The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  “I didn’t . . . ” Hunter began.

  “No,” Stevie said. “He had to wait until the place was empty. He would make his move on you like he had your aunt. He’d play on your interests, probably say something about how you could use the money to help the environment—”

  “Stevie,” Dr. Quinn cut in. “This is quite a story, but it’s not based on anything. Are there facts?”

  “Here’s one fact,” Stevie said. “We sent you that email about the codicil.”

  “The one from Edward King’s office?” she asked.

  “The one from Jim Malloy,” Stevie said. “The one you replied to. Then Jim wrote back, a bit more firmly, and Charles sent the codicil. But here’s the thing . . .”

  She turned back to Charles.

  “You called the King offices. You found out there was no one there named Jim Malloy. But you answered the email anyway—after you made that call. David, check your phone. What time did your dad write to you?”

  David pulled his phone from his pocket and the room was silent as he scanned through his texts.

  “Two twenty-four.”

  “So by two twenty-four it was clear that Jim Malloy wasn’t real. And the codicil was sent at . . .”

  David did some more checking.

  “Three forty-seven,” he said, looking confused.

  “You had taken a good guess who Jim Malloy was,” Stevie said. “You wanted me to see that there was a provision in the will that said teachers and staff could not benefit.”

  “I think that’s a pretty broad reading of the situation,” Charles said. “I replied to an email from someone who may have been on Edward King’s staff. Now, if you’re finished, Stevie, I think we should—”

  “Where did you put Alice?” she said.

  “Stevie . . .” Call Me Charles half smiled. Half. The other bit was something very unpleasant. “I genuinely admire what you’ve done here. I think this is a real triumph of imagination. I also think the cabin fever has gotten to you a little, but no harm done. . . .”

  “Like I said,” Stevie went on, fighting back a tremble, “where did you put Alice?”

  On that, the study doors opened and a cold snuck into the room.

  “I think I have the answer to that,” Larry said. “You were right, Stevie. This thing works like a charm.”

  He held up the wall scanner.

  25

  “OH MY GOD,” STEVIE SAID, LETTING OUT A LONG BREATH. “WAS that enough time? Because I was running out of stuff to say.”

  “More than enough,” Larry replied.

  “That was exhausting,” she said, leaning against the mantel. “Seriously. They make it seem so easy in novels, but you have to keep talking and talking . . .”

  “Can I ask what you’re doing here?” Charles said as a greeting to the former head of security. “You’re no longer employed by this school.”

  “I’m well aware,” Larry replied. “However, I’ve rejoined the local police department on a temporary basis. I’m up here officially, doing a welfare check on everyone. I started making plans to get here as soon as I heard the school was closing and a few idiots decided to stick around and wait out the blizzard. I definitely knew who one of those idiots would be. So I hitched a ride on an emergency vehicle with a plow, then hiked up from the road. Took me almost two days. Then that idiot emailed me to say what she was going to do, and that she’d left me a wall scanner and some very interesting instructions. It’s a good thing I trust you.”

  Stevie looked down to keep herself from smiling.

  “I’ve done most of the second-floor offices,” Larry said. “Dr. Scott’s office is the last room left to do.”

  “I object to an illegal police search of Ellingham property—” Charles said.

  “Larry,” Dr. Quinn cut in, “I authorize anything you’re doing.”

  Charles spun around and faced Jenny Quinn, who seemed to rise out of the floor a bit.

  “Jenny,” he said, “this goes against—”

  “My authority is equal to yours,” she said simply. “And I am telling Larry he should do as he feels best.”

  Her words were a wall that could not be scaled.

  “Fine,” he said. “Go and look in my office if you want. But I would like to be there.”

  “We’ll all go!” David said chirpily. Larry opened his mouth to object, but David was already out the door. Once David had gone, it seemed inevitable that the entire company would be coming along. Larry was not in a position to stop anyone.

  The group made their way up the wide, sweeping stairs. Stevie paused a moment on the landing to acknowledge the Ellinghams. They made their way along the balcony, and through the door with the posters that had asked, so clearly, for someone to come in and issue a challenge.

  Larry had emptied the bookcases and pulled them away from the walls. All of Dr. Scott’s books and pictures were piled in the center of the room.

  “You’re going to put my office back together,” Charles said to Larry.

  “I’ll get right on it,” Larry said. “Everyone sit down and make space. Any place you want me to start in particular?” Larry asked Stevie.

  Stevie shook her head. She was running on instinct at this point. If Charles had opened the trunk that day and seen Alice inside, he would have had to figure out what to do with her fairly quickly. It was most likely that he would have had to hide her in the building. He would have had months to relocate her, and Ellingham was full of places where she could be hidden, but if you had a body that was worth seventy million dollars, you’d probably want to make sure no one else found it by accident. That meant keeping it close, in a place you controlled.

  Larry began on the window wall, moving section by section. From there, he did the other wall that faced the outside. Then the third wall. The atmosphere in the room thickened, and Stevie tried not to notice anyone giving her concerned side eye. Larry moved to the last wall, working around the mantel. It seemed like he was about to finish when he stopped down by the floor, in the corner.

  “Something over here,” he said. “It’s small, maybe a foot and a half square.” He stood and examined the wall up close. “There are some cuts in the wallpaper here,” he said. He knocked on the wall. There was a hollow noise. He knocked around the space, making an outline that was about four feet by four feet, about three feet off the floor.

  “That could be where the jewelry safe was,” Stevie said. “This was Iris Ellingham’s dressing room. After the Ellinghams died, the safe was taken out and it was donated to the Smithsonian with all the contents. I’ve seen the pictures. It’s about that big.”

  Larry pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and used it to gently work along the edges of the space. “We’re going to have to take a look behind this wall,” he said. “We’ll need some tools. We’ll have to wait . . .”

  “You’re not putting a hole in my wall. You have no . . .”

  Without a word, Janelle stepped forward, tapped the wall, then, with one seamless movement, drew her arm back like a bow and struck the wall once with the heel of her hand. It cracked loudly. She wiggled her fingers and returned to the loveseat, where Vi put a proud arm over her shoulders.

  “Holy shit,” David said quietly.

  “Force equals mass times acceleration,” Janelle said, checking her nail polish. “Or, more importantly, force times time equals mass times the difference in velocity over that time. Basic board-breaking physics. Takes about eleven hundred newtons. It’s more intention than strength.”

  Charles openly gaped at this. He may have anticipated many things, but Janelle Franklin bashing in his office walls with her bare hands was probably not one of them.

  “I love you,” Vi said.

  Janelle grinned in a way that suggested this was not the first time she had heard those words.

  “I gotta learn physics,” Stevie mumbled to herself.

  “All right,” Larry said, pushing past this romantic interlude. He pulled his flashlight fr
om a clip on his belt and stuck it into the hole. The sound of the clock drowned out everything else in the room. Stevie heard the hollow, heavy sound of her heart, thudding away in her chest. She couldn’t bear watching Larry staring into the void, so she looked at the clock instead, the one that had held the codicil, the one that had survived revolutions and beheadings.

  What if she was wrong?

  The idea was funny. She almost laughed. She was dizzy. The room seemed to go gray and white and spin a bit. Charles had the calm expression of someone watching something happening in the far distance—a storm, maybe an accident. Something that could not be helped. Germaine, she noted, was trying to video the whole scene without being noticed.

  “I need gloves,” Larry said.

  Stevie bolted upright like someone had yanked on her spine from above.

  “Gloves,” she said, pulling a handful of nitrile gloves from the front of her backpack.

  “Why do you have nitrile gloves?” Janelle asked.

  “Same reason you know how to break a wall,” Stevie replied.

  Janelle smiled with pride.

  Larry put on the gloves and resumed work with the knife, picking at the cracked bit of wall until he had a large enough space to get his hand through. He reached in farther to get hold of a bit of the wall and pulled back hard, making a larger flap. He shone in his light once again, then shut it off and stepped in front of the opening.

  “I need this room cleared,” he said.

  “I’m not going to be tossed out of my own office,” Charles said. His face had lost some of its color.

  “This is not your office,” Larry said simply. “This is a potential crime scene. You will go next door and wait in the Peacock Room, and Mark and Dr. Pixwell will wait with you. Dr. Quinn, if you wouldn’t mind taking the students downstairs?”

  “I would not mind,” she said.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Charles said, but some of the conviction was draining from his voice. The Funko Pop! figurines on the windowsill seemed to make a mockery of him. When Pix and Mark stood up to him, he followed them without another word.

  Stevie got up in a haze to follow everyone else out.

  “Where are you going?” Larry asked.

  “You said everyone go downstairs.”

  “I didn’t mean you,” Larry said. “Shut the door.”

  Stevie shut the door with a trembling hand.

  “Do you want to see?” Larry said soberly.

  “What . . . what’s in there?”

  The words came out dry. After all of that—all she had done—she was out of wind. Out of air. She knew what was in there—who—but the words were too much to say. The concept was too large.

  “It’s not easy to look at, but you have seen a lot.”

  She had no choice.

  The space between Stevie and the wall was only a few feet, but it seemed to expand to the size of a grand, mad ballroom. She stepped up to the dark opening and accepted the flashlight from Larry, as well as the hand on her shoulder.

  At first, Stevie thought she was looking at a large gray bag, rough, frayed with age and exposure. But as the light worked the edges and her mind and eyes adjusted, she could see the shape of a hand. A head. There was a shoe.

  It was too small a space, Stevie thought.

  “We need to get her out,” she said.

  “We will. We need to wait for the crime scene unit. We can’t go in without them.”

  Stevie nodded numbly and turned back to the figure in the wall.

  “Hello, Alice,” Stevie said. “It’s okay. It’s over.”

  26

  THE ELLINGHAM BALLROOM HAD BEEN BUILT TO HOLD A HUNDRED AND one dancing couples. That was Iris Ellingham’s design. A hundred couples was an elegantly large number while maintaining the intimacy a ballroom should encourage. The one extra couple, she had said, was the one that counted; that couple was always the one you were in.

  Iris Ellingham had been a special, creative woman. That was why she had been friends with so many artists. That was why she had such loyal friends. That was why Albert Ellingham wanted to marry her and not any other woman in the world. Stevie wanted to believe Iris would have approved of the one couple in her ballroom now, the one resting side by side in the center of the floor. Iris would have smiled at the girl who found her Alice.

  After the discovery, Charles’s office had been sealed. Charles himself was upstairs with Larry and the other faculty members. The seven students were downstairs and left to their own devices, as they were no longer the ones who needed to be watched for mischief. Vi and Janelle had vanished to some corner. Stevie and David had taken the ballroom, because, why not take the ballroom if the ballroom is there?

  David gathered up their blankets—between them, they had four—and made a nest for the two of them in the ballroom. There they lay, in this marvelous, repeating room of mirrors and masks, looking up at the molded ceiling with its chandelier. David was brushing back her hair softly. Stevie found that she was exhausted, maybe more so than she had ever been in her life. She was between states, between worlds. The chandeliers magnified the scant bit of light in the room and dripped it across the ceiling like a smattering of stars.

  “I did it,” she said.

  “Yup.”

  “You made fun of me when I first got here,” she said. “But I did it.”

  “I was being friendly.”

  “You were being a dick,” she said.

  “Like I said, I was being friendly.”

  “Why do you think we like each other?” Stevie asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how these things work.”

  “Neither do I. Neither does anybody.”

  “Some people seem to. I think Janelle does.”

  “Janelle,” he said, “may know everything, but she doesn’t know that. And I like you because . . .”

  He rolled up to his side and onto one elbow, gazing down into her face. He traced her jawline with one finger, sending such shivers down her body that she struggled not to squirm.

  “ . . . because you came to do something impossible and you did it. And you’re smart. And you’re really, really attractive.”

  There, on the floor that had been scuffed by a thousand dance shoes, under the eyes of the masks on the wall that had seen decades go by, they kissed, over and over, each one renewing the last.

  Outside, the snow retreated slowly as if it was apologizing for the intrusion and taking silent steps back the way it had come.

  Alice . . .

  Stevie could hear her playing. She was running through the ballroom, her tiny patent leather shoes sliding on the floor, a ball bouncing ahead of her.

  “Should we let her have the ball in here?” Iris said. “With the mirrors?”

  “Of course!” said Albert. “It will be all right. Come on now, Alice! Give it a bounce! When you bounce your ball in here, you’ll see a hundred bouncing balls!”

  Alice put her chubby arms overhead, balancing the ball, and then she tossed it with all her might—which was not that far, but it was far enough to please her. She laughed, her voice ringing out and bouncing merrily around the room.

  “It’s good to be home,” Iris said, putting her head on Albert’s shoulder. “We’ve been gone so long.”

  “We are all home,” Albert said. “And here we will stay.”

  At daybreak a gentle light came through the French doors, spreading long rectangles over the dance floor. The light just reached Stevie’s eyes, unsealing them. She looked around for a moment, checking to make sure the reality she remembered from the night before corresponded with the one she was in now. Yes, she’d slept in a ballroom. Yes, David was at her side, his arms over her. They were pressed together under a pile of blankets. Stevie scanned the floor for a moment, seeing the marks and joins in the wood up close. The air in the room was cold. Under the blanket, all was warm and perfect. This was where she wanted
to remain, forever if possible.

  But there was a murderer to deal with.

  Stevie inched her way out from under David’s arm, which had her wrapped in a soft, protective embrace. She set it back in the same position, then crawled away a few paces, scooping her clothes from the floor. She dressed quickly, catching her reflection as it echoed around the room. She didn’t mind the girl she saw. She was the girl with the choppy blond hair, tugging on her faded black clothes. She was exactly who she wanted to be.

  She opened the ballroom door gently and crept out into the hall. The Great House was still and quiet. The fire in the murderer’s fireplace burned low. Larry sat by it, arms folded, nursing a tin mug of coffee. Stevie closed the door and crossed the hall to join him.

  “Hey,” Stevie said, gesturing above. “What’s happening?”

  “Mark, Dr. Pixwell, and Dr. Quinn are all up there with him in the Peacock Room. I don’t think he’ll try anything, but if he does, the three of them can handle it easily. I’ve been watching down here.”

  “Has he said anything?” Stevie said, sitting down in the chair opposite and holding her hands out to the fire.

  “No. He’s been very quiet. The police will be here soon. I told them first light was fine, that I would handle it. They’re going to send someone by helicopter, and there will be some backup with a snowplow down by the main road to help get everyone out. We’ll use the snowcat and then figure out how to move you all down the hill. Personally, I’d suggest sledding. That’s the best sledding hill in the state, provided you don’t steer into the river or a tree.”

  “But him,” she said. “What will happen to him? Did I do it? Was it enough to put him in jail?”