Truly Devious

by Maureen Johnson

  A quick Web search revealed that The End of It All had been released twice a week, starting on June 20. There were ten episodes in total. June 20, June 23, June 27, June 30, July 4, July 7, July 11, July 14, July 18, July 21. A quick check of last year’s schedule showed that Ellingham’s move-out day was June 6.

  The main file had been made on June 4.

  It was made here.

  I went home to Florida last year, surfed for a few days, and it just came to me . . .

  “No, it didn’t,” Stevie said aloud.

  So why say it was? Why lie about where you made it?

  There was a voice outside. Stevie froze in position. It wasn’t outside, though. It was coming through the wall, and it sounded angry.

  David’s voice. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, so she set the computer aside and crept over to the wall. She could still only make out a mumble, and then one shouted word: “Allison!”

  “Who is Allison?” Stevie whispered to herself.

  She felt an anxiety rumble. Allison. A girlfriend? A real one? Not some idiot at school. Allison instantly developed a face, an entire profile. She had long hair and a surfboard. She looked good in shorts. She got waxings. She laughed in her sleep.

  Stevie slapped herself gently on the forehead to make it stop and continued to try to listen, but all had gone silent on the other side of the wall. Now it was just her and her thudding heart in Hayes’s room.

  Pix would be back soon. Stevie shut off Hayes’s computer and tucked it back where she’d found it. She turned off the light, picked up her shoes, and returned the towel to the door. Then, after making sure there was no noise in the hall or coming from David’s room, she cracked open the door.

  The hall was empty.

  She slipped out, shutting the door quietly behind her. She got all the way to the steps when she heard a door open behind her. She turned to see David looking at her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He didn’t reply. Nor did he seem to know that she had just come from Hayes’s room.

  “Come on,” she said. “Say something. You can’t not talk to me forever. We live together.”

  “Something,” he said. But there was no humor in his voice.

  “How about this,” she said. “Can you listen? You don’t have to talk. I’ll keep it short. Will that work?”

  David considered this for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Can I come in for two seconds?” she said.

  He indicated his door was open, and then went back inside. Stevie steadied herself, then followed.

  David did not sit down. He stood in the middle of his room, his arms folded.

  “What?” he said.

  “I want to say I’m sorry.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  Then, nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “Fine. If that’s it, you can go.”

  “Seriously?” she said. The anger was building up again. All the feeling she had been pressing down for a few days shot up unexpectedly. “Come on. You won’t tell me anything about yourself. You lied at dinner.”

  “I made a joke at dinner because I didn’t feel like talking about my dead parents.”

  “I’m the worst. I know I am. But I’m also sorry. You don’t know how sorry.”

  “Why are you holding your shoes?” he said.

  Stevie had forgotten about the shoes.

  “I just took them off,” she said.

  He tilted his head to the side and looked at her for a long minute. She had an idea, which was probably a terrible idea. But lacking any other ideas, it was the one to go with. Radical honesty. Just tell him. Open up.

  “I was in Hayes’s room,” she said.

  He burst out laughing, but again, there was no humor in it.

  “I know how that sounds,” she said, talking over him, “but I had a key. Listen to me. I had to go. Pix was about to box it up and everything would be gone.”

  “And you just needed a few more minutes with his memory?”

  “Something weird is going on,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on what it is. . . .”

  “I think I can,” he said. “There’s someone in this house who keeps going through other people’s stuff. Someone should do something about it.”

  That hurt. She felt her eyes sting.

  “So why did you have to go in there?” he asked. “Do you have to get into every room in this hall? Is that your thing?”

  “Hayes didn’t write The End of It All,” she said.

  “Says who?”

  “Says common sense. I worked on a show with him. He never did anything. And someone else did all of his schoolwork last year. And there is nothing on his computer that shows he did any of it or that he had any ability to write something new. And his ex-girlfriend thinks . . .”

  “Gretchen,” David said, rolling his eyes.

  “Gretchen,” Stevie replied.

  “Gretchen was pissed at him. She broke up with him. It was a whole drama last year.”

  “Hayes played everyone,” Stevie said. “Hayes used everyone. Hayes did none of his own work but took the benefits. And then Hayes dies doing the project that would have allowed him to go off to LA and reap the benefits of everyone else’s labor. Doesn’t it sound unlikely that Hayes would have gone to all that effort to do something that doesn’t even make any sense?”

  “So what are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying someone did it on purpose? That someone murdered Hayes?”

  The words were surreal said out loud. Hayes. Murdered.

  “No,” she said, staggered by the idea. “No . . . like, an accident. Some kind of plan to screw up the filming.”

  Now that the word had been introduced, it bounced around the hallways in Stevie’s head. Murder requires motive, and there was plenty of motive. For a start, all the people Hayes was dating and screwing over and using, the fact that he didn’t write his show, but he was about to get credit for it and make a whole lot of money. That was all very solid motive.

  Murder? Was that what she really thought this was? Was this the reason she felt so restless?

  “You know what’s weird?” David said as Stevie was lost in thought. “What’s weird is making a hobby out of the death of your classmate. You know what’s also weird? Going through people’s rooms, including the room of your dead classmate. Because you seem crazy.”

  People might be dismissive of someone obsessed with mystery stories, as if the line between fiction and reality was so distinct. They didn’t know, perhaps, that Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, Dr. Joseph Bell, and that the methods Arthur Conan Doyle created for his fictional detective inspired generations of real-world detectives. Did they know that Arthur Conan Doyle went on to investigate mysteries in his real life and even absolved a man of a crime for which he had been convicted? Did they know how Agatha Christie brilliantly staged her own disappearance in order to exact an elegant revenge on a cheating husband?

  They probably did not.

  And no one was going to discount Stevie Bell, who had gotten into this school on the wings of her interest in the Ellingham case, and who had been a bystander at a death that was now looking more and more suspicious.

  She was not crazy. And Hayes’s key was in her pocket and Pix was on her way back.

  Stevie turned away and left David’s room without saying anything else. Because she was also not going to let him see her cry.

  * * *

  THE BATT REPORT

  Internet Star Dies in School Accident

  Hayes Major, star of the summer’s viral internet sensation The End of It All, died on Saturday night. Major, a student at the Ellingham Academy, was filming a video about the Ellingham kidnapping and murder case. He was found unresponsive in a disused tunnel that had recently been unearthed. The cause of his death was not immediately evident, but sources close to The Batt Report say that he died of asphyxia in what was likely an accident. Police have determined that Major
removed a quantity of dry ice from the school’s workshop and maintenance area using a pass stolen from another student, most likely to produce a fog effect for the video. Left overnight, the dry ice melted in the contained underground space, filling the room with a lethal level of carbon dioxide.

  The head of Ellingham Academy, Dr. Charles Scott, released a statement on Tuesday morning: “All of us at Ellingham Academy are heartbroken by the loss of Hayes Major, a promising actor and creator, and a beloved friend. Our hearts go out to his family, his friends, and his many fans. His loss is profound.”

  * * *

  26

  “MY NAME IS LOGAN BANFIELD,” HAYES SAID. “AND I DON’T KNOW where I am. I don’t know if anyone can hear me. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if I’m alone. I don’t even know if I’m dead or alive.”

  Stevie sat cross-legged on the floor of the Great House attic watching The End of It All and counting doorknobs. Two days had passed since Hayes’s things had gone away, since she had confronted David. For those two days, she was supposed to have resumed working, resumed studying. The pile of books next to her bed didn’t read themselves, and the essay she was supposed to hand in tomorrow remained unwritten, despite the number of times she opened up her computer and stared blankly at the screen before watching The End of It All again.

  Each episode of The End of It All was about ten minutes in length. She started from the beginning, from the very first moments when Hayes’s character woke up, confused as to what was happening. All of it was filmed in the same location, some kind of bunker, except for the very last minutes. A lot of the show was rambling, reacting, listening. In some episodes, Logan got memories back of the zombie attack. In others, he found communications from possible survivors. It was all standard zombie apocalypse stuff. What made it popular, Stevie guessed, was just that Hayes was so intense. And good-looking. He was a good-looking guy hiding from zombies and slowly losing his grip on reality. In the last episode, Logan left his bunker. Was he being saved, or was he giving up?

  Over and over she watched. And now she watched from row 39 of the Great House attic, which contained small household items, antiquated light fittings, boxes of hammers, cans of screws. And these doorknobs. This house had a lot of spare doorknobs.

  Just a girl and her doorknobs and zombies.

  Stevie had spent most of these last two days tuning out everything to the exclusion of these things. And now, as evening came and her stomach rumbled, she pulled out her earbuds. She couldn’t watch it again.

  She got up and looked through the box of Albert Ellingham’s desk contents again, until she got to the Western Union slip with the last riddle.

  Where do you look for someone who’s never really there?

  Always on a staircase but never on a stair

  She leaned against the metal racks for a moment and stared at the slip under the green fluorescent glow. Someone who’s never really there was sort of how Gretchen had described Hayes. There was no there there.

  Always on a staircase but never on a stair could mean a lot of things. A rail. Something on the wall. The cracks between the stairs.

  Albert Ellingham wasn’t coming back to tell her the answer to this riddle.

  That musk of aged things was present, but the atmosphere had climate and humidity control, so instead of being stale and hard, there was a sweetness to the attic. The rich even decayed well.

  Stevie set the little slip of paper on the ground and looked up at the shelves around her.

  What the hell did it all mean? So what if he didn’t write it? What the hell was she doing, avoiding work and people and life to sit in an attic, staring at Hayes, counting dates and sorting doorknobs? She could work on that essay that was due, oh, tomorrow. She could . . .

  What? Try to talk to David again? That had gone well.

  She put the doorknobs back in their box. As she pushed the box back into position, she scraped her hand on the shelf above it. A thin trickle of blood came from the cut.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said to herself. Once finished, she trudged down the steps of the Great House, her backpack hanging low. Larry sat at his station by the door, carefully going through something in a binder. She was going to walk right past without saying anything, but as she made the door, he called out to her.

  “Not even a hello?” he said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was distracted.”

  “I see that. About what?”

  She shook her head. He tipped back his chair and considered her for a moment.

  “How’s it been going?” he asked.

  “It’s going,” she said.

  “You don’t seem too enthused.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not.”

  “Well, come sit down, then.”

  Even though she didn’t feel like it, an order from Larry was still an order from Larry. She went to the chair in front of his desk and sat in it, perched on the edge so her backpack could fit and so she could get up quickly.

  “Any new thoughts on the Ellingham case?”

  “I haven’t had much of a chance to think about it,” she said.

  “Well, if you want to solve a cold case, that’s what you’ve got to do. You don’t avoid the work. Cold cases get solved because someone goes to the trouble of doing everything. They read every file. They listen to every tape. They talk to every witness. They track down every scrap of evidence. And then they do it all again; they do it until something clicks, until it gets warm again. You do the work. And sometimes, you get lucky.”

  “How much of it is luck?” Stevie said.

  “Luck always plays a role. Something is eating at you.”

  “Just school,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s just school. I think it has something to do with Hayes Major. Something is eating at you and it’s not grief. Something else.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Twenty years as a detective. I do know that.”

  Stevie pushed back into the chair a bit and squared off to Larry.

  “Can you just tell me what you know about his death and what happened?” she said.

  “You mean, details?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t give you all of them,” he said. “I can give you a few. There was a lot of dry ice taken. There were ten units in that container, ten inches square in there, and seven of them were gone. Each one of those squares weighed over fifty pounds. We found Hayes’s fingerprints on Janelle’s ID and on a golf cart. Janelle’s ID tapped into the art barn at 1:12 a.m. We found the container the dry ice was moved in. We know Hayes went into the art barn when you were in your yoga class. We know from testing that the dry ice was in that space for about eighteen hours and that the level of carbon dioxide in the room was extremely high. It’s lucky we weren’t killed when we went in there. The door was open, so the room aired out a bit. Had Hayes been able to shut the door behind him, and then if one of us had gone in there after, we could have died as well.”

  “So Hayes walked into the room that he’d left the dry ice in,” she said. “And died right away?”

  “Probably almost immediately, or at least, he probably lost consciousness almost immediately. Death would have come quick. It was a death trap in there. It’s not a pleasant thing, but that’s what happened.”

  “And you’re sure?”

  Larry let the chair fall forward and leaned into the desk, folding his hands.

  “What makes you say that?” he said. “Is there something more you know?”

  Oh, just a dream I had about murder right before, when a ghostly note appeared on my wall. . . .

  “No,” she said. “Just a weird feeling.”

  He considered her for a moment, then he opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a Band-Aid.

  “For your hand,” he said. “Look, you’ve been brave . . .”

  Brave.

  There was someone else she could talk to.

  �
�Thanks, Larry,” she said, sticking the Band-Aid on. “Good talk.”

  Beth Brave was sitting in her set in her apartment, wall of fan art on display in the background. Hers was more carefully curated than Hayes’s was, with framed prints sitting on white floating shelves.

  Beth was a striking blonde, with stick-straight, shiny hair and giant eyelashes that Stevie assumed were fake. Her long nails, which Beth had constantly been examining during their conversation (seemed like a nervous habit) were grand examples of nail art, with the four houses of Hogwarts represented on the fingers of both hands, and the thumbs painted with a very tiny replica of Harry’s face. It was not the kind of thing you did yourself; it was the kind of thing you spent hundreds of dollars and several hours having someone else do.

  Contacting Beth had not been as hard as Stevie thought. She had over a million followers, but all it took was Stevie sending a message and explaining how she had been at Ellingham Academy with Hayes, and how she worked on the show, and—and this part was where the fib came in—how they wanted to make a tribute and feature her. A reply popped up less than an hour later, and fifteen minutes after that, Beth and Stevie were looking at each other through Skype windows.

  “Thanks for reaching out,” Beth said. She had blindingly white teeth, big as the doors of kitchen cabinets. “It’s been rough. I’m sure for you guys as well.”

  “Definitely,” Stevie said.

  “It’s nice that you’re making a video,” Beth said. “He would have liked that.”

  Behind the Skype screen, Stevie could see the top of an unfinished (well, unstarted, really) essay peeping up, saying yoo-hooo! That was due tomorrow. It would get done. It would. She just had to talk to Beth for a minute.

  “There’s something kind of . . . ,” Stevie said, “. . . there’s something . . . I just . . . I wish I could make you feel better but I’m just so afraid . . .”

  “What?” Beth said.

  “I just feel like someone should tell you because it’s going to come out,” Stevie said. “I mean, you saw that video . . .”

  “You mean that girl?” Beth said.

  “Yeah,” Stevie said. “That girl, Maris . . .”