The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  “Or you could destroy it,” Janelle said. She and Nate had come over to listen to this conversion. Janelle sat primly on the sofa. Even wearing cat-head pajamas, she looked serious.

  “Destroy it?” Vi repeated.

  “If the goal is to take down Edward King,” Janelle said, “you take away the thing he’s using to get his money. Once you destroy it, he has no leverage against these people.”

  “And we have nothing on him,” Vi said. “Or them.”

  “But you’ve completed your objective,” Janelle said. “If this material was obtained illegally, then destroy it. End the crime. Don’t go any farther down this path. If you want to do good, do it the right way.”

  “But all these people . . . ,” Vi said.

  “If the stuff was stolen,” Janelle said, “destroy it.”

  “This is tough,” Hunter said. “Not sure what I would do.”

  David leaned back against the wall and stared at the tablets.

  “Honestly,” he said, “if this stops my dad, I don’t care how we do it. Vi, it’s your call.”

  This left Vi, who gazed at the tablets and the bag of flash drives.

  “There’s so much here,” they said.

  “And these people will go down,” Janelle said. “But there are right ways and wrong ways.”

  Vi looked to Janelle. Stevie could feel something pass between them, something palpable in the air. Vi got up and gathered all the tablets. They put them in the cold fireplace, then grabbed the poker and began to smash them. As they did so, Janelle sat up straighter, her eyes brimming with tears.

  “I’ll flush these,” David said, picking up the flash drives and gathering the remains of the tablets.

  Everyone in the room moved away to give Vi and Janelle a little space as Vi sat next to Janelle and took her by both hands.

  As David left the room, Stevie almost thought she felt him give her a look as well. At least, someone was watching her. She could feel it.

  19

  BEING STUCK IN A MOUNTAINTOP RETREAT DURING A BLIZZARD SOUNDS fun and romantic, especially if you are talking about a place like Ellingham Academy, which was entirely made of nooks and views. It had ample firewood and food. It was big enough for everyone. It should have been pleasant, at least.

  But snow does funny things to the mind. Everything felt close and airless. Time started to have no meaning. Now that the task many people in this particular group had stayed to perform was complete, there was a baggy confusion to what was supposed to happen next. At least Vi and Janelle were back together, sitting pressed up so close to each other that Stevie thought they might actually overlap. Hunter was napping. Nate was trying to sink into the sofa and be left alone.

  And David? Well, he sat on his chair and played a game on his computer, looking at Stevie over the top occasionally.

  She got up and left the room, taking her bag with her.

  They weren’t supposed to go upstairs, but nobody had said they couldn’t sit on the stairs, so that’s where she sat, alone and in public, on the grand staircase. Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase, but . . .

  “We’ll probably be able to get out in about twenty-four hours,” she heard Mark Parsons saying. He was up on the balcony walkway above with Dr. Quinn and Call Me Charles. Plans were being made. They would all leave this place, to go to an uncertain future.

  She sat on the landing, wrapped in a blanket, and stared at the portrait of the Ellingham family. This would be her anchor. It made as much sense as anything else. The swirling colors, the distortion of the moon, the dark sky, the dome looming in the background. Her pulse surged and the world swam, so she dove into the painting. She was there, standing alongside the Ellinghams in their kaleidoscopic world. The doomed Ellinghams.

  The painting. That photo of Leonard Holmes Nair painting on the lawn . . .

  She pulled her bag over and removed the diary. She blinked away some of the spots from in front of her eyes and flipped it open, grabbing for the photos inside, flipping through the shots of Francis and Eddie in their poses, in the trees, and there . . .

  There it was. The photo of Leonard Holmes Nair on the lawn. She looked at the photo and up at the painting several times. Then she got up and went over to the painting, examining it closely. She looked at the sky, specifically, the shape of it around the Ellinghams. The placement of the moon.

  It was the same painting. The figures were precisely the same. The moon in this painting was in the same position as the sun in the one in the photograph. Where the Great House had been in the photograph painting, the scene had been converted into the background of the dome, into a halo of light.

  Same painting. Different setting. Why had he repainted it like this? The moon was high in the painting, and the moonbeams dipped down around the dome, landing on a spot off to the side, right about where the tunnel was. And the pool of light . . .

  There was something there, something she couldn’t put her finger on.

  She turned away from the painting and opened the diary again, flipping through the now-familiar entries. Francis in love. Francis in misery. Francis bored. Francis making charts of ammunition and explosives. She glanced through the poems but kept coming back to the one that stood out from the others.

  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

  Was this about places she had been? Dancing at balls? The Northern Line in London? The Left Bank of Paris?

  Something was eating at Stevie. She knew what this was. She had seen this. She just couldn’t place it.

  She rubbed her eyes and looked back up at the painting, the dome in the moonlight.

  The dome.

  This wasn’t a poem. These were instructions. And she knew exactly what Francis was talking about.

  No one paid any attention as she walked casually back into the morning room and slipped one of the brochures from the table by the door. She retreated to the steps again for privacy and sat on the floor, opening the diary to the poem page and the brochure booklet to the map of Ellingham, the idealized one drawn by the artist who drew books for children.

  All that I care about starts at nine. Nine was Minerva House on the map—the house where Francis lived.

  Dance twelve hundred steps on the northern line. This was fairly direct. Twelve hundred steps to the north. Stevie couldn’t take twelve hundred steps, but the instructions hinted at where to go. To the left bank three hundred times . . . that was a quarter of the distance of the first instruction. If you roughed this out in your mind, it would land you at . . .

  The top of the map, to the initials E and A for Ellingham Academy, in the circle that read, FOUNDED 1935.

  Line flag. There was a flag on the top of the dome, and in this picture, it pointed right toward the E and A.

  There was something there, something Francis was calling a treasure. Which meant Stevie was going to go and find it.

  There was the small matter of the blizzard and not being allowed out. The second part didn’t concern her much. When you are already in a lot of trouble, getting in more trouble isn’t that big of a deal. David had said earlier that the security system was run over Wi-Fi. While the Wi-Fi was up in the house, it wasn’t around campus, so no one would necessarily know she was out there. What she needed were her coat and boots from the security office because they were soaking wet. All she needed to do was go in there, get them, and slip quietly outside. Get some air. Nothing wrong with taking a little walk.

  Stevie put her backpack on and descended the stairs casually. She went to the bathroom first and left her bag on the floor. The bathroom windows were large enough to climb through and led out to the far side of the stone promenade that ran around the side and back of the house. She stepped out. Charles and Dr. Quinn were nowhere in si
ght, but it sounded like they were in one of the offices in the second floor. Mark Parsons had been going in and out and was probably out front with the snowcat. Pix, however, was sitting by the big fireplace in the hall, reading. She would need a way past her.

  The best ways, she had noted from her research, were simple ways. She needed only a minute.

  Stevie walked up to Pix.

  “Um,” she said, “I think Janelle and Vi . . . I think they want to talk to you?”

  “About what?” Pix asked.

  “Not sure. You asked about them earlier . . .” That was good, because it was true. Always put truth in there. “I think they . . .”

  She left it hanging and vague, then shrugged. Pix nodded and got up to go into the morning room. Stevie did not hesitate. That was another thing—once you set the plan in motion, keep moving. Don’t turn around. She grabbed her coat and boots and walked slowly back toward the bathroom. Never run.

  The rest was easy. Coat on. Boots on. Bag on back. She boosted herself onto the sink and got through the window without too much difficulty.

  The difficulties began when she dropped herself into three feet of snow. She considered climbing back in the window immediately, but this was it. Now or never.

  So she began. First, to Minerva.

  That journey, which had to go through the back garden and out of view of the house, took about a half hour, instead of the five minutes it would normally have taken. The snow was heavy, sticky stuff that clung to her boots and legs. The cold air dried out her windpipe and made every breath burn, so she pulled her scarf over her face. Once there, she stopped inside to warm herself and heave for a few minutes. She added a layer of clothing and ran her hands under warm water.

  Back out into the snow.

  Twelve hundred steps north. Stevie pulled out her phone and let the compass spin. She began to walk, counting the steps.

  Twelve hundred steps would normally have been a straightforward thing. Twelve hundred steps in this snow was like ten miles. She was winded after the first two hundred steps, and by four hundred, she was drenched in cold sweat. She had to work her way around the yurt and try to calculate for that, and again at the art barn, she had to make a few guesses.

  Snowblind and exhausted, she stopped at the point that was likely around twelve hundred paces. This was starting to feel very stupid, and the desire to go back to the Great House was strong, but the way back was about as far as she had to go now anyway. Three hundred paces.

  There, back in the snowy trees, back where no one ever went, in a place she had never noticed, was a statue. This was nothing new at Ellingham Academy; the place was littered with them, like someone had gone a little crazy at Statue Target. Statues were like trash cans or lights—just part of the landscape. This one was of a Greek or Roman man, standing tall in his toga, his head covered in snow. He stood on his pedestal, looking bored.

  “Okay,” Stevie said. “Tiptoe.”

  Tiptoe? How the hell did she tiptoe in this snow? She stood on her toes and looked at the statue’s knees.

  Not that.

  She turned toward the house and school and stood on her toes. The view did not change.

  Maybe it would require more. She jumped a few times. She kicked the base of the statue, sending up a small cloud of snow.

  “Come on,” she hissed, turning around and looking at the dimming sky. “Something’s here. Tiptoe. Tiptoe . . .”

  When she said it out loud, she got it. It was a very Albert Ellingham thing Francis had done. Tiptoe. Break the word. Tip. Toe.

  She brushed the snow off the base of the statue, revealing its bare feet. Sure enough, the big toe of the left foot was slightly raised, as if the figure was about to take a step. Stevie leaned in to look at it and could make out, very faintly, a crack—a joint where the stone was split. She pulled off her glove, ignoring the pain the cold caused, and grabbed the toe, pulling, pushing, pulling again until it gave. It hinged back a bit.

  She had no time to express her excitement. This was because she was falling into the earth.

  April 13, 1937

  A SOFT NIGHT RAIN WAS FALLING ON THE ELLINGHAM GREAT HOUSE. Leonard Holmes Nair stood on the flagstone patio in the mist. His feet and hands were covered in dirt; his trouser cuffs would likely never recover. He was trying to let the rain wash away what he had seen down there in the tunnel.

  Leo had been in the house all day; he had never left the property. On impulse, when the car was halfway down the drive, Leo said, “You know, if you don’t mind stopping, I feel a bit unwell. I think I may have to go back to bed for the afternoon, if that’s all right. The walk back up will help, I think.” He got out of the car and returned to the house.

  One very good thing about Albert’s house was that if you didn’t want to be seen, you did not have to be. The size alone made this possible, but the various little passages and nooks made it simple. He watched George Marsh send the security guards to the four winds, he watched Montgomery cleaning things away while he listened to the radio. George Marsh had meandered around all day, slept a bit, and generally done nothing at all until nightfall, when he made his curious journey into the garden. Leo didn’t dare follow him down into the dome, but he watched him come back up covered in dirt, go to his car, and retrieve a bundle. The bundle did not come back up again. So when George Marsh went inside the house, Leo went down under the dome to see what had been put there.

  Now he was aboveground again, queasy, and in shock. The shock made everything mild, almost reasonable. He had just watched George Marsh bury Alice’s body. Leo had seen dead bodies before; in his art-student days he did medical illustrations for money. He had seen human parts in basins and pans and attended autopsies. After the war, he had been unfortunate enough to be present at two suicides. This, however, was something entirely different and new and numbing. It made no sense, and it demanded to be understood.

  Which was why Leo was standing on the patio, shivering and wet under a sliver of a moon, planning his next move. What did you do when you were in a remote location with someone you suspected of murder? There were security men about, but they were far. Montgomery was in the house, but he was asleep and not physically robust enough to take on someone like Marsh.

  The sensible thing would be to slip inside Albert’s office now and call the police. A hundred men would descend on the house within the hour. He could tuck himself away until then.

  That was the obvious course of action. Call the police. Do it now. Stay out of sight and wait.

  But Leonard Holmes Nair was not a man known for doing the obvious and sensible thing. He was not foolhardy, but he often took the other path, the one less traveled. Whatever was going on with George Marsh—there was a story there, a story he might never know if the police raided the house and took him away. This story that was clearly fairly complicated, because if George had killed Alice, why had he brought her back? Questions would linger for the rest of his life, and that was a prospect that troubled Leo quite a bit.

  Then again, confronting a man who was used to physical fighting and was probably a bit on the nervous side also didn’t seem like a good option.

  So what was it to be?

  Leo looked to the moon to help, but it simply hung in the sky and told him nothing. The cold was penetrating his clothes. At least the smell was starting to leave his nose. He would never feel the same way about the scent of fresh earth again. He had gone to the underworld and returned, changed.

  He opened the door to Albert’s office and switched on a small, green-shaded light at the desk by the door. He was fairly certain that Albert kept a revolver in the desk. He tried all the drawers but found them locked. He searched the top of the desk for a key, rummaging through papers, telegraph slips, pen and pencil containers, looked under the phone. He did the same to Mackenzie’s much neater desk on the opposite side of the room. He spent a fruitless hour delicately ransacking the room before pausing to lean against the cold fireplace. The French clock ticked away t
he midnight hours.

  The clock. This chunk of green marble, fabled to have been among Marie Antoinette’s possessions. Leo picked it up. It was a heavy piece, weighing twenty pounds or more. He lifted it over to one of the reading chairs and set it down, flipping it on its head. He felt around for the catch that Albert had shown him those years before, that snowy day in Switzerland. His long fingers worked the base of the clock until he felt the small indentation, barely noticeable. He pressed on it and felt something give—the little drawer in the base. He flipped the clock upright and pulled it open, revealing a small collection of loose keys.

  “Albert, you maniac,” Leo said, snatching them up. A few tries revealed which ones opened which drawers, and a bit more poking turned up a small but powerful-looking revolver and some ammunition. Leo had never loaded a gun before, but the general mechanics of the thing seemed clear enough.

  Five minutes later, he was making his way out into the great open atrium of the house, his steps echoing against the marble and crystal and miles of polished wood, this cathedral of wealth and sadness. It seemed best not to sneak up on Marsh; one doesn’t want to creep up on a person who has just buried a body in a tunnel at midnight. Better to make it loud.

  “Hello!” he called. “It’s me, Leo! George, are you up there?”

  George appeared on the landing in seconds, dressed only in the bottom half of some pajamas.

  “Leo?” he said. “What are you doing here? How long have you been there?”

  His tone gave away nothing, but his question did.

  “I came back,” Leo said again. “God, it’s dismal. Come have a drink.”

  George hesitated a moment, gripping the rail, then said, “Of course, yeah. A drink.” He walked along the balcony rail, looking down as he approached the stairs. “Anyone else come back? I didn’t hear you.”

  “No,” Leo said, trying to sound casual. “I felt terrible and came back earlier. I’ve been in bed all day. I woke up and thought you’d be about.”