Also, there was a tree in the house. It didn’t seem to be a live tree—rather one that had been cut down and somehow brought into the house whole. It dominated one corner of the first floor and stretched up over the second floor. Stevie had no question in her mind that these were Ellie’s friends. This was what the inside of Ellie’s head must have been like.
“So, I . . .”
The guy pointed at the second-floor loft. Stevie cocked her head in confusion.
“Should I . . .”
He pointed again.
“Up there?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Go? I should go up there?”
He nodded again and pointed toward a small spiral staircase in the back of the room, then he walked over to one of the walls and went into a headstand. As Stevie climbed the stairs, she noticed there were paper tags hanging from the tree branches with words on them, things like, “Think the sky,” and “This isn’t the time; this is the time.” Upstairs, sitting on a pile of cushions, was a girl. For one moment, Stevie almost mistook her for Ellie. Her hair was in small, matted bunches. She wore a stretched-out T-shirt that read Withnail and I and a faded pair of Mickey Mouse leggings. At Stevie’s approach, she looked up from her laptop and pushed her headphones off her ears.
“Hey,” Stevie said. “Sorry.”
“Never say sorry as a greeting,” the girl replied.
This was a good point.
“The guy downstairs let me in. He said to come up. Or, he pointed . . .”
“Paul’s in a silent phase,” the girl said, as if this explained everything.
“Oh. I’m Stevie. I am . . . was . . . a friend of Ellie’s. . . .”
Stevie barely had the words out when the girl sprang from the floor and wrapped her in an embrace. The girl smelled of a sweet mix of body odor and incense. Her body was taut from what was probably daily, intensive yoga. It was like being wrapped in a warm, stinky garden hose.
“You came to us! You came! She’d be so happy! You came!”
Stevie had not known what kind of reception she would get in the Art Collective, but this was not on the list of possibles.
“I’m Bath,” the girl said, stepping back.
“Bath?”
“Bathsheba. Everyone calls me Bath. Sit. Sit!”
This was weird, because when Stevie first met Ellie, Ellie got into the bath with all her clothes on to dye her outfit pink, probably for this very cabaret. The word bath would always remind Stevie of Ellie.
Bath pointed at another pile of cushions on the floor. They looked faded and stained and vaguely bedbuggy, but Stevie sat down anyway. Once on the floor she noticed that almost one entire wall of the upstairs was lined with empty French wine bottles with melted candles in them.
“From Ellie,” Bathsheba said, sitting cross-legged on the bare floor. “Of course. French wine. French poetry. German theater. That was my girl.”
With these words, Bath broke into tears. Stevie shifted on the cushions and fussed with the bag for a moment.
“I’m glad you came,” Bath said as she sniffed and calmed down. “She liked you. She told me all about you. You’re the detective.”
This made something catch in Stevie’s throat. Right from the start, Ellie had taken Stevie seriously when she said she was a detective. Ellie seemed to have so much confidence in Stevie that Stevie had more confidence in herself. Ellie had taken her in, made friends with her from the start, much like Bathsheba was doing now. Now that Stevie was looking at Bathsheba, it occurred to her that Ellie may have copied her look a bit, as well as some of her behaviors.
“How did Ellie end up here?” Stevie asked. “This is part of the university, right?”
“Not part of,” Bath said. “Most of us who live here go there. The house is owned by a patron who wants to support local arts. It’s an open place for artists. Ellie found us the week after she got to Ellingham. She showed up at the door and said, ‘I make art. Are you going to let me in?’ And we did, of course.”
“I’m here because I’m trying to figure out . . .” Such a rookie mistake. Always have your questions ready. Then again, as a detective, you might not always know who you were going to end up talking to. So talk, she thought. Get talking and the rest will come. “. . . about Ellie. About what she was like, and . . .”
“She was real,” Bath said. “She was Dada. She was spontaneous. She was fun.”
“Did Ellie talk to you about Hayes?” Stevie asked.
“No,” Bath said, rubbing her eyes. “Hayes is the guy who died, right? That was his name?”
Stevie nodded.
“No. She said she knew him, but that was it. And that she was sad.”
“Did she ever mention helping him make a show?”
“She helped make a show? Like a cabaret piece? Hey, did you ever see our cabaret?”
“No, I—”
Bath was already on her laptop and pulling up a video.
“You need to see this,” she said. “You’ll love it. It’s one of Ellie’s best performances.”
Stevie dutifully watched ten minutes of dark, confusing footage of tuneless saxophone, poetry, handstands, and drumming. Ellie was in there, but it was too dark to really see her.
“So yeah,” Bath said as the video ended. “Ellie. I haven’t been able to do much since she died. I try to work, but I mostly stay in a lot. I know she would want me to make art about it. I’ve tried. I’m trying. I don’t want to let her down.”
Me either, Stevie thought.
“When I think of her . . . ,” Bath went on, “how she died. I can’t.”
Neither could Stevie. The idea of being trapped in the dark, underground, with no one able to hear you—it was too horrible. Her panic must have risen as she felt her way down that pitch-black tunnel and realized there was no way out. At some point, she would have known she was going to die. Stevie was thankful for the Avitan gliding through her bloodstream, holding down the pulsing nausea and air hunger she felt whenever she conjured this image in her mind.
Ellie’s death was not her fault. It really wasn’t. Right? Stevie had no idea there was a passage in the wall or a tunnel in the basement. Stevie certainly hadn’t sealed the tunnel. All Stevie did was lay out the facts of the matter in Hayes’s death, and she’d done so in public, in a place that seemed perfectly safe.
Bath had reached over and taken Stevie’s hand. The gesture caught Stevie off guard, and she almost recoiled.
“It’s good to remember her,” Bath said.
“Yeah,” Stevie replied, her voice hoarse.
She looked around the room for a new point of focus. What did she see? What information was there? Splattered paint, Christmas lights, a guitar, glitter, some laundry in the corner, canvases stacked against the wall, a load of wine bottles . . .
They had done some partying here. And so had David. That’s right. He’d told Stevie that he used to come to visit Ellie’s art friends in Burlington. These were those friends. So maybe these people knew something about where he was? Stevie latched on to this.
“I think another friend of ours came here? David?”
“Not recently,” Bath said. “He used to come with Ellie.”
“But not recently?”
“No,” Bath said. “Not since last year.”
So, no leads on Hayes, and no sightings of David. All she had really accomplished was making this girl cry and making herself late.
“Thanks for your time,” Stevie said, getting up and shaking out a sleeping leg. “I’m really glad I got to meet you.”
“You too,” Bath said. “Come back anytime, maybe for cabaret? Or whenever you want. You’re welcome.”
Stevie nodded her thanks and gathered up her things.
“I’m sorry for all you went through,” Bath said as Stevie reached the stairs. “With all this bad stuff. And that thing on your wall.”
Stevie stopped and turned back toward Bath.
“My wall?” she repeated.
> “Someone put a message on your wall?” Bath said. “That was horrible. Ellie was so pissed about that.”
Had Bath said, “By the way, I can turn into a butterfly at will, watch!” Stevie would hardly have been more surprised. The night before Hayes died, Stevie had been woken in the middle of the night to see something glowing on her wall—some kind of riddle, written in the style of the Truly Devious riddle. Stevie felt her body physically tremble, partially at the memory of the strange message that had appeared that night.
“That was a dream,” Stevie said, ignoring the fact that her phone was buzzing in her pocket.
“Ellie didn’t seem to think it was a dream.” Bath leaned back, and her tank top revealed a little casual and confident side boob and armpit hair. “She said she was pissed at the person who did it.”
“She knew who did it?”
“Yeah, she seemed to.”
“I thought . . .” Stevie’s mind was racing now. “I thought, if it happened at all, maybe she did it? As a joke?”
“Ellie?” Bath shook her head. “No. Definitely no. Absolutely no. Ellie’s art was participatory,” she said. “She never worked with fear. Her art was consent. Her art was welcoming. She wouldn’t put something up in your space, especially if she thought it would scare you or mock you. It wasn’t her.”
Stevie thought back to Ellie bleating away on Roota, her beloved saxophone. She would not have described the sound as welcoming, but it also wasn’t aggressive. It was raw and unschooled. Fun.
“No,” Stevie said. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”
“That thing about the wall is messed up,” Bath said. “It’s like Belshazzar’s feast.”
“What?”
“The hand on the wall. You know—the writing? From the Bible. My name is Bathsheba. With a name like mine, you end up reading a lot of Bible stories. There’s a big feast and a hand appears on the wall and starts writing something no one can understand.”
Stevie’s knowledge of the Bible was not tremendous. She’d had some Sunday school classes when she was small, but that was mostly coloring pictures of Jesus and singing along while their Sunday school teacher played “Jesus Loves Me” on the piano. And there was a kid named Nick Philby who liked to eat handfuls of grass and would smile his big green teeth. It was not a complete education. But she had a passing memory of words written on a wall.
“Rembrandt used it as a subject,” Bath said, typing something on her laptop. She turned it around to face Stevie. There was an image of a painting—the central figure was a man, leaping up from a table, his face bug-eyed with horror. A hand reached out of a cloud of mist and etched glowing Hebrew characters on the wall.
“The writing on the wall,” Bath said.
The phone was buzzing again. Stevie put the shopping bag on top of it to muffle the noise.
“But she didn’t say who did it?” Stevie asked.
“No. Just that she was mad that someone was trying to mess with you.”
Buzz.
Someone projected a message. It happened. And if it wasn’t Ellie, who? Hayes? Lazy Hayes who did nothing on his own? Who else would even care enough about her to want to get her attention like that?
Only David. David could have done it. And now David was gone.
“Yeah,” Bathsheba said, nodding to herself. “Ellie always talked about the walls.”
“The walls?”
Buzz.
The phone could have stood up and walked over to her at this point. It could have exploded. It would not have mattered.
“Yeah. She said that there was weird shit in the walls at Ellingham. Things and hollow spaces. Stuff. She’d found things. Shit in the walls.”
Shit. In. The. Walls.
She had a clue now, a point of focus. There were things in the walls. She wasn’t sure what that meant, or what she might be looking for. But so much of this had been about walls. Writing on them. Disappearing into them.
And, at some point, a hand had written on her wall.
5
THERE IS DARK, AND THEN THERE IS DARK. UP ON THE MOUNTAIN, IT was the second kind.
This was something Stevie had to wrap her head around as fall turned to winter at Ellingham. In Pittsburgh, there was always some ambient light somewhere—a streetlight, cars, televisions in other houses. But when you are on top of a rock that is close to the sky, surrounded by woods, the dark wraps around you. This was one of the reasons Ellingham supplied everyone with high-powered flashlights. When you walked around at night, it could get intense. Tonight, the clouds were rolling in, so there were only a few visible stars; there was nothing between Stevie and oblivion as she walked to the art barn. She stayed on the paths, generally, and even felt a little thankful for the eerie blue glow from the security cameras and outposts that Edward King had installed around the place.
It had been a slightly uncomfortable ride back to campus. She had ridden to town with Mark Parsons, the head of grounds and maintenance. Mark was a big, serious man with a square head and a John Deere tractor jacket. He drove an SUV with one of those phone mounts on the dash so he could monitor and reply to a seemingly endless stream of texts about pipes and materials and people coming and going from work. Her lateness had screwed up his day, and she tried to make herself very small and apologetic in the passenger seat.
Stevie got around the lateness by saying that she had to take an emotional moment and walk around Dr. Fenton’s neighborhood. Lying like that was gross and weird, but again, these were not normal times. She had to do what was necessary. Much like Rose and Jack at the end of the movie Titanic. The door was not a great raft, but when your choices are a door or the deep, cold ocean—you take the door. (Stevie’s other big interest, outside of crime, was disaster, so she had seen Titanic many times. It was clear to her that there was plenty of room on that door for two people. Jack was murdered.)
So, for the whole twenty-minute trip, Stevie tried to act sad until Mark couldn’t take the palpable awkwardness in the car anymore and turned on the radio. There were reports of snow coming. Lots of snow. Blizzards and whiteouts.
“The storm that’s coming in a few days is going to be huge,” he said as they turned up the steep, winding path through the woods to the school. “One of the biggest in twenty years.”
“What happens up here in giant storms?” Stevie said.
“Sometimes the power goes out for a little while,” he said, “but that’s why we have fireplaces and snowshoes. And that’s why I had to go to town for some extra supplies and why I need to get back.”
There was an implied “And now I am late” at the end of that.
Mark deposited Stevie on the drive, and from there Stevie began her walk to the art barn, where she was due to watch Janelle’s test run. She crunched along the path in the dark, walking past the statue heads. There were the night sounds that Stevie had still not come to grips with—the rustling on the ground and above, the hooting of owls—things that suggested that far more happened here at night than during the day. (And yet, Stevie had yet to see the one creature that had been promised in sign after sign along the highway, the ones that read MOOSE. One moose. That’s all she wanted. Was that so much to ask? Instead, there were these suggestions of owls, and all Stevie ever heard about the owls was that they liked shiny things and would eat your eyes given half a chance.)
She was so caught up in her swirling thoughts about Ellie and walls and owls and moose that she didn’t notice someone coming up behind her on the path.
“Hey,” said a voice.
Stevie lurched off the path and spun, half raising her arms in defense. Behind her was a person who looked like they might be part owl—wide, wondering eyes and a sharp, tight expression.
“So,” Germaine said, “your adviser died.”
Germaine Batt didn’t mess around with niceties. Stevie had a case to solve; Germaine had stories to follow. She got into Ellingham because of her journalism, and her site, The Batt Report. The Batt Report had gone from a s
mall blog to a medium-sized one on the strength of Germaine’s inside stories about the deaths of Hayes Major and Element Walker, and the general bad luck at Ellingham Academy. She, like the owl, hunted in the dark and the shadows, looking for something new that would get her more clicks.
“It was an accident,” Stevie said.
“That’s what they said about Hayes until you said differently. Lots of stuff happens around you, huh?”
“Around us,” Stevie said. “And yeah. Stuff happens.”
She continued toward the art barn, and Germaine fell in alongside. Even though she didn’t really feel like being pummeled by Germaine’s questions, she had to admit, if only to herself, that it was good having company through the woods.
“I heard you’re getting a housemate,” Germaine said.
“You heard that? Where?”
Germaine shrugged to indicate that sometimes we will simply never know where knowledge comes from. Perhaps the wind.
“Not a student. Some guy.”
“His name is Hunter. He was Fenton’s nephew.”
“Fenton?” Germaine asked.
“That was her name. Dr. Fenton.”
“So why is this guy who isn’t a student getting to live here?”
“Because the school feels bad,” Stevie said.
“Schools feel bad?”
“This school does,” Stevie said. “Dr. Fenton wrote a book about this place. And I guess it looks good for us to support the community or something after . . .”
“People keep dying here?” Germaine said.
Stevie let this go and focused on the warm lights of the art barn up ahead.
“You want a story?” she said. “Janelle’s going to test-run her machine. Report on that.”
“I don’t do human interest,” Germaine said. “What about David? Everyone’s saying he went home for some family thing, but that seems like bullshit. You guys are dating or something, right? Where is he?”
“I thought you just said you don’t do human interest,” Stevie replied, walking faster.
The Hand on the Wall Page 5
