The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  Three major events had occurred to bring on this monastic, peripatetic activity.

  One, David Eastman, perhaps boyfriend, had gotten his face punched in in Burlington. He had done this on purpose and paid the assailant. He uploaded video of the beatdown to the internet and vanished without a trace. David was the son of Senator Edward King. Senator King had helped Stevie return to school, with the proviso that she would help keep David under control.

  Well, that had failed.

  That alone would have occupied her mind entirely, except that on the same night, Stevie’s adviser, Dr. Irene Fenton, had died in a house fire. Stevie had not been close to Dr. Fenton, or Fenton, as she preferred to be called. There was one upside to this horrific event—the fire was in Burlington. Burlington wasn’t here, at Ellingham, and Fenton was identified as a professor at the University of Vermont. This meant that the death wasn’t attributed to Ellingham. The school probably couldn’t survive if there was another death. In a world where everything went wrong all the time always, having your adviser die in a fire off campus was one of the few “but on the bright side . . .” elements of her confusing new life. It was a terrible and selfish way of thinking about things, but at this point, Stevie had to be practical. If you wanted to solve crime, you needed to detach.

  All of that would have been plenty to deal with. But the crowning item, the one that spun through her mind like a mobile, was . . .

  “Don’t you think we should talk?” Nate said. “About what’s going on? About what happens now?”

  It was quite a loaded question. What happens now?

  “Walk with me,” she said.

  She turned and headed away from the classroom buildings, away from people, away from cameras posted on poles and trees. This was to keep their conversation private and also so no one could see the devastation she was going to wreak on this doughnut. She was hungry.

  “Ish olfed decaf,” she said, shoving a bite of doughnut in her mouth.

  “You want decaf?”

  She took a moment to swallow.

  “I solved it,” she said. “The Ellingham case.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s what we need to talk about. That and the fire and everything else. Jesus, Stevie.”

  “It makes sense,” she said, walking slowly. “George Marsh, the man from the FBI, the one who protected the Ellinghams . . . someone who knew the house layout, the schedules, when the money came in, the family habits . . . someone who easily could have set up a kidnapping. So, here’s what happens . . .”

  She got Nate loosely by the arm and changed direction, turning them back toward the Great House. The Great House was the crowning jewel of the campus. In the 1930s, it was the Ellingham home. Today, it was the center of the school administration and a space for dances and events. Around the back, there was a walled garden. Stevie walked on autopilot to a familiar door in the wall and opened it. This was the sunken garden, so called because it was once an artificial lake and Iris Ellingham’s massive swimming pool. Albert Ellingham had drained it following the disappearance of his daughter, on the word of someone who thought her body was at the bottom. It wasn’t, but the lake was never filled again. So it remained, a great big grassy hole in the ground. And in the middle, on a strange little hill that had once been an island in the lake, was a geodesic glass dome. This dome was where Dottie Epstein had met her fate and where, under it, Hayes Major met his end.

  “So,” Stevie said, pointing, “Dottie Epstein is sitting in that dome, reading her Sherlock Holmes, minding her own business. All of a sudden, a guy appears. George Marsh. Neither one of them expecting the other. And out of all the students from Ellingham George Marsh could have run into, he runs into the most brilliant one, and the one whose uncle is in the NYPD. Dottie knows who Marsh is. The whole plan is ruined, instantly, because George Marsh met Dottie in that dome. Dottie knows something bad is about to happen, so she makes a mark in her Sherlock Holmes, she does the best she can to say who she’s looking at, and then, she dies. But Dottie fingers the guy. Flash forward . . .”

  Stevie turned in the direction of the house, toward the flagstone patio and French doors outside the room that had been Albert Ellingham’s office.

  “Albert Ellingham spends the next two years trying to find his daughter, when something . . . something jogs his memory. He thinks about Dottie Epstein and the mark in the book. He gets out the wire recording he made of her—we know he did this, it was on his desk the day he died—and he listens. He realizes that Dottie could have recognized George Marsh. He wonders . . .”

  Stevie could practically see Albert Ellingham pacing the office, walking across the trophy rugs, from leather chair to desk, staring at the green marble clock on the mantel, trying to figure out if what he had worked out in his mind was true.

  “He writes a riddle, maybe to test himself, to see if he really believed it. Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair. He’s saying, take the word stair out of staircase. Who’s always on a case? A detective. Who’s never really there? The person you hired to investigate, the one who was by your side. The one you didn’t even think of or notice . . .”

  “Stevie . . .”

  “And then, that afternoon, he goes out sailing with George Marsh and the boat explodes. People always thought anarchists did it, because anarchists tried to kill him before, and everyone thought an anarchist kidnapped his daughter. But it can’t be that. One of them caused that boat to explode. Either George Marsh knew it was all over and took them both out, or Albert Ellingham confronted him and did the same. But it ended there. And I know whoever kidnapped Alice isn’t Truly Devious, because I know that note was written by some students here, probably as a joke. This whole thing was just a bunch of stuff that got out of hand. The note was a joke, then the kidnapping went wrong, and all those people died . . .”

  “Stevie,” Nate said, snapping his friend back to the present, to the cold and marshy grass they stood on.

  “Fenton,” Stevie replied. “She believed there was a codicil in Albert Ellingham’s will, something that said that whoever found Alice got a fortune. It’s some real tinfoil-hat, grassy-knoll stuff, but she believed it. She said she had proof. I didn’t see it, but she said she had it. She was really paranoid—she only kept paper records. She kept notepads in old pizza boxes. She had a conspiracy wall. She said she was putting something huge together. I called to tell her what I had figured out, and she said she couldn’t talk and something about ‘the kid is there.’ And then, her house burned down.”

  Nate rubbed his head wearily.

  “Is there any chance that was an accident?” he said. “Please tell me there is.”

  “What do you think?” she asked quietly.

  “What do I think?” Nate replied, sitting on one of the stone benches on the edge of the sunken garden.

  Stevie sat next to him, the cold of the stone seeping through her clothes.

  “I think I don’t know what to think. I don’t believe in conspiracies, usually, because people are generally too uncoordinated to pull off huge, complicated plots. But I also think that if a bunch of weird stuff happens in one place at one time, maybe those things might be connected. So Hayes died while you were making that video about the Ellingham case. And then Ellie died after she ran away after you figured out that she wrote Hayes’s show. And now your adviser is dead—the one you were helping to research the Ellingham stuff—and she died just as you said you figured out who committed the crime of the century. These are all some terrible accidents, or they’re not, but I am out of ideas and need to conserve my energy so I can freak out more effectively. Does that help?”

  “No,” Stevie said, looking up at the gray-pink sky.

  “What if—hear me out—what if you told the authorities everything you know right now and let all of this go?”

  “But I don’t know anything,” she said. “That’s the problem. I need to know more. What if this is all connec
ted? It has to be, right? Iris and Dottie and Alice, Hayes and Ellie and Fenton.”

  “Does it?”

  “I have to think,” she said, running her hand through her short blond hair. It was standing straight up now. Stevie had not gone to get her hair cut since she had arrived at Ellingham in early September. She had cut it a bit, once, in the bathroom at two in the morning, but lost her vision halfway through. What she had now was an overgrown crop that hung over one eye more than the other and often went right toward the sky like the quiff of an alert cockatoo. She had bitten her nails down to the quick, and even though the school had a laundry service, she wore the same unwashed hoodie almost every day. She was losing track of her physical body.

  “So what is your plan, then? You just walk around all the time, not eating or talking to anyone?”

  “No,” she said. “I have to do something. I need more information.”

  “Okay,” Nate said, defeated. “Where can you get information that isn’t dangerous or misguided?”

  Stevie chewed a cuticle thoughtfully. It was a good question.

  “Back in the present,” Nate said, “Janelle is showing us a test run of her machine tonight. She’s worried that you’re not going.”

  Of course. As Stevie went down these little lanes in her mind, life was going on. Janelle Franklin, her closest friend here and next-door neighbor, had spent all her time at the school building a machine for the Sendel Waxman competition. It was now complete, and she wanted to show her closest friends the test run. Stevie could remember that much through the haze in her mind—tonight, eight o’clock. Look at machine.

  “Right,” she said. “I’m going. Of course. I’m going. I need to think some more now.”

  “Maybe you need to go home and take a nap, or shower or something? Because I don’t think you’re okay.”

  “That’s it,” she said, snapping up her head. “I’m not okay.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I need help,” she said with a smile. “I need to go talk to someone who loves to be challenged.”

  February 1936

  “IT HASN’T COME, DARLING,” LEONARD HOLMES NAIR SAID, WIPING the tip of his brush on a rag. “We have to be patient.”

  Iris Ellingham sat in front of him in a wicker chair, usually used in better weather. She shivered under her white mohair coat, but Leo suspected it was not against the cold. It was a relatively mild day for mid-February on the mountain, just warm enough to go outside to work on a painting of the family and the house. Around them, students from the new Ellingham Academy hurried from building to building, bundled in their coats and hats and mittens, arms filled with books. Their chatter broke the once crystalline quiet of the mountain retreat. This palace—the work of architecture and landscaping—this marvel of engineer and human willpower . . . all of it for a school? It was, in Leonard’s opinion, like preparing the most divine of feasts and then taking it outside to watch it be devoured by raccoons.

  “Surely you have a little,” Iris said, shifting in her seat. “You always have something.”

  “You need to be careful. You don’t want the candy to get the better of you.”

  “Enough moralizing, Leo. Give me some.”

  Leo sighed and reached into the deep pocket of his smock and pulled out a small enameled box in the shape of a shoe. Using his nail, he scooped out a pinch of powder into her open palm.

  “That really is all of it until I get a delivery,” he said. “The good stuff comes from Germany, and that takes time.”

  She turned her head and sniffed delicately. When she faced him again, her smile was brighter.

  “All better,” she said.

  “I regret introducing you to this.” Leo dropped the container back into his pocket. “A little now and then is fine. Use it regularly and it will take you over. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “It’s something to do,” she said, watching the children. “We can’t do anything else up here now that we appear to run an orphanage.”

  “Take it up with your husband.”

  “I’d have better luck taking it up with the side of the mountain. Whatever Albert wants . . .”

  “Albert buys. It’s a terrible situation, I’m sure. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t mind being in it, to be fair. There is a bit of a national crisis going on.”

  “I’m aware,” she snapped. “But we should be back in New York. I could open a kitchen. I could feed a thousand people a day. Instead, we’re doing what? Teaching thirty kids? Half of them are our friends’ children. If their parents want to be rid of them, they could send them to any boarding school.”

  “If I could explain your husband, I would,” Leo said. “I’m just the court painter.”

  “You’re an ass.”

  “Also that. But I’m your ass. Now hold still. Your jawline is exceptionally placed.”

  Iris held still for a moment, but then she slumped a bit. The powder had begun to relax her. The perfect line was lost.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “And I know your position on this, but . . . Alice is getting bigger now. At some point, it will be good to know . . .”

  “You know better than to ask me that,” he replied, dabbing his brush on the palette and swirling a vivid blue into a gray. If Iris was no longer in focus, he could look at some of the stonework along the roof as it melted into the sky. “I gave you something nice. This is no way to repay me.”

  “I know that, darling. I know. But . . .”

  “If Flora wanted you to know who the father was, don’t you think she would have told you? And I don’t know.”

  “But she would tell you.”

  “You are testing my friendship,” Leo said. “Don’t ask me to give you things I can’t give.”

  “I’m done for the day,” she said, pulling out her silver cigarette case. “I’m going inside for a hot bath.”

  She stood, sweeping her coat around her as she strode across the top of the green to the front door. Leo had given her the powder to help alleviate her boredom—small doses, now and again, the same small doses he took. Recently, he had noticed her behavior was changing; she was fickle, impatient, secretive. She was getting more from somewhere, taking it often, and getting anxious when there was none around. She was becoming hooked. Albert had no idea, of course. That was so much of the problem. Albert ran his kingdom and entertained himself, and Iris spiraled, having too little to occupy her agile mind.

  Perhaps he could get back to New York. He and Flora and Iris and Alice. It was the only sensible thing to do. Get her back to a place that stimulated her, get her to a good doctor he knew on Fifth Avenue who fixed these kinds of problems.

  Albert would balk. He couldn’t stand to be away from Iris and Alice. Even a night was too much. His devotion to his wife and child was admirable. Most men in Albert’s position had dozens of affairs, mistresses in every city. Albert seemed loyal, which meant he probably only had one. Perhaps she was in Burlington.

  Leo looked up at the subject in front of him, the brooding house with the curtain of stone rising behind it. The late-February afternoon sun was a white lavender, the bare trees etching themselves on the horizon, looking like the exposed circulatory systems of massive, mysterious creatures. He touched the paint to the canvas and drew back. The three figures in the painting stared at him expectantly. There was something wrong, something incomprehensible about this subject.

  There is the mistaken notion that wealth makes people content. It does the opposite, generally. It stirs a hunger in many—and no matter what they eat, they will never be full. A hole opens somewhere. Leo saw it all in a flash in that dying sunset, in the faces of his subjects and the color of the horizon. He examined his palette for a moment, concentrating on the Prussian blue and how he might make a ruinous sky of it.

  “Mr. Holmes Nair?”

  Two students had approached Leonard while he was staring at the painting, a boy and a girl. The boy was beautiful—his hair genuinely golden, a color poets w
rote about but rarely saw. The girl had a smile like a dangerous question. The first thing that struck Leo was how alive they looked. In contrast to the surroundings, they were bright and flushed. They even had traces of sweat at the brow lines and under the eyes. The slight confusion of the clothes. The errant hair.

  They had been up to something, and they didn’t mind that it showed.

  “You’re Leonard Holmes Nair, aren’t you?” the boy said.

  “I am,” Leo said.

  “I saw your Orpheus One show in New York last year. I liked it very much, even more than Hercules.”

  The boy had taste.

  “You are interested in art?” Leo said.

  “I am a poet.”

  Leo approved of poets, generally, but it was very important not to let them get started on the subject of their work if you wanted to continue enjoying poetry.

  “Would you mind very much if I took your photograph?” the boy asked.

  “I suppose not,” Leo said, sighing.

  As the boy raised his camera, Leo regarded his companion. The boy was pretty; the girl was interesting. Her eyes were fiercely intelligent. She had a notebook closely clutched to her chest in a way that suggested that whatever was in it was precious and probably against some rules. His painter’s eye and his deviant soul told him the girl was the one to watch of this pair. If there were students like those two at Ellingham Academy, perhaps the experiment was not a total waste.

  “Are you also a poet?” Leo asked the girl politely.

  “Absolutely not,” she replied. “I like some poems. I like Dorothy Parker.”