“You can get them in any drugstore,” she said, taking the phone from him. “Treat yourself.”
She flattened herself on the floor as best she could and turned her head to the side to get a view into the space. It appeared to be a shallow space, dark, webby. She positioned the phone’s light to get the best illumination she could and reached in, slowly, in case there were wires or sharp edges. She poked finger by finger until she hit the back of the space. It was about as long as her hand. Almost big enough for the tin but not quite.
She lifted her neck and stretched it, then reached her fingers up.
There was space there. The hollow went all the way up. Plenty of space for the tin.
“So there’s a hole?” David said. “That’s pretty good. I mean, you never disappoint with your . . .”
“Shut up for a second.”
She craned her hand around to get a full sense of what might be there.
“Maybe Janelle has one of those laparoscopic little cameras,” she said. “Or . . .”
Her finger hit something. Something fabric.
“I’ve got something,” she said. She wormed her fingers into the space, looking for something she could hook on to. Was it more of the beaded fabric, or the thing the feather had come from? Was it more of the photos, a bag . . .
The thing pulled free and landed on the floor inside the hole. She wrapped her hand around it and was pulling it out when her brain sent her the alert that something was amiss with this object, but sometimes when you start a movement, you can’t stop. She pulled the thing out of the hole.
Whether it was a large mouse or a small rat, she did not know. It was dead, and had been for some time. It still had fur in places, but in others it was exposed to the bone. Overall, it was hard, possibly mummified by being in the wall.
“Oh,” she said, jerking away her hand. It was not an adequate expression of horror, but it was all she had. When you find yourself holding a mummified mouse-rat, words may fail.
“That’s not Ellie,” David said, looking over and grimacing.
Stevie got up and scooted away from the thing, ripping off her gloves. She shoved them in her hoodie pocket.
“Are you keeping those?” he said.
“I can’t put them in the trash in here,” she replied.
“You think they’re checking her trash?”
“I don’t know. You asked me to come in here.”
“Okay.” He held up his hands. “What do you think?”
Stevie surveyed the room again.
“What was she wearing that night?” Stevie asked.
“She had ballet shoes on,” he said. “I remember looking at them.”
“And a little dress. Ballet shoes and a little dress.”
He had a good point. It would be hard to get down the mountain in that.
The room told her about Ellie—that she was a freewheeling artist, an impractical dresser, a French speaker, messy. She liked wine and cabaret. She had a lot of colored pens and drawing books. Her medium was everything. She was color and glitter and chaos.
David was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to make some kind of proclamation, but she had nothing. The room had no secrets to share. The only thing it had given her was a dead rodent, and now she had to get rid of it.
“Let me think,” she said. “I . . .”
David’s phone buzzed. He looked at it.
“Looks like I have a date. Gotta go up to the Great House. Someone thinks I put a bunch of squirrels in the library.” He tucked his phone in his pocket. “Thanks for looking. Maybe it was stupid. I . . .” He shrugged. “Better go,” he said.
When he was gone, Stevie found herself quaking internally, and it wasn’t just because she had to scoop up the rat with some cardboard and take it out to the woods.
8
DETECTION HAS MANY METHODS, MANY PATHWAYS, NARROW AND subtle. Fingerprints. The lost piece of thread. The dog barking in the night.
But there is also Google.
After dumping the rat, Stevie sat down and looked up the names she had uncovered.
Francis Josephine Crane had lived long before the existence of social media, long before every moment and movement could be tracked, but she still lived in a time where the life events of a prominent young woman could be traced. That she was a prominent young woman was the first thing Stevie found out when she sat down in her own room.
Francis Crane was the daughter of Louis Crane, the founder and owner of a company called Crane Flour. The internet had plenty to say about Crane Flour, one of America’s most popular brands between 1910 and 1945. Many people collected Crane Flour tins. The most important fact about Crane Flour seemed to be that one of their factories exploded in 1927, killing eight people and wounding thirty. Crane was roundly denounced for insufficient safety precautions, and Crane Flour winked out of existence about twenty years later, purchased by some larger company that folded it into another company, and into another.
Francis hid among these stories, concealing herself in the depths of available information. Stevie caught a glimpse of her in a list of attendees at a ball held in New York on September 19, 1936. Then her name appeared in a list of the 1937 incoming class at Vassar. There was no mention of her in any list of graduates.
Finally, Stevie found herself reading selections from a book called Better Than Homemade! The Story of Baking in America, which was published in 1992 and patchily uploaded in the form of a bunch of bad scans. This was the longest piece of information she could find on Francis:
Louis’s daughter, Francis, was well known for her literally hell-raising ways. In despair, her parents sent her away to join the first class of their friend Albert Ellingham’s new academy in the hills of Vermont. Unfortunately, her stay there was concurrent with the infamous Ellingham kidnapping, and she returned home. The Crane family, it seemed, attracted disaster.
“What do you mean, ‘literally’ hell-raising ways?” Stevie said aloud. “She literally raised hell? What, is she summoning demons?”
There were other annoying things, like the fact that the author said “hills of Vermont” and not “mountains.” So it made the claim that Francis and her family attracted disaster seem a little dubious. But still, this was an intriguing paragraph. It was also the only one that mentioned Francis.
Stevie found the author’s name, Ann Abbott, and read down the list of her other works (Jell-O! The Wobble that America Loves, Salad Days: How Salad Became Popular). Another few minutes of poking around produced an email address. Stevie wrote her an email and asked her if she had any information about what became of Francis. She had just sent it when there was a knock at her door, and Janelle poked her head in.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
Stevie glanced up at the corner of her screen and realized that she had been scouring the internet for Francis Crane for over three hours. It was almost six thirty.
“Work,” she said, shutting her computer. “Lots to catch up on.”
Janelle stepped into the room. The light smell of lemons trailed in with her.
“You’re wearing your lemons,” Stevie said. “For luck?”
“I’m just happy you’re back,” Janelle said, sitting on the edge of Stevie’s bed. “When I’m happy, for luck. I just love lemons. Here. I made you something.”
She handed Stevie a small plastic object, about the size of a deck of cards, with two wheels.
“It’s a self-balancing robot,” she said. “You can attach your phone to it. I was playing around with some spare parts, and working on inertial measurement units, and I just wanted to make you something, so . . .”
She shrugged happily as Stevie accepted her friendship robot.
“How’s your project going?” Stevie asked.
“I’m glad you asked. Do you want to see specs?”
Janelle bounced off the bed and returned a minute later with her laptop open. She showed Stevie several videos of machines rolling around and swinging things. She had the same int
ensity that Stevie had when she was talking about murders, except this was pipes and motors and things that spun and moved. All of this was interspersed with a detailed analysis of Janelle’s favorite K-drama, Love Lessons with Tofu. Janelle’s mind was a busy but perfectly organized place, running like one of her impossible machines. TV show plots ran alongside mathematical formulas, which blended seamlessly into smoky-eye tutorials, which catapulted her into romance before dropping her gently back into a bed of physics. And also, she answered every single one of her texts within a minute.
She did not, however, know about crime, and she would probably not be interested in what Stevie had just discovered (or not discovered, really) about someone who was related to someone else who made flour.
Janelle’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down at it.
“Everyone’s going over to the yurt,” she said. “Vi is on their way over.”
“You and Vi seem so happy.”
Janelle did a tiny squee. It was an actual squee, a real one. A pip of joy.
“I’m trying to learn a little Korean,” Janelle said, “but languages aren’t really my thing. Vi’s fluent in Korean and Japanese, and they thought I’d like to learn Korean the most. Do you want to go over? Let’s get Nate and go over.”
Before Ellingham, yurts had not been a part of Stevie’s life. She had never even heard of them. When she first saw the massive, circular tent structure, it reminded her of a circus, both inside and out. Outside, all big top. Inside, it was a mass of colorful rugs, beanbags, futons, and cushions. It was the place where people gathered to hang out, play games, read, do work. It was a strange structure—it had no windows, and the inside was a skeleton of sunburst beams that supported the ceiling and a lattice that held up the walls. There was a woodburning stove in the middle that kept it all toasty, and lights and colorful decorations hung from the ceiling.
Janelle and Vi sat propped up back-to-back on the floor. Nate was sitting with them, though his attention was on a game on his tablet. The school was abuzz with the story of the squirrels. It seemed common knowledge that it was David’s doing, and he had not yet returned from his trip to the Great House. Back in Pittsburgh, if someone had infiltrated the library with fifty squirrels, that person would have been hailed as a hero. But Ellingham was full of library lovers, and there was the feeling in the air that this was, perhaps, a bridge too far. You could be naked, you could scream and hang out on the roof, but you do not mess with the place with the books.
“Nothing else got him kicked out,” Nate mumbled as the topic floated up in their group.
“If they can prove it,” Vi said. “I guess they have footage. They have footage of everything, because now we live in a surveillance state.”
Janelle rolled her eyes just a tiny, tiny bit.
“Seriously,” Vi said. “People are saying those cameras we got? They’re from someone on the outside. The school didn’t want them.”
“Then who bought them?” Janelle said.
“I don’t know. It’s private, though. I know you think I’m a paranoid protestor, but it’s true.”
Stevie bit her lower lip. It appeared that no one knew about Edward King’s connection to the school. This meant that the helicopter had not been seen up close. Stevie felt like she was sitting on a secret—palpably. Like it was an egg. If she moved, it would crack open.
“I don’t know,” Janelle said. “I get the problem, but I don’t hate the cameras. There are . . . things around. Bears and moose . . .”
“No moose,” Stevie said. “The moose is a lie.”
“I’m just saying that considering everything that happened, cameras aren’t completely the worst idea.”
“All I’m saying,” Vi said, steering the topic back to even ground, “is they must have seen him do it.”
A new person came up to where they were sitting. He was tall. Actually, he was by far the tallest student at Ellingham, and maybe the tallest Stevie had ever seen. She practiced measuring people by height, as that was a useful observational skill. Witnesses routinely got heights wrong. The best way to note a height was to measure it against something that didn’t move. In this case, this person was up to a large knot in the wood of the latticework that held up the yurt wall. Based on her other observations, this probably put the guy at six foot four, maybe five. He had a full build, like a football player, or like how Stevie guessed football players were built. (They existed at her old school, but they were not present for Stevie. She didn’t care enough to make note of them. Stevie hated football, and she specifically hated the car commercials that were in football, with the meaningless slogans and aggressively masculine messages about how important it was for Americans to drive up rocks and treat every trip to the store or a soccer game like a single-person invasion. Maybe she was overthinking this.)
This person probably did not play football. He was fiercely pale—not like Nate, who had a gentle, bookish gray tone. This was a kind of paper-white, contrasted sharply by jet-black, obviously dyed hair. He had purple cat-eye contacts in, wore a Slipknot T-shirt, and had spiked black leather cuffs on both wrists.
“Hi,” he said softly to Stevie. “I’m Mudge. I don’t think we met before, but Pix asked me to get you up to speed on anatomy stuff. Do you want a Pringle?”
His voice was so soothing, he sounded like someone who might be on a recording or one of the meditation apps Stevie used when she had anxiety.
“I’m okay,” Stevie said.
Nate peered up from his tablet and he seemed to regard Mudge as some kind of fellow traveler.
“Yeah, I want a Pringle,” Nate said.
The can of Pringles was extended, and Mudge entered the group. To Stevie’s surprise, he and Nate immediately started talking about a board game. Stevie was adrift in her small group, alone. Then she felt them. The eyes of Germaine Batt. They were watching her from across the room.
“I’ll be right back,” she told the others.
Germaine Batt was petite, just touching five feet. She had long, straight hair that today she pulled back in a bun. Like Stevie, she dressed for the job she wanted to have—she wore a black blazer with a white T-shirt under it, as if she might be called to be a talking head on the news at any time. She was sitting by herself on a pouf—not in the corner, as yurts have no corners—but tucked off into a nook with some screens and a coffee table. She sat alone, bent over her laptop. She was typing away when Stevie approached, but there was no pretense. They both knew they had been staring each other down.
“Welcome back,” Germaine said. Her voice had a high register, and her words a hard, fast clip. She spoke like she typed.
“Thanks.”
Stevie tried not to overload the word. It wasn’t Germaine’s fault that her article caused her parents to remove her from Ellingham. She didn’t mean for it to happen. Still, it was hard not to feel the connection between Germaine and being ripped from the mountain and thrown back to the earth below.
“Something wrong?” Germaine asked.
“No.”
“Seems like something’s wrong. By the way, you still owe me a favor. From that night.”
Stevie had forgotten about this. At the silent party, when Stevie was trying to figure out who had taken Hayes’s computer, she had asked Germaine to show her some photos on her phone. She had promised a favor in return, but she didn’t really think that she would be hit up for it.
“You figured it out because of my picture,” Germaine reminded her.
“I know. So what do you want?”
“Nothing yet,” Germaine said. “When it’s time, I’ll ask.”
Stevie found she was clenching her jaw. She consciously released it, but it snapped right back into position.
“So,” Germaine said, half closing her computer, “what do you think happened?”
“With?”
“Ellie,” Germaine said, as if this was obvious.
“I think she got out through a passageway,” Stevie said.
“Yeah . . .” Germaine rolled her eyes. “But where did she go?”
Stevie didn’t like being treated like she was stupid, but since she had just had this conversation with David, she decided to take the indignity to find out why Germaine was also asking this question.
“Burlington?” Stevie said innocently.
“How did she get there?” Germaine said. “You can’t walk there. She didn’t call anyone—they have her cell phone records.”
“She could have used another phone.”
“Whose?” Germaine asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Maybe a friend’s?”
As if on cue, the door to the yurt flapped open, and David entered. David had a way of walking—a way that suggested that he belonged anywhere he went. In this, he had his father’s manner, which was gross and horrific. But there was something else, something of the rake in a casino movie, who has come in to knock the place over, or an entertainer who might at any point somersault into the center of the room.
Or maybe he was just walking in and her brain chemistry was telling her stories.
He had changed his clothes and was now wearing jeans and a formfitting black sweater, which complemented his dark curls and made the musculature of his arms and chest clear. He smiled at her and Germaine, then went over to Janelle and Vi. Mudge and Nate had gone to examine some of the board games on the shelves.
“A friend’s phone?” Germaine said again.
“Yeah,” Stevie said, getting up. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe worth finding out?” Germaine called to her as she rejoined her housemates.
David was leaning on the back of the futon, talking to Janelle and Vi. Janelle had her face tipped up toward him, an expression of dull patience on her face. Vi’s arms were crossed. They did not look impressed.
“I’m on house arrest,” he said. “No trips to Burlington for me.”
“Seriously?” Janelle replied.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t think they can do that.”
“No,” she said, “that’s it?”
“Isn’t that enough?” he said. “I didn’t even do anything.”
The Vanishing Stair Page 9
