The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  It was a strange story and a weird way to announce that you’d been around for hours, but it would have to do. The weight of the gun in Leo’s pocket seemed to increase. Would it be noticeable? Perhaps. Best to put it down.

  “Come to Albert’s office,” Leo said, hurrying back in that direction. “The good stuff is in here.”

  He quickly settled himself in the chair by one of the decanter trollies and stuffed the gun behind him, making sure the barrel was pointed downward. Hopefully it wouldn’t set itself off. Guns didn’t do that, did they?

  “Funny I didn’t hear you,” George said. “When did you get back?”

  “Oh . . .” Leo waved his hand airily. “I never went. Turned around on the drive. Couldn’t face a day out there on the boat. The whole thing is very . . .”

  He shivered a bit to indicate the emotional state of things.

  “Yeah,” George said, seeming to relax a bit. He came over and poured himself a bit of the whiskey from the decanter. “It really has been. I could use a drink.”

  “You were smart to stay as well,” Leo said, sipping gingerly. “This nightmare.”

  The gun made it impossible to lean back, so Leo hunched forward a bit as if the weight of the day sat on his shoulders like a monkey. The two men drank in silence for several minutes, listening to the rain hit the wall of French doors and the wind whistle in the chimney.

  It was now or never. He could drink and go to bed, or he could continue.

  “George . . . ,” Leo said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know I . . . well, I’d like to ask you something.”

  George Marsh’s expression didn’t change much. A few blinks. A slide or two of the jaw.

  “What’s that?”

  Leo swirled the liquid in his glass with one hand, keeping the other alongside his leg, where he might slide it back if necessary.

  “I saw what you did. I thought you might explain.”

  There was no immediate reply, just the ticking of the clock and the patter of the rain.

  “Saw?” George finally said.

  “Out under the dome, in the tunnel.”

  “Oh,” George said.

  Oh didn’t quite cover the situation, Leo felt, but the conversation had started. George let out a long breath and leaned forward. Leo had a surge of raw panic and almost slid his hand back for the gun, but George was only putting his drink down in order to rest his elbows on his knees and cradle his head in his hands for a moment.

  “I found her,” George said.

  “Clearly,” Leo replied. “But where? How?”

  George lifted his face.

  “I’ve been doing some digging around in New York,” he said. “Working some leads. I got something promising a few weeks ago, couple of hoods started talking about doing the Ellingham job. I went down, did some listening of my own. I finally found one of the guys, grabbed him outside of a restaurant in Little Italy. It didn’t take much to make him talk. He gave me a location. I went there. I found her body.”

  “So why didn’t you say something?” Leo said.

  “Because the idea of her is keeping Albert alive,” George replied, becoming more animated. “He doesn’t have Alice, but if he has this idea of Alice—someone to look for and buy toys for—what would he do without that?”

  “Move on with his life,” Leo said.

  “Or end it. That kid is everything to him.” George’s voice choked a bit as he said this. “I failed him that night. I failed Iris, and I failed Alice. But then I found her. I brought her here because she should be at home, not in the place I found her, some field. Home. She should be buried with some kind of love. Near her father.”

  “Near her father?” Leo asked.

  “Albert,” George replied. But the little quiver in his voice told Leo what he needed to know.

  “So Flora spoke to you,” Leo said.

  George sagged, his head lolling toward his chest.

  “How long is this supposed to be a secret?” Leo asked. “Forever? Until he gives his entire fortune away trying to find her?”

  “I don’t know,” George replied. “I only know this is what’s best for now.”

  “And then at some point you’ll say, ‘You’ll never guess what happened! I found your daughter and buried her out back. Happy birthday!’”

  “No,” George snapped. “Forever, then. Probably forever. As long as she’s alive in his mind, that part of him is alive.”

  “And the people who did this?”

  “Taken care of,” George replied. This time, his tone brooked no further comment.

  “So,” Leo said, tapping his nails on the arm of the chair, “the case is over.”

  “Yes.”

  “With Alice buried here behind the house.”

  “Yes.”

  “Something only you and I know,” Leo said.

  “Yes.”

  “So what you want is for me to enter a pact of silence with you on this matter.”

  “Yes. It has to be a secret.”

  “Obviously,” Leo replied.

  “I mean, just us. No one else. Not Flora. No one.”

  “Again, that is obvious. I don’t want this on her conscience.”

  “So,” George said, “we agree?”

  Leo shifted carefully in his seat, the gun still pressing into his spine. On one hand, it was clear what he needed to do—tell someone. Tell everyone. Call the police now.

  And yet . . .

  He had seen people give up hope before, seen the light leave their eyes. Albert Ellingham could buy almost anything he wanted, but not hope. Hope is not for sale. Hope is a gift.

  “I suppose,” he said after a moment, “that nothing can be done for Iris or Alice now. So we must look after the living.”

  “Exactly. We look after the living. I’m glad you know, actually.” George rubbed his forehead. “It’s been difficult.”

  “Well, a burden shared . . .”

  The two men continued sipping whiskey as the rain fell. Later, when he retired for the night, Leo took the gun with him to his bedroom. He could not articulate the reason why.

  20

  FALLING DOWN A HOLE IS EASY. EVERYONE SHOULD TRY IT. YOU JUST let the ground go away and allow gravity to do its thing.

  There was some good news about this hole. It wasn’t terribly deep, only eight feet or so, and there were no stairs, just a dirt slope. Stevie rolled, which was apparently a good thing to happen if you fall. She stopped about twenty feet later and gave herself a moment to let the world stop spinning. Her backpack had absorbed much of the blow and had kept her head from ever hitting the ground, which, again, was dirt. Hard, frozen dirt, but dirt nonetheless. She felt her face and head for blood and found none, which was a positive.

  Still, unexpectedly falling eight feet is not ideal.

  She got up slowly and leaned over to catch her breath. She was sore but nothing seemed to be broken. She shuffled around to get her flashlight out of her backpack and walked back up the slope. Above her, the open hatch in the ground revealed a rectangle of sky and an edge of snow. It was immediately obvious that she wouldn’t be able to reach the hole, but she jumped a few times anyway, almost tumbling back down the slope in the process. She checked her phone and found it undamaged, and, of course, without a signal. If there was no signal aboveground right now, there was definitely not going to be one in a giant hole in the ground.

  “Do. Not. Panic.” She said it out loud to herself, the words bouncing back at her.

  Unlike many of the other hidden spots at Ellingham, this was not a tunnel—it was more of a cavern, a wide, open space underground, with rough rock walls studded with jutting formations. Yes, it was dark. Yes, it was cold. Yes, she was alone in a hole in the ground. But things had been worse than this recently. A big hole in the ground with an open hatch was better than a narrow hole in the ground with a closed one.

  You had to do the best with what you had.

  One good thing about the flash
lights Ellingham provided was that they were powerful enough to signal an airplane at forty thousand feet. Stevie swept the cave with light and saw that it went back a good distance, maybe twenty yards or so, then it bent to the left. She took a few tentative steps and scanned the ground around her. There were a few things: broken shovels, a whiskey bottle from some bygone era, a spoon, a melted-down candle end, a few planks of wood, some beer bottles, and a bag of screws. There were a few balled-up bits of newspaper; these were in a delicate, disgusting state but she could smooth one out enough to see a date: June 3, 1935.

  Her confusion at falling into the hole was being replaced with confusion about where it was she had landed. This was a very unnatural natural cave, full of stalagmites and stalactites that seemed to be man-made. The arrangement was weirdly precise and orderly. She stepped carefully, shining her light up and down, making sure the floor and the ceiling were safe. Her light glinted at something on the ground, and she bent to examine it. Shell casings—lots of them. The wall above them was pockmarked. Someone had been doing a little shooting practice around here. The old cigarette pack she found nearby indicated that this had not been anytime recently.

  She went all the way to the back of the cavern. Here, at the back, there was a bend and an opening maybe twice the size of a normal doorway. She poked at the dark with her light, paused and considered the risk of going in.

  “It would be stupid to go in there,” she said out loud.

  But, of course, she went.

  As she passed through this portal, she entered into a bizarre fantasia.

  The majority of the space was taken up by a low ditch, about four feet at its deepest point. On the far side of the ditch was a boat in the shape of a swan, painted gold. It was tipped on its side, the head of the swan dipping into the ditch. The more she shone the light around, the more Stevie saw the half-complete detail—blue tiles, wires that connected to nothing, wooden vines painted a bright green. Along the back wall was a fresco of women—goddesses, dressed in gauzy robes—looking down from rose-gold clouds.

  She was walking in the dream of a weird-thinking man from the past, a dream made real in stone.

  This was, almost certainly, the treasure. This was where Francis and Eddie had come. She found evidence of them almost at once—loads of candles in a ring on the ground, in all degrees of melt. She found a big red button torn off some clothes, more cigarettes, several bottles of wine and gin, and more shell casings.

  There were a few bags of concrete off to the side and a few busted crates. She tested theses crates to see if they would be stable enough to stand on, but they were broken.

  Stevie sat on the ground in the middle of the candles and took it all in. The world of the present drifted away for a moment. She was in 1936. This was where the pair had come to be together. The button had probably torn off Francis’s dress or coat. This was the treasure—another underground spot. Another trip to nowhere. It was fantastic, but it told her nothing.

  Light. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it bouncing. Someone was in here with her. Without a moment’s hesitation, she moved behind one of the rock formations, her heart pounding. Someone had followed her. Someone was coming up behind her quietly. She snatched a shovel from the ground. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was something. She held it like a bat, her hands tense.

  The light was close now. The person was inside the grotto. She tensed her stance. She was ready. . . .

  “Hey! Hey! Stevie!”

  The voice was David’s.

  “What the hell?” he said, winded. “Were you going to hit me?”

  “What are you doing here?” she said, still holding up the shovel.

  “What do you think? I saw you go up to a statue, dance around, kick it, and then you fell into a hole in the ground. What the hell did you think I was going to do? Will you put that down?”

  She looked at the shovel in her hand as if she had to consult with it first. She set it down slowly.

  “Why did you sneak up on me?” she said.

  “I didn’t. I was yelling your name up there. When you didn’t answer I jumped in after you to make sure you weren’t hurt.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Do you think I’m lying?” he said. “So am I supposed to be sorry for following you into a hole? Thanks a fucking lot.”

  Stevie didn’t know what she thought, except that sound would seem to echo in a grotto underground. It wasn’t something someone would lie about, though. Her breathing slowed a bit. She came out from behind the rock formation.

  “I thought you wanted to ignore me,” she said.

  “You vanished from the house.”

  “And you ran after me?”

  “I didn’t run,” he said. “It’s snowing. There was one set of footprints. Even I, with my inferior mystery-solving skills, can work that one out.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay?”

  “What do you want me to say?” she replied.

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Say nothing.”

  Stevie had just failed some test she had no idea she had to take, on a subject she was not aware of. She had been sitting here in her hole in the ground, minding her own business, and then this. There was no winning.

  David shined his light around the room.

  “I’ve seen some crazy shit here, but this may be the winner,” he said. “How did you find it?”

  “I found a diary,” she said. “From a student who was here in the thirties. There were instructions. I followed them. The last thing I had to do was pull the toe of the statue, and I did that. And then I fell in the hole. I guess no one found this before because no one pulls on statue toes that often.”

  “Just another way our generation is lazy,” he said. “So you came out in a storm to pull on a toe.”

  He stepped down into the ditch to get a closer look at the lopsided swan boat and the fresco.

  “We’ve got some Mad King Ludwig action going on here, huh?”

  “What?”

  “Trip to Germany with Dad when I was ten,” he said. “This, if I am not mistaken, is a replica of something in one of King Ludwig’s castles. Underground grotto, big classical painting on the wall, big swan boat. It all checks out. Why not have your own underground grotto with a swan boat? What are you, poor?”

  As he looked around, Stevie mind continued to reel. He had followed her through the snow, to a place he could not have known she was going. This could not be his plan if she didn’t know the plan herself.

  “We’re going to have to climb back out of here,” he said. “Come on.”

  “Before we do that,” she said, “I want to know something.”

  “What now?”

  “I met some of your friends in town,” Stevie said. “At the art colony.”

  This was clearly not what he was expecting. He pulled back his head a bit in surprise.

  “Oh, the art house. Fun place. Did you meet Paul? Is he still talking through puppets?”

  “I think he is in some kind of silent phase,” Stevie said.

  “That’s better than puppets.”

  “Bath—Bathsheba—said that Ellie told her something about the message that showed up on my wall that night before Hayes died. . . .”

  “I told you before and I’ll say it again—I didn’t shine any creepy message on your wall.”

  “Well, Ellie knew about it and thought it was real, and she seemed to know who did it. If you didn’t do it and Ellie didn’t do it, who did it?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “But it’s getting late. If we’re going to get out of here, we have to go. Come on.”

  It must have gotten considerably darker outside, because as they approached the entrance there was no patch of light where the hatch was, no dim square of snow sky. As they got closer, the slow and sickening realization entered her bloodstream. She knew it before she saw it for sure.

  The hatch had closed above them.


  21

  “UHHHHHH,” DAVID SAID.

  It was as good a summary of the situation as any.

  “Oh,” Stevie said.

  Again, this about summed it up.

  There was a real entombing problem at Ellingham Academy. This was undeniable. Stevie felt a vein throbbing near her ear and had the sure sense that a massive panic attack was about to level her flat. It would wipe away the world and bring her to her knees and she would die from it.

  She waited. The vein continued to beat away, like the annoying sound of music from a far-off car. But there was no panic. She focused her light up on the hatch, then on David, who was himself looking a little pale.

  “I didn’t think that would happen,” David said. “The hatch opens in.”

  “But it happened,” she said. “How did it happen?”

  “Wind’s kind of blowing hard up there,” David said, shining his flashlight on the flat metal hatch. “Suction? I guess?”

  “Or it’s designed to close,” Stevie said. “Secret lair, secret door.”

  “There’s no handle on this side,” David said, a twinge of worry coming into his voice. “Why is there no handle on this side? Who builds a hatch with no way of pushing it open? Who does that? This is a problem. This is a real problem.”

  He shone his light around the space, looking over the debris. He grabbed a broken shovel handle and poked it up at the hatch. It didn’t reach. He threw it down.

  “Calm down,” she said, and then immediately regretted it. Telling someone to calm down was the worst. He hadn’t seemed to notice; he was too busy freaking out.

  “We need to do something a little more proactive,” he said. “We can’t wait this one out. The temperature will drop. We need to get that open and get the hell out of here.”

  “That boat,” she said, taking him by the arm. “We’ll get it and stand on it. There’s two of us. Two of us is better than one of us. And if we can reach it, we can work out a way to get it open.”

  “I guess,” he said, sounding a little breathless. “Yeah. Okay.”

  It turned out that being the calm one eased Stevie’s panic. The more anxious David seemed, the more she could talk through it. She found her steps were steady and firm as she led the way back into the cavern.