THE PROCESS OF WRITING TRULY DEVIOUS, THE VIDEO SERIES, WAS not as smooth as Stevie had promised.
On the first day, Nate greeted Stevie in the morning with a huge smile. “I drafted two chapters of the new book last night!” he said. “I mean, they’re drafts. I was writing so fast, Stevie. I swear to you I wrote like fifteen thousand words last night.”
“Is that . . . good?” she asked.
“I don’t know!” he said. “But it turns out that making me write this screenplay made me want to write anything else, which meant I worked on my book!”
“Wait,” Stevie said, “wait, does that mean you didn’t write the script?”
Nate shook his head happily.
“Yep!” he said.
By dinner, the story had changed.
“Everything I wrote last night is terrible,” he said. “And we have no script. Let’s write this thing. Show me that stuff again.”
This pattern repeated several times. Stevie would produce copied transcripts of the police interviews. These were all readily available online. Nate would go off to write. Nate would do something else. Finally, Stevie sat down with Nate at the farm table for five hours and side by side, passing the computer back and forth, they assembled ten pages of script.
The scene opened in the tunnel, with Hayes reading the Truly Devious letter. Then it went to the scene of the ransom drop, with Hayes playing Albert Ellingham. How Hayes was going to play Albert Ellingham, a man thirty years his senior, was not their problem. Nor was the fact that this scene involved Albert Ellingham rowing a boat across a lake that was no longer there. What mattered was that it all took place in the sunken garden, because maybe if they shot there, Stevie could get into the observatory.
Priorities.
All in all, she was pleased with what they had done. The result looked script-like, with people saying words and doing things.
On Monday evening, as it thundered outside, Stevie and Nate presented the script to a small team who assembled in the art barn. Along with her and Nate, there was Maris, who looked every inch the vixen in a tight, black, fuzzy sweater that was far too heavy for the weather. Her lips were a luminous poppy red. She had on semi-sheer black stockings with a seam running up the back, which she showed off by stretching her legs along the floor and rotating her feet, exposing her calves. She had a mug of smoky tea; its steam perfumed the space.
“I think you guys know Maris,” Hayes said. “She’s going to help with the filming and direction.”
There was also someone Stevie had seen before—in the yurt that first night. His face was long, with a high forehead and a lantern jaw and premature worry wrinkles in his forehead. He wore a long black coat and a scarlet scarf swung over his shoulders.
“This is Dash,” Hayes said. “He’s going to be our stage manager. Dash is the best.”
Hayes read out the script from his computer, with Maris filling in the set directions. It was rough in spots, and most of it was just verbatim from the various case documents, but Nate had given it enough of a shape. Stevie had chosen the best parts of the transcripts. And to his credit, Hayes did a good job of playing Albert Ellingham. Somehow, they had actually made something that felt like a show.
“This is amazing,” Hayes said as he finished. “Hey, Maris, would you take a few pictures? Just to document the working process.”
“Sure,” she said, pulling out her phone and taking a few photos of Hayes studying his computer.
“I need more detail,” Dash said. “What was it like that night?”
“It was foggy,” Stevie said.
“We can do fog,” Dash said, pulling out his phone. “You want fog? We can for sure do fog.”
“Lots of fog,” Hayes said.
“Ooh, yeah.” Dash nodded. “I can rig a few T-90s all over the sunken garden. That chemical fog hangs low. We can make it look like the lake is full of fog.”
“Great,” Hayes said. “Fog.”
“I’m going to need fog machines, some poles to rig lights. We can make this work.”
The next steps involved making it all work, and Stevie and Nate were not off the hook yet. There were costumes to assemble and props to prepare.
For the costumes, Maris and Stevie went to the Ellingham Academy theater. It was a small, dedicated space that looked like a tiny Greek temple from the outside. The theater space had a long, low stage room for about a hundred people, and black walls. The costume area was accessed by climbing a ladder in the corner of the lobby, which led to an attic that was composed of two long rooms separated by a hallway only two feet wide.
The costume closet was on one side, with a sharply sloped roof Stevie kept hitting her head on. It was crammed completely with clothes racks overstuffed with random clothing items that seemed to be loosely grouped by type. There was a rack thickly packed with men’s suiting of all kinds, a rack of coats, a rack of dresses from every era, racks of fuzzy things, plaster and plastic armor, amorphous items that probably made sense in some context like a giant foam French fry container and a brown sack covered in felt eyeballs.
The floor was a sea of shoes and boots, and the racks above were hats, helmets, purses, shields, feathers (just feathers? Just feathers. Why?) and items of no known nature or provenance. The whole thing smelled like a thrift shop that had been baked in a low oven and felt like a too-tight and too-long hug by a rejected Muppet.
Eventually, two suits were chosen, along with a hat and an overcoat. The prop closet, which was just as oppressive and even more loosely organized, produced a canvas bag and an oar for the fake boat.
Wednesday evening brought something unexpected—construction. The group gathered in the workshop, a barn structure off to the side of the maintenance area. It was open and cold and contained things that didn’t feature much in Stevie’s daily life: tables with circular saws, racks of tools, large industrial bins. This was where the students of Ellingham came to make things that required space and tools and fire. This didn’t include too many people, but it did include Janelle, who had a welding mask over her face and was staring down two pieces of metal. She lifted the mask as Stevie came in, and waved.
“I need you to cut these into lengths,” Dash said to Stevie, pointing at some wood. “Here are all the measurements.”
He shoved a piece of paper at Stevie.
She looked blankly at a bunch of numbers. “What?” she said.
“Cut. The wood. Into lengths.” Dash pointed at the wood, then the circular saw.
“You must be kidding,” Stevie said.
“I’ll do it,” Maris said, her voice thick with a can you believe this one doesn’t even use a circular saw vibe. She sauntered up to the saw in her fuzzy sweater and leaned over expertly.
The buzz saw cranked to life and Maris put a board on it and sliced it in two. The air filled with the scent of sawdust. Hayes came sauntering in while all of this work was going on, greeted everyone, and rested on the ground and studied his script.
“Hey,” Janelle said as Dash scooped up some poles from an upright storage container in the corner. “What are you doing with those?”
“Making light rigs,” Dash said.
“Oh no you are not. Those are my poles.”
“You can’t need all these poles,” Dash said.
“I do,” Janelle said.
“We just need them for a few days.”
“My poles are specially measured for my machine. These aren’t just any poles,” Janelle said.
“Look, there is no way you need all these poles. I’m taking some.”
“Could we borrow a few?” Stevie said quietly. “I’ll make sure you get them back.”
“For you,” Janelle said. “I would only give my poles to you.”
Dash had the poles out of the bucket in a shot and hurried them out of the workshop.
Maris had stopped sawing for a bit and was looking in a large blue industrial bin on the side of the room.
“There’s dry ice here,” she called to Dash. “Lots of it.”
“I have enough fog machines,” he said. “The liquid is easier to work with.”
Maris shrugged and shut the container.
After constructing their ramps and organizing their poles and all the things that would be needed to film in the sunken garden on Saturday, the plan was made for the excursion into the tunnel. It would be the next night, with everyone meeting behind the art barn at seven.
Still smelling of sawdust, Stevie walked home and dropped into bed. For a few minutes, she rested on her back, fully dressed, and felt the cool air from the window brush against her face. The late summer twilight fell into darkness. There were footsteps creaking above her. David was home. She could tell everyone in her house by their footsteps. She started to understand how Minerva settled and shifted almost musically. She reached up and felt the cool iron of the bedstead. She pulled her comforter over her, sealing herself in with the sawdust smell coming off her sweatpants. Janelle was behind one wall, Ellie the other. She was in the middle, and it felt utterly normal. The thought grabbed her. She had settled in. This was home, and she had almost completed a major project about the Ellingham case with her friends. Well, Nate was her friend, and probably Hayes and Maris and Dash. Her friend Janelle gave her supplies.
A pleasant wave of satisfaction swept over her, and it inspired her to lean over and grab her phone from the bedside stand. She had a note app on her phone that had carefully organized files of images and information about the Ellingham case. She clicked open the folder marked SOCIAL. This was her research on the life the Ellinghams had led up here before the tragedy, back when the house was just a weird and wonderful mountain showpiece, and famous friends would come to ski in the winter, watch the leaves in the fall, and drink all the time. Some of those people probably stayed in this building, in this room, back before the school was opened and Minerva was a guesthouse. Stevie flipped through, stopping on one of her favorites: an image of a guest list from a party in 1929. She had no idea who these people were, but she loved reading the names: Gus Swenson, the Billbody twins, Esther Neil and Buck Randolph, the Davis sisters (Greta and Flo), Bernard Hendish, Lady Isobella de Isla, Dr. Frank Dodds, Frankie Sullivan, the VanWarners, “Telegraph” McMurray and Lorna Darvish . . .
The list went on and on. They had come to have their champagne here, to dance under the stars. Actors, writers, artists, socialites. And then, Dottie Epstein lived here. Stevie had read about Dottie—one of the brightest in her school. Strong-willed. Brilliant. A tough Lower East Side girl who could steal apples and quote Virgil. Stevie reached down for her phone to look at Dottie’s picture for perhaps the thousandth time. She had a head of brown curls, apple cheeks, and a gap between her front teeth. She was the often-forgotten victim because she was not rich. She did not own a school. She was just a smart girl trying to make something of herself at Ellingham Academy. She read mysteries. She had gone to the observatory to read, leaving a book behind.
Stevie set her phone on her stomach and stared up at the ceiling for a long time. The case needed solving for all of them, but maybe Dottie most of all. Dottie, who loved mysteries. Tomorrow night, she would go into the tunnel that had been blocked since 1938. Truly, this was something no one else who looked into the case in recent decades had done. She was literally going to be on new ground. Dottie had passed through that tunnel. She had died in or near or because of it. The tunnel marked the place where Dottie crossed over from life to death.
Stevie fell asleep in this position, phone on her stomach, thinking about Dottie and the tunnel. A pulse of light brought her back to consciousness.
Stevie blinked, confused. Her brain tried to work out the source of the light for a split second. Car headlights?
No.
Still mostly asleep, she pushed herself up on one arm.
The light, or something made of light, was on the wall. It filled the space next to the fireplace. Blobs of color. Letters, words.
It was all a scramble in her brain until she realized the blobs were a message made of cutout letters:
In another flash, the message was gone.