“So you came to the drop-off the next night,” Ellingham said.
“By that point, I’d had a chance to think,” George Marsh replied. “I had no idea what had happened to Iris and Alice, but I had to try to get them out of it. I would have done anything.”
“But you still took some of the marked bills from the pile,” Albert Ellingham said. “To cover yourself. To frame someone else.”
“I had to show the guys I had something I could use to get them out of trouble, something to make the whole thing go away. I always had a mark in mind—Vorachek. He was trouble. We would all be glad to see him busted. He’d threatened you before. All I had to do was plant some of the money on him. I was going to tell the guys that, that they’d walk away with no problems. I waited for them to contact me. They never did. So I threw myself into the case. I looked into everything I knew about those guys. I shook every contact I had, but that kind of money can put you into the wind. Then Iris turned up in the lake. . . .”
He looked off the side of the boat at the very waters Iris had been floating in.
“Who killed Vorachek?” Albert Ellingham said.
“I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of his own popped him. Or it could have been someone in the crowd who was just angry.”
“Iris,” Albert Ellingham said. “Dottie. Anton Vorachek. Three people dead. And then there is my Alice. That is why we are here. That is what I must know. Where is Alice?”
George Marsh finally gathered himself enough to lift his chin and look Albert Ellingham in the eye.
“What good is it,” he asked, “us dying out here?”
“It is a price I am willing to pay.”
“I know where Alice is,” George Marsh said.
The reserve that Albert Ellingham had possessed up to this point left him. He half stood, his fist tight around the rope, his face purpling and the capillaries in his eyes marbling. When he spoke, his voice was a low rumble.
“You just claimed,” Albert said, “that you knew nothing of what happened to Alice. That you were not involved in her direct kidnapping. That you looked for her.”
“And I eventually found her,” Marsh said.
“Is my daughter alive?”
For the first time in this conversation, George Marsh sat back. He loosened his tie and stretched out his legs as if this was again the relaxing afternoon sail he had been promised.
“I have to ask myself,” he said, “is this one of your games? You love games, Albert.”
“This is no game. You tell me where my daughter is or—”
“Or you let go of that rope and we’ll be blown to bits? Is that it? And if I tell you, you’re just going to let me go? Is that what happens? I tell you, and you wind that rope back up and we sail back to shore and then everything is fine and ginger-peachy?”
“We sail back. You get to live.”
“Where?” George Marsh put out his hands and shrugged. “In jail? You know what they would do to me in jail, Albert? A cop who kidnapped a kid? Your kid? I’d be beaten every day until I was made of pulp—probably by the other cops. If I even made it that far. There is no future for me on the shore.”
“If you tell me where Alice is, we could come to an understanding. I don’t care what happens to you if I get my daughter.”
“We’d have to come to one hell of an understanding. How would it work? You’d let me go free, promise me some money, maybe, and then I’d give you her location. No.” Marsh shook his head. “You could never risk it. You can’t let me go. As long as I know what happened to Alice, you need to keep control of me. And if you kill me, then you’ll never know.”
He leaned forward enough to slip out of his jacket. Albert Ellingham watched him, speechless, his face mottled in rage.
“To tell you the truth,” Marsh said, standing now, and rolling his sleeves, “I’m amazed it took you this long. I guess I’ve been waiting for the day when it all dropped, and the day is here. You’re right. It does feel better to tell you. I’m tired of it. And you must be too—all your dirty little secrets. I bet Mackenzie doesn’t even know them all. You, with your newspapers—all those payments you made, the stories you buried, the politicians you kept on a leash. The great Albert Ellingham . . .”
“I did no such—”
“And Alice. I know about Alice too. Is she the biggest secret of all?”
Marsh stood and finished pulling off his jacket, which he sat on the seat behind him. He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a lighter.
“There’s no going back for either of us,” he said as he put his cigarette between his lips.
Less than a minute later, people nearby saw a bright flash and heard a boom that scattered birds into the night. The explosion tore the Wonderland and its occupants into pieces and flung them into the air. Bits and pieces of boat and human would be found for weeks to come, washed up on the shore all along Lake Champlain.
25
“WHY DO YOU WRITE BOOKS?”
Nate was sitting on the ground across from Stevie in the dark of the cupola. Both of them had tucked their knees into their chests and were huddled inside their coats. Quiet places, Stevie noted, were very noisy once you got used to them. The ear settles, and then every sound comes out. Every leaf that falls has a tender impact. Every surface the wind brushes has its own percussion. Everything that lives in the dark—and many things live in the dark—makes a tiny footfall. Owls call. Wood creaks. It’s a real racket.
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “I don’t know how to do anything else?”
“That’s not a reason.”
“I don’t know. I just do. Do I need a reason?”
“There are reasons for everything, even if we don’t know them,” Stevie said. “Motive.”
“Okay,” Nate said. “My motive is that I prefer dragons.”
“To what?”
“To the absence of dragons.”
Stevie looked at the Great House at the opposite end of the green. The windows glowed in the darkness, distorted rectangles like stretched-out eyes. The moon outlined the husk of the house; the portico shadowed the door completely, so it was a hulking creature that could see you, but did not allow you access. Outside, the spotlight on the Neptune statue landed on the points of his trident. Now, when it was shrouded and nearly invisible, Stevie saw the Great House for the first time. She saw what it was—a demented place, unwanted by the mountain. Mount Hatchet, that’s what they called it, because it was shaped like an ax. Mount Hatchet had not wanted to have its face blasted and its trees cut. It wanted nothing to do with this school, so it had eaten the family that made it. Eaten them in slow, careful bites until there was nothing left.
Her brain was going weird on her.
“What does the Pulsating Norb do?” she asked, trying to push down her thoughts.
“Nothing. It’s like a Jell-O wall. Well . . . you can put stuff in it and no one can see it.”
“It’s a wall that hides things? You didn’t tell me that before.”
“Mainly it pulsates,” Nate said. “It looks like it’s breathing. I’m not putting the Pulsating Norb in.”
Stevie did not like the sound of this pulsating, breathing wall, not with this diseased house menacing her at the end of the lawn. Why had she come here? Why had she passed through the Sphinxes? Why had she come back after Hayes died? How much warning did you need?
Oh, it was coming. The rising beast in her chest, the thing with the fingers inside that squeezed her heart in broken rhythms, the thing that whispered troubles in her ear until everything fell apart. It was coming now, just as everything built to a head.
“I like it,” she lied.
“You don’t understand the Pulsating Norb. No one understands the Pulsating Norb.”
“I ship it.”
“Nobody ships the Pulsating Norb,” Nate said. “Do you want to wait inside?”
“No,” she said.
“Why?”
; “Because I can’t move.”
That was true at least. If she turned to stone, gripped her phone tight, held on to the reality of Nate and Larry and Fenton and Hunter, she could ride the beast. She had to. She had the answer.
“Why did you call it a Norb?” she said, trying to keep herself talking.
“It was a typo when I was typing the word ‘orb’ and I kept it. Seriously, Stevie, it’s cold. Janelle and Vi . . .”
“What if I solved it?” she said. “What if I really did it?”
Nate paused for a moment.
“Then it would be a big deal,” he said.
“I’m scared.”
To Nate’s credit, he did not ask why she was scared, and he did not tell her not to be scared. Maybe he understood how terrifying it is to do the thing you meant to do. Maybe he could see the monsters in the night. “So why do you do it?” he asked. “Why mysteries?”
This, Stevie had thought about.
“With mysteries,” she said, “with crime, you get all this information—everything matters. The location. The time. The weather. The building. The ground. Every single thing that floats by. Every object in the room. Everything everyone says. It’s a lot of stuff. And you have to look at it all and find the pattern, find the thing that stands out, figure out the thing that means something. Is there a piece of thread stuck in the fence? Did someone hear a noise? Is there a fingerprint under the table? And there could be thousands of fingerprints—so which one means something? You take everything in the world and you figure out what matters. That’s what it is. And then you make things right.”
“So you want to find out the answers and I want to make up the answers,” he said. “I think we just saved a ton of money on therapy.”
“Also I want to wear the exam gloves,” Stevie said.
“We all want that.” Nate smiled a bit.
“It’s funny when you smile,” she said. “It’s like a rainbow on a cloudy day.”
“Don’t ever say that to me again.”
Stevie’s phone clattered on the cement. The sound was so shocking that she recoiled for a second. Larry’s name came up, and she snatched it.
“Hey,” she said.
“Stevie,” Larry said with a strangely level voice. “What made you call me?”
“A bad feeling,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to . . .”
Larry went quiet.
“Hello?” Stevie said. “What’s happening?”
“Stevie . . . the house was on fire. It was a bad one, Stevie. They think she left the gas on and lit a cigarette. They found a body on the first floor. It was your professor, Dr. Fenton.”
Stevie felt herself on the verge of a laugh. It wasn’t funny, but the laugh wanted to burble up.
“They found someone else on the stairs. She has a nephew . . .”
The laugh was maybe the urge to vomit.
“Is he . . .”
“I don’t know his condition. Stevie, you knew something was wrong. . . .”
Nate was leaning forward. He could tell that something was not right.
“She was being weird on the phone.”
“Was there someone else there? What did she sound like?”
Not now . . . The kid is there. The kid is there!
“Stevie?”
Things were getting dark. It was night, of course, but now more night was coming and Stevie felt that it was time to lean back and lay flat on the ground. Nate slid over, and he was asking if she was okay, but she couldn’t hear him properly.
She noticed, now that she was on her back and the other lights in the world were dimming, just one point of light above her head. A pinpoint, blue, shining down. It was encased in a shiny black eye that reminded her of the cow eye she had dissected with Mudge. What was that point where it all connects and you just can’t see . . . ?
She could have sworn the little blue eye of Edward King’s security camera in the cupola ceiling winked at her.
It saw all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WHEN I WRITE A BOOK, I OFTEN FEEL LIKE A LONE WEIRDO, MAKING things up and chattering away to herself. I feel this way because it is a fairly accurate representation of what is going on. BUT! We are never really alone! Books happen because of friends and family, because of publishers, editors, agents, publicists, marketing folks, booksellers, librarians . . . so many people help make and shape a book, and then get that book to readers.
Thank you to Katherine Tegen for your guidance and your support. Thank you to Mabel Hsu, who shepherded this book through the editorial process. Thank you to my incredible editor Beth Dunfey for your incredibly insightful notes and endless positivity. And to everyone at HarperCollins who took care of this book during every step of the process. (And there are a lot of steps.)
Thank you to my agent and partner in crime, Kate Schafer Testerman. She’s the best. No one else can have her. Back away. She is mine. Thank you to my assistant, Kate Welsh, and her glorious spreadsheets. Thank you to the Crime Lady, Sarah Weinman, for her support and for all the crimey stories.
Thank you to my friends, my wonderful friends. I am very lucky to have friends who are brilliant and share their deep knowledge of story and structure. Thank you to Cassie Clare, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Kelly Link, and Robin Wasserman. I cannot overstate how much my life and craft are enriched by their wisdom. Thank you to my pal Dan Sinker, who insisted that I make something I love, and got me into podcasting with him. Not sure where I would be without that outlet. And to Jason Keeley, Paula Gross, Alexander Newman, John Green, Kirsten Rambo, Peggy Banaszek, Shannon Skalski, Alexis Fisher, Crista Kazmiroski, and Julie Polk, for everything, generally, all the time. And so many others. You are all great. (Except for you, Keeley. You’re okay.)
Thank you to my parents for all their love and bottomless support.
Thank you to my beautiful girl Zelda. She is my stinky angel and entirely perfect, even when she is barking for three hours straight when I am writing. Someone has to guard the house from marauders.
I got married in the middle of writing this book! So thank you to my amazing English family, who have taken me on as the newest member. It is wonderful to have in-laws and a new brother and sister and two amazing nephews. It is unclear what I bring to the table here, but I thank you for having me.
Thank you to my husband, who shall remain nameless. We will call him Truly Lovely. (Gross! So gross! Lolololol so gross.) (But he is. Lovely, I mean.) (Lololol gross.)
And thank you. I mean YOU. Thank you for reading this book. YOU are the reason for the book!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit Angela Altus
MAUREEN JOHNSON is the bestselling author of several novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, the Suite Scarlett series, and the Shades of London series. She has also written collaborative works such as Let It Snow with John Green and Lauren Myracle, and The Bane Chronicles with Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan. Maureen lives in New York and online on Twitter @maureenjohnson or at www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
BOOKS BY MAUREEN JOHNSON
13 Little Blue Envelopes
The Last Little Blue Envelope
The Key to the Golden Firebird
On the Count of Three
Girl at Sea
Devilish
Let It Snow
The Shades of London series
The Suite Scarlett series
Truly Devious
The Vanishing Stair
The Hand on the Wall
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COPYRIGHT
Katherine Tegen Books is
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE VANISHING STAIR. Copyright © 2019 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2019 by Leo Nickolls
Cover design by Katie Fitch
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959001
Digital Edition JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-233810-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-233808-2
1819202122PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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The Vanishing Stair Page 27
