“So why leave me the card?” George asked.
“I guess I was tired of fighting it. You get tired.”
George felt something roiling in his abdomen—coffee and bile. You get tired. He was so tired. Once he got Alice, it would be over. Whatever happened to him then, maybe it didn’t matter. Get Alice and get Andy. Albert Ellingham knew half the government of Cuba. That would be easily settled. A sweet relief broke with the dawn. So much pain and tension and fear this last year, and for what? Now, there would be some redemption.
“Here,” Jerry said. “Turn here.”
They turned down something that was barely a road—it was a dirt path cut into the woods, pocked and pitted, full of ice and snow. The car sputtered and at one point almost slid off the road and into a tree. At the end of the road was a house, rough, made of logs and clapboard, with a collapsed-in porch with several deer antlers scattered around. An anemic finger of smoke came from the chimney.
“This is it?” George said.
“This is it. This is the house. These are the people. Nice people.”
“So here’s what we’re going to do,” George said. “I untie you. You walk up to the door in front of me, in case these are the kind of people who say hello with a shotgun. I’m behind you with my gun. Remember, I want to shoot you. You do anything funny, I give in to my impulse.”
“Nothing funny, nothing funny.”
George tugged the ropes loose so that Jerry could get out. The cuffs he left on, covered once again with George’s coat. Jerry stumbled ahead as the front door of the house opened and a man walked out. He may have been George’s age, or even younger, but time ravaged here. His hair was thinning and greasily patched to his head. He had a gray complexion, the look of someone who hadn’t seen the sun or a decent meal in some time. He wore loose overalls and a flannel shirt, but no coat. He did not seem happy to have visitors.
“Morning!” Jerry said with a queasy fake cheerfulness. His New York accent sounded like snapping twigs in the cold morning. “You remember me? With the kid?”
The man regarded them both for a long moment, and George rested his hand on the butt of his handgun tucked into the back of his trousers, just in case. This man had keen eyes and seemed to read the situation well—he took in Jerry, supplicant and bundled, and George, who always looked like a cop, no matter what he did.
“Took you long enough to come back for her,” the man said, sounding annoyed. “You said a week. Lot more than a week.”
“I know,” Jerry said. “I’m sorry. But we’re here now.”
“Only paid us for the week.”
“You’ll be paid,” George cut in before Jerry could say anything else. “Take this for a starter.”
He reached into his pocket and grabbed a handful of bills. He had no idea how many. Could have been two hundred bucks or two thousand. He held them out, and the man stepped down from the porch and took them. His hands were rough and worn from work, but clean. This lightened George’s heart somehow. This was a poor house in a rough terrain, but there was nothing wrong with being poor, and people knew how to live here, how to keep warm and fed, even during the depths of an endless winter.
“Thought so,” the man said, looking at the fistful of cash. “It’s that kid from the papers, isn’t it? Has to be. The Ellingham girl.”
George tilted his head noncommittally.
“Bet there’s more where this came from,” the man said, holding up the crumpled notes.
“You’ll be paid well.”
The man grunted. “You should have come sooner. Been a long time. You said a week or two.”
“We’re here now,” George said.
“She’s in the back.”
George went to walk up the stone steps, but the man shook his head.
“No, not in the house. She’s outside, out back. Come on.”
George looked out at the snowy field that stretched behind the house. A good place for a kid. A kid could build a good snowman out there. He could almost see her already, thumping through the snow, laughing. Maybe this had all been for the best. Maybe Alice had had a normal life here, a simple life. Maybe she had swum in a lake in the summer, picked apples in the fall.
“Bess liked having a kid around,” the man said, trapping through a half foot of snow.
George looked around at the smooth, pure snow. There were, he noted, no footprints.
“Where?” he said, scanning the area.
“Over there,” the man said somewhat impatiently. “By them trees.”
George began to walk faster, forgetting Jerry, who stumbled along with his hands bound behind his back, the coat slipping from his shoulders. Alice. Alive. Alice. Alive. Those words were so alike. She was here, playing. She was here, in the snow. She was . . .
There was no one by the tree.
George felt the rise of the panic and his reflexes kicked in. He pulled the gun from his waistband and spun in one move, hampered a bit by the snow packed around his ankles. How had he been so stupid? He had walked into a trap. This was a conspiracy, and George was about to be taken down.
And yet, when he faced the stranger and Jerry, there was no gun pointed at him.
“What’s going on?” he yelled. “Where is she?”
“I just told you,” the man said. “She’s here.”
“There is no one here.”
“Look down,” the man said.
George looked down at snow.
“It happened not two weeks ago,” the man said. “She got the measles. Marked her there, where the stone is.”
George saw it now—a stone. Not a headstone. Not even a marked stone. Just a rock, covered in snow.
“I told you, you shoulda come sooner,” he said. “Can’t do nothing with the measles. Kept her in the back. She was never gonna make it, kid like that. Kid was weak.”
George stared at the rock that marked his daughter’s grave.
“Did you get her a doctor?” he rasped.
“Couldn’t get a doctor out for that kid,” the man said dismissively. “Once we knew who she was.”
Once we knew who she was. George breathed in the freezing air evenly. He felt no cold.
“Get a shovel,” he said.
George sent the man back to the house and stood guard as Jerry did the digging. The first layer was quick—all snow. Alice was not buried deep, barely a foot underground, and not even in a coffin. The body had been wrapped up in some sacking.
“Oh God,” Jerry said, looking down at the bundle. “I never . . .”
“Put the shovel down and move away from her.”
Jerry stumbled back, dropping the shovel. He held up his hands in surrender.
“I’m not going to shoot you, Jerry,” George said, tucking his gun into his waistband.
Jerry half collapsed, breathing heavily, heaving, praising George and God in equal measure. He did not see George pick up the shovel, and was shocked by the first blow, which knocked him to his knees. They came fast, a flurry mixed with cries and gulps. The snow splattered with blood.
When it was over, George tossed the shovel down and panted. There was no movement from the direction of the house. They were far enough that nothing may have been seen or heard. The stranger would have been listening for shots, most likely, and there had been none.
Gathering himself, he walked over to the grave. He lifted the little parcel from the hole. It had frozen stiff. He set Alice down carefully on the fresh snow, then used the shovel to enlarge and deepen the hole. He deposited Jerry, facedown.
He carried Alice to the car and put her gently on the back seat, carefully arranging the car rug over her as if warmth could revive her.
After taking a moment to consider what he had done, he removed his gun from his waistband, confirmed that it was loaded, and began the walk back to the house.
16
STEVIE FELT LIKE SHE WAS CONCEALING A BOMB.
It was so weird that it was night now, weird that the group was back together
around the big farm table. In the excitement of the search, Stevie had temporarily forgotten everything else that was going on—the snow, David, the files they were reading.
Pix, unaware of all the activity going on around her, had put out bread and sandwich makings, plus some of the salads and odds and ends that the dining hall had left behind. There were cold drinks with snow still on the bottles. Stevie grabbed one of the maple spruce sodas that she thought were disgusting. She didn’t care how anything tasted right now. She needed to go through the motions, eat, and go back to her room with the diary that was sitting on her bed. There was a bowl of tuna salad. She grabbed two slices of the closest bread and smacked on a gob, squashing it flat. She sliced it with one long cut and dropped down into a chair at the far end of the table.
David sat at the other end, one of the old tablets next to him, facedown.
“I don’t eat tuna salad,” he said, grabbing a piece of bread. “It’s too mysterious. People sneak things into it. It’s a sneak food.”
“I like it,” Hunter said. “We make it at home with sliced-up dill pickle and Old Bay Seasoning.”
“Good to know,” David said. “Nate, where do you come down on tuna salad?”
Nate was trying to read and eat some cold mac and cheese in peace.
“I don’t eat fish,” he said. “Fish freak me out.”
“Noted. What about you, Janelle?”
Vi kept sneaking looks over at Janelle. Janelle remained polite but resolute. She made herself a plate of cold roasted chicken and salad, then sat next to Stevie. Vi stared into the depths of their mug of tea. “I have better things to think about,” she said. “How has your day gone?”
“Slow,” David replied. “But, you know.”
“I don’t, actually,” Janelle said.
David kept looking over at Stevie. His expression was impossible to read. It wasn’t unfriendly. It was almost . . . pitying? Like he felt bad for her?
That was unacceptable. Give her the smirk. Ignore her. But pity didn’t sit well on David’s sharply angled face. Stevie lifted her chin and stared back as she ate her tuna salad. And when she accidentally dropped some tuna salad on her lap, she brushed it to the floor, refusing to acknowledge that it had happened.
She excused herself as soon as she had cleared away her plate. Janelle came with her. Back in her room, Stevie knelt next to her bed, like someone praying or bowing before an artifact. Janelle sat on the bed and watched as Stevie opened the book again. The cover made that same creak. It had a very faintly musty odor, and the pages were a milky yellow, but the diary was otherwise in good repair. The handwriting was an ornate cursive, perfectly level, small and exquisitely formed. The ink was smudged in places.
“Let’s start with the pictures.” Stevie held up the photo of the girl in the slinky knit dress, her hand on her hip, a cigar in her teeth. “This is Francis. This has to be her diary. She lived here.”
Francis Josephine Crane and Edward Pierce Davenport were both students in the first Ellingham class of 1935–36, the class that had to go home early in April when the kidnappings happened. Francis lived in Minerva; this had been her room. Her family owned Crane Flour (“America’s favorite! Baking’s never a pain when you’re baking with Crane!” had apparently been their slogan). They were a massively wealthy family, friends of the Ellinghams in New York City; they had adjacent town houses on Fifth Avenue. She was only sixteen when she was at Ellingham, but her life was full of travel, tutors, summers in Newport, winters in Miami, trips to Europe, balls and parties, everything afforded to the rich during the Depression while the country starved. Her life after Ellingham was a bit of a mystery. She had a coming-out ball at the Ritz when she was eighteen, but there was very little after that.
Edward, or Eddie, came from a similar background. He was a rich kid who had burned his way through schools and tutors. Eddie wanted to be a poet. His fate was known. After Ellingham, he went to college, then dropped out and went to Paris to be a poet. On the day the Nazis took over the city, he got drunk on champagne and leaped off the top of a building and onto a Nazi vehicle, a fall that killed him.
In these photos, they were alive again, and wild. Stevie turned the pages carefully, first examining the clippings. Many were from newspapers—stories of John Dillinger, Ma Barker, Pretty Boy Floyd. All bank robbers. Outlaws. There were other things too—pages torn out of science textbooks. Formulas.
“These mean anything to you?” Stevie said to Janelle.
“Only that most of these things are explosive,” Janelle replied.
In the margin of one of the pages was a note: Fingerprints: H2SO4 NaOH
“What’s this?” Stevie asked.
“Sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide. Common acids. I don’t know what the fingerprints means.”
“I think it means burning off fingerprints,” Stevie said. “Gangsters and bank robbers did that. Burned them off with acid.”
The next few pages were full of hand-drawn maps, very detailed and finely done in pencil, hearkening from a time before Google, when you had to find physical copies to plan your route. Whoever had drawn this was competent at sketching, with a steady, precise hand. There were more pages, both handwritten and torn out of other sources, about guns and ammunition.
“This is some scary stuff,” Janelle said. “Like someone preparing for a school shooting.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Stevie replied. “I think this is a self-written guidebook. This is about becoming a gangster or a bank robber. There was no internet, so she made herself a textbook.”
A ribbon divided the book in two. Stevie opened to this dividing point. Here, it was less clippings and more handwriting. These were diary entries. Stevie scanned the first few:
9/12/35
Everything was supposed to be different here, but it looks to me to be a lot of the same crummy stuff that happens at home. I have to look at Gertrude van Coevorden every day, and sometimes I think if she says one more inane thing I will have to set her hair on fire. She’s an unbelievable snob. She’s really mean to Dottie, who seems to be the only one around here with any brains at all. It’s a shame she’s so miserably poor.
9/20/35
A bright spark. His name is Eddie, and he’s a very interesting boy. If he’s the same Eddie I’m thinking of, the stories about him are something else. They say he fathered a baby once and the girl had to be sent away somewhere outside of Boston to give birth in private. He looks capable of it. I intend to find out more.
9/21/35
I asked Eddie about the baby. He smiled and asked me if I’d like to find out about it, that he’d be willing to show me. I told him if he said anything like that to me again I’d put out a cigarette in his eye. We’re going to meet tonight after dark.
9/22/35
Eddie gave me some lessons. This place will not be so bad after all.
9/25/35
Quite intensive studying with my new professor. Oh, Daddy. Oh, Mother. If you only knew. Bless you and your devotion to your friends. Thank you for sending me here.
“Get yours, girl,” Janelle said.
Stevie flipped around, scanning the entries. As the book went on, there were some poems.
OUR TREASURE
All that I care about starts at nine
Dance twelve hundred steps on the northern line
To the left bank three hundred times
E+A
Line flag
Tiptoe
This one stumped Stevie a bit more. E suggested Eddie, but who was A?
Then she got to the page that almost stopped her heart. Here, in black and white, was the draft of Truly Devious. Stevie could see them working out the wording.
Riddle, riddle time for fun
Should we use a rope or gun?
Matches burn, scissors slash
Knives slice, matches burn
Knives cut
Knives are sharp
And gleam so pretty
Bombs are
<
br /> Poison’s bitter
Poison’s slow
There were three pages of this before they got to the final version.
Stevie had to walk around the room several times.
“You know what this is?” Stevie said.
“Proof,” Janelle replied.
“More proof. Of something. At least that Truly Devious is—”
Then the power went out.
17
“FUN FACT,” STEVIE SAID, TRYING TO LIGHTEN THE MOOD IN THE VAST, gloomy space. “This fireplace? Henry the Eighth had one just like it, in Hampton Court. Albert Ellingham had an exact copy made.”
“Fun fact,” Nate replied, “Henry the Eighth killed two of his wives. Who wants a murderer’s fireplace?”
“I’m not sure, but that’s the name of my new game show.”
Nate and Stevie were the first to make it over to the Great House, which was where all the residents of Minerva were to be moved after the loss of power; the Great House had its own generator. The distance from Minerva to the Great House was only a few hundred yards, but conditions outside had become too dangerous for walking. Mark Parsons drove over in the snowcat, which he had parked under the portico in preparation for the storm. The cab of the snowcat could hold only two of them at a time, along with Mark. There was a lot of confusion while everyone worked out who would go with who, and in what order. Janelle and Vi edged around each other uncertainly. Hunter looked deeply uncomfortable with everything that had happened in this confusing universe he had just landed in. David was giving dark, baffling looks.
The Hand on the Wall Page 16
