  As Stevie stepped onto the green, the rain began, and in a moment
, she was in a hailstorm with chunks the size of marbles crashing around her. She put up the umbrella, but the battering was too severe. She ran. She made it as far as the cupola on the bottom end of the green, where she found herself stranded for a few minutes. When the hail got to the point where it was unlikely to pound her to death, she made a sprint for Eunomia, where she was to meet Dr. Velman for her one-on-one on criminology and sociology.

  Dr. Velman looked to be about seventy and, after reading off the list of books he wanted Stevie to get—and finding she had read two of the major textbooks already—proceeded to spend half an hour talking about the art and craft of the hangman, and how the best of them knew how to tie a knot just at the right location so that the victim’s neck was broken quickly instead of suffocating. The next half hour, he talked about the breeding of dachshunds.

  After class, Stevie lingered for a moment outside the building, the rain drilling down on her umbrella. Her next class was in two hours. Ellingham ran like a college—you went to your classes and your time between them was yours to make of as you wanted. No moving along with the crush of a high school hallway. No study halls that stank of Doritos and the dishwasher steam from the cafeteria. This was like being an adult.

  So she stood there in the rain like an idiot. Everyone else seemed to have some idea. She wondered if she should go eat or sit in her room or maybe just stand there forever. She took a deep breath of the moist mountain air. She had time. Where did she most want to go? What felt right?

  She turned toward the library.

  When she entered, no one was there except Kyoko, who sat alone at her massive desk, eating an apple.

  “Hey!” she called to Stevie. “Come in! You’re new, right?”

  “Yeah,” Stevie said. “My name is Stevie Bell. And there’s something I’d like to see. . . .”

  “You want to see Dolores’s book,” Kyoko said, balancing her apple on her desk and wiping her hands.

  Stevie had been about to ask if they had materials on the case, so the offer of Dottie’s book stunned her into silence.

  “I get a file on all the new students,” Kyoko said. “It’s the librarian’s job to know what materials are needed. You’re interested in the Ellingham case. Come on back.”

  She waved Stevie around the desk station to a deep brown wooden door with the words LIBRARY OFFICE painted in gold.

  Behind the door was a large but cozy room. Everything here was original—wooden tables and desks, wooden cabinets. There were large tables with books that were in the process of being bound or covered.

  “So you know the book was returned to us in 1993,” Kyoko said. “We keep it out of circulation, because of its historical significance. Here.”

  She pulled a pair of blue nitrile gloves from a box and indicated that Stevie should put them on, which Stevie was only too happy to do. There was nothing she really wanted more than the satisfying snap of the examination gloves. It was a small thing, but it made the investigation just a touch more legitimate.

  “Here we go,” Kyoko said, putting on her own pair of gloves and opening up a glass-fronted banker’s shelf and removing a thick volume. She set it on one of the tables and waved Stevie to it.

  The book was well preserved from years in evidence and library storage. It had a pristine dust jacket with a picture of Sherlock Holmes in a deerstalker with a meerschaum drawn in red on a white background.

  The book made a faint crackling noise as Stevie opened it. The pages were faintly yellow and the type was very tight and dense. There was a slot for library cards that read ELLINGHAM ACADEMY LIBRARY, but there was no card inside. The book had been checked out, but never technically returned. Stevie turned the pages carefully, and as she got to the first story, A Study in Scarlet, she stopped.

  There was a jagged pencil mark on one of the first pages, roughly underlining one line. It was a very famous line, one of the most famous in all the stories.

  Sherlock said, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

  “Did Dottie do this?” Stevie asked.

  “No idea. This particular book was checked out several times by students before her. Any one of them could have marked it up. But I noticed that as well.”

  Stevie glanced through the book, but there was nothing else in it. It was simply a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. But it was the book. That was what mattered.

  “As it happens, we know a lot about Dolores’s reading,” Kyoko said. “This may also interest you.”

  She opened one of the wooden filing cabinets and removed an expanded file.

  “The first Ellingham librarian, Diana Cloakes, was a remarkable person—one of the top research librarians at the New York Public Library. Albert Ellingham hired her to come work here. Everyone he hired was the best at what they did. She bought an incredible collection, and she took meticulous notes on everything.”

  Kyoko pulled a thick stack of typewritten sheets from the folder and paged through them, then carefully set a few piles down on one of the big book tables.

  “When Albert Ellingham set up the school,” she said, “it was the policy that any book a student wanted could be ordered, and we have all the records from that first year. This pile . . .”

  She pointed at one of the stacks.

  “. . . shows all requests from the 1935–36 school year. Dolores alone put in requests for over five hundred books. The school ordered four hundred and eighty-seven of them. The remaining thirteen were at a library in a university in Turkey that refused to sell them. If it’s one of Dolores’s, it will have the letters DE after the title.”

  Stevie scanned down the list. Dolores had requested several works in Greek, a lot of novels Stevie had never heard of, some classics. There were all kinds of requests from other students, including a list of very intriguing titles.

  “Gun Molls Magazine,” Stevie read. “Vice Squad Detective, Dime Detective, All True Fact Detective Stories . . .”

  “Oh, those,” Kyoko said. “Yeah, I love those. All pulp magazines. Most libraries or librarians would never have ordered them, but Ellingham’s policy was clear—whatever they asked for. I so wish we still had these, but I think the students took them and didn’t give them back.”

  Stevie felt like she would have gotten along with those students.

  Two days at Ellingham Academy passed by in a series of flashes. First, there was just the weight of everything. The readings. The thought. The writing. The expectation of knowledge. It was kind of an academic monster-truck rally. Everything went so fast. Session to session, reading to reading.

  Meals developed more of a rhythm.

  The overall groupings started to make sense—some sat by houses. Some were gamers. Some read. Some people took food away and never stayed. Germaine Batt tended to sit apart from everyone, watchful, always on a device. Gretchen with the astonishing head of red hair frequently held court over a long table inside. Hayes moved away from the Minerva table to start sitting with Maris and a very assorted group of artsy-looking people. Vi was a regular feature at the Minerva table. Nate started to talk a bit more. Ellie came and went, as did David, but they didn’t come and go together. They didn’t seem to be a couple—more just two people who were really comfortable in their skin and not very conscious of what made other people uncomfortable.

  After lit class on Wednesday, Stevie was walking across the green when a larger pair of ratty-sneaker-clad feet fell in step beside her. Actually in step, deliberate and rhythmic. Stevie didn’t need to look up, didn’t want to, but her neck craned in that direction seemingly of its own accord, like a flower bending toward the sun, if the sun was an annoying person who lived upstairs. She managed to avoid conversation with David for the last few days. If he was at her table, he sat at the other end. In Minerva, he stuck to his room. But now he was here, smiling, his hair flopping and unruly, his navy blue T-shirt looking conspicuously worn. There were holes in his sho
rts large enough to lose a phone.

  “Hey, Murder Girl,” he said. “How’s the case going? Got any perps? An unsub? How are your perps and unsubs? Am I doing it right? Perp? Unsub? Suspect?”

  Stevie clenched her jaw. You could trip her. You could kick her in the shin. She could handle those things. But no one was allowed to go after her mysteries. That cut right into her.

  “You know,” Stevie said, “in a murder mystery, you’d end up dead.”

  He smiled wider and nodded. His body was . . . ropy. Like the word from the Truly Devious letter. He was long and thin and was probably strong. He seemed to be made of knots.

  “What do you want?” she said, speeding up.

  “I’m just walking this way,” David said. “We live in the same place. What’s the problem?”

  “No problem.”

  “Oh, good.”

  They passed the cluster of statue heads on the way to Minerva. It was a weird landmark on the way home. Stevie was getting used to the statues, but this head-only grouping was still off-putting. It seemed like they were in the middle of a conversation and had stopped talking as strangers walked by.

  “So Ellie was telling me about your conversation from the other day,” he said.

  “What conversation?” Stevie said. She’d had several conversations with Ellie, but none seemed worth recounting.

  “About you,” he said.

  Stevie had to think about this for a moment. Was he talking about the conversation from the tub room? The one where Ellie had asked about their love lives and she explained she didn’t have one?

  “She said your parents work for Edward King,” he said.

  She exhaled. Right conversation, different topic.

  “Yeah,” she said, waving away a bee. “Some of us just get lucky, I guess.”

  “You a big fan too?”

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “Who knows?” he said. “Does anyone really know anyone else? You love some law and order.”