STEVIE WALKED IN THE CLEAR SUNSHINE OF THE VERMONT MORNING, along the snaking paths and under the canopy of trees, to the Great House. She rang the bell by the massive front door. In Ellingham’s day, the door would then have been answered by his butler, Montgomery. Montgomery came up a lot in books about the case. He was the head of the Ellingham staff, trained in England, had served royalty, and was stolen away from one of the finest houses in Newport to head up the Ellingham Great House. After the kidnappings, he remained in service but was broken, shaken, and died a few years after.
No butler now. Just a gentle buzz to signal the door was open. She stepped into the cavernous space. Security Larry sat in the shadows at his desk right by the front door.
“Dr. Scott, right?” he said.
Stevie nodded.
“Have a seat over there,” he said, pointing to some chairs by the massive fireplace. A few people were already there, including Germaine Batt, who was doing something very intently on her phone. “When it’s your time, go up the stairs and turn left along the corridor,” he said, pointing to the balcony directly over his head. “He’s the very last room at the front of the building.”
“Iris Ellingham’s old bedroom,” Stevie said, looking up at the ceiling.
“That’s right,” Larry said, leaning back. “You’re interested in the case? What’s your favorite book on it?”
“Murder on the Mountain by Sanderson,” Stevie said without hesitation. “His style is annoying, but I think he explores the case in the most depth.”
“That’s a good one,” Larry said, nodding. “Did you read The Ellingham Case Files?”
“I think that jumps to a lot of conclusions,” she said.
He nodded at that.
The air in the Great House was cool, and there was a faint smokiness to it despite the fact that it was very unlikely that anyone had smoked in there since the 1930s. She knew so much about this building. This main hall was made of rosewood imported from India. The eight-foot-high fireplace was constructed of pink marble from the Carrara region of Italy, where Michelangelo’s marble was from. The fittings were all Austrian crystal, hand selected by one of the six architects who worked on the project. The stained glass in evidence everywhere was in the style of the Glasgow school (which meant something very fancy, Stevie wasn’t sure what), including a sunroom with a roof made of interlocking flowers and hidden birds.
“Stevie? Stevie Bell?”
She looked up at the sound of her name. Call Me Charles was on the floor above, at the rail, looking down. He was wearing a Green Lantern T-shirt and chinos, his hair a floppy, schoolboyish mess.
“Come on up,” Call Me Charles said. He met her at the top of the stairs and extended his hand for a shake.
A woman came out of a nearby door. The first thing Stevie noticed was her height, which was accentuated by a pair of black heels with a buttery, subtle sheen. As she turned, Stevie got a glimpse of the red undersides. She wasn’t a fashion expert, but she knew that heels like that were expensive, as was the finely cut pencil skirt and the large, complicated blouse sweater, mysteriously flowing and folding. Her long hair was delicately colored in an array of auburns and golds. The woman was working her phone.
“Morning, Jenny,” Charles called.
“Hey,” she said, not looking up. She strutted on, never missing a beat of her typing. There was no missing the dismissive attitude. Stevie had never seen anything like it at her old school. Charles smiled and covered well.
“That’s Dr. Quinn,” Charles said. “She teaches a seminar in American history and culture to all the first years. Come on. Let’s go to my office.”
The creaking wooden floors had carpet runners to muffle the noise. Each door on this level was made of heavy, dark wood, with sharply cut crystal doorknobs that looked like they would be painful to touch.
The last door, Iris and Call Me Charles’s, had a corkboard attached to the front. This was entirely covered in signs, small posters, and stickers: QUESTION EVERYTHING; STAND BACK, I’M GOING TO TRY SCIENCE!; I REJECT YOUR REALITY AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN. The biggest sign was in the middle, and looked homemade. It read: CHALLENGE ME.
This was truly everything her parents feared, and it thrilled her as much as it repelled her.
Inside, the room had definitely been converted. The pale silver wallpaper was probably original, but now the room was crammed with bookcases, a few chairs, a desk, and a small sofa. There were books everywhere, filling the bookcases, stacked sideways on top of other books, piled on the floor, resting on the back of the sofa, stacked along the mantel. There were six different diplomas and certificates on the wall, all heavily framed—Harvard, Yale, Cambridge. There was a picture of a rowing team, a group photo from Cambridge . . . evidence everywhere of a long academic career of importance.
Charles waved Stevie into a chair. “So,” he said, “I have to say, Stevie, yours was one of the most interesting applications I’ve ever read.”
Stevie sucked in her breath. “Interesting” was one of those uncertain words.
“You’re very enthusiastic about the history of this place, and in crime and criminal procedure. You have an interest in working for the FBI?”
Stevie nodded stiffly.
“That’s excellent. Let’s see what we’ve got here for you.”
He consulted his laptop, taking a moment to put on a pair of glasses.
“So, based on your interests, this is what we came up with. You’ll be taking anatomy and physiology, statistics, and Spanish . . . that covers your core and aligns with your interests. All very useful. Then we have you assigned to a tutor for readings in criminal justice and American legal history. You have yoga three times a week for your physical education. Everyone takes Dr. Quinn’s literature and history seminar. Usually, students do a small project in the first year that leads into the major project in the second. Have you given any thought to this over the summer?”
Stevie swallowed hard. She’d said it out loud the night before, but now, facing Charles, facing the actual reality of the situation, could she say it again? She pushed the words past the lump in her throat.
“My project . . . is solving the case.”
“Solving it?” Charles said, cocking his head. “Doing a report on it?”
“No,” she said. “I mean . . . figuring out what happened.”
Charles removed his glasses, folded them, and leaned back in his chair.
“That’s a fairly tall order,” he said. “Define that for me.”
“I’ve read all the theories,” she said, steadying herself in the chair. “I’ve read all the transcripts.”
“There are a lot of those, I think.”
“The main interviews are about eight thousand pages,” Stevie said. “I think the answer is here. I think someone who was in the house that day was responsible.”
“Hang on a moment,” Charles said. He leaned back and considered her for a moment, pressing his fist against his chin. Each moment of his pause pulled Stevie down into her chair farther and farther.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Follow me.”
He grinned the grin of a presenter on some educational show with a cartoon dog, as if to say, “Come with me if you want to learn.”
Stevie hopped up and followed him back down the hall, to the back set of stairs. They went up a floor to a door with a polite PRIVATE sign on it and a digital access pad. Stevie liked rooms marked PRIVATE with digital access pads. Stevie watched as Charles entered the access code on the pad. He made no effort to hide the number, which led Stevie to think he wanted her to see it.
“1936?” she asked.
“Not very creative,” he replied with a smile. “But easy to remember.”
The attic steps were narrow, plain, stained dark. Once they got to the top, everything opened up into a massive space that covered the footprint of the entire house. It was very dark; the windows were covered in light-blocking shades and curtains.
“Obviously,” he said, tapping the digital buttons on a panel of lights, “the Ellinghams had a lot of stuff. The papers went to Yale, some to the Library of Congress. The really valuable things went to the Smithsonian or the Met or the Louvre or various art museums around the world. What we have here are the remnants of their lives. The furnishings. The dishes. The clothes. The household items.”
Flick, flick, flick. The space came to light.
Everything was nooks and corners, every direction just racks of metal shelving that went from floor to ceiling. Archive boxes and books in one direction. Trunks in another. Lamps, vases, extra pieces of furniture—bedsteads stacked by a window, chairs clustered together in a tight communion, ottomans, dressers pushed back to back. There were rolls of old wallpaper, globes, boxes of crystal doorknobs.
Stevie felt like her brain had been replaced by a few dozen bees, bumping and swirling in her skull.
“This way,” he said.
She followed without a word. Charles led her to the far wall, to a large lump, about four feet high and six feet wide, covered in a silver satin bedspread. He lifted the sheet carefully. It was the Great House in miniature. A perfect replica, in dollhouse form, right down to the flower boxes in the front, which were full of tiny flowers.
“Albert Ellingham had this made for Alice months after she disappeared,” he said.
He reached over on the side and clicked a hidden button, then swung the dollhouse open on a hinge, like a giant book. There was the atrium, the giant staircase. Everything was perfect—the lamps and the tiny crystal doorknobs and the fireplaces. Even better, everything was arranged as it had been then.
“I read about this dollhouse,” Stevie said. “I didn’t know it was still here.”
“You can go into the other rooms by opening the back and the side,” Charles said. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Stevie moved closer and bent down to examine the little rooms. There was Alice’s room, complete with teddy bears on the bed. Iris’s dressing room had little silver hairbrushes and impossibly small cosmetics. The kitchen was full of china dishes the size of fingernails. And there was Albert Ellingham’s office, with two desks, tiny telephones, pictures on the wall . . . a replica of the past.
“It’s a masterpiece,” Charles said. “It cost ten thousand dollars in 1936 money. We would have sent it to a museum, but all of Alice’s things have to remain in the house, as part of the estate. Everything that’s Alice’s stays here.”
Stevie helped him close the dollhouse, and the sheet was replaced.
“So,” he said, “why do you think I showed you this?”
“Because it’s awesome?” Stevie said.
“It is. But that’s not why.”
A dollhouse. The house in miniature. The world made small.
“It’s simple,” Charles said, cutting right to the answer. “A grieving man made a perfect toy for his daughter that she would never see. This is about real people, not figures from fiction. I know this crime is popular—that crime itself is popular. But crime has a human face. If you’re going to study crime, you have to remember the people involved.”
Stevie couldn’t tell if this was a rebuke of some kind or just one of those one-to-grow-on lessons, but it was fair enough. At least he was taking her seriously.
“To that end,” he said, “before you get caught up in trying to break the case open, I want you to get involved in a smaller project, something that restores a human face to this tragedy.”
“What project?” Stevie asked.
“Oh, I don’t do that. You do that. You come up with something.”
“But is this a paper, or . . .”
Charles shook his head. “The rest is up to you. I’ve got to get to my next appointment. I’m excited to see what you’re going to come up with.”
As Stevie walked back downstairs, her head spun with all she had just seen. Germaine Batt came out of Dr. Quinn’s door and hurried down the stairs, moving past Stevie. Her expression suggested someone who had just seen a document detailing how they died.
Nate was waiting below. He watched Germaine go, and then turned around to Stevie.
“Well?” he said.
“It was good,” Stevie said. “He showed me the attic and some stuff the family owned.”
Nate nodded and folded his arms over his chest, looking around, not really paying attention.
“Did you notice something strange about what Hayes said this morning?” Stevie asked.
Nate turned back.
“You mean about Hayes not knowing anything about the Monroeville Mall, the setting of Dawn of the Dead and a super-famous zombie thing? Yeah.”
Stevie was pleased at how quickly she and Nate seemed to link thoughts.
“What did you make of it?”
“I have no idea. The guy looks like he came out of a 3-D printer.”
“Nathaniel,” came a voice from above. Dr. Quinn looked over the rail. “You may come up.”
“You’ll be great,” Stevie said, putting as positive a look on her face as she could.
“Yeah, don’t do that,” Nate said.
“Fine. It’ll be horrible.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you at lunch or something.”
He settled his brown canvas backpack squarely on his shoulders and took the stairs like a man climbing up to the guillotine platform.
Larry watched this from his desk and stopped Stevie as she exited.
“Dr. Scott gave you a little tour?” he asked.
“Of the attic,” Stevie said.
Larry tipped his chair back and picked up a pen, holding it like a dart.
“And what did you think of it?”
“I think it’s the best place I’ve ever seen,” she said.
Larry’s expression never changed. His face was as stony and unmoving as the mountain they stood on.
“Good meeting otherwise?” he asked.
“I think there’s a lot to do,” Stevie said.
“You’ll be all right. They work you hard here, but no one ever died of it.”
“I guess if you do, you can just take the body out into the woods and bury it,” Stevie said, smiling.
Larry did not smile. His eyes crinkled just a bit at the corners in an expression Stevie could not read.
This was maybe the kind of place where you didn’t joke about the buried bodies.