THE NEXT MORNING STEVIE SHUFFLED TO THE WINDOW, WIPING SLEEP out of her eyes, and peeled back the edge of the curtain to look out on a green sky. Had she believed in omens, she might well have taken this as a bad sign for the first morning of classes. But Stevie did not believe in omens. A green sky was a meteorological oddity, and maybe something for Instagram. Not a sign.
Stevie brought an umbrella.
Her first class, anatomy, was in the unsubtly named Genius Hall. There were only six people in the class. It helped that Pix was the teacher—at least something felt familiar.
“Welcome to Anatomy and Physiology,” she said. “We are going to talk about the human body without any skin, about the body of muscle and bone and organs. Over here . . .”
She walked over to the skeleton hanging at the side of the whiteboard and picked up its hand.
“. . . are the two hundred and six bones of the human body, fully articulated. One of the first questions I get about the skeleton is . . . is it real? Usually they’re plastic, but this one is the real deal. It was a private donation to the academy, and every year, someone attempts to steal it. It is alarmed. Don’t steal the skeleton. His name is Mr. Nelson. Be nice to Mr. Nelson. He’s here to teach you about what’s inside of you, inside of all of us.”
Mr. Nelson, the real skeleton, grimaced at them with his big, empty eyes.
“The bones themselves have their own geography, peaks and valleys where they associate with muscle and tissue. You are going to learn the relationship of these things, all of these systems—skeletal to muscular, nervous and endocrine, digestive, reproductive, excretory, integumentary, cardiovascular, respiratory. Once you learn what these things are, you will learn how they work.”
There was talk of quizzes and tests (there were a lot), labs (twice a week), and dissections (far too many for Stevie’s comfort). Teacher Pix was a lot more hardcore than house Pix.
As Stevie stepped onto the green, the rain began, and in a moment, she was in a hailstorm with chunks the size of marbles crashing around her. She put up the umbrella, but the battering was too severe. She ran. She made it as far as the cupola on the bottom end of the green, where she found herself stranded for a few minutes. When the hail got to the point where it was unlikely to pound her to death, she made a sprint for Eunomia, where she was to meet Dr. Velman for her one-on-one on criminology and sociology.
Dr. Velman looked to be about seventy and, after reading off the list of books he wanted Stevie to get—and finding she had read two of the major textbooks already—proceeded to spend half an hour talking about the art and craft of the hangman, and how the best of them knew how to tie a knot just at the right location so that the victim’s neck was broken quickly instead of suffocating. The next half hour, he talked about the breeding of dachshunds.
After class, Stevie lingered for a moment outside the building, the rain drilling down on her umbrella. Her next class was in two hours. Ellingham ran like a college—you went to your classes and your time between them was yours to make of as you wanted. No moving along with the crush of a high school hallway. No study halls that stank of Doritos and the dishwasher steam from the cafeteria. This was like being an adult.
So she stood there in the rain like an idiot. Everyone else seemed to have some idea. She wondered if she should go eat or sit in her room or maybe just stand there forever. She took a deep breath of the moist mountain air. She had time. Where did she most want to go? What felt right?
She turned toward the library.
When she entered, no one was there except Kyoko, who sat alone at her massive desk, eating an apple.
“Hey!” she called to Stevie. “Come in! You’re new, right?”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “My name is Stevie Bell. And there’s something I’d like to see. . . .”
“You want to see Dolores’s book,” Kyoko said, balancing her apple on her desk and wiping her hands.
Stevie had been about to ask if they had materials on the case, so the offer of Dottie’s book stunned her into silence.
“I get a file on all the new students,” Kyoko said. “It’s the librarian’s job to know what materials are needed. You’re interested in the Ellingham case. Come on back.”
She waved Stevie around the desk station to a deep brown wooden door with the words LIBRARY OFFICE painted in gold.
Behind the door was a large but cozy room. Everything here was original—wooden tables and desks, wooden cabinets. There were large tables with books that were in the process of being bound or covered.
“So you know the book was returned to us in 1993,” Kyoko said. “We keep it out of circulation, because of its historical significance. Here.”
She pulled a pair of blue nitrile gloves from a box and indicated that Stevie should put them on, which Stevie was only too happy to do. There was nothing she really wanted more than the satisfying snap of the examination gloves. It was a small thing, but it made the investigation just a touch more legitimate.
“Here we go,” Kyoko said, putting on her own pair of gloves and opening up a glass-fronted banker’s shelf and removing a thick volume. She set it on one of the tables and waved Stevie to it.
The book was well preserved from years in evidence and library storage. It had a pristine dust jacket with a picture of Sherlock Holmes in a deerstalker with a meerschaum drawn in red on a white background.
The book made a faint crackling noise as Stevie opened it. The pages were faintly yellow and the type was very tight and dense. There was a slot for library cards that read ELLINGHAM ACADEMY LIBRARY, but there was no card inside. The book had been checked out, but never technically returned. Stevie turned the pages carefully, and as she got to the first story, A Study in Scarlet, she stopped.
There was a jagged pencil mark on one of the first pages, roughly underlining one line. It was a very famous line, one of the most famous in all the stories.
Sherlock said, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”
“Did Dottie do this?” Stevie asked.
“No idea. This particular book was checked out several times by students before her. Any one of them could have marked it up. But I noticed that as well.”
Stevie glanced through the book, but there was nothing else in it. It was simply a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. But it was the book. That was what mattered.
“As it happens, we know a lot about Dolores’s reading,” Kyoko said. “This may also interest you.”
She opened one of the wooden filing cabinets and removed an expanded file.
“The first Ellingham librarian, Diana Cloakes, was a remarkable person—one of the top research librarians at the New York Public Library. Albert Ellingham hired her to come work here. Everyone he hired was the best at what they did. She bought an incredible collection, and she took meticulous notes on everything.”
Kyoko pulled a thick stack of typewritten sheets from the folder and paged through them, then carefully set a few piles down on one of the big book tables.
“When Albert Ellingham set up the school,” she said, “it was the policy that any book a student wanted could be ordered, and we have all the records from that first year. This pile . . .”
She pointed at one of the stacks.
“. . . shows all requests from the 1935–36 school year. Dolores alone put in requests for over five hundred books. The school ordered four hundred and eighty-seven of them. The remaining thirteen were at a library in a university in Turkey that refused to sell them. If it’s one of Dolores’s, it will have the letters DE after the title.”
Stevie scanned down the list. Dolores had requested several works in Greek, a lot of novels Stevie had never heard of, some classics. There were all kinds of requests from other students, including a list of very intriguing titles.
“Gun Molls Magazine,” Stevie read. “Vice Squad Detective, Dime Detective, All True Fact Detective Stories . . .”
“Oh, those,” Kyoko said. “Yeah, I love those. All pulp magazines. Most libraries or librarians would never have ordered them, but Ellingham’s policy was clear—whatever they asked for. I so wish we still had these, but I think the students took them and didn’t give them back.”
Stevie felt like she would have gotten along with those students.
Two days at Ellingham Academy passed by in a series of flashes. First, there was just the weight of everything. The readings. The thought. The writing. The expectation of knowledge. It was kind of an academic monster-truck rally. Everything went so fast. Session to session, reading to reading.
Meals developed more of a rhythm.
The overall groupings started to make sense—some sat by houses. Some were gamers. Some read. Some people took food away and never stayed. Germaine Batt tended to sit apart from everyone, watchful, always on a device. Gretchen with the astonishing head of red hair frequently held court over a long table inside. Hayes moved away from the Minerva table to start sitting with Maris and a very assorted group of artsy-looking people. Vi was a regular feature at the Minerva table. Nate started to talk a bit more. Ellie came and went, as did David, but they didn’t come and go together. They didn’t seem to be a couple—more just two people who were really comfortable in their skin and not very conscious of what made other people uncomfortable.
After lit class on Wednesday, Stevie was walking across the green when a larger pair of ratty-sneaker-clad feet fell in step beside her. Actually in step, deliberate and rhythmic. Stevie didn’t need to look up, didn’t want to, but her neck craned in that direction seemingly of its own accord, like a flower bending toward the sun, if the sun was an annoying person who lived upstairs. She managed to avoid conversation with David for the last few days. If he was at her table, he sat at the other end. In Minerva, he stuck to his room. But now he was here, smiling, his hair flopping and unruly, his navy blue T-shirt looking conspicuously worn. There were holes in his shorts large enough to lose a phone.
“Hey, Murder Girl,” he said. “How’s the case going? Got any perps? An unsub? How are your perps and unsubs? Am I doing it right? Perp? Unsub? Suspect?”
Stevie clenched her jaw. You could trip her. You could kick her in the shin. She could handle those things. But no one was allowed to go after her mysteries. That cut right into her.
“You know,” Stevie said, “in a murder mystery, you’d end up dead.”
He smiled wider and nodded. His body was . . . ropy. Like the word from the Truly Devious letter. He was long and thin and was probably strong. He seemed to be made of knots.
“What do you want?” she said, speeding up.
“I’m just walking this way,” David said. “We live in the same place. What’s the problem?”
“No problem.”
“Oh, good.”
They passed the cluster of statue heads on the way to Minerva. It was a weird landmark on the way home. Stevie was getting used to the statues, but this head-only grouping was still off-putting. It seemed like they were in the middle of a conversation and had stopped talking as strangers walked by.
“So Ellie was telling me about your conversation from the other day,” he said.
“What conversation?” Stevie said. She’d had several conversations with Ellie, but none seemed worth recounting.
“About you,” he said.
Stevie had to think about this for a moment. Was he talking about the conversation from the tub room? The one where Ellie had asked about their love lives and she explained she didn’t have one?
“She said your parents work for Edward King,” he said.
She exhaled. Right conversation, different topic.
“Yeah,” she said, waving away a bee. “Some of us just get lucky, I guess.”
“You a big fan too?”
“What do you think?” she said.
“Who knows?” he said. “Does anyone really know anyone else? You love some law and order.”
There was no lower insult than this, and having to say she didn’t like Edward King was even worse. Edward King was famously disgusting—rich, corrupt, vain. He was the root of a lot of the trouble in Stevie’s life. In less than thirty seconds, David had made two successful digs in the softest parts of her psyche.
“I’m not a fan,” she said in a low voice.
“Oh. I was going to say, it sounds like your parents—”
“I don’t know why they like him,” she snapped. “I try to work that one out all the time. I kind of want to get away from it here, so . . .”
“Sure,” he said, loping along. “You can’t control your parents. I mean, my mother is a beekeeper and my father invented the smorgasbord.”
They had reached the blue door of Minerva. He tapped his ID to the panel to admit them.
“We have time to get to know each other,” he said. “So much time. See you around.”
He turned and went back the way they had come. He didn’t even go inside. Stevie was left to wonder what the hell had just happened to her.
This would not be Stevie’s only strange encounter that day. The next would come an hour or two later, in the form of Hayes Major leaning in her doorway as she was trying to read.
“Hey,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”
He was wearing a tight white T-shirt. A fresh one. Possibly never worn before. (Stevie didn’t buy white T-shirts. Their shelf life was too short.)
“Do you mind if I come in?” he asked.
“Sure?” she said.
He left the door wide open and came inside with his easy, comfortable way. She indicated that the floor was his, if he wanted to stay. He didn’t sit; he squatted. It didn’t look even remotely comfortable; it just showed off the tone of his leg muscles and the outline of his patellae. (Anatomy word! Kneecaps. She was already using her knowledge.)
“I had an idea,” he said as he balanced on his little invisible stool. “You mentioned the other day that you needed a project. So do I. I was thinking, what if we worked together on something?”
Dust motes danced in the air between Hayes and Stevie. In the bright, late-afternoon light, his hair had an actual glow, like it was spun of golden thread. He could have been a statue model in Greece or Rome. The light was so rich that he seemed like a statue now, an otherworldly nature made of light and shade, with a southern accent and a formfitting shirt. Stevie wasn’t sure if the wooziness she felt around him was attraction, or just numb confusion as her brain tried to work out his exact species. “Looks human,” it was saying to itself, “but cannot be. Cheekbones not possible. Is simulation. Origin unknown.”
“Together?” she said, pulling herself out of her mental wanderings.
“See, my agent . . .” He dug a neatly manicured fingernail coyly into the wooden floor as he said this word. “. . . thinks I should make another series. I’ve been thinking about what to do, and I thought . . . what about the stuff that happened here? The crimes. The kidnapping thing. You know about that.”
“About?” Hayes was super distracting to talk to in close quarters, and now he was talking about making a series. None of this made sense.
“The crimes,” he said again. “You know about the crimes, right? The crime here? Crimes?”
“Crimes,” she repeated. “Yeah. I do. But . . . what?”
She was not coming off well.
“You’d be, like, the technical director. The expert. I even had an idea for a trailer. We could shoot it in that tunnel, the one under the sunken garden.”
Everything came into sharp focus in a second.
“The tunnel?” she said. “You mean the one the kidnappers used?”
“Under the sunken garden,” he repeated.
“That tunnel has been filled in since 1938,” Stevie said.
“They dug it out in the spring,” Hayes said, his smile widening. “For construction. They started at the end of last school year. I’ve already been in it.”
“You were in the tunnel?” Stevie said. She was leaning forward and she made no effort to hide the urgency in her voice.
“Once,” he said. “Last year, when they first excavated it.”
The idea of the tunnel being open again had never occurred to Stevie. She really did not believe in fate, but the timing of this was incredible.
“I was just thinking how it would be a good place to make something. And you’re here now, and you know all the stuff about the crimes. People would like that. We’d be the first ones to show what the tunnel looks like.”
Stevie’s heart was pounding hard.
“Are we allowed in there?”
“Well . . .” Hayes unfurled his smile slowly. “Technically, we don’t know about it. They tried to hide the fact that they opened it up, but I was back there one day and we saw that they were taking out tons of dirt.”
“And you actually went in?”
“Actually went in,” Hayes said. “But it’s just an idea. If you’re too busy, I understand. . . .”
“I’ll do it,” Stevie said. “Write. Or, whatever. I’ll do it.”
“Great!” Hayes replied. “So, you’ll get Nate. And you guys can write something over the weekend? By Monday?”
“Wait, what?”
“It doesn’t have to be long,” Hayes said. “Five pages or something. Ten. Just something about the crime, something that happens in the tunnel. Didn’t some student die? Or the thing with the ransom? Wasn’t there a thing with the ransom? With a boat or something? In the sunken garden?”
Stevie nodded.
“So that,” Hayes said. “Do that. Write something with the tunnel and something about the ransom in the sunken garden. We can do that. This is going to be great.”
Minutes later, he was gone, and Stevie wondered how you made a script. It was a minor point. She was going into the tunnel. That was all that mattered.
Strange conversation three was instigated by Stevie.
“Think about it,” Stevie said, sitting in Nate’s desk chair later that evening. “I could give you all the facts. There are transcripts. There are files. It’s practically written. You’d barely need to do anything.”
“I don’t know anything about writing scripts,” Nate said.
“But you write!”
“Scripts are totally different,” Nate said. “Scripts are . . . they’re like an X-ray of a book. Just the bones. The words people say and the things they do. Books are . . . everything. What the characters see and feel and how everything is told.”
“It sounds easier,” Stevie pointed out.
“It’s a different thing,” Nate said. “I’m supposed to show Dr. Quinn outlines for the next three chapters of my book, plus all this reading . . .”
“Maybe,” Stevie said, “if you wrote this, Dr. Quinn would let you have more time on the book. You could write this instead of that for a while? They love group projects here.”
Much like Stevie had been lured in by the tunnel, Nate could not resist the offer of skipping out on his book.
“So I take this stuff and make it into some scripts,” he said. “And you do what?”
“I advise on technical matters.”
“Meaning?”
“I explain what happened,” she said. “I help you. We could call it Truly Devious.”
Nate exhaled long through his nose.
“Fine,” he said. “Anything is better than doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”