THE SLOW SUMMER TWILIGHT WAS FALLING AND THE FIREFLIES ROSE out of the grass and bobbed around as pockets of people made their way to the party, which was being held in the yurt. The Ellingham Great House windows caught the last of the dying sunlight, the windows glowing orange and gold. Ellie led the pack, blasting away on Roota in a series of off-kilter squawks that made the birds fly out of the trees as they passed.
“David needs to get here,” she said. “You’ll love him. He’s the best.”
As they went through one of the many wooded areas with statues, Ellie stopped for a moment in front of one of the statues, reached into her bag, and produced a small spray can. She painted the words THIS IS ART onto the torso in dripping blue letters, replaced the can, and kept skipping ahead and bleating on the sax.
“Someone has a case of the try-too-hards,” Nate said in a low voice. The yurt was packed when they arrived. There was a hum of voices coming from within. Ellie peeled back the canvas opening and raised Roota high. A group of people on a small sofa in the back cheered, and she joined them. Within a minute, she was wrapped in a black boa that had materialized from somewhere. A first year was in this group, striking in black lipstick and a shaggy red dress. Her name, Stevie would pick up as the evening went on, was Maris Coombes, and she was an opera singer. Stevie learned this because she kept emitting high, clear snatches of arias.
An intense-looking guy with wild hair who wore a massively oversized dress shirt, like something a painter might drape over themselves, was gesturing with a vape. Hayes was there as well, sunk deep into the folds of the sofa. Maris was very close to him and they spoke face-to-face.
Janelle scanned the room and found Vi, who was sitting on a rug with three other people, playing a tile-based game.
“Let’s sit there,” she said to Nate and Stevie.
It was as good a place as any. Vi scooted over and made room for everyone, and introductions were made.
“This is Marco, DeShawn, and Millie,” she said. “Do you like Castles of Arcadia? We were going to play.”
“Sure!” Janelle said. “I don’t know how but show me.”
Stevie also didn’t know how to play. Nate did, and this brought a bit of enthusiasm to his demeanor. He immediately started explaining the value of tiles with pictures of grain and bricks on them, the importance of the various green squares, why you needed to build by rivers and collect the tiny wooden sheep and cows and put them in fenced areas. Janelle remained focused, but Stevie couldn’t help looking around the room, and soon she lost track of what the game was even supposed to be about.
A girl came in through the flap with a kind of queenly bearing. She had a crown of vibrant long red hair, thick and curly. Stevie had met people with long hair and people with curly hair and people with red hair, but this hair was like a force of nature. It wasn’t fully curly—it was stretched out and full and golden. It was less like hair and more like a weather pattern. Someone called out the name “Gretchen” and Ellie hopped across the room to greet her. Stevie watched the girl stare down the group on the sofa, narrowing her focus on Hayes and Maris. She spoke to Ellie, then gave a massive hair flip and pointedly did not join the group on the sofa. Hayes just cocked his head for a moment, and then turned back to Maris.
Something going on there.
Germaine Batt, the girl from the coach, sat talking to Kaz, though she also appeared to be mostly looking around the room. She continued to work her phone with an intensity Stevie had rarely seen. “She does that show,” Janelle said. “The Batt Report. She’s some kind of journalist.”
As the room grew louder and more crowded, it became clear that there would be no Castles of Arcadia, and Millie, Marco, and DeShawn split into their own group, and Vi and Janelle got to talking. Nate and Stevie remained together, with Nate sadly gripping a handful of wooden cows.
“This is fun,” Nate said. “What are we supposed to be doing?”
“Meeting people,” Stevie said.
Nate made a sound like a deflating balloon.
“You don’t like meeting new people,” Stevie surmised.
“No one likes meeting new people.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Stevie said as she watched Janelle and Vi. Stevie found herself getting strangely nervous as Janelle and Vi talked, their heads getting a little closer together with each exchange, the laughs a little bigger. A bubble of jealousy rose in her and she clamped it down.
“It’s true,” Nate said. “Everyone pretends to. It’s just one more thing we’re supposed to pretend to like.”
“I’m a new person you’re meeting,” Stevie said.
Nate didn’t reply to that.
“So,” she said, to make conversation, “are you working on the sequel to your book?”
“What?”
It was like a spotlight had come onto Nate and he was pinned to a brick wall, facing down the guards. He squeezed his cows.
“I started it,” he said.
“How many chapters have you written?”
“It’s not like that,” he snapped. “Why are you asking me this?”
“What?”
“I mean . . .” Nate fidgeted. “You don’t just write something and it’s done. You don’t just do it. You write parts and you rewrite and you have new ideas and you move stuff. I don’t want to talk about the book.”
“Okay,” Stevie said. She pressed herself deeper into the futon, until the wooden frame was hard against the base of her spine.
Nate also shifted uncomfortably. “They let me in here because of the book,” he said. “That’s why I am here. Do you know how many pages I’ve written?”
“I thought you didn’t . . .”
“Two thousand. Two thousand.”
“That seems good?” Stevie said, unsure of what was happening.
“It’s two thousand pages and nothing happens. It’s all terrible. I wrote the first book and then I forgot how to write. It used to be that I would sit and write and I would go into some other world—I could see it all. I was totally in another place. But the second it became something I had to do, something in me broke. It’s like I used to know the way to some magical land and I lost the map. I hate myself.”
He leaned back against the pillows and exhaled.
“So, no, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Stevie nervously side-eyed Nate until it was clear he wasn’t going to say any more. Then she turned her attention to the rest of the room.
Hayes was sidling up to Maris. Before long, they were in intense conversation again. Stevie wondered about Beth Brave—she probably wouldn’t be happy that Hayes was sidling up to other people now that he was at school. Stevie also noticed she was not the only person paying attention to Hayes and Maris. Germaine Batt was watching the two of them carefully, and at one point lifted her phone and took a photo. The girl with the red hair, Gretchen, also appeared to object to what she was seeing because she kept deliberately turning away.
Lots of strings attached to Hayes, pulling in all directions.
“It’s David!” Ellie said, throwing up her arms and breaking Stevie’s concentration on Hayes and his orbit. “David, David, David!”
As David David David came into the yurt, the strings of lights shook and a fragrant night breeze blew in. He raised his arms high, as if in triumph. Ellie sprang over and ensnared him in a boa-filled hug. He half lifted her and she wrapped her legs around his middle and stayed there, riding around.
Ellie directed the triple David over to the Minerva group. He was tall, with a shock of partially curly, partially wild dark hair that likely hadn’t seen a pair of scissors in months. Many people in the yurt were casually dressed, but David was leaning a little more toward shabby—cargo shorts with visible wear and holes; a thin, dark-blue T-shirt with a logo that had faded into obscurity; broke-down-looking skate shoes.
In that first moment, Stevie had the feeling she had met David before. Something about him that just had a suggestion of . . . something she couldn’t place. Something that made her brain itch.
“This is David,” Ellie said from her position clinging to his torso. “He’s the last member of House Minerva. Say hello, David.”
Stevie had a strange thought that she really hoped he didn’t say “hello, David” in reply, but that was exactly what happened. Another point on the scorecard. Maybe people at Ellingham were not so different after all.
David’s eyes, which were deep brown and bright, went right to hers, as if he had clocked her disapproval. His peaked brows peaked a bit higher into his forehead, and he gave a long, thin smile. He set Ellie down on the back of the sofa and dropped between Stevie and Nate in a space not quite big enough for him to fit. Ellie did the introductions as she decorated David’s hair with loose feathers from her boa.
David dug into a pocket and produced a battered deck of cards.
“Pick one,” he said, presenting the pack to Stevie. As he leaned in, Stevie picked up a number of scents. There was something low and funky that she couldn’t place, along with the stale air from a plane.
Stevie did not want to pick a card, but the pack was outstretched. So she pulled one out.
“Look at it,” David said. “Don’t show me.”
Stevie eyed the jack of hearts in her palm.
“Okay,” David said, tipping his head back, looking at the ceiling of the yurt. “Is it . . . the three of clubs?”
“No.”
“Okay. The six of diamonds?”
“No.”
“The ace of spades?”
“No.”
David hmmed. Nate shifted in commiseration, but Janelle gave an obliging smile. Ellie draped herself over the back of the sofa.
“Seven of hearts?” he said.
“You should probably give up now,” Stevie replied.
“No, no,” he said, “I always get it within the first fifty-two guesses.”
That got a little laugh from Janelle, but Stevie suspected it was simply politeness.
“Okay,” David said, looking back down and taking a deep breath. “Last guess. Is it . . . the king of clubs?”
Stevie held up the jack of hearts.
“Yeah,” he said. “I wasn’t going to guess that. I was just naming cards.”
He plucked the card from her hand and shoved it back in the deck. Stevie felt a burning rush of blood to her cheeks. Was this mockery? What the hell did it mean? Stevie could handle mockery. What she couldn’t stand was not understanding. The yurt was close and the air thick.
Ellie gently whacked David on the head, sending feathers flying.
“You’re so dumb, David,” she said affectionately. She gave Stevie a reassuring smile over his head. “I was starting to worry you weren’t coming.”
“I almost didn’t make it,” he said. Then, to everyone, he said, “I was a little distracted last year.”
“He sat in his room and smoked weed and played video games,” Ellie clarified.
“You make it sound like I was doing nothing,” David replied. “It was all research.”
“David makes video games,” Ellie said. “Or he says he does.”
“So,” David said. “Who are you people?”
More introductions went around, thanks to Janelle. Nate was again singled out as the one who wrote that book that one time. And then they got to Stevie.
“She researches crime,” Janelle said.
“Researches crime?” he repeated. “What does that mean?”
“What it sounds like,” Stevie said.
“You . . . watch a lot of Discovery ID?” he said.
She did watch a lot of Discovery ID, as it happened. That was the all-murder channel. She did not say this, though.
“She does criminology and things like that,” Janelle said, maybe a little defensively. “And she knows everything about the Ellingham case. That’s why she’s here.”
“What, are you here to solve it?” he asked.
Stevie gulped in some air.
Yes, that was kind of the plan. But no one else was supposed to say it, and they really weren’t supposed to say it like that. It was like he had just taken her dreams, which had been floating so gently and rising so high this whole day, and with one prick of a pin, popped them, exploded them. Rubbery dream pieces all over the yurt.
“You weren’t going to say that, were you?” he said. His eyes were so bright, so piercing.
There was an awkward pause in their corner. To end it, Ellie tipped herself off the edge of the sofa into David’s lap.
“I thought that was solved,” she said to Stevie. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t someone confess?”
“Someone was found guilty,” Stevie said. “He probably didn’t do it. He confessed because . . .”
A burst of laughter from behind, and Ellie looked up to see what was going on. No one wanted to hear why Anton Vorachek, the local anarchist who was arrested and tried for the crime, confessed.
“He confessed because he was on the stand . . .” Stevie tried to continue.
Unlike before, when everyone was listening, now there was a dance breaking out and David was doing this weird smirk and Janelle, Vi, and Nate looked vaguely uncomfortable.
You know when your moment is over.
A flask appeared from somewhere. Ellie had some. David passed. It was waved in Janelle, Nate, and Stevie’s direction, and they all shook their heads. Stevie thought drinking from containers other people drank from was gross. She embraced Locard’s exchange principle: every contact leaves a trace, meaning in this case, backwash.
Ellie and David went away to talk to some other second years, leaving the first years on their own.
“He seems fun,” Janelle said with forced brightness.
Nate was unable to bring himself to lie.
“I feel kind of better,” he said to Stevie. “I think you’re even more screwed than I am.”
Nights always brought the worry. Night was hard.
It was three in the morning and Stevie was wide awake. If she was going to have a panic attack, it would likely be tonight. New school, new start, new friends, new home up here on the mountain when she’d never been away from home and her parents for more than a few days. The night brought cooler air, but still, the room felt a bit crowded. When she opened the window, a giant moth blew in. It beat a hasty path to the ceiling light and landed against it with a thunk.
“I know the feeling,” Stevie said to it.
The panic attacks had started when she was twelve years old. No one knew why. Her parents tried to help but were largely confused by them. Medication took care of some of it, but Stevie had worked out the rest with some assistance from the school counselor and by reading more or less the entire internet.
It had been a year and three months since Stevie stopped having the panic attacks all the time, and at least six months since she’d had a big one. But the nights still worried her. She still paced before she slept, eyeing her bed, wondering if this was going to be one of the nights she was dragged out of sleep by a heart racing like a car with no driver and a board pressed up against the gas pedal.
She sat on the floor beneath the window, closed her eyes, and let the breeze play on the back of her neck. Breathe in. Breathe out. Count. One. Breathe in. Breathe out. Two. Just let the thoughts come and go.
You weren’t going to say that, were you?
Let it go.
You can always come home.
Let it go, for real. Go full Frozen.
You’re even more screwed than I am.
She opened her eyes and looked over at her bureau. She could take an Ativan and knock herself out, but she would be groggy tomorrow.
No. She was going to do this. It was going to be fine.
So she turned to her other medicine—her mysteries. Stevie had always loved mysteries from the time she was small. When the attacks hit, she found that mysteries were her salvation. If she was awake at night, she had her mystery novels, her true-crime books, her shows, her podcasts. Maybe most people wouldn’t be soothed by reading about the acid bath murders, about Lizzy Borden or H. H. Holmes, about highway murders, about the quiet neighbor with the dark secret, about bodies in walls and latent fingerprints, about thirteen guests at dinner when you know they can’t all live. . . . These things were problems for her mind to work on, and when her mind worked on the mystery, it couldn’t panic.
So Stevie became a mystery machine, with true crime playing in her ears between classes at school and while she filled bean containers at the coffee shop at the mall. She couldn’t get enough. She got into the Websleuths world online. There, she found people like herself, people who spent their time looking into cold cases. It was there that she became transfixed by the Ellingham case.
Yes, the idea of her solving this case sounded improbable. She was a sixteen-year-old from Pittsburgh. This case was decades old. Everyone had tried to solve it. The FBI hadn’t been able to do it. The scores of serious (and not serious) investigators had not been able to do it. Thousands of people obsessed over it all the time. Ellingham himself, a genius, had tried to find out what happened and the search had killed him.
You didn’t just solve the Ellingham Affair.
She stared at the walls with their thick paint and their possible secrets.
She wasn’t screwed. She was Stevie Bell, and she had gotten into Ellingham Academy on her own. They didn’t exactly admit people by mistake.
Unless it was a mistake.
What if they’d made a mistake? What if they’d made the first mistake they’d ever made? Why had they done this to her?
Nope nope nope nope.
Stevie put on a podcast and pushed across the floor and opened up a still-sealed box. She pulled out several thick folders full of perfectly organized printouts and copies, a roll of heavy-duty tape and a pair of heavy-duty scissors. Once the box was empty, she set about breaking it down into flat pieces, trimming off the flaps to make the rectangles nice and even. She worked quickly, her mind split between the podcast and her task.
In police procedurals, there was always a case board—a place to store the images of victims and suspects, maps and diagrams. A visual reference when you needed to think it all through. The box would serve as a board.
At the top, she put three photos: Iris Ellingham, Alice Ellingham, and Dottie Epstein. Here were the floor plans of the Great House at the time of the kidnapping. The case board began to take shape as it filled.
In the center of her board, Stevie put the most notorious piece of evidence of all, the one people always talked about: the Truly Devious letter:
Look! A riddle! Time for fun!
Should we use a rope or gun?
Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty
Poison’s slow, which is a pity
Fire is festive, drowning’s slow
Hanging’s a ropy way to go
A broken head, a nasty fall
A car colliding with a wall
Bombs make a very jolly noise
Such ways to punish naughty boys!
What shall we use? We can’t decide.
Just like you cannot run or hide.
Ha ha.
Truly,
Devious
The physical letter was lost in the mess of the investigation, so it could never be tested or fingerprinted. Only a photo remained—a stark, terrifying communication that arrived at the Ellingham house a week before the kidnapping. It had been composed with words cut out of magazines and newspapers, that creepy, classic style of hiding your handwriting.
Of the many intriguing aspects of the Ellingham Affair, this was the one she always came back to—this strange declaration from an unknown person that said, “I am bad. I intend to do harm. I’m harming you now by inspiring fear. I am the knife. I am Truly Devious.”
It was like trolling, kind of. Except so complicated. It took more effort to get under the skin of a famous person in the 1930s. They had to get a collection of magazines and newspapers, find the words they needed, clip them delicately and glue them with a crooked precision, then send it off in the mail, never knowing what effect it would cause.
Why announce yourself, Truly Devious? Why tell them you’re coming?
Stevie added another photo to the board—Anton Vorachek. It was the Truly Devious letter that always convinced Stevie (and other people) that Vorachek was innocent. Vorachek could barely speak English—he probably wouldn’t have written a poem in English, a poem modeled on the style of Dorothy Parker, no less. No one ever thought it made sense, but they found the marked bills on Vorachek, no one liked him, and he confessed on the stand.
Truly Devious hung over the case like a ghoul.
Over the next hour, Stevie assembled the images, organized the files. There were floor plans, copies of interviews, police reports. It had taken a very long time, a helpful librarian, and the assistance of other Websleuths to collect it all. She had run through two toner cartridges and a box of paper that belonged to the Edward King campaign (good) to print out this mass of information. And it was a mass. It was heavy. Stevie liked to hold the files and bundles of paper, to pore over it again and again until it all ran through her head like an ancient stream. Surely other people had come to Ellingham with an interest in the case. Some of those people came before the internet existed, so they wouldn’t have had access to all Stevie did. And the others . . .
No. None had her passion. You know when you’re the top fan—the one who knows the words and feels the gaps and senses the disruptions. You know when you are the one who gets it.
It was dawn when Stevie finished assembling her board and putting all of her documents in order on her desk and in the bookcase. She went to the window and found a soft, friendly morning with a light, sweet breeze. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
The critical scene of the mystery is when the detective enters. The action shifts to Sherlock’s sitting room. The little Belgian man with the waxed moustache appears in the lobby of the grand hotel. The gentle old woman with the bag of knitting comes to visit her niece when the poison pen letters start going around the village. The private detective comes back to the office after a night of drinking and finds the woman with the cigarette and the veiled hat. This is when things will change.
The detective had arrived at Ellingham Academy.