STEVIE HAD GREAT HOPES FOR THE BOARDING SCHOOL DINING HALL. She knew better than to hope for floating candlesticks and ghosts, but long wooden tables didn’t seem out of the question. Long tables were also featured in so many murder mysteries, when all the guests of the house were arranged, eyeing each other over their wineglasses, wondering who Lord Dudley was going to put into his will or who might have killed Ratchets with the golf club.
What she actually got was something that looked a bit like the buffet area in the conference hotel she stayed in with her high school forensics club when they did a tournament in Hershey, just a little more artisanal and maybe crossed with a bit of ski lodge. (Or what she understood ski lodges to look like. She had never been to one.) It had a high, peaked ceiling made of bright pine-and-stone walls, scattered with tables of varying shapes and sizes—round ones that could fit a large group, square ones for four, and quite a large number of small ones that could fit only one or two people. There were also some plaid sofas and beanbags along the wall farthest from the food, with a few low tables—clearly some kind of coffee shop area for people who were too far up a mountain to get to a Starbucks.
The chalkboard menu really seemed to emphasize that everything was local and that everything had maple syrup in it. The BBQ beef was in maple syrup BBQ sauce. The mac and cheese was made with smoked maple cheese. There was maple tofu and maple-syrup dressing for the salads.
“Did you forget you were in Vermont for a second?” Stevie said to Janelle as they took their trays. “Look down. You are standing in maple syrup.”
“Yeah,” Janelle replied, a bit dispiritedly, as she took some tofu and vegetables. “It’s not my favorite.”
Nate stared down the sneeze guard at the mapleized meats.
“I’ll drink the living blood of trees,” he said. “Hit me.”
The drinks area had sparkling water on tap (fancy) and a cooler full of expensive natural sodas that were free to take, including one maple-lime-spruce-flavored one that Stevie examined out of intense curiosity. This was the kind of stuff she never saw and wouldn’t have had the money to buy, and it was just sitting here. This, more than anything else, seemed to indicate what kind of place this was. Free fancy sodas full of maple.
She took one. She had to.
Since it was still warm and bright, there were tables set up outside. Ellie had commandeered a picnic table and began waving at them to come over. Hayes sat across from her.
Janelle and Stevie started for the open door but Nate hesitated.
“Eating outside is the worst,” Nate said, waving away a fly from his plate, which seemed to be full of nothing but various meats.
“Vitamin D,” Stevie said. “You need it.”
“You don’t know that,” he said. “I want to eat my meat in my room with the lights off.”
“As a writer, are those really the words you want to use?” Stevie asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Let’s just sit with the others for today?” Janelle said. “We’ll sit inside next time.”
Nate sighed and went along.
“So how was it?” Ellie asked as they sat down.
“It was great,” Janelle said. “They’re giving me access to the workshop and I’m getting space in the art barn to work on my Rube Goldberg machine for the Sendell Waxman competition. That’s the high school version. There’s even budget to get supplies. This place is amazing.”
“Mine was okay, I guess?” Stevie said. “I’m supposed to come up with some project this week about putting a human face on crime.”
Nate was quiet.
“Well?” Janelle said.
“She hates me,” he said plainly.
“Come on,” Janelle said, shaking her head. “Stop it. You can’t be like this on the first day.”
“Yeah, I’m not kidding.”
“She said she hated you?” Janelle said.
“She never looked at me. She said something about how it’s so easy for anyone to be published now and then read me a list of classes and told me to go.”
“That doesn’t mean she hates you.”
“You had to be there,” Nate said.
Stevie felt eyes on her back. Eyes to the side. She glanced around as subtly as she could and realized that no one was looking at her—people were looking toward Hayes. He was like a weak center of gravity.
“What the hell are you drinking?” Nate said, turning the soda bottle to look at the label.
“Natural soda,” Stevie said. “It was there. I decided to try it.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know.”
“It’s going to be bad,” Nate said. “What is there to know?”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh my God.” Janelle drew a hand over her face. “Seriously, Nate. You have to like something. You can’t go around being miserable about everything.”
Nate indicated that Stevie should drink and folded his arms. Stevie took a long swig. As soon as the drink hit the back of her throat, it attacked her palate with a woody, biting, cleaning-fluid type sensation that shot up the inside of her nose. She lurched forward, clasping her hand to her mouth just in time to avoid spraying Nate with a maple-lime-spruce fountain. She coughed so loudly that people at the adjoining tables stared.
“Yes,” Nate said. “I see.”
“Tell me more about your book,” Stevie replied when she could speak again.
Nate returned to studying his plate of meats.
Janelle suddenly half stood and waved. “Vi!” she said. “Come sit here!”
Vi was back, with her tinted glasses, wearing an overall short set, a red tank, and striped knee socks. Her hair was perhaps a little spikier than the day before. She slid in beside Janelle.
Again, a tiny panic bubble glurped inside. What if Stevie was going to be completely friendless? What if Janelle didn’t pair bond with her and Nate never talked and that was it? Maybe she had given up her life before and come up this mountain and no one would like her and she would have to go home an abject failure.
That was anxiety talking. Janelle did like her. All she did was ask Vi to sit with them, and that was because she wanted to flirt with Vi. And Nate, he was there. He was just a tough nut to crack.
Things righted themselves for a moment, until David came out of the dining hall, his unruly hair sticking up at odd angles. He still hadn’t changed out of the clothes from the night before. Stevie had that same quiver of recognition, like he was someone she knew well. But there was no way they could have met before.
“Hello,” he said much too loudly as he sat down. “You love looking at me. I get it. You didn’t drink that, did you?”
He pointed at the bottle of soda in front of Stevie.
“I got it for you,” Stevie said, pushing the bottle his way.
Ellie smiled and stretched out on the bench, putting her bare feet in David’s lap.
“Bad news, Hayes,” he said. “Someone was watching you last night.”
He passed his phone down the table.
“Looks like we have our own personal TMZ,” David said. “Someone named Germaine Batt?”
As he spoke, Stevie felt a ripple in the air around them. People had been looking, and now there was an undercurrent of chatter.
“Your girlfriend is going to be pissed,” David observed.
Hayes looked at the screen but didn’t seem disturbed by what he saw.
“Oh well,” he said, passing it back to David.
“Guess that’s what happens when you’re famous,” David said. “Eyes everywhere.”
For no reason Stevie could determine, Ellie put her foot in David’s face, and he bit it. She screamed with laughter. It just happened, out of the blue—something that weird and familiar. Stevie felt her insides flex and twist a bit, and a flush of anxiety run through her system.
Vi and Janelle exchanged looks. Nate stubbornly refused to look up. Hayes didn’t feel like he was really part of the group at all, somehow.
Stevie felt very alone, except for a bee that had decided to linger by her ear and buzz furiously. Stevie was all right with being alone, generally, but this felt like she was being severed from the group bit by bit.
You can always come home . . .
When she got back to her room, Stevie sat on the floor for a bit, looking at her research board.
What if this place wasn’t different? What if it was, as Ellie said, all bunnies on a hillside? She had come here because it was supposed to be different. What had she expected?
She drummed her fingers on the floor for a moment and stared at the faces of the Ellingham family. Then she pulled her computer out of her bag. She couldn’t sit there entertaining these kinds of thoughts. If she could learn some more about the people around her, maybe that would help.
First, David. What was his deal? His last name, she knew from the student registry, was Eastman. David Eastman was a fairly common name, so there was a lot to sort through, dozens and dozens of search results. She added Ellingham. She added California. She looked up and down through every social media platform. An hour passed, and her butt grew numb as she sat in the same scrunched position, her computer pressed between her chest and her knees. The more she looked, the less David seemed to exist. No profiles anywhere.
“Where the hell are you?” she mumbled to herself.
There was a knock on her door and a gentle push. Janelle appeared in the space.
“Hey,” she said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” Stevie slapped the computer shut.
Janelle fluttered in. She had a delicate way of walking on the balls of her feet, lifting the hem of her long sundress from the ground. Unlike Stevie, who was once again in black shorts (there had been a three-for-two deal and she got three pairs, all black), Janelle looked like a summer picnic. A faint scent of orangey perfume wafted from her as she moved. Her braided hair was coiled precisely on the top of her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, coming and sitting on the floor opposite Stevie.
“For what?”
“I ignored you at lunch. I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s okay,” Stevie said. “You were . . .”
“Yeah,” Janelle said, unable to contain a smile. She tucked her long floral dress around her knees and pulled the material taut. “You know I broke up with my girlfriend in the spring.”
“You told me.”
“And I didn’t think . . . but Vi? I don’t know. I just . . . I don’t want to be that person who gets obsessed and ignores their friends.”
Stevie felt a warm sensation all over, and something in her released that she didn’t know she’d been holding.
“You like her?”
“I like them,” Janelle corrected her.
“Sorry. Well, they seem to like you too.”
“I just have to take a breath,” Janelle said, plucking a lip gloss from the side of her bra, blindly and perfectly applying a coat, and tucking it back in place. “We just got here. Maybe this is some kind of . . . I don’t know. Gotta keep my head in the game. I have a machine to make, and this schedule I got this morning is nuts. I love math, but this scares me. Differential equations in the morning, calc in the afternoon, physics in the middle.”
“That’s nothing for you,” Stevie said.
“I like your board,” Janelle said.
“Everyone needs a conspiracy wall,” Stevie said.
“No,” Janelle said, pointing. “You came here to do this. I’ve heard you talk about this. You got me interested, and I don’t care about this stuff. You and me, we have this. And no matter what, we’re going to stick together this year. I’m going to make my machines and you’re going to solve a crime.”
When Janelle left, Stevie eased down onto her back and looked up at the ceiling.
She had Janelle. And yes, she would solve her case. But now she had another one. Who was David? There was something there. She could feel it under her skin.
Stevie had no fears of the dead. The living, however, sometimes gave her the creeps.