The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  Stevie looked down at herself. There was some fine glass powder on her hoodie, but otherwise she was no worse for wear. Nate, Hunter, and Vi were all the same, more stunned than anything else. Vi immediately ran to Janelle, who stood in mute, confused horror.

  Suda, the girl in the emerald-blue hijab, leaped up. She immediately ran to the hurt people and started assessing injuries. She proceeded quickly to Mudge and knelt down at his side. Stevie’s tall, goth friend, who always helped her in anatomy, was bent over his arm and weeping quietly.

  The demonstration was over.

  9

  “SO,” HUNTER SAID, BREAKING THE SILENCE. “WEIRD NIGHT, HUH?”

  “Not really,” Nate replied, picking through the bottom of a large bowl of popcorn, looking for any fully popped pieces that weren’t hard kernels in disguise. “This is pretty much how it goes. Something terrible happens and we all come back here and talk about how terrible it is. We don’t learn.”

  Stevie elbowed him gently, but firmly, in the ribs. She sat next to him on the sofa, while Hunter was in the hammock chair, tacking softly from side as the fire crackled in the fireplace. On the other side of the room, Janelle sat with Pix. She had been crying almost nonstop all the way back to the house.

  “They’re standard paintball-gun canisters,” she said tearfully.

  “It’s okay,” Pix said, her arm over Janelle’s shoulders. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is my fault,” Janelle said, tears flying as she spat out the words. “I built it. I’m responsible for what I build. The tanks were correctly pressurized. The regulators were set at a very low level. I don’t understand what happened. Everything about this machine was safe. It’s all benign. I tested it dozens of times.”

  Pix couldn’t think of anything to reply to this with, and for a moment, neither could anyone else. Then Hunter stepped in.

  “Carbon dioxide canisters are really common,” he said. “People have them in their kitchens. Those home seltzer things?”

  “Carbon dioxide canisters?” Stevie said.

  “Is that what you were using?” Hunter asked. “Or some other kind of canister?”

  “Carbon dioxide,” Janelle said. “Yeah, people use them for making seltzer.”

  Stevie began to quake a bit.

  “Be right back,” she said.

  She stumbled frantically back to her room and pulled down the coat and robe and other clothes from the hooks, the clothes that were hiding the sticky notes she had put up the night before. She looked at the blue ones.

  Hayes Major: CO2 poisoning/dry ice

  Ellie Walker: exposure/dehydration/immurement

  Dr. Irene Fenton: house fire

  She reached for the blue sticky notes and added one more.

  Janelle’s machine: CO2 tank accident

  There could be no doubt about it now. There was some hand in this—some quiet hand that tipped things in the wrong direction. It moved the ice, shut the doors, turned the knob, and now, perhaps the hand altered Janelle’s machine.

  Why the hell would anyone want to ruin a Rube Goldberg machine? She glared at the four notes, demanding that they speak to her, that they make the picture clear. What did Hayes, Ellie, Dr. Fenton, and . . . some random students have in common?

  Well, in two cases, Janelle.

  Janelle’s pass had been used to take the dry ice. Janelle had that access because she was building her machine, a machine that was now destroyed. But those two things had no connection to what happened to Ellie or Dr. Fenton, unless there was a killer out there with the goal of messing up a few Ellingham student projects.

  Stevie pulled off a few more sticky notes, listing all the things that played on her mind.

  Janelle’s pass

  The message on the wall

  CO2 accidents

  There was a light knock at her door, and Nate slouched his way in. Stevie grabbed her robe and some towels and made a half-hearted attempt to hang them back up to cover the wall, but Nate had already seen it.

  “You don’t think that was an accident,” Nate said. “Whenever you leave a room like that it means you think the bad thing that just happened wasn’t an accident. It’s your move.”

  “Do you?” she said, giving up and tossing her robe across the room, where it missed her bed by several feet and splayed dramatically on the floor.

  “No,” Nate said, coming in and sitting down in her squeaky desk chair. “I don’t think anything is an accident anymore. Even I’m not that fatalistic. I do think it’s weird how someone or something hates this building in particular. It feels like we’re living in a parable.”

  “What’s the message of this parable?” Stevie asked.

  “I don’t know.” Nate spun the chair. “Don’t go to school?”

  “It’s right here and I can’t see it,” Stevie said, shaking her head. “We’re famous for being the school with the murders. There’s all this legend around the place. Isn’t it easier to do bad things in a place where bad things are supposed to happen? All these people died here, and there’s a reason. Maybe even the same reason. Maybe there’s a line right from 1936 until now.”

  She opened up her dresser drawer and pulled out the battered tea tin she’d found in Ellie’s room, the tin that had broken the Truly Devious case open for her. She opened it carefully and pulled out the contents, setting them on her dresser next to her brush and her deodorant.

  “A bit of a white feather,” she said, holding it up. “A lipstick tube. A shiny clip. This little enamel box that looks like a shoe. A piece of torn cloth. Photos. And a poem. Someone collected these things back in 1936 and hid them. It’s junk. But that’s what clues are. Clues are junk. They’re things that fly off the car when it gets into an accident. Murder is messy, and you have to use garbage to figure out what’s going on. Somehow this shit takes us all the way to now, and these accidents with carbon dioxide and fire and people getting trapped. This school isn’t cursed. There’s no such thing. Unless money is a curse.”

  “It kind of is,” Nate said. “Not that I have any. Well, I have some. From the book. Actually, I do. I don’t know what to do with it. I have to pay tax.”

  “Money,” Stevie said. “The kidnappings were for money. If Fenton was right, if there’s something out there in a will that says someone gets a fortune if they find Alice dead or alive . . .”

  “But didn’t Charles tell you that didn’t exist?”

  Stevie stared at the items on her dresser. The beads glistened. She rolled the lipstick under her finger, back and forth.

  “There’s something big that sticks all this stuff together,” she said. “I don’t know how to find it. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to investigate a case. I mean, I’ve read about it, but I don’t have a forensics lab. I don’t have access to police databases or the ability to question people. I can look at stuff in the past, but I’m not sure how to do this in the now. This is real. It’s ongoing.”

  “Tell someone,” Nate said.

  “Tell them I think a bad big murderer is sneaking around and show them all my Post-its?”

  “I guess?”

  There was a knock, and the door creaked open a bit. Hunter’s tawny blond head stuck in, and he bit his lip nervously.

  “Can I come in?” he asked. “I feel weird because Janelle is really upset, and I don’t want her to think I’m ignoring her or staring at her . . .”

  “Sure, sure . . .” Stevie stepped in front of her sticky notes and tried to do a casual lean. Hunter had seen the tin before, so that was no problem—but the conspiracy wall of death was something he might not be prepared for.

  “I guess this machine thing is going to be a problem,” he said.

  “Maybe not,” Stevie replied. “The school has had to deal with worse. It’s not like before, when everything was in the news and there was a lot of pressure. As long as—”

  “Does this count as news?” Hunter asked.

  He held up his phone. The headline was
loud and clear:

  ANOTHER ACCIDENT AT ELLINGHAM: A BATT REPORT EXCLUSIVE

  “Germaine,” Stevie said. “Germaine.”

  The bottom line came via a school-wide text that landed at seven the next morning, buzzing Stevie out of her restless sleep. She had gone to bed in her hoodie and sweatpants again, the phone loose somewhere in the blankets, demanding her attention. Before she could fish it out to see what it wanted, Janelle was at her door in her cat pajamas, her eyes flooding with tears.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I shut down the school.”

  “Huh?” Stevie managed.

  Janelle dropped down next to Stevie on the bed, pushed over her own phone, and burst into tears.

  School-wide meeting at 9:00 a.m. Attendance is mandatory. All classes are canceled. Please meet in the dining hall.

  A short while later, the small group from Minerva joined the migration across campus. Janelle had only just stopped crying. Nate’s hands were so far into his pockets that they must have touched his knees. Vi was waiting by the front door to accompany them. They were dressed in a shirt and tie, and they had made Janelle some paper flowers to cheer her up. Hunter walked with them as well. He was not a student and did not have to come. He was still feeling new and awkward and wasn’t quite sure how to fit in, so he trailed along.

  “This is all my fault,” Janelle said, sniffing. “Whatever is about to happen.”

  “It’s not,” Vi said. “And it’s probably nothing. They’re probably going to put some new policy in place, or maybe it’s about the snow. This storm is going to be huge.”

  They pulled out their phone and quickly scanned through the forecast.

  “Listen,” they said. “Updated forecast, up to thirty-six inches, with high winds, so expect high drifts. Snow will begin tomorrow morning, initially two to three inches per hour, intensifying rapidly.”

  “This is my fault,” Janelle said again.

  As the group prepared to cross the green, Hunter paused.

  “I need to take the path, if that’s okay,” he said. “I’ll meet you.”

  “Why don’t we take the green,” Vi said to them, giving them a knowing look that said, Give me a few minutes with her.

  “Sure,” Stevie said. “We’ll take the path and meet you two over there.”

  Vi and Janelle crossed the grass, and Hunter, Nate, and Stevie turned to go around the drive.

  “Sorry,” Hunter said, “my crutch gets stuck in the grass a bunch.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Stevie said. “I think they needed to talk anyway.”

  “What do you think is going on?” Hunter asked.

  “Nothing good,” Nate said. “There’s no such thing as a good emergency school assembly. Not here.”

  All of Ellingham was in attendance in the dining hall. A fire was crackling in the big fireplace in the front of the space, in the cozy study area with the chairs. Most people sat there, draped over every surface, some still in pajamas and hoodies. There was a high pulsing energy in the room. Teachers milled around with cups of coffee. Vi and Janelle were sitting at a table. Vi was trying to tempt Janelle into eating some pancakes, but it wasn’t working. A few tables over, with her face close to her laptop screen, Germaine Batt was watching something intently.

  “I’ll be over in a second,” Stevie said to Nate and Hunter.

  She approached Germaine’s table and sat down. Germaine did not look up.

  “Don’t,” Germaine said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have posted it. I didn’t say it was Janelle’s fault.”

  “You said her machine blew up,” Stevie said. “Which isn’t even true.”

  “Did you see that thing go? It broke Mudge’s arm.”

  “But it didn’t blow up. It . . .”

  Germaine shut her laptop firmly and stared at Stevie. “Look,” she said. “I know Janelle is upset. I told the story. That’s it. Just like you looked into Hayes’s death. And how did that turn out?”

  It was like Stevie had been punched in the face. She almost physically reeled from the blow. She leaned back, then got up, walking back to the group table in a daze. Call Me Charles and Dr. Quinn came briskly into the room. They conferred with a few teachers by the door, all their expressions serious.

  “Not good,” Nate whispered to Stevie.

  Charles went to the middle of the study area and stepped up onto a low table made of heavy wood.

  “Can everyone gather or look over here?” he said.

  The room went quiet very quickly. Stevie could hear the fire crackle from a good distance.

  “We asked everyone to come here this morning so we could all talk,” he began. “This semester has been one of the hardest in the school’s history. We’ve never experienced anything quite like it, at least not in our lifetimes. We mourn the loss of two of our friends. Those losses brought about some very serious conversations—conversations about safety, both physical and emotional. We felt that the school and all of you would benefit from continuing the semester. However . . .”

  However was bad. Very bad.

  “. . . and I want to stress this is no one’s fault . . .”

  Janelle coughed back a sob.

  “. . . we’ve come to the very difficult decision that this semester should be brought to a close.”

  The ripple that went through the room was a sonic event the likes of which Stevie had never experienced. It was a collective intake that seemed to suck away all the air, followed by a yelp, then a cry, an “oh shit” and several “oh my Gods.”

  “What? What are we going to do?” This was from Maris. She was sitting on the floor by the fire, curled up like a cat in a pair of velvety black pajama bottoms and a massive fuzzy sweatshirt. She gazed up from her position like a tragic heroine in a silent movie.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Charles said. “First, you don’t need to worry about your academics. We’re going to work out a way for all of you to finish the semester remotely. None of your academic credit will be affected. None of it.”

  One relieved sigh from an unknown corner of the room.

  “Normally, we would want to give you time to process, to talk, but there is a complicating factor. I’m sure you’ve heard about the storm coming in. It’s looking to be a big one. By this time tomorrow, the roads will be impassible. So, unfortunately, we’re going to have to start the moving out tonight. . . .”

  Everything was spinning a bit. The room seemed to elongate. Stevie looked up at the peaked roof with its wood beams, the ones that made this building seem like a ski lodge or some kind of Alpine retreat. She could smell the warm maple syrup, the fire, and that strange funk that all cafeterias possess no matter how hard they try not to.

  “I realize that is not much time,” Charles said. “You do not need to worry about any travel—we will arrange and pay for all of it. For those of you who need flights, we’re already getting them set up. Planes are still taking off from the airport this afternoon and this evening, which is why we had to meet this morning. For those of you who are within driving or train distance, we have set up that as well. You don’t need to worry about packing all your things. Take the things you need for this week, and we’ll get everything else to you. We’re going to text each one of your travel—”

  “Are we coming back?” someone else asked.

  “That remains an open question,” he replied. “I hope so.”

  He went on for another five or so minutes, talking about community and emotions. Stevie heard none of it. The room continued to distort, and her pulse raced. She had not thought to bring her bag with her medication, so she closed her eyes and breathed. In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.

  Pix was coming in as they were going out. She embraced everyone, except Nate, who did not hug.

  “I have a flight to San Francisco at two,” Vi said, staring at their phone.

  “Mine’s at four,” Janelle said.

  The two
held each other. Stevie felt the buzz in her pocket but refused to look.

  “I’ll meet you all at home in a few minutes,” Pix said. “I’m sorry. It’s all going to be okay.”

  But it wasn’t, of course.

  They made their way back to Minerva in a slow, silent procession. Vi came along with them, walking hand in hand with Janelle. Stevie had memorized that sentence from The Great Gatsby that had so transfixed her. She hadn’t meant to—she just read it several times and now it was stuck, running through her head as she looked up: He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

  She still didn’t know exactly what it meant, but the words scared her. They made her aware that there were echoey hallways inside herself that she had not yet explored, that the world was big, and that objects changed upon examination. These are not the kinds of things you want to think about when your dreams of school and escape and friendship have—at long last—properly exploded. Everything was the last. The last time as a group walking back from the dining hall. The last time touching her ID to the pad. The last time pushing open the big blue door. The last time looking at the weird snowshoe spikes, and the moose head, and David sitting on the saggy purple sofa. . . .

  David. Was sitting there. Hands folded in his lap, a massive backpack by his feet, wearing his two-thousand-dollar Sherlock coat and a knowing smile.

  “Hey, everybody,” he said. “Miss me? Shut the door. Not a lot of time.”

  September 1936

  IT WAS VERY ODD SEEING A LAKE GO AWAY. HOUR BY HOUR, IT SANK from view. At breakfast, Flora Robinson had gone out to its bank to wish it good-bye. After lunch, it was not looking itself and had revealed a mossy, slimy border of rock. By four, one could hear a whooshing sound as it continued to sink. Leaves congealed on the contracting surface. By sunset, it was gone.