The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  “You’re back,” she said. “And you have . . . Germaine?”

  “Hey,” Germaine replied.

  Pix shook her head.

  “Get warm,” she said, pointing them to the fireplace. “I give up.”

  It’s a funny thing about being cold—sometimes it doesn’t hit you until you start to get warm again. As soon as Stevie was in front of the fire, she started to shake almost uncontrollably. Her feet and hands burned.

  “H-h-how are you here too?” Stevie said through chattering teeth.

  “You guys n-n-never turned up on the coach that day,” Germaine said. “I f-f-figured something was up. I took the c-c-coach back when they were doing the next pickup. I told the guy I forgot something. Then I s-s-stayed. It was really easy. I wrote to my parents and said I was staying.”

  “You c-c-can do that?” Stevie asked.

  “My parents t-t-trust me.”

  Stevie and David looked at her blankly.

  “What’s that l-l-like?” David asked.

  Germaine shrugged.

  The rest of the group came out to see the stragglers from the snow and were surprised to find Germaine Batt had joined their number. They had a lot of questions, but none of the three were up to answering them yet. They were covered in dust, still coughing. The ringing was getting less loud, but it had not stopped entirely.

  And then, it arrived.

  Anxiety does not ask your permission. Anxiety does not come when expected. It’s very rude. It barges in at the strangest moments, stopping all activity, focusing everything on itself. It sucks the air out of your lungs and scrambles the world. Her vision went spotty around the edges. The ringing in her ears swelled again. Her knees buckled.

  “Stevie?” someone said. She really didn’t know who.

  She stumbled away from them all. The Great House was turning into a hideous parody of itself. The fireplace was like a terrible maw of fire. Her friends’ faces made no sense. Everything was rushing. She was on a current she could not control.

  “Where’s your medicine?” Janelle said, kneeling next to her.

  Her medicine was in a hole in the ground, having been dumped out to carry bricks. She was going to ride this one with no help.

  She stared at the grand staircase sweeping up in front of her. Anxiety, her therapist had told her many times, never killed anyone. It felt like death, but it was an illusion. A terrible illusion that inhabited your body and tried to make it its puppet. It told you nothing mattered because everything was made of fear.

  “Fuck it,” she mumbled, barely able to make the words.

  For no reason that she could think of, she started for the steps.

  “Hey, wait,” Janelle said, holding her arm. “Maybe you should sit down.”

  “Steps,” she said. The word popped out of her mouth like a strange bubble.

  “Steps,” Janelle repeated. “Okay. Fine. Nate, get her arm. We’ll help you.”

  Where do you look for something that’s never really there . . . Together, between her two friends, Stevie climbed the staircase.

  The Ellinghams waited for her on the landing. Always on a staircase, but never on a stair. That’s where they were. She needed to look for something and hold on to it—something she could wrap her head around. Any rope would do. The Ellinghams. That’s why she was here. Albert. Iris. Alice. She repeated their names to herself over and over. Leonard Holmes Nair had preserved them here, in this bizarre painting, the one he had altered to include the dome, the pool of moonlight stretching over . . .

  Where do you look for someone who could be anywhere?

  The question popped up in the corner of her mind, distracting her for a moment.

  The kid is there, Fenton had said on the phone. The kid is there. If George Marsh had committed the crime, what if he brought her back? What if he buried her out of guilt? What if Alice had been in the tunnel, and . . .

  She looked at the painting again, forcing her eyes to focus. The pool of light, the moonbeam, it stretched over the point where the tunnel would have been. And the form of the light—it was vaguely in the shape of . . .

  “Hey,” David said. He had joined them and was sitting in front of her. “It’s okay. It’s just panic.”

  “Shut up,” she said. She could not articulate what was happening in her head, this massive word problem that was assembling itself in some part of her brain. Alice had been buried here. Alice was here. The kid was here. Alice had been found.

  Point by point, things began to line up. Suddenly, it all made sense. All of it. The facts, which before had been falling from the sky like snow and evaporating in her memory, all sprang forth, solid, and put themselves in line. The tunnel. The excavation. Hayes in the tunnel . . . Fenton . . .

  “It all makes sense,” she said to David. She could feel her eyes widening.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Your phone!” she said. “Give it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Please.”

  There must have been something in her tone. Though he looked confused, he pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her. She scrolled through until she found what she needed.

  There it was—the one discordant note.

  Of course, it wasn’t an accident that it ended like this. She had done the work, reading things for years. She had gotten herself to Ellingham. She had made herself a detective and put herself on this path. She had summoned this moment through work and falling down holes and running into the dark. It was time to gather the suspects, like they did at the end of every mystery.

  “Get everyone,” she said to him. “Everyone in the building.”

  “Why?” he asked. “What is going on? Are you okay?”

  She looked up at him, her panic gone, her vision clear, the world starting to settle back into position.

  “It’s time to solve some murders,” she said.

  November 10, 1938

  ANARCHISTS SUSPECTED IN EXPLOSION DEATH OF ALBERT ELLINGHAM

  New York Times

  Police and the FBI are investigating a local anarchist group in the death of Albert Ellingham and FBI agent George Marsh.

  “We believe this may have been retaliation for the death of Anton Vorachek,” said Agent Patrick O’Hallahan of the FBI. “We are looking into multiple leads. We will not stop until the culprit or culprits are caught, mark my words.”

  Vorachek, the man convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Iris Ellingham, and the disappearance of Alice Ellingham, was murdered by a gunman outside the courtroom after his sentencing. The gunman was never found.

  Albert Ellingham had been the subject of many threats. Indeed, he met Detective George Marsh of the New York Police Department after Marsh discovered and foiled a bomb plot against him. In appreciation, Albert Ellingham hired Marsh as person security. When Marsh joined the FBI, Ellingham asked Director J. Edgar Hoover to station him in the area of Vermont around the Ellingham home and school. Despite this precaution, Iris and Alice Ellingham were taken . . .

  Leonard Holmes Nair pushed the newspaper aside, but there was another underneath.

  ALBERT ELLINGHAM BURIED AT MOUNTAIN RETREAT

  Boston Herald

  A private ceremony was held today for Albert Ellingham at his mountain retreat outside Burlington, Vt. Mr. Ellingham was killed on October 30 after a bomb exploded on his sailboat. An FBI agent, George Marsh, died with him. It is believed the two men were victims of an anarchist bomb plot. The funeral . . .

  Leo got up and took his coffee to the window of the breakfast room and looked out at the kaleidoscope of color outside.

  The funeral was a lie.

  Parts had been found, enough to match fingerprints; the condition of the hands and the fingers the prints belonged to told authorities that the persons involved were no longer alive.

  “There wasn’t much,” the one investigator told Leo. “We found three hands, a leg, a foot, some skin . . .”

  The police could determine little
about what had transpired, aside from the fact that they believed that the explosives were probably toward the back of the boat. Albert and George went out and never came back. They were most certainly dead, but there, the facts ended.

  Iris had family, but Albert did not—not any he acknowledged. And while he had many employees and endless acquaintances, the only people who really counted as friends were Leo and Flora, and Robert Mackenzie, who was both secretary and confidant. The remains were still in a police mortuary, so these three were at the Ellingham Great House, going through a macabre pretense that there was some kind of remembrance ceremony going on.

  So much of what was left was paperwork and packing. Like Iris before him, Albert was now being sorted into piles and boxes. Such a great life reduced to this. Leo thought about getting up and working on the family portrait some more. It was the one thing he was meant to be doing. It was only right to finish it. It sat under a sheet in the morning room. He had opened the door to the room a few times and seen it sitting there, like a ghost, frozen in a sunbeam in the center of the room. He couldn’t face it, or the warm light, or the echoes of the house. The Ellingham Great House was built for parties, for families, for friends—a house made as a centerpiece to a school that sat vacant around them. This terrible quiet was hard to take, so Leo decided to spend the morning in Albert Ellingham’s study, one of the few places truly set up to be quiet and soundproof. Even though the room was two stories high, with a balcony of books and shelving running around above, it managed to be snug with its rugs and leather chairs, the fire. With the curtains drawn, the room was muted. On the mantel above the fire was the green marble clock that Albert had purchased in Switzerland when they were there for Alice’s birth. It had belonged to Marie Antoinette, so the story went. It was a survivor of a revolution. The reality was probably much more mundane.

  “Good morning,” Robert Mackenzie said, coming in. Mackenzie was a polite, serious, and deeply efficient young man, but Leo didn’t hold that against him.

  “There’s quite a lot to be sorted,” Mackenzie said. “I am going to pack the desk and have the contents taken upstairs. I hope it won’t bother you if I work in here.”

  Leo was quite used to watching other people work as he sat and did nothing. He nodded graciously. Mackenzie set about going through Albert’s desk, sifting through printed stationery, pots of ink, pens, notes. It was lulling to watch.

  “Excuse me a moment,” Mackenzie said, holding up a small box marked WEBSTER-CHICAGO RECORDING WIRE. “I want to see what’s on this. It looks like Mr. Ellingham was listening to it that morning and I need to know what’s on it to file it.”

  “Of course,” Leo said.

  Mackenzie went over to a machine against the wall. He removed the heavy cover and set the wire on a spool. A moment later, Albert Ellingham’s voice boomed out from the corner of the room, causing Leo’s stomach to lurch.

  “Dolores, sit there.”

  The thin, high voice of a young girl responded. She had a pronounced New York accent.

  “Sit here?”

  “Just there. And lean into the microphone a bit. Good. Now all you have to do is speak normally. I want to ask you about your experiences at Ellingham. I’m making some recordings—”

  Mackenzie snapped the machine off and the voices fell silent. There was a whir as he rewound the wire and put it back into the box.

  “Dolores,” he said. “He must have been listening to this recording of her voice. He felt so bad about that girl. Apparently she was exceptional.”

  Leo had no reply, so the room fell silent but for the ticking of the marble clock on the mantel. Mackenzie cleared his throat and took the package with the wire recording and packed it into the box.

  “It seems he was looking at the book she was reading as well,” Mackenzie added. He laid a finger on a copy of The Collected Stories of Sherlock Holmes, which sat on the desk. “This was with her when she died. I suppose I should put it back in the library. That’s what he would want. Books in their proper places . . .”

  He let the thought trail and remained as he was, one finger on the cover of the book, staring at nothing in particular. Again, the ticking clock took over the conversation. Leo began to shift in his chair uncomfortably. Perhaps it was time to seek out a cup of tea.

  “Something has been bothering me,” Mackenzie said. “I need to speak to someone about it. But I need your confidence. This can go no further than this room.”

  Leo lowered himself back into the seat and looked around as an automatic gesture, but of course, they were alone.

  “Something was off that morning before he went on the boat,” Mackenzie said. “I don’t know what it was. He wrote a riddle, which seemed like a good thing. Then he made me promise to enjoy myself. He was saying things like—”

  Mackenzie cut himself off.

  “Like?” Leo prompted.

  “Like he knew he wouldn’t be coming back,” Mackenzie answered, as if this thought was occurring to him for the first time. And then, there was the codicil.”

  He shuffled around in the desk for a moment and produced a long piece of legal paper. This he walked over and handed to Leo.

  “Just read the top bit,” he said.

  “‘In addition to all other bequests,’” Leo read aloud, “‘the amount of ten million dollars shall be held in trust for my daughter, Alice Madeline Ellingham. Should my daughter no longer be among the living, any person, persons, or organization that locates her earthly remains—provided it is established that they were in no way connected to her disappearance—shall receive this sum. If she is not located by her ninetieth birthday, these funds shall be released to be used for the Ellingham Academy in any way the board sees fit.’”

  “His mind was sound,” Mackenzie said, “but his heart was broken—that’s what made him do this. I have no idea where Alice is, but if she is out there . . .”

  “This won’t help,” Leo said, finishing the sentiment. He set the paper down, crossed over to the window, and pulled back the curtain, revealing the pit in the ground behind the house where the lake had been. It was swampy and raw, the dome looking like an exposed sore.

  He could tell Mackenzie now—tell him that Alice was there, buried in the tunnel. This terrible secret could be over. But what good would it do? She would be exhumed. There would be a frenzy. Her body would be photographed and poked and prodded. She had gone through enough. Leo had never known himself to have a single paternal instinct, but he felt one now. Alice was home.

  “I can’t destroy it,” Mackenzie went on, “as much as I would like to. It’s a legal document. But I can’t let it get into the world either. It would be chaos. It would make it harder to find Alice, not easier. I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Here,” Leo said, turning from the window and reaching out his hand.

  “I can’t let you destroy it either.”

  “I’m not going to,” Leo said.

  Mackenzie paused, then handed it over once more. Leo went over to the mantel, to the green clock. He turned it over carefully, as he had seen Albert do. It took a moment to find the button that popped out the drawer in the base. He folded the paper several times on the mantel until it was a small square, then he put it in the clock and snapped it shut.

  “It is secured with Albert Ellingham’s belongings,” he said.

  Mackenzie nodded.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m going to move these upstairs, I think.”

  When Mackenzie was gone, Leo found himself rippling with nervous energy. He left the study and strode across the massive main hall to the morning room. He went right to the easel and tore the sheet from the canvas. There was his work—Iris, captured one afternoon not that long ago, lounging in the cold, begging for more cocaine. Albert and Alice had been captured at different times, all stuck together in this creation of his, with the backdrop of the house. The figures were fine. The backdrop had to go.

  He pulled the easel and canvas out onto the fla
gstone patio outside, pointed in the direction of the empty lake and the dome. Pointed toward Alice herself. He worked with swift, big strokes, covering the Great House. He painted in the dome instead, and the rising moon as the day wore on. He slashed apart the sky. Now it was every color, his grief and anger coming out, the knowledge that sat in his stomach. Over the spot where Alice was buried, he directed Iris’s hand. And the moonbeam that shone down upon the spot, he crafted it into a gentle tombstone. He could do that at least. This small gesture. He worked all night, not pausing to eat, taking the canvas inside and working by the fire.

  By dawn it was done. The Ellingham family looked out at him from his hallucinatory rendition—all three together, locked in mystery, but together.

  23

  IT HAD TO BE ALBERT ELLINGHAM’S OFFICE—THE PLACE WHERE IT ALL began that night in April 1936 where a desperate man pulled money from a safe in the wall. This room, with its balcony of books as silent onlookers to the drama below, had seen so much—everything wealth had built and everything wealth had destroyed.

  There were only so many seats in the office. Dr. Quinn and Hunter were in chairs by the fireplace, where no fire was lit. Call Me Charles leaned against one of the two desks in his standard “Work can be fun!” pose. Janelle, Nate, and Vi all sat on the floor, avoiding the trophy rug, which Vi was gazing at in horror. Germaine sat on one of the steps to the second-floor balcony, a notebook in her hand. David roamed the room a bit by the windows. Mark Parsons and Pix leaned against the wall by the door.

  Stevie took the center of the floor, because that is where the detective stands.

  The expressions in the room varied from confused, to annoyed, to faintly bemused, to intensely interested. Whatever anyone felt about Stevie, she was doing a big, weird thing here in the office, where she had already once done a big, weird thing that had then led to Ellie’s death.