Truly Devious

by Maureen Johnson

  “I need you to cut these into lengths,” Dash said to Stevie, pointing at some wood. “Here are all the measurements.”

  He shoved a piece of paper at Stevie.

  She looked blankly at a bunch of numbers. “What?” she said.

  “Cut. The wood. Into lengths.” Dash pointed at the wood, then the circular saw.

  “You must be kidding,” Stevie said.

  “I’ll do it,” Maris said, her voice thick with a can you believe this one doesn’t even use a circular saw vibe. She sauntered up to the saw in her fuzzy sweater and leaned over expertly.

  The buzz saw cranked to life and Maris put a board on it and sliced it in two. The air filled with the scent of sawdust. Hayes came sauntering in while all of this work was going on, greeted everyone, and rested on the ground and studied his script.

  “Hey,” Janelle said as Dash scooped up some poles from an upright storage container in the corner. “What are you doing with those?”

  “Making light rigs,” Dash said.

  “Oh no you are not. Those are my poles.”

  “You can’t need all these poles,” Dash said.

  “I do,” Janelle said.

  “We just need them for a few days.”

  “My poles are specially measured for my machine. These aren’t just any poles,” Janelle said.

  “Look, there is no way you need all these poles. I’m taking some.”

  “Could we borrow a few?” Stevie said quietly. “I’ll make sure you get them back.”

  “For you,” Janelle said. “I would only give my poles to you.”

  Dash had the poles out of the bucket in a shot and hurried them out of the workshop.

  Maris had stopped sawing for a bit and was looking in a large blue industrial bin on the side of the room.

  “There’s dry ice here,” she called to Dash. “Lots of it.”

  “I have enough fog machines,” he said. “The liquid is easier to work with.”

  Maris shrugged and shut the container.

  After constructing their ramps and organizing their poles and all the things that would be needed to film in the sunken garden on Saturday, the plan was made for the excursion into the tunnel. It would be the next night, with everyone meeting behind the art barn at seven.

  Still smelling of sawdust, Stevie walked home and dropped into bed. For a few minutes, she rested on her back, fully dressed, and felt the cool air from the window brush against her face. The late summer twilight fell into darkness. There were footsteps creaking above her. David was home. She could tell everyone in her house by their footsteps. She started to understand how Minerva settled and shifted almost musically. She reached up and felt the cool iron of the bedstead. She pulled her comforter over her, sealing herself in with the sawdust smell coming off her sweatpants. Janelle was behind one wall, Ellie the other. She was in the middle, and it felt utterly normal. The thought grabbed her. She had settled in. This was home, and she had almost completed a major project about the Ellingham case with her friends. Well, Nate was her friend, and probably Hayes and Maris and Dash. Her friend Janelle gave her supplies.

  A pleasant wave of satisfaction swept over her, and it inspired her to lean over and grab her phone from the bedside stand. She had a note app on her phone that had carefully organized files of images and information about the Ellingham case. She clicked open the folder marked SOCIAL. This was her research on the life the Ellinghams had led up here before the tragedy, back when the house was just a weird and wonderful mountain showpiece, and famous friends would come to ski in the winter, watch the leaves in the fall, and drink all the time. Some of those people probably stayed in this building, in this room, back before the school was opened and Minerva was a guesthouse. Stevie flipped through, stopping on one of her favorites: an image of a guest list from a party in 1929. She had no idea who these people were, but she loved reading the names: Gus Swenson, the Billbody twins, Esther Neil and Buck Randolph, the Davis sisters (Greta and Flo), Bernard Hendish, Lady Isobella de Isla, Dr. Frank Dodds, Frankie Sullivan, the VanWarners, “Telegraph” McMurray and Lorna Darvish . . .

  The list went on and on. They had come to have their champagne here, to dance under the stars. Actors, writers, artists, socialites. And then, Dottie Epstein lived here. Stevie had read about Dottie—one of the brightest in her school. Strong-willed. Brilliant. A tough Lower East Side girl who could steal apples and quote Virgil. Stevie reached down for her phone to look at Dottie’s picture for perhaps the thousandth time. She had a head of brown curls, apple cheeks, and a gap between her front teeth. She was the often-forgotten victim because she was not rich. She did not own a school. She was just a smart girl trying to make something of herself at Ellingham Academy. She read mysteries. She had gone to the observatory to read, leaving a book behind.

  Stevie set her phone on her stomach and stared up at the ceiling for a long time. The case needed solving for all of them, but maybe Dottie most of all. Dottie, who loved mysteries. Tomorrow night, she would go into the tunnel that had been blocked since 1938. Truly, this was something no one else who looked into the case in recent decades had done. She was literally going to be on new ground. Dottie had passed through that tunnel. She had died in or near or because of it. The tunnel marked the place where Dottie crossed over from life to death.

  Stevie fell asleep in this position, phone on her stomach, thinking about Dottie and the tunnel. A pulse of light brought her back to consciousness.

  Stevie blinked, confused. Her brain tried to work out the source of the light for a split second. Car headlights?

  No.

  Still mostly asleep, she pushed herself up on one arm.

  The light, or something made of light, was on the wall. It filled the space next to the fireplace. Blobs of color. Letters, words.

  It was all a scramble in her brain until she realized the blobs were a message made of cutout letters:

  In another flash, the message was gone.

  13

  STEVIE WAS OUT OF BED IN A SECOND, DROPPING ROUGHLY TO THE floor. Her eyes were throbbing slightly, reacting to the sudden wakefulness, the shift from dark to light.

  The words were tumbling in her head as she crawled to the window. When she reached it, she huddled beneath it for a moment, her body shaking from the adrenaline. Was there someone there? Would she pop up and be face-to-face? The window was open about six inches. Would someone reach in?

  Only one way to find out.

  She pushed herself to her knees with one quick movement. Outside was dark and still. She clutched the window, unsure whether or not to slam it down or open it farther to look out. Her grip on the frame tightened.

  Another idea: she pulled her heaviest book on criminology from the shelf, the one she had scored at a library sale for three dollars, the one that was her prize possession. She stuck it out the window and let it drop.

  No one screamed. She heard the book land in the grass with a thud. She slid over to the closet and pulled out the tactical flashlight that the school had provided and switched it on and scanned the area. Nothing. Just darkness and more darkness and the slight rustling sounds of the night.

  She closed and locked the window, pulled the curtains, and tucked her head into her knees. What had it said? Riddle, riddle, on the wall, murder something something something . . .

  And then it hit.

  Panic attacks are mean little freaks.

  First came the speed. Then came clamping in the throat, the lightness in her head, the feeling of blind acceleration into confusion. Then comes the strange wind that blew into her mind, knocking everything over and turning everything into a mockery of reality. Every avenue was blocked off. Every option meant doom. Nothing made any sense. It felt like hands were around her neck. Stevie gulped hard, proving to herself that she could swallow, that her airway was open.

  “It’s fine,” she said to herself. “Breathe one, two . . .”

  But she couldn’t breathe one, two because the universe was co
nverging to a point. It would be a welcome feeling to pass out, except there was a terror that somehow the merry-go-round would just go on, even in an unconscious state.

  People say depression lies. Anxiety is just stupid. It’s unable to tell the difference between things that are actually scary (being buried alive, for example) and things that are not scary at all (being in bed under the covers). It hits all the same buttons. Stop. Go. Up. Down. It’s all the same to anxiety. The curtains said fear and the floor said fear. The dark said fear, and if she turned the light on, that too would likely say fear. She turned the light on anyway. The faces of the murdered Ellinghams looked at her accusingly from the case board. She hurried over to the dresser, pulling open the drawer with shaking hands. She knocked out one Ativan, then hurried back over to her nightstand and washed it down with a gulp of water from the bottle next to her bed.

  It would take some time to work, and the universe was still howling in her ears.

  She needed help.

  She slipped into the hallway, bumping against the door frame as she went. She went to Janelle’s door and knocked. After a moment, there was a sleepy, “Yeah?”

  Stevie tried the door and found it was unlocked. She was too muddled to be embarrassed or feel bad for waking her.

  “What?” Janelle said, sitting up. “Are you okay?”

  “Panic attack,” Stevie said. “Can I . . . can you . . .”

  Janelle pushed herself out of bed, grabbed her robe, and put it over Stevie’s shoulders. She guided Stevie to the bed and sat her down, putting an arm around her shoulders.

  “Sorry,” Stevie wheezed, “sorry.”

  “Here,” Janelle said, taking her hand. “It’s okay. We’re going to do this. Hold my hand.”

  Holding Janelle’s hand brought some semblance of reality back.

  “Can I sit here for a minute?” Stevie said.

  “You stay until it’s over,” Janelle said. “As long as it takes. Did something happen?”

  Stevie couldn’t bring herself to explain. Everything was wobbling. She leaned back against Janelle and the wall behind the bed and waited for everything to stop moving, for the words to stop running through her mind, for Truly Devious to leave.

  The next morning, when Stevie emerged from her room, Janelle was in the common room, looking amazingly perky for someone who had been up half the night helping a friend. She was wearing a fleecy sweatshirt that said ASK ME ABOUT MY CAT and a pair of yoga pants, and her braids were coiled up under a cheerful red scarf. Stevie, on the other hand, was still wearing the sawdust-covered sweatpants. She had not consulted her hair. It could be doing anything. She had not bothered to wipe her face or crusty eyes or brush her teeth. She just needed to get up and shake off the night.

  Stevie was embarrassed looking at her friend. She’d never really had an experience like that before, outside of her parents, where someone actually took care of you like that. Janelle had put her back into bed just before dawn, and Stevie had slept heavily for a few hours. Now she was groggy and heavy and slow.

  “How are you doing?” Janelle asked in a low voice.

  “I’m okay,” Stevie said. “A little nauseous. Tired. But okay.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say “thanks to you” out loud, but she tried to convey it in her eyes, and then by generally being awkward. Janelle just shook her head in a don’t worry about it kind of way.

  Stevie went outside. The morning was fresh and bright—big blue skies and shaggy, happy clouds blowing over the mountains. It was the kind of morning that mocked the fear of the night before. This kind of pleasantness almost made it worse. How could she be anxious when everything was so cheerful?

  Very easily, as it happens. Brain chemistry doesn’t care about how pretty things are.

  She stepped along the edge of Minerva, through the moist grass to retrieve her book from the ground outside her window. It was a bit damp, but on examination it showed no real damage.

  What had happened? She had been reading case materials right up until the time she went to sleep. She was thinking about the kidnapping and the tunnel. She could have easily dreamed that note on the wall. But it was vivid, crisp. She had gotten out of bed. She’d thrown a book out her window trying to catch a stranger.

  She watched the sky for a moment and held her wet book and tried to work out what was real, then she rubbed her burning, tired eyes. She still had to go to class. She dried the cover with her shirt and brought it back inside.

  As she went to her room, she bumped into David coming downstairs.

  It was nothing, really. He just kind of half smiled at her. He had that long mouth with the twisting edges. Just a smile. But something about it made Stevie boil. She blocked him.

  “Good night?” she said.

  “It’s so nice of you to ask,” he replied, leaning against the wall. “Sure. How about you?”

  His tone was neutral but his smile was expanding by just a few millimeters.

  “Busy last night?” she asked.

  “You have a lot of questions.”

  Still neutral, still half smiling. Something in his eyes, though. A flash. It was impossible to tell what was going on, but there was something there.

  “This is fun and all,” he said, “but can I go and get breakfast?”

  Stevie stepped aside, but turned to watch him go. Could David have put that note on her wall?

  She was fairly unfocused during the discussion of Leaves of Grass that morning. She spent most of the discussion trying to remember the words she had seen.

  Riddle, riddle . . . something murder, something lake, something Alice. Definitely Truly Devious in there somewhere. But the more she tried to remember, the more the words slipped away and didn’t feel like words at all.

  Walt Whitman was getting involved now:

  And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken

  soon out of their laps.

  What do you think has become of the young and old men?

  And what do you think has become of the women and children?

  They are alive and well somewhere . . .

  Riddle, riddle. A woman in a lake, a girl in a hole . . .

  She would be a girl in a hole later tonight, when she went into the tunnel.

  She went in and out of the explanation of the functions of the axial and the appendicular skeleton in anatomy. Lunch brought her closer to the surface, and by the time she was in Spanish lab, the dread was burning away and she began to focus on going into the tunnel. She felt a flutter of excitement, which carried her through the afternoon.

  Stevie hurried back to Minerva in the midafternoon to get her flashlight and gloves, then met Janelle for their first yoga class at five. Yoga was the class she picked from Ellingham’s mandatory physical education selection. It sounded better than Running for Fitness and Clarity, Cooperative Boot Camp, or Perspectives on Movement. At Stevie’s high school, they let you just go on the treadmill for half an hour and left you alone to listen to podcasts, which was literally the only thing she preferred about her old high school.

  Janelle met her outside the art barn, a rolled mat tucked under her arm.

  “Doing okay?” Janelle asked.

  “Yeah,” Stevie said. “I think so.”

  “Anxiety dreams are the worst,” she said.

  Stevie had, late last night, managed to explain to Janelle what she had seen. She must have made it sound like it was definitely a dream, and not some questionable occurrence that may or may not have been real.

  “I guess . . . I guess I dreamed it?” Stevie said. “I don’t know.”

  Janelle nodded, as if this was the only answer she had been expecting.

  “But,” Stevie said as they walked into the art barn, “let’s just say for a second I didn’t dream it. How hard is it to project something on the wall like that? I guess you’d need a projector?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Janelle said. “You can make one out of cardboard and tape and a mirror. It
’s not impossible, but . . .”

  “I mean,” Stevie said. “I woke up. I was in bed, and I saw it on the wall. I threw my book out the window trying to catch whoever was out there. Like, tried to drop the book on their head.”

  “Did you catch anyone?” Janelle said. “See anyone?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re woken up in certain phases of sleep, reality and dreams, they blend together for a little bit. And being up here for the first time, it’s probably going to cause some anxiety dreams. My anxiety dreams are all about how I just never go to class. And it’s the end of the year and I’ve skipped everything. On a good night, I dream about advances in 3-D printing and Gina Torres dressed as Wonder Woman. But here’s the thing . . .”

  She stopped Stevie before they entered the yoga room.

  “I think we all come here because we have something in our heads we can’t get out,” Janelle said. “We’re all kind of fixated on something. I want to make machines, and you want to solve mysteries, and Nate wants to write—or he doesn’t want to write—and Ellie wants to live in her own art commune. Hayes, he makes shows. I guess David makes games. I see him doing coding, so I know he can. We’re all kind of in our own world. It’s that your world is a real place here. I think your brain is a little busy processing the information. You had an intense dream. Something woke you. You can carry through some of those states and see things and think you’re awake and not really be completely out of a sleep state. Sleep is a funny thing.”

  Put like that, everything seemed to make sense.

  “How are you so smart?” Stevie asked.

  “I read a lot,” Janelle said, smiling. She unzipped the front of her bag, shoved her pass inside and secured the lanyard to a clip, and zipped the bag back up again. Janelle did everything completely, even putting her pass away. “And I’m just amazing.”