“SO,” CHARLES SAID. “LET’S TALK.”
It was the next morning, and Stevie sat in front of Call Me Charles up in his office. The rain beat against the windows as classical music played very quietly from small white speakers. Stevie had been waiting for this call, and when it finally came, she felt like her body and soul were ready. She’d read about Marie Antoinette, waiting in a prison palace in Paris while they built guillotines outside.
“Let’s talk about what happened,” Charles said. “First of all, tell me how you’re doing.”
“You mean, how I feel?” Stevie said.
“However you want to answer the question.”
Stevie was not someone who liked talking about feelings, but in this one instance, feelings were probably better than facts.
“I mean,” Stevie said, “I’m okay. It’s weird, but Hayes wasn’t someone I knew well. So, it’s horrible, but . . . we weren’t close.”
Charles gave a concerned nod.
“Can you talk to me about what happened? Whose idea was it to use the tunnel?”
“It was Hayes’s,” Stevie said. “I thought the tunnel was filled in.”
“No,” Charles said. “We dug it out in the spring. It’s going to be demolished and filled in when we run the new water and sewer line for the art barn expansion. We thought we were keeping that fact under wraps, but . . .”
“I was the one who picked the lock,” Stevie said.
It just felt important to say it to him. The police already knew. Best not to have the telltale heart beating under her until she lost her marbles.
“I know,” he said.
Several long seconds passed. Charles didn’t look so young and carefree today. No superhero T-shirts under his suit.
“Tunneling has been a feature of this school for a long time. We try to discourage it. And Hayes didn’t—it wasn’t the tunnel that hurt Hayes. What happened to Hayes was an extremely unfortunate accident. Extremely unfortunate. Should you have gone into that tunnel? No. But you didn’t take Hayes in there that night.”
Stevie looked at the pattern of the drops beating on the glass.
“Am I going to be expelled?” she asked.
“No,” Charles said. “But there is something I’m going to have you do. Come with me.”
Stevie followed him, almost in a trance, as he took her back to the attic entrance. She wasn’t being kicked out—and she was being taken to the attic?
“We’ve decided after what happened with Hayes to double up on all security,” he said, entering a new, longer security code into the panel. They made their way up the narrow stairs.
“When we spoke before,” he said, turning on the lights, “I said I wanted you to find a project that put a human face on the crime that happened here, the loss. You found a project. No one could have predicted the terrible lesson on loss you learned. Now that you know about the tunnel being opened, there’s something I can show you.”
He took her down several aisles and turned down one full of archival storage boxes and three shelves of identical long, green leather books with dates on them.
“This row contains a lot of the records and personal effects from Albert Ellingham’s office and the household management,” he said.
At the end of the row, near the window, he knelt down to the floor and pulled a beaten metal box, about three feet in length and a foot or so high, off the bottom shelf. The box was clearly very old. It had been painted red, and parts of the paint remained, but much was worn or rusted away.
“When the crew first went in the tunnel, they found this packed into the dirt used to seal up the tunnel. It was locked when the crew found it. . . .” Charles carefully lifted the old latch. “Everyone was excited. A buried box in the tunnel . . . it could have been anything. So we opened it and . . .”
He lifted the lid, revealing two side-by-side piles of yellowed newspapers. The headline of the top one read: ELLINGHAM FAMILY KIDNAPPED. Stevie knelt next to Charles to have a better look. The newspapers were all different, different cities, different dates, but all featured the Ellingham Affair in the headline.
“Someone buried a box of newspapers in the tunnel?” she said.
“We don’t know who put them there,” Charles replied. “But I think it was probably Albert Ellingham. Maybe he was trying to bury the past, bury his pain.”
“It must have been hard for a man who owned a newspaper to hide from the news,” she said.
“A good point,” Charles said, nodding. “But I think you understand, that tunnel was a sacred space. It’s seen so much death. People are going to sensationalize this.”
Stevie took this as a bit of an admonishment.
“So here is what you are going to do,” he said. “These rows . . .”
He took her back out and to another row, labeled 38.
“Thirty-eight through forty-five are full of household items. Things were gathered up in boxes but not well sorted. I want you to sort and catalog these seven rows of materials.”
“Is this my punishment?” she said.
“We don’t do punishments,” Charles replied. “We do projects. This is your project. Sort, organize, catalog.”
Stevie looked down the row. It looked like it contained bins of doorknobs, stacks of old magazines, bags of junk.
“You can start now,” he said, “if you feel up to it.”
“Sure,” she said.
“Then I’ll leave you to it. Just let security know when you’re done. You may need to do this over a few days, so I’ll arrange it that someone can take you up here.”
He left her alone with all of the treasures. As punishments went, this was about as good as it got. She wandered the aisles, taking in the view passively. She allowed the patterns to sink into her mind—clothes here, furniture there. Globes, books, dishes . . . It was her and the Ellingham items, and they became familiar with this repetition.
She spent some time standing in front of a massive cabinet with horizontally glass-fronted shelves before working up the courage to open it up and pull out a delicate soup bowl—white, with a pattern of pink flowers and tender green vines, edged in gold. At the bottom of the dish, the letters AIE were also painted in gold. There was a stack of books near the china.
She returned to the first row he had taken her to and looked at the long green ledgers. Some contained orders of groceries and household supplies. These people went through a lot of food on the weekends—endless lemons and oranges and eggs and mint for drinks. Massive orders of cigarettes to be put in cigarette dispensers. Notes of dozens of smashed champagne glasses and orders of fresh ones. Floor wax for the scuffs in the ballroom.
One book just contained household menus. Stevie paged through until she found April 13, 1936. It was written in a neat, precise hand:
MAIN TABLE:
Crème de céleri soup
Filet of sole with sauce amandine
Roast lamb
Minted peas
Asparagus hollandaise
Potatoes lyonnaise
Cold lemon soufflé
April 14 was not as elaborate:
No main table service. Tray taken to office.
Sandwiches of cold chicken and ham salad
Sliced celery and stuffed olives
Lemon cake
Coffee
Guest, Miss Flora Robinson, tray service: clear soup, tea with milk, tomato juice, sandwiches of cold chicken salad, sliced celery, junket
Guest, Mr. Leonard Nair, tray service: scrambled eggs, coffee
Insignificant though this may have seemed, it gave a sense of the day and the change in the household. Everything had been going along as normal on the thirteenth. On the fourteenth, it was a different place. The tray of cold sandwiches, thrown together because they had to eat to keep going. The weird addition of just some sliced celery that had probably been around from the day before and some olives (eat anything, anything, whatever is there), some cake that was probably already made. The coffee to keep them going.
Flora Robinson and Leo Holmes Nair seemed to have eaten in their rooms, simple foods, foods you ate when you were sick or hungover. Scrambled eggs. Broth. And more coffee and tea. Just stay awake. The whole house, crackling with nervous energy, waiting for the phone to ring. And still, the butler recorded it, this desperate meal, because that was how things were done. The kitchen staff had probably been questioned as well, so they didn’t have as much time to prepare food.
She worked her way along the row, pulling out boxes of old office supplies—three telephones, rolled maps, wax tubes, telephone directories. One large, velvet-lined box held a number of items that seemed unique—a crystal ink pot, a fine pen, pushpins, paper clips, a stack of business cards, an invitation to a dinner party on October 31, 1938.
That was a meaningful date. These were the things that must have been on his desk when he died. She shuffled through them, the notepad with some circles and numbers drawn on it, with drips of ink on the page. A bit of ripped newspaper with information about the stock exchange. A Western Union telegraph slip with the words:
10/30/38
Where do you look for someone who’s never really there?
Always on a staircase but never on a stair
His last riddle, with no solution given. On the thirtieth of October, 1938, Albert Ellingham told his secretary that he was going for a sail. He seemed strangely bright that day. He took George Marsh, his loyal friend, with him. They sailed out of Burlington Yacht Club. Later that evening, residents of South Hero heard a boom and saw a flash on the water. Ellingham’s boat had exploded. The wreckage revealed a bomb had been placed on board. The anarchists who had long dogged him, who had been blamed for the murder of his wife and the disappearance of his child, seemed to have gotten him in the end.
Last things were so strange. Most people had no control over or concept of what their last acts would be. She wondered for a moment if Hayes had realized what was happening to him, that he was going to die while filming a video at school.
For a moment, she remembered the letter on the wall, her vision. It had seemed so real, but there was no way it could be. It made no sense. It had simply been a vivid dream caused by a racing mind. Stevie did not believe in psychics, in precognition. She didn’t think she had seen Hayes’s death coming. The word murder had appeared in her dream, but that was because murders happened here. There was nothing spooky about it. She dreamed of a murder, there was a murder. Albert Ellingham wrote a riddle, as he did many times, and then he died.
She stared at the little telegram slip for a long time, examining the words, the ink, the old but well-preserved paper. This must have been Ellingham’s last riddle, something he was working on the day he died. A little bit of nonsense, a return to his old way of being. And then fate interrupted. Had anyone noticed this before, this little bit of detritus from his desk? Or did no one care about his little games in the wake of his death, when the great empire had to be managed? Who cares about a little riddle when one of the richest men in the world dies?
Stevie carefully put the slip of paper back in the box, like she was setting a flower on his grave. Her eyes teared up a bit and her throat grew rough.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and went over to one of the windows and looked out over the expanse of the campus and the view beyond. Death had come to Ellingham again. Death loved this place. But if Stevie was going to cope with being here, cope with the job she wanted to do, she had to look death in the eye. She could not be afraid, or cry whenever she saw a sad memento. She had to be tough. That’s what the dead deserved.
But, Stevie wondered, what was the solution to the riddle? What was always on a staircase but never on a stair?
INTERVIEW BETWEEN AGENT SAMUEL ARNOLD AND GEORGE MARSH
APRIL 17, 1936, 5:45 P.M.
LOCATION: ELLINGHAM PROPERTY
SA:Thank you for taking the time to speak to me again.
GM: Whatever you need me for.
SA:This has been a difficult few days.
GM: I haven’t slept in two nights. Doesn’t matter. Iris and Alice are still out there. Can I have one of your cigarettes?
SA:Of course. Can I just go over your relationship to Albert Ellingham and the safety concerns in the past? You were with the New York police department when you met?
GM: That’s right. I was a detective. We’d been working an anarchist gang that was causing trouble. We found out that they were planning to bomb an important industrialist. We found out it was Albert Ellingham, and luckily I got there in time.
SA:You personally saved his life moments before the car exploded.
GM: I did my job. After that, Mr. Ellingham was kind enough to recommend me for the FBI. I worked out of the New York office. You ever work out of New York?
SA:No. Only Washington. Director Hoover sent me up here to work this case.
GM: Mr. Ellingham asked me to come up to Vermont when he built this place. I do field work for the bureau and I consult for him.
SA:But you don’t live here in the house.
GM: No. I live in Burlington. I come here whenever Mr. Ellingham needs me. I usually come up when important guests are here. I was here for the party that weekend, mostly because Maxine Melville, the film star, was here. He wants to sign her for his studio, so he had her come up for a visit. The weekend party was mostly to entertain her. I watch the place, watch for press, make sure the staff don’t get too nosy. They’re pretty good, but people get strange around famous people.
SA:What’s your thought on the missing student?
GM: Wrong place, wrong time, most likely. I’ve looked through her school files. Good kid. Real smart. One of the brightest here. But she liked to find places to hide and read. I heard you found a book of hers in the observatory?
SA:That’s right. We did.
GM: Damn. Poor kid.
SA:What was your assessment of the letter that came in on April eighth? The one that we’ve been calling the Truly Devious letter.
GM: Mackenzie handles all the correspondence. He shows me the ones he thinks are trouble.
SA:But he didn’t show you this letter until after the kidnapping?
GM: It was a busy weekend. I think there wasn’t time. By the time I saw that letter, the thing was under way. Mackenzie’s always on top of things. It’s just too bad he didn’t tell me. Not that it would have changed anything.
SA:What do you mean?
GM: I mean that it’s hard to get Albert Ellingham to change his plans. Like this place, for example. You see exactly what I see. The advantage and disadvantage of this place is its location. On one hand, it’s hard to get to, so it’s not going to be the target of spontaneous crime. You have to really make an effort to come here, and then you have to make a bigger effort to get away. But, as we’ve found out, the disadvantage is that there are many places to ambush and many ways to escape.
SA:Surely, as someone who foiled a bomb plot on Albert Ellingham once before, this occurred to you?
GM: It worried me to death. I talked about it with Albert. I suggested getting more men up here to guard the place. He said no.
SA:Why?
GM: His words, “It’s not conducive to playful learning.” His words.
SA:So he went without the necessary security?
GM: Listen. There’s something you need to understand about Albert Ellingham. He’s a great man. No one I admire more, aside from J. Edgar Hoover himself. But he thinks he’s invincible. He thinks he can do anything. Because in his experience, he can. He made all of his own money. Everything he has—his newspapers and movie studio and the rest—he built from nothing. The guy was a newsie as a kid, lived on the street, didn’t have two pennies to rub together. Man’s a genius. But he thinks nothing can touch him. I don’t think he keeps me around because he thinks I actually help—I think he sees me like a lucky rabbit’s foot. I saved him from that bomb, but he saw it as luck and he took me along. I’m grateful. But he believes his will is enough. Something like this was always bound to happen. I knew it. You can see it. It was always bound to happen.
[Interview terminated 6:10 p.m.]