The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  “Unless he’s bluffing?” Nate said. “Do you think he’s bluffing? Maybe he’s messing with you?”

  “I didn’t get the feeling he was,” Stevie said. “He paid someone to beat him up. He put the video up on Hayes’s page, which he hacked into. That’s deliberate, and weird. He’s doing something, but I can’t figure out what.”

  “Destroying our lives,” Nate said.

  “It does not matter,” Janelle said. “He paid someone to beat him up. That’s not good. Hayes is dead. Ellie is dead. No one else in this house gets hurt. You tell someone. Tell Pix. Do it now.”

  Janelle was right, of course. Telling someone was the right thing to do. What David had just done was deeply disturbing. But in his eye there was something solid. He was doing this to an end. He had been hurt, but not so hurt. And putting it on Hayes’s channel was sending some kind of message, if only she could read it.

  Janelle was still right.

  “I’ll tell Pix,” Stevie said. “About the punching and that he’s not coming back. Not about his dad. But the next thing that happens is that I’m going to get pulled out of school.”

  “You don’t know that,” Janelle said.

  “I do,” Stevie replied. “David’s not okay, so the deal is off.”

  “We’ll fix that,” Janelle said. “That’s not Edward King’s call. We’ll help you. But now, we tell Pix. And the three of us? No secrets anymore.”

  “No secrets,” Stevie said.

  “One exciting thing,” Nate said. “This is definitely all worse than writing my book.”

  22

  STEVIE WAS DREAMING. THE CONTENT OF HER DREAM WAS JUMBLED. She was walking the streets of Burlington, down the same path she had been walking with David, and someone was yelling, “They’re pulling people out of the lake!” So Dream Stevie ran down to the waterfront, to where she first met Fenton, and saw dozens of bodies being pulled from the lake. But they weren’t dead. They flopped like fish on the waterside. All of these flopping human bodies. Someone came up behind Stevie, but she did not turn. She heard a voice whispering to her, a girl’s voice, but she could not make out the words. Something in her told her it was Dottie Epstein, and if she turned, Dottie would disappear. So she kept her eyes on the flopping-fish people on the dock, trying to make out Dottie’s words.

  Then, the phone.

  “Did I wake you?” Edward King said.

  Stevie pushed herself up in bed and rubbed at her eyes furiously. Her computer was open on her lap, still on the Websleuths forum page she had been reading when she fell asleep. That was something she did to relax when things got too much. She squinted at it through the sleep in her eyes. It was seven minutes after seven.

  “No,” she lied.

  “I did. My apologies for calling so early. We have a vote on the floor in two hours and I have several meetings before that.”

  The call was destined to come, of course. She had expected it soon after she told Pix, who took the news of David’s beating and escape with a grim resolution. She had lost two students; that another was gone was more weight on an already crushing load. Stevie delivered the news and got into bed with her computer and stayed there.

  The strange thing was, she had gotten such a good night’s sleep. For the first time in longer than she could remember, there was no worry of anxiety coming for her in the night.

  “Are you there?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to keep the morning croak out of her voice.

  “Good. Now, there was a video that posted yesterday evening. I assume you saw it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not my favorite video, Stevie. We had an agreement. I can’t help but think you aren’t keeping up your end of it.”

  “What do you want me to do, exactly?” she said.

  “That’s up to you. You were a possible solution to the issue. If this solution isn’t working, I will find another. I suggest you talk to him.”

  There was no point in arguing, as much as she wanted to.

  “Anything else?” she said.

  “No. I will be checking in this time tomorrow. Good-bye.”

  “He’s fine, by the way,” she said.

  Edward King hung up.

  She felt an odd sense of clarity. The clock would strike. Every day counted, and every hour of every day. This time, right now, in the cool of an Ellingham morning, was the most precious thing she had.

  She ejected herself from bed (points for effort), yanked off her fuzzy pajama bottoms, and replaced them with a nearly identical pair of gray sweatpants. No shower. The old T-shirt she was wearing (one of her favorites—something she dug out of a box of old crap in the attic) would do. Yes, she still smelled a bit of night funk, but that was fine.

  Sometimes detectives smell like night funk.

  She snatched up her backpack and put in all she could anticipate needing: phone, charger, computer, tablet, a flashlight. One of her favorite true-crime authors who was trying to solve a murder case from the seventies would do everything she could to immerse herself in the time and the place. Stevie had read that she would make playlists of all the songs that would have been on the radio at the time of the murders, and then she would drive around those neighborhoods listening to those songs to finely tune her mind to the atmosphere. Because it all mattered, she said. You had to feel it, to understand it in every way you could, to get inside of it—and the thing might take over, it might try to rule your life, but it was your case to solve.

  She found a 1930s online station and shoved in her earbuds.

  The morning was apple-crisp. The air cleaned the body from the inside, scraping out the lungs, pumping cold life into the arteries. (Not veins. Veins return deoxygenated blood to the heart. The arteries were carrying this, swinging up the arch of the aorta, shooting up the carotid, giving her brain all the delicious oxygen candy it wanted.) She turned on the music, and a low swinging sound pumped into her ears. She walked in time with it, letting her foot hit the stones of the path with each beat. Become it. Tune into it. Go back in time through the air, the rhythm.

  She would walk the campus once. She would start by going between the houses, wandering through the streets and the snaking pathways. She found herself moving gracefully, straightening her back. If she saw anyone in the distance, she changed her path, moving gently around a tree, turning a corner. The rumor was that Albert Ellingham had designed his pathways by following a cat that was walking the grounds because “Cats know best.” It probably wasn’t true, but you never knew with Albert Ellingham. As she walked her new, musical path, Stevie suddenly had the realization of how right this statement could be. Cats do know best, in many ways. They are hunters, good at tracking, remaining unseen. They can move from the slinking shadows up to the heights and down again. Cats see all the levels, where people generally look straight in front of them.

  Who was here? Edward and Frankie, with their gangster cosplay. They had become Truly Devious. But why? Just to play a game back at the game master?

  They looked rich. Two rich, bored kids, wanting to be bad. Sort of like a rich boy she knew who had gone and gotten his face punched to gravy last night for no reason she could fathom except making his father notice him. Today wasn’t about David, but the connection made sense. She would use it. Edward and Frankie were acting something out that only they understood. So they sent a letter. But they didn’t get a car and take Iris and Alice, did they? They would have been noticed, surely. And where would they have put Alice? They weren’t the large man out on the dome that night. They didn’t beat up George Marsh, or get a boat to collect a ransom on Lake Champlain. There was no internet then, and barely any phones. You don’t coordinate something like that when you have basically nothing to work with.

  So it was a coincidence, maybe. Or someone used that letter, folded it into the plot.

  And what about Dottie? Stevie was walking across the base of the green now, past the statues of the Sphinx. Dottie understood myth. She would have kn
own all about the riddle of the Sphinx. She read constantly.

  Stevie stopped and looked at the Great House from this, the farthest point you could survey it on the campus. The music had changed to an up-tempo jazz song. This is the kind of music that would have played that weekend before the kidnapping, when the party was going on in the house. The house, the heart of this place, beating with life and song . . .

  What had Fenton told her, about the last thing Albert Ellingham said to Mackenzie? “It was on the wire.” Wire? Wireless? Had he heard something on the radio? Was it meaningless? He was just going out for a boat ride. He had no idea he was going to die. He could have been talking about anything.

  But . . .

  He had been updating his will. The codicil that had long been rumored, what if that was real? What if he had put together a fortune for anyone who could produce his daughter, dead or alive? What if he knew something was about to happen to him? He wrote a riddle. He finalized his business. And he told Mackenzie it was on the wire.

  Stevie once went to one of those sushi places where the food comes by on a little conveyor belt. That’s what her mind felt like sometimes—facts floating by on a little track. Sometimes she’d have the urge to reach for one, pick it up, feast on it. The wire.

  “The wire,” she said out loud.

  She walked toward the house. It seemed to swell as she approached it. The Neptune fountain was switched off for the season, leaving the god of the sea to regard her from his dry perch.

  There was someone in Larry’s place by the front door—a younger guy with a uniform from a security company, the same one Edward King had hired to install the cameras. He stopped her as she tried to walk in, but Call Me Charles called out from the balcony above.

  “Stevie! Could you come up a second?”

  Stevie continued up the steps, passing the Ellingham family portrait. Charles was standing on the landing with Jenny Quinn.

  “Have you seen David Eastman, by any chance?”

  “Yesterday,” she said. “In Burlington.”

  “Since then?”

  She shook her head. Jenny looked to Charles as if to say, See?

  “Has he called you, or . . .”

  “No,” she said. “Sorry.”

  There was no point in telling him that David said he wasn’t coming back. This was not her circus, and he was not her clown on the loose. All of that business would come crashing down on its own. No need to rush it.

  “All right,” he said. “Thanks. You going up to the attic?”

  Stevie nodded.

  “If he happens to call you, would you tell us?”

  “You saw the video,” Jenny said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I’ll let you know if I hear from him,” Stevie said, continuing up, and then heading to the back staircase that led to the attic.

  Stevie usually noodled around when she first got up here, letting herself have a look around, peering into boxes, pulling things from shelves. Not today. There was one thing she had come here for, and she had to find it. It was in the boxes that contained objects from Albert Ellingham’s office. The dust and smell of old paper itched the inside of her nose. So many things from Albert Ellingham’s office—thumbtacks, petrified rolls of tape that had turned amber with age, yellowed unused notepads with his name embossed on them, scissors, paperweights, letter openers, dried up pots of ink . . .

  And a bunch of spools in maroon and white with the words Webster-Chicago written on them. Next to that, on a scrap of paper taped down with yellowed tape were the letters: DE. She dug down farther, pulling something from the bottom of the box that had been meaningless. It was a cardboard box, the packaging for the spools. She could tell because there was a picture of one drawn on the package. It read: WEBSTER-CHICAGO RECORDING WIRE.

  “Recording wire,” she said out loud. “Recording wire.”

  If this was a recording, the question was, what the hell would play it? If you had tapes, clearly something made them. Stevie spun around in the tight confines of the aisle. The music changed again, and so did Stevie’s thinking. Albert Ellingham had handily made her a guide of things in his house and where they were, and he did it in the form of a giant dollhouse. Stevie hurried to the other end of the attic, pulled off the cover, and carefully opened the dollhouse. She squatted down in front of Albert Ellingham’s tiny office, feeling like a giant looking down on this great man’s life. There were so many recognizable things in there—some had moved around a bit, but surprisingly little had changed in terms of placement and decor. There were the leather chairs, the trophy rugs, the two desks covered in tiny papers and telephones no bigger than Stevie’s thumbnail. The bookshelves were full of impossibly small volumes. There was the globe, the green marble clock on the mantel, and . . .

  A cabinet with a weird little object on it, about the size of a computer printer. (Well, this thing was about the size of a matchbox. But it represented something the size of a printer.) She reached down and pinched the thing up. It could have been a radio, but it had words painted on it with what must have been a fine brush: WEBSTER-CHICAGO.

  The device.

  She had the little thing for reference, and now she had to find the big one. The Ellinghams had so much stuff—hundreds and thousands of things, but nothing mattered right now except this thing. She worked methodically, starting on the first shelf that contained office materials. She pulled down one after another, sneezing into documents, hauling down old phone directories, staining her fingertips with dust and muck. She climbed the metal shelving when it was high, not really testing to see if it could hold her. The thing had to be found.

  It took almost two hours. It was in a large cardboard box under a box heavy with records. The machine weighed perhaps thirty pounds. It was silver and maroon, very sleek and art deco, the words WEBSTER-CHICAGO still with a bit of a gleam. She looked at the thick old cords, the spools, the dials. She wasn’t even sure if it was safe to plug in or how to make it work.

  Luckily, she knew a genius.

  23

  “OKAY,” JANELLE SAID, FASTENING HER TOOL BELT. “LET’S HAVE A look at this thing.”

  The ancient recorder sat on a cart in the middle of the maintenance shed. Janelle had a look of pure happiness on her face, and a pair of goggles resting on her head.

  The one nice thing about the new security setup was that Larry was not there to question the fact that Stevie needed this dusty hunk of garbage from the attic. She said she had been told to bring it over to the maintenance shed to be cleaned up, and the person at the desk nodded. She lugged it over, where Janelle, Nate, and Vi were waiting. There was nothing like a text that said I NEED YOU TO FIX A MACHINE to get Janelle’s attention.

  Janelle began by wiping the outside of the machine down delicately with a cloth, then she undid the latch, revealing the four spools of the old mechanism. She got down low to examine the machine, walking around it, peering into the top. Then she closed the box and turned it over.

  “This casing has to come off,” she said, going over to a wall of tools and picking up a cordless drill that sat in a charger.

  Nate was cross-legged on the floor, looking at his phone. Vi was sitting on a pile of wood, gazing at their girlfriend with an undisguised You look hot with your tools look. Stevie fidgeted, sometimes leaning against the wall or sitting next to Nate or walking to the door. More than once she crossed the room to where the dry ice container had been, the one that had contained the substance that caused Hayes’s death. It had been taken away, possibly for good or maybe stashed somewhere else. A few loose rakes and shovels leaned against the wall in the spot.

  There was the quick bzzzzzzzt of the drill as Janelle took out the screws that held the casing.

  “It’s going to snow in a few days,” Nate said, looking up from his phone. “A lot. Some kind of monster blizzard is coming.”

  “Oh, good!” Janelle said, setting the drill down on the floor. “I love snow. Bet it’s amazing up here.”

  “
Do you like a lot of snow?” Nate asked.

  “Yes, but define ‘a lot.’ I’m from Chicago. It snows there.”

  “Three feet. Possibly more with drifts.”

  “That . . . is a lot of snow,” Janelle said approvingly. “You probably don’t like snow, right?”

  “Oh, I like it,” Nate said. “Snow makes it socially acceptable to stay in.”

  Janelle’s laugh rang from one end of the workshop to the other as she carefully turned the machine over and lifted off the casing, revealing the naked mechanism underneath. It was a gray-and-brown mess of spools and wires and grungy metal places.

  “Pretty girl,” Janelle said. “Dirty girl. First thing, she needs a cleaning.”

  “You think you can get it to work?”

  “You gotta have a little patience,” Janelle said, lowering the goggles over her eyes. “I have to do my thing. I’m going to blast it with some air and clean it out.”

  She retrieved something that looked like a clunky toy gun with a slender, hummingbird beak of a barrel. She poked it into the machine and began shooting air into it, releasing little puffs of dust and debris.

  “Okay,” Janelle said, pushing the goggles back and stuffing the air gun into her belt. “This looks like it’s been preserved pretty well. I think what I need to do is switch out these capacitors and maybe wire on a new power cord. I have capacitors in my supply box, and I’ll find a cord and strip it down, wire it in.”

  This was all having an effect on Vi, whose eyes had almost turned to heart shapes.

  “Love is in the air,” Nate said quietly. “Love may be on top of your machine in a minute.”

  After about an hour of work, Janelle replaced the casing on the machine.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s see how this goes.”

  She turned one of the dials and the reels began to spin. Stevie and Nate jumped from their places on the floor.

  “You did it?” Stevie said. “Seriously?”

  “Of course I did it,” Janelle said, reaching into her bra and producing a lip gloss, which she applied without looking. “I’m the queen of the machine.”