The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  It was, perhaps, a little too close to reality at the moment.

  February 18, 1937

  New York City

  GEORGE MARSH PUSHED OPEN THE DOOR OF MANELLI’S RESTAURANT on Mott Street. Manelli’s was like many joints in the area—spaghetti and clams, veal, decent red wine, rapid-fire Italian spoken all around. At ten o’clock on a snowy night, it was still thrumming quietly, a haze of cigar smoke hanging over the tables and laughter puncturing the rhythm of forks and knives hitting plates. He took a stool at the bar and ordered a glass of whiskey and a plate of salami and bread.

  “I’m looking for two guys,” he said as he tore into the small loaf.

  The bartender wiped down some rings on the bar.

  “Lots of guys around here. Pick any two.”

  George reached into his pocket and put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. The bartender blinked, then slid the bill off the bar and into his apron pocket. He lingered by George, polishing the zinc bar top in circles. Even in a place like this—a place where rackets were managed and numbers run, where small fortunes were passed back and forth in paper bags and cigar boxes—a free hundred-dollar bill would get attention and a friendly ear.

  “These guys have names?” he asked casually.

  “Andy Delvicco and Jerry Castelli.”

  The bartender nodded as if George was talking to him about the weather.

  “Yeah, I may know these guys,” he said. He shoved the rag in a sink below the bar, rinsed it, then wrung it out. “Might take a day or two.”

  “This is my phone number.” George pulled a nub of pencil from his pocket and wrote it down on a napkin. “In case anything comes to mind. If you have something useful for me, that fella I gave you has plenty of friends.”

  He polished off the whiskey and the last bite of the salami and slipped off the barstool. Once outside, George turned up his coat against the falling snow, which glowed pink and blue in the light of the neon signs. He walked slowly to give anyone who wanted to follow him a chance to catch up.

  Each night for the last ten nights, George Marsh had followed the same routine. He went to a known wise-guy hangout, had a chat with the bartender, and dropped a hundred. The bartender usually said he’d ask around. George would leave his phone number. So far, no one had called. He’d had one or two slow tails, but it seemed to George that they were more casual—mob guys always liked to take a look at anyone coming in, and everyone knew who George Marsh was. No one was going to go after Albert Ellingham’s man. Too much trouble. They just wanted to have eyes on him, and George wanted to be seen. He wanted it known: Andy Delvicco and Jerry Castelli were wanted men, and there was money for anyone who could turn them up. Ellingham money. Bottomless money. Easy money.

  Easy money. That was the start of most of the trouble in this world. It was certainly the start of his trouble. . . .

  George had always played cards. Nothing serious—a game here or there, at the station, at someone’s house on a Saturday night. He liked a little dice now and again, or a trip to the races. Things got a bit more exciting when he started running in Albert Ellingham’s circles. Suddenly there were nights at the Central Park Casino, weekends in Atlantic City, trips to Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles . . . places with bigger and better games, more glamour, more excitement, more money.

  It had happened quickly, the debt. People were happy to front him credit, as he was such a good friend of Albert Ellingham’s, and George was always sure he would win it back. It was nothing at all to be five thousand dollars in debt, then ten, then twenty. . . .

  He could have asked Albert for the money, of course. He thought about it. But the shame was so great. What if Albert said no? Then there was no money, no job, no credit, no friends—the life he had made for himself would be gone. He had to get the money. Twenty thousand.

  About the amount that Albert Ellingham regularly kept in the safe in his office to pay the workmen at the school . . .

  The plan had been so simple.

  Andy and Jerry were two nitwits he knew from his days as a cop—wannabe made men who never quite made much of themselves, but perfect for a straightforward job like this. On the day of the job, they would get the signal from him and wait on the road for Iris Ellingham to drive by in her Mercedes. They were to grab her and hold her for a few hours in a farmhouse while George did the rest. After that, they would get paid and go home, have a steak dinner. Easiest money they’d ever make. No one would be hurt. Iris would laugh when it was over. She would tell the story forever. She loved adventure. This was her kind of thing.

  The first problem was that Alice was there. Alice didn’t usually go along with her mother for her car rides. Iris probably got defensive because of her daughter—she probably fought back to protect Alice. Iris somehow got dead and wound up floating on Lake Champlain.

  And then there was the kid—little Dottie Epstein. She should never have been in the dome that day. No one was. And she had jumped down that hole herself, out of fear. She busted her head in the fall. It was horrible to see. George had no choice but to finish the job.

  And Andy and Jerry proved to have a little more upstairs than he had given them credit for. They jumped him when he turned up that night to get Iris and Alice and bring them back. They had hidden them away, and they wanted more money. The whole thing was out of control from the start. Two people dead, and Alice still missing.

  Alice. His kid. Not Albert Ellingham’s. His kid.

  Andy and Jerry had done a good job of hiding themselves for almost a year. There had been no sightings of them at all. Then, out of nowhere, one of George’s sources had called him a week ago to tell him that he’d seen Jerry near Five Points. George had come back to New York at once and had been working street by street. If you spread enough paper around Little Italy, someone would know something.

  He took a taxi back uptown to Twenty-Fourth Street, where Albert Ellingham had one of his many Manhattan pieds-à-terre. Albert Ellingham bought apartments and houses in the way other people bought fruit. This one had been a rumored haunt of Stanford White, before he was shot on the roof of Madison Square Garden during the performance of a musical called Mam’zelle Champagne in 1906, over thirty years ago now. White was a creep who deserved what he got. The guy who shot him was a creep too. So many creeps in this town.

  The apartment was small but perfectly outfitted. There was a handsome bedroom, a safe for cash, a modern little kitchen that never got used, and a first-rate radio. George turned this on the moment he came inside. The sound of a symphony filled the room. He didn’t care what was on—he just couldn’t handle the silence. He sat down in the dark room, coat and hat still on, lights off, and watched the falling snow. He ran through it again in his mind, for the thousandth time.

  If Alice had not surfaced, there had to be a reason. Of course, she could have died with her mother, but that felt wrong to him. It would be easy to keep a kid, especially a kid like Alice who was small and gentle. You couldn’t ask for a sweeter child. He had played with her often. She showed everyone her toys and dolls, and always gave a hug and a kiss. She would take his hand and follow him around the grounds sometimes. She would be easy to hide somewhere. She wouldn’t even have to be very well hidden. Change her clothes, cut her hair, she could be any kid at all.

  Little Alice. Now, his every memory of her had new meaning. His daughter. He had put her in harm’s way. It only made sense that he, her father, would come and rescue her again.

  George Marsh fell asleep in the chair, watching the snow. When he woke, it was light again. The morning radio program was a history lecture about President Lincoln. It had snowed quite a lot during the night; the bathroom windowsill had at least four inches.

  As he was still wearing his coat, there seemed little point in showering and changing. He would go right to the corner diner for breakfast instead.

  As he approached the front door, he noticed there was something pushed underneath. It was a postcard. On one side was an illustration of
Rock Point in Burlington, the place where he and Albert Ellingham had lowered a massive amount of marked bills down to a boat—a boat which then disappeared. He flipped over the card and read the following words, written in a blocky scrawl:

  KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT IF YOU WANT HER.

  George smiled grimly. The fish was tugging on the bait.

  12

  “WAKEY, WAKEY.”

  Stevie opened her eyes, but she was still in the dark. There was a hand shaking her shoulder. It took her a moment to process that the hand and the voice belonged to David. Stevie had dozed off leaning against the closet wall in her stack of pillows, And Then There Were None open in her hand. She shook her head hard and tried to seem alert and together, though she strongly suspected she had been drooling and snoring. There was a stiff crustiness to her whole body, the kind you get from wearing the same clothes for a few days because you’ve been preoccupied, then spending a winter’s day inside a pool closet with a bunch of chemicals.

  “Up and at ’em,” David said. “Time to go home.”

  “Home?”

  “No point in hiding now,” he said. “That just makes them look for us and cause trouble.”

  Stevie stepped out of the closet into the pool room. The glass ceiling was heavy with snow. Nate was looking up at it worriedly.

  “I know it’s probably built for this weather,” he said. “But that is a lot of snow. Not to be a big baby or anything, but I don’t want to die in a shower of glass shards.”

  The first thing they found was that they could no longer open the door; a foot of snow had already blocked it. They left through the window they had used to come in. The snow was pouring down. It was so heavy that Stevie couldn’t see the other buildings, just outlines in a white and night-pink world. The view was a bit magical—the Great House framed against the sky, with a white blanket set all around it. A few lights were on, glowing against the fierce, weird weather. The rest of Ellingham was dark. Nothing stirred in the library or the classrooms or the houses. Neptune was slowly being buried in his fountain, consumed by another form of water, which had slipped out of his control. The snow muffled everything. That was maybe the strangest part. Stevie realized that even though it was quiet up here, there was always a low, gentle current of noise—trees rustling in the wind, creaking wood, animals. Tonight, nothing but the operatic whistle of the wind. Their voices were flattened by the thick coating all around them, making each word stand out.

  Not that they could say much. Walking was hard. Each step demanded that she pull her leg out of the almost knee-deep accumulation, lift up the other foot, and plunge it down through the snow. It was heavy and aerobic. She sweated from the effort of the walk, and the sweat created a halo of cold all over her body. It wasn’t long before her feet began to burn and go numb. By the time they had gotten back on the path to Minerva House, Stevie would have faced anything or anyone to get inside.

  Minerva was deliciously warm when they trudged back in. There was a cheerful fire going, tended to by Hunter, who poked at it threateningly, in case it decided to get out of hand. He was wearing the fleece and slippers she had picked out for him. Pix was next to him, on the beaten-down sofa, wrapped in her massive brown fuzzy robe. Though she was dressed like a teddy bear, she had the look of a much more frightening creature on her face as she stood up.

  “Everyone get changed so you don’t freeze to death,” she said. “Then you come right back here so I can yell at you. Because I am pissed.”

  Stevie stumbled into her room, which was darker than normal as the snow had piled on her windowsill and blocked the window halfway. She knocked on the light switch with a raw, burning hand and peeled off her wet clothes. Everything hurt as her body came back up to temperature. Instinctively, she grabbed her robe and staggered across the hall to the shower. Even the hottest water felt cold against her skin. She huddled in the corner against the tiles until something approaching warmth took over again. Her feet were the last to come back online. She went out, numbly pushed her way back into her room, and grabbed at whatever clothes were closest and softest and warmest. Then she put on more—more socks, another sweatshirt on top of the first, then a blanket around her shoulders. Finally, covered in so many layers she had to shuffle, she went back to the common room. Janelle was there, in her fuzzy cat-face pajamas. Vi was wearing another borrowed pair covered in rainbows. David must have had one spare set of clothes in his big bag—the sloppy old Yale sweatpants that used to be his dad’s. He had been wearing them on the night they first kissed.

  “Okay,” Pix said once everyone was seated. “I’m going to be really, really clear about some things. Everyone is under house arrest. Nobody leaves here until the snow clears. The school may be closed, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no way to enforce this. You want good recommendations at your home schools? Do you want any chance of coming back if we ever reopen? Do you want to go to college? You stay put until I say otherwise. Except you, Hunter. You can do whatever you like.”

  “I can’t go anywhere either,” he said. “The snow is nuts.”

  “No. But I have to say that you’re free to do whatever.”

  “Fine,” David said, kicking back and putting his feet by the fire. “Nowhere to go anyway.”

  “We’re not even going to get into where you’ve been,” Pix said. “Only because it’s probably not even relevant anymore.”

  “I went on a quest,” he said.

  Nate shot him a look that seemed to say, “Don’t joke about quests, jackass.”

  “All of you,” Pix said. “Have you called home yet?”

  “I don’t have a signal,” Vi said.

  “Yeah, me either,” Nate said.

  Stevie pulled out her phone. No signal.

  “I have a landline upstairs,” Pix said. “We’ll take it in turns. Who wants to start?”

  No one wanted to start, so somehow Stevie ended up going first. In all the time she had been at Ellingham, she had not been in Pix’s private apartment, which took up the space above the common room and kitchen, and also the area down the hallway opposite the upstairs rooms. She had painted the walls a clay color. There were beautiful Middle Eastern and African objects—brass teapots with long spouts; low, hexagonal tables topped in azure and white tiles; delicately carved wooden animals; tin and brass hanging lanterns with colored insets. There were reproduction hieroglyphics printed on vellum hanging alongside Pix’s other passion: her 90s music. She had at least a dozen original concert posters from bands like Nirvana. Nirvana was the only one Stevie recognized.

  Of course, there were bones too. There were Pix’s precious teeth in the little craft organizer. Her mantel was decorated with some bones that were probably fake—a femur, a skull, a knee joint mounted on a little board. The rest of the place was filled with books—books in all directions, piled into bookcases and into stacks along the walls. Books next to her little sofa, books by the hallway and books on the table.

  Pix handed her a landline phone. Stevie braced herself against Pix’s treadmill and dialed. Her mom answered.

  “Hey,” Stevie said. “I’m sorry. I missed the coach. It all happened really fast, and . . .”

  “You’re all right! Oh, Stevie, are you okay? Are you warm?”

  To her utter amazement, her mom did not seem angry. The school had to have said something mild, that she had missed the coach or something—not that she had run and hidden in a pool until nightfall. This seemed like Call Me Charles’s work; it was his job to smooth the rough and make it seem like Ellingham wasn’t a total death trap. In his defense, he had done a pretty good job. All the bounciness and platitudes had some good effect.

  “You stay in,” her mom said. “Stay safe, stay warm. As soon as the snow clears, you’ll come home.”

  “Sure,” Stevie said, unsure of how to feel. When her parents were understanding about things, it always made her feel like a toad, like she was misjudging them.

  “We love you,” her mom added.

 
; What was this love stuff? It wasn’t something her parents and she did. They all felt it, but they didn’t go around saying it.

  “I, um . . . yeah. We’re fine. We have lots of food, and, like, popcorn and stuff. And blankets and firewood.”

  What was she saying? She must have been trying to build some mental picture of what a cozy weekend indoors in a cabin was like. Which, to be fair, was a pretty accurate picture. They did have food and popcorn and blankets and firewood. It would be cozy.

  When she was done with the call, she handed Pix the phone.

  “You seem confused,” Pix said.

  “I thought they’d kill me,” Stevie replied.

  “Surprise, Stevie. Your parents just want you to be safe.”

  Pix put the phone back on the charging base and leaned against the wall.

  “You guys are morons, you know that?” she said. “Out of all the houses, I got the most boneheaded. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy you’re all still here. Now come on. Let’s get all the calls out of the way and then we can eat. I raided the dining hall when I realized all of you were still here.”

  The mood in the room lifted a bit as everyone made their calls and then the food started coming out of the kitchen. Pix had come back with a solid haul—trays of mac and cheese, plastic bowls of salad and fruit, lasagna, chicken, roasted potatoes, grilled tofu . . . whatever had been prepared for the day’s lunch, plus milk and juice and all kinds of drinks. There was too much of it to fit in the fridge, so Pix had put some of it outside, under the kitchen window. Nature had provided the refrigeration. There were plenty of the normal things like hot chocolate and popcorn and cereal. Really, they had all the makings of an amazing weekend in. One great last hurrah together. They all dug into the food enthusiastically.