Truly Devious

by Maureen Johnson

  “Oh, I know about that,” Beth said.

  “And you’re okay with it?”

  “The thing is,” Beth said, “and this isn’t for the video, right? You’re not recording?”

  “No,” Stevie said. (She never had been.)

  “Of course he was dating someone at school. I date someone else too. It’s not like either one of us is supposed to be single. We’re going to get together . . . we were going to get together when he got to LA. But we discussed that it was okay to see other people when we were apart. But that’s not for the fans. They’d be upset. We knew how to be apart from each other.”

  “Did he mention,” Stevie said carefully, “the video? Doing an effect with dry ice?”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing. I wish he had. I mean, I talked to him the night he took that stuff.”

  Stevie felt a tingle on the back of her neck.

  “Wait,” Stevie said, “you spoke to him on Thursday night?”

  “Yeah, we usually Skyped before bed. I was probably the last person he talked to that night,” she said.

  “You talked to him late?”

  “Oh yeah,” Beth said.

  “Do you know when?”

  “I don’t know . . . late.”

  “The thing is,” Stevie said, “it would be so amazing if . . . if you talked to him late that night and it was . . . like the romantic high point of this tribute. I mean, do you have the time on Skype?”

  “Let me look.” Stevie got a close-up of Beth’s nose as she leaned in to read. “Here it is. It was . . . ten twenty.”

  That made no sense. Hayes had been with Maris then.

  No, stupid, Beth was in California. That was 1:20 in the morning.

  But Janelle’s ID had been used at 1:12 in the morning. There was no way Hayes could have used it and gotten back to his room by 1:20.

  Either Hayes went into the workshop or he was speaking to Beth at 1:20 a.m., but he wasn’t doing both. And the one he was most likely doing was the one someone saw him do.

  Which meant someone else put that dry ice in the tunnel but made it look like Hayes did it.

  Which sounded a lot like murder.

  27

  THAT NIGHT, IT RAINED. IT WAS NOT A GENTLE RAIN, THE KIND THAT lulled Stevie to sleep. It was a sideways, angry rain that threw itself haphazardly at the walls and windows and roof. It was a rain that made Hayes’s empty room feel even more vacant.

  It was a rain that pounded Stevie Bell into alertness.

  What you lack in any investigation is time. With every passing hour, evidence slips away. Crime scenes are compromised by people and the elements. Things are moved, altered, smeared, shifted. Organisms rot. Winds blow dust and contaminants. Memories change and fade. As you move away from the event, you move away from the solution.

  This is why no one found Dottie and Iris until it was too late. The days dragged on. If someone had called the police that night. Maybe it would have all been different for the Ellinghams. But they didn’t.

  Stevie had information now—real information. She could take it to Larry, but Larry had already warned her off playing detective. She could go to him when she knew something, when she understood what she knew. So she started making lists.

  Facts:

  Someone took Janelle’s ID from the art barn when we were in yoga.

  Someone used that ID to get into the workshop at 1:12 the next morning. At the same time, seven pieces of dry ice were removed from the storage unit.

  Hayes’s fingerprints were on the ID.

  Hayes was Skyping with Beth at that time.

  Hayes lied about The End of It All.

  Strong possibilities:

  Hayes did not write The End of It All, at least not alone.

  Conclusions:

  Hayes had that ID at some point, but he was not the one who went into the workshop.

  Question:

  Why did Hayes turn around and go into the tunnel?

  Did he know the dry ice was there?

  Did he ask someone to get it for him?

  That morning, she sat in anatomy lab in her oldest T-shirt and hoodie, glassily staring as Pix worked the skeleton. She was entering the too-awake stage. The head of a femur looked like a strange mushroom. Stevie turned it around in her mind, working her way around the bone. The greater trochanter. The lesser trochanter. The head that articulates with the acetabulum and that thing in the pelvis, the tuberosity of ischium . . .

  She was drooling a bit. She slapped her hand to her chin and looked down at her notebook and the names of bones she had scrawled there as they were written on the board. It was all gibberish. She thought of Hayes, his knees, seeing his feet on the floor.

  In Lit, she nodded off, only to be jerked awake to answer questions about the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (“And what do you think it means, Stevie, when Eliot writes that the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table?” Answer: “He’s . . . tired?”)

  She ate lunch alone and listened to people discussing the Silent Party that would be held that evening.

  She continued stumbling through the day, trying to process everything her brain had accumulated. By the time she got to yoga, she was straining to keep herself awake. She took her slightly smelly purple mat from the stack in the corner and left a spot next to her for Janelle, but someone else took it. Janelle came in, saw that Stevie had set up without her, and quietly made a space for herself on the other side of the room.

  She left class before Stevie could catch her.

  That night, Stevie skipped dinner and went over her facts again. Her stomach growled as the rain beat on her window. Janelle and Ellie had gone over to the Great House for the dance. What David and Nate were doing, she had no idea.

  Think, Stevie. Think.

  But her thoughts had gone stagnant. She had gotten this far, but nothing more was coming up. She put her earbuds in and turned up some music, loud, trying to get her head somewhere else, somewhere she could see the pattern. So she didn’t hear the knocking and was surprised to see Nate standing next to her in a pair of loose corduroys and a plaid shirt and a tie. He was speaking, but Stevie couldn’t hear him with her earbuds in and her hoodie over her head. She jerked the buds out and the hood off.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “You,” he said. “Are coming with me.”

  “I am? Where?”

  “To the dance.”

  “Dance?”

  “Yes, dance,” he said. “There’s this dance tonight. And you are going with me. Not with me, with me. But we are both going.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Dance. Thing. At the Great House. Everyone. Over there. So come on.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  Nate came into the room and kicked the door half closed behind him. “Here’s the thing. You’ve gone kind of psycho. I have never willingly gone to a dance in my life. But I am doing this because you are my friend, okay? And something is wrong with you. I don’t want to go to this, obviously. And you don’t want to go to this. I’m doing this for you, for your own good. This is the one and only time I’m offering to do something like this. Sometimes you have to leave the fucking Shire, Frodo. If we’re friends, get up, and come with me now. And you should take that seriously, because you are kind of losing friends all over the place.”

  He extended his hand to her.

  “You’re serious.”

  “I’m serious.”

  She looked down at her lists and up at Nate.

  “You’re wearing a tie,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Is that a dance thing?”

  “How would I know? Do I look like I go to a lot of dances?”

  Stevie felt like she was made of concrete and attached to the floor. But seeing Nate there, seeing the effort he was going to, she felt her moorings coming loose. She got off the floor. Her hoodie was dusty. She wasn’t wearing makeu
p. She had sneakers on.

  “Like this?” she said.

  “You look good to me. Not that I’m saying you look good. I’m saying come on before I lose the nerve to go to this.”

  It was a strange walk over to the Great House. Stevie could see gently pulsing lights coming from the long windows of the ballroom.

  “So what are you doing that’s making you so weird?” Nate asked.

  “Solving Hayes’s murder,” she said, stuffing her hands deeper in her hoodie pockets.

  “Say that again?” he said.

  “I’m solving Hayes’s murder,” she repeated.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Hayes didn’t put that dry ice in the tunnel, and I can prove it.”

  “How?”

  Stevie sat Nate down under the portico of the Great House and explained all that she had discovered.

  “Okay,” he said. “So this is why you’ve been weird.”

  “Mostly,” she said, looking up at something flying past the cupola. A bat, probably. Ellingham was full of bats. Nate saw it too, and got right to his feet.

  “So, you’re going to tell Larry, or someone, all of this?” Nate said after a silent moment.

  “I think I need to wait,” Stevie said.

  “Why? For what?”

  “If I do this wrong, if I’m wrong, the whole school could be shut down,” she said. “If it’s an accident and Hayes did it, we’re okay. If there’s someone out there, we’re all in trouble.”

  “But something has happened. You have proof that Hayes didn’t do this himself. So you want to find this person yourself because you don’t want to go home?”

  “I want to find this person because I want to find this person,” she said. “And because I don’t want to go home. But I guess now I’m going to dance. With my friend.”

  She reached over and squeezed him by the arm.

  “You did this for me,” she said.

  “Yeah, I did this for you, but don’t make it a thing. And how do we go into a dance after what you just said?”

  “We go in,” she said. “Because you brought me here, and because the answer may be here.”

  “Are you really serious about all of this?” he said quietly. “You’re not messing with me?”

  “I’m not messing with you,” she said.

  “Do you think they knew it was lethal? Not an accident?”

  “That,” Stevie said, meeting his gaze and feeling herself break out in a sweat, “I don’t know.”

  “So we could be dancing with a murderer?”

  “We might be,” Stevie said.

  “And you really think this should wait?”

  “Give me tonight, at least,” Stevie said. “To look around. I promise you, I’ll talk to Larry soon.”

  Nate took a heavy breath.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you say so. This is probably only the second stupidest thing I’ve done since I got here.”

  August 13, 1937

  THE BUTCHER FIGURED IT OUT FIRST. HE WAS THE ONE WHO NOTICED that the local anarchist, Anton Vorachek, was suddenly buying some better cuts of meat. He usually bought remnants and offal—whatever was going cheap—and not much of it. One day, he came in and bought some cube steak.

  Or maybe it was the waitress at the diner. She said that Vorachek came in for his weekly single scrambled egg—he always did this on Sundays to try to talk to people at the counter and recruit. That Sunday, he ordered two eggs, hash-browned potatoes, a side of bacon, and toast. He even had coffee. And he tipped her a quarter on a thirty-five-cent check because “the worker deserves a greater share of the profits.”

  Or maybe it was the bus driver, because Vorachek suddenly had money for the bus.

  All of Burlington reported a man who, if not vying with the Rockefellers for wealth, was more flush than he previously had been.

  He was not liked by many. He started strikes and handed out anarchist literature. He shouted “Death to tyrants!” when Ellingham’s name was mentioned. Albert Ellingham was much beloved in the area. He provided money for the police and the schools and the fire department and the hospital and any other cause that came his way, and had touched many thousands of lives in Burlington. This was a man who provided free ice cream for poor children. And now he had opened a school of his own.

  So people took offense to calls for his death.

  Officially, the police searched his house because a witness came forward and said he saw Vorachek scouting out telephone booths. Then someone else came forward and said that they definitely saw Vorachek place a call at 7:07 on the night of April 14. Seven separate witnesses from the night of April 14 who received fifty cents for their reports said they saw Vorachek heading for Rock Point. It didn’t seem to bother many people that it took a few months for these people to realize they had seen these things, or that the witness accounts didn’t match. Two of the people writing reports claimed that Vorachek went to Rock Point in a black car. Two said on foot. One said in a cab. One said on a bicycle. One could not explain the means of transport.

  In any case, the Burlington police had enough to go and have a look in his house, where they found a pile of cash painted with Leonard Holmes Nair’s glowing paint, and even a cash bundle with Ellingham’s invisible fingerprint. More troubling, they also found a child’s shoe, the match to the one left on Rock Point.

  Vorachek was arrested and charged with the kidnapping of Iris and Alice Ellingham and the murders of Iris and Dottie Epstein.

  “I did it,” he said when handcuffed. “All tyrants will fall. This is only the beginning!”

  The wheels of justice began to grind. All that fall and winter the evidence was examined, experts brought in. A famous attorney came in to represent Vorachek. In the spring, everything seemed ready to start, but then there were delays. The anarchists came to town to protest Vorachek’s arrest. There was talk of moving the trial, but that was quashed.

  Finally, everything was set to start on July 15, during a devastating heat wave. Burlington was almost broken from the weight of it all. There were no hotel rooms, so Albert Ellingham simply bought a house near the court. The press lived on the lawn and cracked the sidewalk from their pacing. The case was front page, every day, everywhere. There were reporters from every paper in America, all over the world. There were so many telegraph wires outside the court that when Robert looked up, sometimes he couldn’t see the sky. Then there were the onlookers, the people who simply came to watch. You couldn’t walk down Church Street. The restaurants ran out of food daily. Boatloads of people came across Lake Champlain just to be in Burlington, to see Anton Vorachek stand trial. Vendors set up out in front of the court and sold cold beer and popcorn and lemonade. It was like being at a baseball game.

  Every day during that brutal month, Robert Mackenzie sat in the stifling courtroom next to Albert Ellingham and watched the presentation of evidence. He took notes that weren’t really necessary, but he was the right hand, and the right hand needed to do something. He saw the police show the photos of the money they found under the floorboards, the notes they had painted with Leo’s special paint. They saw the one paper wrap that Albert Ellingham had marked with his fingerprint in the invisible paint, proving without a doubt where those bills had come from. Leo testified about making the paint and the process by which it was revealed.

  Vorachek used the courtroom like a pulpit to rage against the industrialists of the world. This was revenge, he said. Soon, all people like Albert Ellingham would pay. The anarchists cheered and were taken from the court. The crowd gasped and cried and ate their popcorn.

  Albert Ellingham sat expressionless through it all. Sometimes he didn’t even sweat. He was gray and unmoving. His focus never waved. Every day he said to Robert, “Maybe today he will say where Alice is.”

  Vorachek was found guilty on all counts.

  On the night before sentencing, Albert Ellingham c
ame into Robert’s room at the house.

  “We’re going to the court,” he said simply. “I’m going to talk to him.”

  Robert grabbed his hat and followed. They surprised the journalists, many of whom were off having dinner or eating sandwiches on the grass. They walked down Church Street, a gang of people on their heels, barking questions.

  Because of the interest in and the sheer magnitude of the event, Anton Vorachek could not be housed in the normal jail. A cell had been built in the basement of the imposing custom house and post office next to the court, in a space usually reserved for storage. George Marsh met them there.

  “He’s this way,” he said, beckoning them down the darkened hallway to the stairs.

  Robert and Ellingham were escorted inside, down through the sorting rooms and the sacks of mail, into the empty depths. There, behind a specially constructed barred door, sat the man convicted of it all. He was small, with a sharply pointed beard and bright eyes. He was dressed in the rough brown coveralls he had been given to wear in his cell. Robert could tell they had not been washed in some time. There was a smell even a few feet away. The cell Anton Vorachek occupied had a cot and a wooden bench; buckets had been provided for bodily necessities. There was no window, and the light came from outside the cell, so he was mostly in darkness.

  “They keep you safe down here,” Ellingham said in greeting.

  Anton Vorachek blinked and took a seat on his bench, hunching his knees close to his chest. A guard brought a wooden chair for Albert Ellingham, and he put it directly in front of the bars so he could look deep inside the cell.

  “Tell me where she is,” Ellingham said. “Tell me who helped you. There’s no way you did this alone.”

  Anton Vorachek said nothing. For an hour he sat in silence and Ellingham watched him. Robert smoked with George Marsh and the guards. They stood, and shifted on occasion, but no one broke the spell.

  “They’re going to put you in the electric chair, you know,” Albert Ellingham finally said, leaning back.

  Anton Vorachek finally left his seat and came to the bars and gripped them tightly.

  “Why does it matter who I am?” he said. “Your kind destroys mine every day.”