Truly Devious

by Maureen Johnson

  Robert lit a fire and called for his supper. The cook was always happy to make food for someone who would actually eat, so soon he had a heaping plate of chops and creamed spinach and potatoes. He switched on the radio and settled down at his office table. He was looking forward to the Mercury Theatre program. They had done some very good shows recently, productions of Sherlock Holmes and Around the World in 80 Days. The program was one of the highlights of Robert’s week.

  Just as the music played and the announcer said, “We take you now to Grover’s Mills, New Jersey . . .” the telephone rang. Robert put down his napkin, turned down the radio volume, and answered it.

  “Robert Mackenzie,” he said, wiping a touch of creamed spinach from the corner of his mouth.

  “This is Sergeant Arnold.” His voice was breathless and almost breaking. “Can you confirm, Albert Ellingham, his boat . . . he took the boat out.”

  “Yes, hours ago,” Robert replied. “With George Marsh.”

  “He hasn’t returned yet?”

  “No,” Robert said. “He said he would likely stay in Burlington. What’s going on?”

  “There were reports of a boat going down off South Hero . . . ,” the sergeant said. “An explosion . . .”

  There was a hollow sound in Robert’s ear, a feeling of falling, of many things converging to a point as he listened to the following words and low drum of the radio and the sound of his own heart echoing through the halls of his body. He would later say that he felt like he was floating up to the ceiling, looking down on the room for a moment.

  He would always remember the strange conversation he’d had with Albert Ellingham that day. His Riddle of the Sphinx. The command to enjoy.

  It was like Ellingham knew that that was his day to die.

  The riddle would run through Robert’s head for the rest of his life, but he never did figure out the solution.

  30

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG NIGHT.

  The residents of Minerva had to stay out of the house while the police went through it. There were some rooms in the Great House reserved for when faculty or guests were snowed in. Janelle and Nate took these. David was in the faculty lounge on the sofa. Stevie sat awake, watchful on the massive staircase for hours and hours, her brain echoing with facts and riddles.

  Always on a staircase but never on a stair. But she was always on a stair. All night on a stair.

  She watched police and security come in and out, and Charles and Dr. Quinn and the school lawyer. A search was made of the property, but little could be done in the dark. The woods were dark and deep. There was talk of bears but not of moose.

  Still, no moose.

  A window was found propped open in the basement and a pile of boxes beneath it. Gone, gone, gone. Up the mountain. Down the mountain. Around the mountain. Who knew?

  So Stevie sat in the throbbing heart of the Great House, once again the scene of a search in the night. In the wobbling version of reality playing in her tired and overextended brain, Stevie ran through the events of the last few weeks, finally settling on the message she had seen on her wall a few nights before Hayes died. Riddle, riddle, on the wall . . .

  So many riddles.

  She rubbed her hands over her face and covered it for a while. She nodded off like that for an unknown period of time, until she was awoken by a cup of coffee being held out to her.

  “Not sure if you want to sleep like that,” Larry said. “There’s a cot in the security office and more sofas upstairs.”

  “I don’t want to sleep.”

  “Sometimes it’s not about what you want.”

  Stevie shook her head. “Did you find her?” she asked.

  “It’s getting light now. The chopper is coming in.”

  “Can I go outside? Get some air?”

  Larry rocked back on his heels.

  “Just stay right out where I can see you from the front,” he said.

  So Stevie took her coffee and sat on the wet grass of the green and stared at the Great House and stopped thinking for a while. Dawn broke over Ellingham Academy in a swirl of rose pink going into a bloodless blue. Stevie watched the newly risen sun come up over the Great House like a celestial game of peekaboo. She wasn’t out there that long before she saw someone else come out the front door.

  David made his way over in his easy, loping walk, his hands jammed into his pockets. He dropped down next to her and said nothing.

  There is something about early mornings that changes your perceptions subtly. The light is new; no one has put on the defenses of the day. All is reset and not quite real yet.

  Whatever had happened between David and Stevie didn’t exist at this moment. Everything was dew and Larry’s instant coffee and the gentle, buttery morning sun.

  “Well,” David finally said, “I guess the school’s fucked.”

  Stevie took a long sip of the coffee. It was too strong and full of clots of powdered creamer, but it was wakeful.

  “One student dead,” David said, looking up at the faint sound of chopping from above. “One student missing, presumed to have murdered him, I guess. This one is going to be hard to spin.”

  “Yup,” Stevie said, taking another sip.

  The wind was cutting sharply through the mountains like an audible gasp from nature. A helicopter was nearing.

  “I guess they’re doing an air search,” David said.

  “Yup.”

  “You have a lot to say for someone who just busted open her first case. Aren’t you excited? Don’t you get a sheriff’s star?”

  Stevie put the coffee cup on the grass. She watched it for a moment to see if it was going to tip over and scald her. It did not.

  “Let me just ask you,” Stevie said. “The night that the dry ice went into the tunnel, you said you were with Ellie. You were, right?”

  “Until midnight or something,” he said. “But I did lie to you. We weren’t smoking a bowl. We were just talking.”

  “So you added that . . .”

  “Just for fun,” David said.

  The helicopter was now visible, circling back over the woods.

  “I still can’t believe this,” he said. “Ellie’s not malicious. I get that something is happening here I don’t understand, but she’s not . . . she doesn’t hurt people. Not on purpose, anyway. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know anything.”

  “Do you have any idea what she was saying at the end?” she asked. “About how Hayes knew things? When she kept saying this whole place and Hayes’s idea?”

  “No clue.”

  Stevie rubbed the grass between her fingers until she stained her fingertips green. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep. She’d put it together. Ellie had admitted to writing the show. Ellie had bolted. Why run if you haven’t done anything?

  She thought of Hercule Poirot, and how he would hesitate when he lined up the facts and found that something did not tally. He always talked about the psychology of the crime. Things here were not clean. They were not clear.

  Just like Vorachek. He had had the money in his possession. Vorachek even admitted to the crime. But there was no way it was Vorachek.

  Two police officers came out of the trees from the direction of Minerva. One carried a box.

  “It looks like they’ve gone through her stuff,” David said. “I guess we can go back.”

  The both got up, stiff and tired, with wet-grass impressions on the backs of their clothes.

  Minerva was silently creaky in the morning, filled with pale light and cool ghosts of old smoke. The moose had a more genial expression, and even the red wallpaper looked a bit less aggressive. The house felt hollow. It was empty of people at the moment, and at least two people were never coming back. Maybe no one was coming back.

  Down the hall, Ellie’s door hung a bit open. Stevie stood there for a moment, looking in through the space. David was close behind her. She could feel the heat coming off his body.

  “You’re going in, right?” he said. “That’s your t
hing.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’m not arguing this time,” he said, reaching over and pushing the door open wider.

  The scene of their game hours before had been much disturbed. The police had pulled Ellie’s bed away from the wall and left it slightly crooked toward the middle of the room. The covers had been pulled straight. Books were tipped down or taken from the shelves and stacked in neat piles. The drawers were all closed, which meant they’d gone through them all—last night most of Ellie’s drawers were cocked or ajar with something sticking out of them.

  “It actually looks cleaner in here after the cops went through it,” David said.

  He poked around the edge of the bed before sitting down. Stevie looked over at him. In the morning light, his face looked gentle. There was something a little—angelic about David. His large eyes and the light curl to his hair.

  She remembered her mother commenting on the way in to the property that the statues were strange angels, and she had said no, those are sphinxes. Angels or sphinxes?

  She really needed sleep.

  She sat next to David on the bed and stared at Ellie’s things. Her canvas backpack. The pile of dirty clothes in the corner. The scatter of pens on the floor. The little phrases she’d written on the walls. There was a framed picture next to her bed, one with dozens of people in it. That had to be the commune she had spoken of. Roota leaned against Ellie’s bureau, glinting in the sun and looking lonely.

  “I’m sorry,” Stevie said, sort of to Roota and mostly to David.

  “Sorry?”

  “About going through your stuff. I’ve felt bad since the second I did it. I just . . . I don’t know. I just wanted to know. About you. And you were being weird . . .”

  “This is a great apology.”

  “Fine.” She started again. “I was wrong.”

  The helicopter sounded like it was hanging overhead, beating the air. Ellingham would wake up and Ellie would be gone and there would be chaos again.

  “Yeah,” he said after a long moment.

  “Yeah?”

  He shrugged.

  “If this whole place closes down, I guess we shouldn’t be mad at each other.”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  The silence was long. Then David picked up her hand and, with one finger, he traced a small circle in her palm. Stevie was almost staggered by the flood of feeling. Could you kiss in the cool light of morning, when everything was visible? On the bed of your vanished classmate? Who probably killed someone?

  He was leaning in a little, and in response, she leaned back just a bit. As she did so, her hand landed on something hard hiding in the bedding.

  She pushed the quilt aside and revealed a small box. It was red metal, about eight by eight inches, with rounded corners. Age had taken a bit of a toll on it—it was dented and rusted, but still the artwork was fairly clear. It was marked OLD ENGLISH TEA BAGS and had a picture of a steaming cup of tea on the front. Some weird old junk.

  There was something thrumming now.

  Really thrumming.

  Actually, that was the helicopter hovering very, very low. It was now impossible to ignore. David squinted at the window, then released Stevie’s hand and got up to have a look.

  Stevie took a deep breath and steadied herself. She examined the strange box, prying off the lid and pouring the contents onto the bed. There was what looked like the remains of a white feather, a torn piece of cloth with some beading on it, a gold lipstick tube. There was a square rhinestone clip and a miniature red enameled shoe that turned out to be a very tiny pillbox. Stevie opened and closed this a few times, peering into the dulled bronze interior.

  “This is weird,” she said. “Come look at this.”

  “Hang on,” he said.

  Stevie continued looking. Pressed on one side of the box was a piece of lined, folded paper and a dozen or so old black-and-white photographs, rough and unevenly sized. Stevie looked at the paper first. It was fragile along the sharp lines of the folds, but only a bit yellowed. Written in a neat but loose handwriting was the following:

  The Ballad of Frankie and Edward

  April 2, 1936

  Frankie and Edward had the silver

  Frankie and Edward had the gold

  But both saw the game for what it was

  And both wanted the truth to be told

  Frankie and Edward bowed to no king

  They lived for art and love

  They unseated the man who ruled over the land

  They took

  The king was a joker who lived on a hill

  And he wanted to rule the game

  So Frankie and Edward played a hand

  And things were never the same

  The photographs pictured two teenagers, one male and one female, in a variety of poses that were both familiar to Stevie and utterly baffling at the same time. The guy wore a suit and hat with a loosened tie. The girl, a tight sweater and skirt set with a cocked beret. They posed in front of a car in one photo. In another, the girl had a cigar. In another, they were face-to-face, the girl holding the guy back at arm’s length. Stevie flipped the photos over. On the back of one was written 11/4/35.

  Stevie stared at the photos for a long moment before it clicked. These people were posing like Bonnie and Clyde, the famous 1930s outlaw couple. They were cosplaying.

  One of the photos was different; it was a touch thicker, heavier. Stevie examined this one more carefully and found that it was actually two photos stuck together. She ignored the sound of the landing helicopter out on the green. This—whatever this weird collection of photos and items was—was extremely important. She tried to pull the photos apart delicately, and when that failed, pulled with more force. They started to give way. There was something stuck between them. It looked like . . .

  A word? From a magazine?

  It was the clipped out word US in bright red letters on a yellow background. Tiny. Maybe a quarter of an inch.

  Stevie’s hand began to shake.

  A letter cut from a magazine in a box of things that were dated from 1935–36. Photos of two people her age cosplaying Bonnie and Clyde. And part of a poem—a poem not unlike the Truly Devious letter, written only days before the Truly Devious letter arrived. A rough, short poem about playing some kind of game with the king who lived on the hill.

  This was Truly Devious. Whoever wrote this poem, whoever Frankie and Edward were. Stevie ran through her mind attic feverishly, tearing open boxes, looking in drawers. She was far away from this strange morning and David and Ellie’s room. There. She had it. She was looking at a page of a witness statement taken from Leonard Holmes Nair about a boy and a girl he thought showed some spark. They were a pair. She had hair like a raven and he looked like Lord Byron, and the girl asked him about Dorothy Parker. Two students from the first class at Ellingham Academy.

  Students had written the letter. She had proof of that in her hand.

  Had students murdered Iris Ellingham? Was Dottie’s murder committed by people who knew her well? Was this about Dottie? Stevie’s mind was whirring.

  “David . . . ,” Stevie said. There was a tremble in her voice.

  In response, David left the room. He was walking with some speed. His departure was so abrupt that Stevie couldn’t quite make the mental leap for a moment. She blinked, and then, still clutching the photos, she followed him. He was already out the door, walking toward the green. The helicopter was there, its rotors slowing. There were some people out now. Ellingham was awake.

  It wasn’t a police helicopter. The lettering was dark bronze, faintly reflective. It said . . .

  King?

  David had stopped abruptly at the top of the path leading to the green and was staring at the helicopter.

  “What the hell is happening?” Stevie said, catching up to him. “Is that what it looks like?”

  David did not answer, but he didn’t need to. The helicopter door opened and someone stepped out.


  In life, Edward King was smaller than he appeared on television, his expression more hassled, his hair blowing strangely in all directions. He ineffectively tried to smooth it down.

  David still hadn’t moved. It was as if he had turned into one of Ellingham’s many statues, a stone replica of himself.

  In myths, Medusa turned you to stone if you looked directly at her.

  “How is this happening?” Stevie said. “Why is it happening? What is happening? David?”

  David did not reply.

  And then, the convergence. All the facts in Stevie’s brain attic assembled themselves in the necessary order. She did a number of tiny calculations, working out the proportions of his face. Her mind flashed back to that first moment she saw him in the yurt, that weird dislike, the thing that scratched-scratched at her mind. The angle of the nose, the bearing of the shoulders . . .

  She couldn’t place it then. There was no way she could have. It was all so impossible.

  Edward King was making his way across the grass in their general direction.

  Now it was a torrent of calculations. David’s avoidance, his lack of social media, his lack of photographs, the move to California, the beaten Rolex . . .

  “David,” she said quietly.

  He did not look at her.

  “David?” she said one last time.

  He glanced sideways at her. He looked helpless, trapped.

  “Remember when your parents got that position?” David finally said. “With him? Well. I told you I was trying to help.”

  Stevie’s grip on the photos tightened, though she had forgotten she was holding them.

  “Tell me what you mean,” she said.

  David started to smile, but it was like the smile Stevie pasted on her face that night at dinner with her parents. With every second, her hope slipped a bit further, until she was scrabbling at the edge of hope, trying to gain a hold. And then she felt herself lose contact.

  “Meet my dead dad,” he replied.

  To be continued . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I HAVE MANY PEOPLE TO THANK.

  First and foremost, thank you to Katherine Tegen. There would be no Truly Devious without her.