The Vanishing Stair

by Maureen Johnson

  “You,” Stevie said to them in a low voice. There was no one in sight, and talking out loud helped. “You wanted to be outlaws.”

  “We were outlaws,” said Francis.

  “We wrote the poem,” said Edward.

  “It’s a stupid poem,” Stevie replied. “I’ve read your poems. You’re a bad poet.”

  Edward drew back in offense.

  “Your stupid poem messed up the case for years,” Stevie went on, circling the space. “Everybody thought this was about Truly Devious. But there is no Truly Devious.”

  “We were playing the game,” Francis said. “Like in the poem. ‘The king was a joker who lived on a hill and he wanted to rule the game. So Frankie and Edward played a hand and things were never the same.’”

  “But you wrote that before you left school,” Stevie said, “before it all went wrong. You had no idea what was coming. You had something else in mind.”

  Francis smiled quietly.

  “So you’re in this,” Stevie said. “But you’re not responsible. No. You weren’t the person who was never there, the one on a staircase but never on a stair. You take the stair away—that’s what he was saying. Take the stair away and you have . . .”

  The figure of George Marsh materialized in the seat next to Francis. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a fedora. He was a large man, strongly built, with a square jaw. He folded his arms and stared at Stevie, challenging her.

  “You’ve got nothing,” he said. “I’m in the FBI. I know when you have no case.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said to him. “You made a mistake. You were seen by someone who loves mysteries.”

  One more ghostly figure appeared in the circle—a girl, with curled hair and a gap between her teeth. She wore a plain brown wool dress and slightly crooked glasses. She clutched a book to her chest. She looked at George Marsh for a long moment, then turned to Stevie and nodded. Stevie nodded back.

  The dark forms of trees, the pillars of the cupola, the statues all stood in witness.

  “Gotcha,” she said to him.

  Her phone rang. The phantom circle vaporized into the night, leaving Stevie alone with the flower petals.

  “Are you coming back?” Nate said. “What are you doing?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  “I solved it.”

  A pause.

  “Where are you?”

  “The cupola.”

  “I’m coming over,” he said.

  Stevie lowered the phone from her ear and checked her messages again. Hunter had still not read the text. What the hell was Fenton doing? Not now. . . . The kid is there. The kid is there! Sure, people said stuff when they were drunk, but that was so specific, so insistent.

  Suddenly her brain was itching.

  Of course, people sometimes don’t answer their phones. Sometimes people say strange things. But these were discordant notes. She looked at the cement she was standing on. The remains of Hayes’s tribute crunched under her shoes. Ellie had been under them all along, all that time. They had walked over her. Had she heard them above, heard her friends passing overhead as the air grew stale, as she shivered, as she starved and dehydrated? The fear must have been extreme, beyond anything Stevie would ever know. Did she realize she was dying, down there in the dark? Did she make friends with that dark, with the thing that came for her in it? That insidious friend in the shadows who came to take her pain and fear away . . .

  Why was the phone so quiet?

  He said to do it. He said whenever. She clenched and unclenched her fists several times, then made the call. Larry answered on the second ring. Stevie could hear the television in the background and a barking dog.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “All right. Talk me through it.”

  “I know who kidnapped Alice and Iris,” she said. “I know who killed Dottie.”

  “What?”

  “But that’s not it,” she said, her breath coming fast. “That’s not what’s wrong. I think . . . I’m worried? About the professor I work with in Burlington. And I don’t know why. Something’s wrong. I feel it in my gut.”

  “Give me her address,” Larry said.

  October 30, 1938, 6:00 p.m.

  IT HAD BEEN QUIET ON THE SAILBOAT FOR SOME TIME. GEORGE Marsh and Albert Ellingham sat looking at each other as the sky turned a volcanic red and orange. A sensational Vermont autumn sunset was beginning.

  “Be dark soon,” Albert Ellingham said, breaking the silence. “Very peaceful out here at night.”

  The water lapped gently against the sailboat.

  “Albert . . .”

  “No, no,” Albert Ellingham said. “It’s too late for that, George. Carrying secrets is exhausting work. I know this from experience. The burden seems bearable at first, but as time goes on, it increases in weight. It pulls on you. Now it is time to put that burden down.”

  “Albert . . .”

  “You see,” Albert Ellingham said, ignoring the interruption, “I picked the right girl in Dottie Epstein. She was one in a million. I’m not sure anyone else could have gotten the answer to me. I’m only sorry it took me so long, Dottie. I was slow. I let you down. But I finally got there.”

  He addressed this remark to the setting sun.

  “I think perhaps I figured it out on a subconscious level, George. You must know that feeling as a police officer. You know on a level you can’t reach. It was clear someone inside the house had to be involved in the kidnapping. I had everyone investigated to within an inch of their lives. I found out about the cocaine that Leo had, that Iris was taking. I found out so many things about so many people that I didn’t want to know, but I didn’t find anything that explained what happened to Iris or Alice. The most obvious thing is the thing I missed. You really never do see the thing that’s right in front of you. I wrote a little riddle to myself the other day. It went like this: Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair? I sometimes come up with my riddles automatically. My mind generates them and I have to solve them for myself. There are many things to try when solving riddles. Always on a staircase but never on a stair. In this case, the riddle is telling you to remove the word ‘stair’ from staircase. What word do you get? Tell me.”

  “Case?” George Marsh said reluctantly.

  “Exactly. Who is always on a case? An investigator. Who is someone who is never really there? The guest who isn’t a guest? The police officer, there to protect, never part of the crime. You were the person standing on that vanishing stair. Dottie told me. She told me in her own words. You see, when the students first arrived, I did some recordings of them talking about their experiences at the school. I was thinking of putting together a little reel to show before films. Dottie said something very amusing. She said she had been frightened to come to the woods because she was from the city. Imagine that! For Dottie, the city was the safe space, and nature was wild and frightening. But her uncle the police officer told her not to worry. He said there was an ‘attic man’ at the school. I had no idea what she was talking about, so she explained that thieves are often called second-story men, and that the police were attic men, who were on the floor above—they’d jump down and catch the second-story men. Her uncle knew who you were—George Marsh, the famous cop who saved Albert Ellingham. And so did Dottie.”

  Another boat came by at a distance, heading in for the night. Albert Ellingham raised his hand in greeting as if nothing was wrong.

  “I don’t know it all,” Albert Ellingham said as he waved. “That’s why we’re here. I’m going to tell you what I’ve worked out and then you’ll fill in the rest. I know that on the afternoon of the kidnapping you were in Burlington. You were seen at the post office, at the police station—you were all over Burlington when Iris took the car out. So you probably were not involved in the physical act of kidnapping, though I could be wrong.
You must have come up to the house in the late afternoon. I imagine the fog helped—not a lot of cars out, hard to see. There were no unusual tire patterns, so I suspect you parked where you always park. You didn’t play around with anything silly, like wearing shoes that were too large and trying to leave fake prints. If any traces of you were around—well, so what? You were at my house all the time. You are the person who is always and never there. You went into the tunnel. You went up into the dome, and there you were, face-to-face with one of the brightest girls in New York City. You had some kind of weapon, I’m sure, but she had something greater. She had her book. She looked at you and she recognized the attic man. Maybe she knew her time was limited. She wasn’t going to let you get away with it. Like the dying person in A Study in Scarlet, she left a message—a message for me. This is where I need you to take over, George. Explain it to me.”

  “There is nothing to explain,” George Marsh said.

  “Then we have nothing to talk about, and if we have nothing to talk about, then I suppose I’ll . . .”

  He reached for the rope, and George Marsh leaned forward, his hand outstretched.

  “That can’t be real,” George said. “The bomb.”

  “Oh, it’s real. As is my promise to set it off if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

  “Why would you . . .”

  “Because I have nothing left,” Albert Ellingham said quietly. “The only thing I need is the answer. I know you have it. If you do not give it to me, then I will end us both. Think very carefully about what you will do next, George. Realize I did not get where I am in life by making idle threats.”

  Quiet can be deafening. The lapping of the water, the sound of a bird in the distance. Every flutter and every ripple boomed. George Marsh remained where he was, half-lurching forward, sweat appearing on his forehead. He licked his lips and blinked several times. Then the air seemed to go out of him and he slowly fell back against his seat.

  “That’s right,” Albert said, his voice gentle. “You see now. Set it down, George. Talk. Talk and feel the relief. Go ahead, son. We have all the time in the world.”

  It was the softness of tone that made George Marsh’s eyes go red.

  “It was never supposed to happen the way it did,” he finally said. “That’s what you need to understand. There was never supposed to be any violence. Never. It just went wrong.”

  “Why did you do it, George?”

  George Marsh knotted his hands together.

  “When I started running with you and your friends . . . I got in a little over my head. I played some cards. I’m good at cards. I was winning. And then, one day, I wound up in the hole for about twenty grand with some guys in New York, real heavies. They knew I was connected with you, so they let me keep betting. I thought I was going to win. . . .”

  “Money?” Albert Ellingham said. “George, if you needed money, why didn’t you come to me?”

  “To pay gambling debts?” George Marsh said.

  “If you needed help, I would have helped you.”

  “And then never worked with me again,” George Marsh said. “I needed to get myself out of this jam and never get back into it.”

  “And so you took my wife and child?” Albert Ellingham’s voice was rising a bit. He cleared his throat and composed himself. “Go on,” he said.

  “One day,” George Marsh said, his head down, “I saw one of the kids from the school out reading one of those crime-story magazines. I asked her about it, and she said she was reading one about a kidnapping. She wanted to know if I had ever worked on one. I said I had. She asked me if there were notes, trails of clues. The more she asked me, the more I realized that the kidnappings I had seen were simple. You take someone, you get paid, and you give them right back. As long as no one sees your face, the matter is largely settled. Then I thought about the money in the safe in your office. It all came to me. I’d ask for that money. Honestly, I thought Iris would . . .”

  “Would what?”

  George Marsh looked up from wringing his hands.

  “Enjoy it,” he said.

  “Enjoy it?”

  “She was looking for thrills, Albert. She was using cocaine. You know that. You know what kind of company she kept. She wanted fun and adventure. She was bored up here. All that was supposed to happen was that she would be grabbed and put in a barn for a few hours. You could see Iris telling that story over dinner.”

  If Albert Ellingham could picture this, he did not say so.

  “I got two guys I knew—real two-bit hoodlums, no real brains. They’d steal anything but they never hurt anybody. I offered them two grand apiece to help me out for a few hours. Their job was to block the road with their car, and when Iris went out driving, they were supposed to grab her, blindfold her, tie her up, and put her in a barn a few miles away. I would get the money. Then she would be freed. Maybe she’d have a scratch or two, but she’d be home, laughing. Home and laughing.”

  “But she is not home,” Albert said. “She is not laughing.”

  “No. No she isn’t.” George Marsh pulled the cigarette from behind his ear. “Alice was in the car. I think that . . . complicated things.”

  He faltered, but Ellingham waved him on.

  “I was in Burlington that day, like you said. We had a signal set up. I would have lunch at Henry’s diner and when the thing was done—when Iris was, you know, with them—they would call the diner and ask for Paul Grady. The waitress yelled out for Paul Grady at five after one. I paid my check and left, but I stayed in town for a while and kept an eye on where you and Mackenzie were working. Then I drove down Route Two toward the house and parked by a phone booth. One of the guys was on lookout for when you left Burlington, and called me. That was when I had to get into place. It was foggy, so no one was really around. I parked in the back and let myself into the tunnel. I was wrapped up in a scarf and coat and hat. All I had to do was wait in the dome, get the money from you, tie you up, and then drive back to the phone booth. I know someone at the telephone exchange. . . .”

  “Margo,” Albert Ellingham said. “Margo Fields. This was the one element that always bothered me—we reached you at home that night, and you couldn’t have gotten home in time if you were the person Dottie saw. I realized quickly just how simple it would be to have your call connected somewhere else. But Margo had spoken to the police. She said she put the call through to your house. I had to go back and ask her again, and finally she admitted that she put the call through to the phone booth. She said you told her not to say—it was part of FBI business, and that certain things had to be kept from both the public and me. So you go to the dome, and instead of finding it empty, you find Dottie Epstein. What happened to Dottie?”

  “You’ve got to understand,” George Marsh said, “the thing had already started. We had to go through with it. I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t know what to do. She’s just standing there, holding her book like a shield or something, telling me she won’t say anything. And I’m standing there thinking, ‘What do I do with this kid?’ I think I said, ‘I can’t let you leave’ or something, and before I knew it, she jumped right into the open hole in the floor. I swear to you, she jumped. She jumped right down into that hole trying to get away.”

  His voice splintered and it took him several minutes to recover.

  “God, she must have hit her head so hard on the ground. That fall is what, ten, twelve feet? I climbed down after her. There was so much blood. She was groaning and trying to crawl, but she couldn’t make it. She was . . . sliding. Her skull musta been cracked wide open. If I left her, it would have been worse. I swear, it would have been worse. I watched her sliding on that floor, and it was so horrible that . . . I had my piece on me, but if I shot her, that would trace back to my gun. So I grabbed a pipe that was leaning against the wall—some stick or something, you must use it to prop open the hatch—and I just hit her the once and she stopped moving. . . .”

  The sky began to properly darken
.

  “I don’t even know what my mind was doing at this point. It had all happened in seconds. I never wanted anything to happen to that kid. You were going to be coming soon. My only thought was—clear the scene. I put her in one of the liquor crates that was down there. It was full of wood chips for the bottles, so it soaked up some blood. I cleaned the floor with booze. I scrubbed my shoes with booze. I put the crate on one of the wheeled dollies and I rolled her up, I got her into my car.”

  “Why didn’t you leave her?” Albert Ellingham asked.

  “If there was no body, there’d be nothing to see. No crime scene. I could come back, clean it right later on. I had to clean it up. Then I went back up and took my place to meet you. I didn’t mean to hit you like I did—I was so jazzed up because of the kid. I took the money, I went back out of the tunnel, and I got in my car and left. I went to a roadside diner. I’d started having dinner there for a few weeks so they’d expect me. It was closer to your place than my house. I’d always tell everyone I ate before I got to your place because of all that French stuff you eat—crème de ooh-la-la when a guy just wants a burger. Everyone got a kick out of that. So I had a Salisbury steak and a coffee and waited for the call to come. I knew it would. That’s what everything was banked on. If calls came in in the evening and there was no answer at my house, Margo at the exchange would route my call there so I would seem to be at home. From there, I would wait for your call, which came. I would come to the house. I would be the one to go out and get Iris. When I got there, I’d give my guys their cut and I’d bring Iris home. That was the plan. But that’s not what happened.”

  “No,” Albert Ellingham said. “It was not.”

  “When I got there, I gave them the money. I was holding it together, but they were rattled too. Iris fought because of Alice. She struggled. And they weren’t as stupid as I thought they were, or as harmless. They said that Ellinghams were worth a lot more than two grand each. I offered them five. They both jumped me. I could have taken them under better circumstances, but one of them got me with a wrench. They said they were in charge now. They had moved Iris and Alice to another location and said they had another guy with them, and that guy was ready to shoot and kill them if things didn’t go as they said. They gave me the drop-off instructions. The situation was out of control.”