THERE WERE ONLY TWO SEATS LEFT ON THE RETURN COACH WHEN they reached it, so it was David and Stevie together again. Stevie felt the tightness in her chest and realized that she was balling her fists so hard in her pockets that her nails were cutting into her palms.
“They seemed to like me,” he said.
“What the hell was that about?” Stevie said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Stevie got out her phone and stuck in her earbuds. David pulled one out.
“What? You get to stay. Why are you so mad?”
“Because,” Stevie said. “I don’t get to stay because of me. I get to stay because of you. Because they think we’re dating. Because they probably think I’ve landed some rich, preppy boyfriend. I get to stay because there’s a guy.”
“I know,” he said, his brows angling in annoyance. “That’s why I did this. You said they thought that was important. That’s why I came along. If you want me to learn my valuable lesson, you have to spell it out.”
“Dating,” she said coolly, “is what my parents think girls do. They date. So I have now achieved all they expect from me. Also, the Edward King thing? Yeah. I had to sit there and swallow that whole.”
“Seems to have worked out,” David said. “Again, not seeing why you’re mad. You’re here, they’re far away.”
“Because again, it’s not me. It’s Edward King, the guy who represents literally everything I hate. The guy is racist, fascist scum and now my parents run his goon army for the state, and I had to smile.”
“I just want you to know, you didn’t smile . . .”
Stevie was too enraged for a moment to speak. She breathed heavily until she found her voice again.
“Also, your mom isn’t a pilot, you lying freak,” she added.
“How do you know? She might be.”
“And your dad runs a fertilizer farm?” she asked.
“That one is true,” David said.
“Near the beach in San Diego?”
“Never swim there,” David said, gravely shaking his head.
“I know one thing that is full of shit,” she said. “And it’s you.”
He shrugged as if to say, Fair enough.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked.
“Lots of things,” he said.
“You’re a liar,” she said.
“Maybe we both are a little sensitive about our parents. I just wanted to help you solve your problem. Problem solved. You want to be mad, be mad. Here.”
He picked the dangling earbud back up, and she reinserted it. But she didn’t turn anything on. She looked out the window, and at his pale reflection in the glass. She found herself annoyingly transfixed by the line of his jaw. At first, it had looked so sharp to her, like his face was coming to a point. It wasn’t that sharp after all. He must have been tense before, jutting it out.
He was looking at his phone now, paying her no attention.
Except he had made his hand into a little spider and was dancing it along his thigh. She watched it, as she was surely supposed to, and it crept closer to her leg . . .
. . . then backed off.
. . . then it approached again, with one tentative spider-leg finger hanging over hers but not touching, not touching . . .
. . . just the very tip touched; was it even touching?
Her entire body was static, anticipatory.
The coach made the violent turn into the drive, jolting them and washing the spider away.
Stevie walked ahead of David when they got out on the drive. When she was halfway to Minerva, she slowed, expecting his footsteps behind hers. He was nowhere in sight. She entered the common room a ball of frustration.
“How was it?” Janelle said when Stevie passed her room. Janelle was in the middle of a pile of math books and wires and an open computer playing a TV show.
“Good,” Stevie said, taking as casual a stance as she could. “Good. I think it’s okay. I’m staying, for now.”
Janelle made an excited squeaking noise.
“Come sit,” she said.
“I’m just going to . . .” Stevie tilted her head toward her room. “I just need a few minutes.”
Inside her room, she paced around with her coat on. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were bright red from the cold. Her short hair was pressed flat against her head from the pressure of her knit hat.
It was time to ask herself something she had never seriously considered—was she attractive? What was attractive? What did other people like? She knew what she liked—the short hair. She liked the way she looked when she narrowed her eyes, because it was sharp and penetrating without being too squinty. She liked the fullness of her mouth, because she was not afraid to speak up. She felt solid in the fullness of her hips.
Was this what pretty was?
Who knew. This was what a Stevie was, anyway.
She grabbed the top edge of the bureau and stretched her arms out, looking down at the floor. Stevie knew about panic. What she didn’t understand as much was this new hormonal cocktail her body had on the menu and what it meant for her plans. She wanted to go upstairs. She wanted . . . David.
She wanted him. David, who had just made her madder than anyone else aside from her family. David, who she had to see every damn day. Someone who came in from a run smelling rank and appeared again in the common room all spicy and clean and . . .
Why him? Out of anyone, why did the hormone gods pick him?
She heard him come in. Heard him come into the hall. Was he going to stop?
No. There was the loud creak of the steps.
She had to go and talk to him, maybe. She wasn’t sure what about. She slipped out of her coat, paced the length of her room, and found herself leaving and heading upstairs.
Once at his door, she stood there uncertainly. She didn’t come up to this floor that often. The guys had to come down, but this place was optional. It was darker up here. The wind made more noise. She raised her hand to knock and held it in place for a full minute before bringing it timidly down on the wood.
When David opened the door, he did not look cocky. The heat collected up here, so it was extremely warm. The only light on inside was a small bedside lamp.
“You want something?” he said.
“I want . . .” What did she want? “. . . to understand.”
“What? Life? The universe?”
“I want to know what your deal is,” she said.
“My deal? What’s a deal?”
“There’s something you’re not saying,” she said. “There’s something . . .”
“There’s something you’re not saying either,” he replied. “Why won’t you mention that we made out?”
“What am I supposed to say about it?” she said, her face flushing.
“Wow, you’ve got real blushing issues. You gotta work on that.”
She tipped her head up angrily.
“What is it we are supposed to talk about?” she said. “Technique?”
“We could. I thought yours was good. You really like to explore with that tongue. Every part of you is a detective, I guess . . .”
“Okay,” she said, turning to the door. “Good-bye.”
“I annoy people,” he said. “Believe me. I’m aware. It’s an effective way to communicate if you don’t have any other options. If you can’t get in through the door, throw a rock through the window. And I think maybe you’re the same way.”
This grounded her for a moment. It made sense, and she was always willing to grant when someone else made sense. He left the door open and moved away from it. She went toward it hesitantly, pushed it open a bit more, and stepped inside. He was sitting on his bed.
“She comes in,” he said.
Stevie tapped the doorframe nervously.
“I think maybe I’m embarrassing you by talking about what we did the other night,” he said. “I actually don’t want to embarrass you. That’s not my goal. Maybe I’m more comfortable talking about that stuff. I guess there are some things I just don’t give a shit about, for the right reasons. I can tell you I liked what we did.”
Her wrists were throbbing. Her pulse was going to make her hands balloon up, maybe explode from the pressure.
“The fact is,” he said, “I liked you from the first moment I saw you, when you looked like you wanted to punch me in the face for just being alive. That probably says something dark about me. And I think you like me because I annoy you. Both of us have real problems, but maybe we should make our weird personalities work for us.”
Stevie had often wondered how these conversations worked, when people talked about feelings and touching and all of the stuff she thought was meant to be kept carefully bottled inside her own personal apothecary. Now someone wanted in, to take the lids off the vials, to peer at the contents. Stevie was unaware that people were even allowed to talk about emotions this frankly. This was not how things happened at home.
She shut the door. Her hand shook as she did it, but that didn’t matter. She took the few, nervous steps to the bed and sat gingerly on the edge. Sitting on his bed. This was new, dangerous territory.
He didn’t move.
“So?” she said. “What do we do?”
“What do you want to do?”
Her eyes were going in and out of focus. She moved over toward him and reached around, putting her hand on the back of his head and pulling him closer. She wondered if he would strain against her hand, if this was all wrong, but his head moved forward. She pressed her lips to his.
This time, the kissing was slow as they delicately balanced on the very knife edge of the bed. Their lips met and they would be together for a minute, then they would both stop and stay where they were for another few seconds, faces together, before doing it again. There was no pressure, no anxiety. It was like they were talking easily through the kisses. Her hand slid down his chest and she felt his heart beating hard. He was stroking her hair, running his fingers up the short strands. He leaned back against the bed, and Stevie rested on top of him gently.
And then, a knock.
“David?” Pix called.
Everything stopped dead. Reality came down with an audible thump. This could not happen again.
“Closet,” David whispered.
Stevie found her legs were wobbly when she went to stand. She stumbled over to the closet and climbed in with a pile of shoes and bags and ski equipment, all jumbled and smelling (not overpoweringly, but still) of use, pants and shirts crowding her head. She shut the door, closing herself in. David greeted Pix.
“You need to go over to the Great House,” she heard Pix say. “Nothing’s wrong, Charles just needs to talk to you about—”
“It’s fine,” he said. “Sure. I’ll come now. My coat’s downstairs.”
Quiet. They seemed to have gone.
Stevie crouched in the closet, her heart thumping, rumpled and a bit overheated, her breath coming fast. She slowed it down, turned on her phone for light, and shone it around the closet space. She looked at his shoes, picking them up, giving them the once-over. All had relatively unworn soles. Stevie had sneakers that had worn straight through the bottoms, and most of her shoes had scuffing to the toes, to the sides, little imperfections she either tried to hide or just accepted. These were new shoes. Replaced regularly. And all name brands. There were dress shoes in here, made of soft leather, with the name inside: ELLIS, OF LONDON. Tennis gear. Skis. Everything confirmed the diagnosis of well off, and not the son of a pilot and the manager of a fertilizer plant, probably. When she heard nothing outside the door, she crawled out of the closet and went to the door. No noise.
She was just in David’s room. Alone.
There is a principle often discussed in murder mysteries. Agatha Christie even wrote a book with the title: Murder Is Easy. The idea is that the first time is the hardest, but once you transgress that barrier, once you take a life and get away with it, it becomes progressively easier each time. Stevie had yet to see anything in her reading that showed that this was necessarily true in real life, though it certainly seemed true that people may commit additional murders in a state of panic. Still, it logically held up. Murder is easy. And going through rooms is easy, especially if the owner of said room is someone who let you in and left you alone there.
And she had so many questions. Who was David, the David with no social media? The guy who kept telling weird lies about his family. The desire to know was like hunger, really—it rumbled, it demanded information.
Maybe she could just have a little look around? Just eyeball the place. There would be time. To walk over to the Great House, meet with Charles, come back—that was a minimum of twenty minutes, even if Charles said very little. And it was probably best she wait in here a minute or two anyway, just to make sure Pix was gone.
Just a little look around.
He had a video game system, lots of computer gear. Good speakers—Stevie had seen the brand advertised. Good headphones. Good everything. His books were haphazardly piled. Subjects: philosophy, game theory, lots of literature, books on how to write (interesting), graphic novels. There was an e-reader on the stand next to the bed. She flipped through the library contents: more graphic novels, lots of sci-fi (David liked a space opera, clearly), books about history. David was a reader. An avid one.
She put the e-reader back on the page it had been on when she picked it up and replaced it. She had a look at his bedside light: an Italian brand, another quality piece. Everything in his room was just a little bit better, from the weight and smoothness of his sheets (she sat down on the bed and gave them a feel; they smelled of him) to the heavy down comforter.
She allowed herself to rest back on the bed for a moment.
What else was in plain view? Police could look at things in plain view when they came inside with no warrant. The room was clean. Not tidy, but generally clean. An effort had been made to keep things in the right place. There was one old Led Zeppelin poster, but Stevie got the impression that it had just been put up as a kind of non-decorating. Get the first object you see, stick it up. The vast majority of the room was a blank canvas, without photos or decorations.
She leaned back and her hand struck something hard. She reached into the sheets and pulled out his laptop.
His laptop, just sitting there.
She looked it over for a moment. No stickers, no markings. She put her hands on the edge of the computer.
To open or . . .
The thing about looking just a little bit means it’s really easy to look a little bit more. Once you’ve touched it, well, you’ve touched it, and if you have the computer in your lap and you open it and a screen comes up, there you are.
Maybe this was what Pandora felt like when she got her famous box. Open it and the light pours out . . .
“What the hell are you doing?”
Everything stopped for a moment. How he had come upstairs without her hearing him was unknown. She must have been too into what she was doing—of course, what she was doing was going through his computer.
Answering his question would have been self-incriminating, so Stevie sat there, still and silent. Still things can sometimes appear invisible.
“What,” David said again, “are you doing?”
“I was just . . .”
He came over and put his hands out for the computer. She passed it over.
“I . . . didn’t even look.”
“It seems like you did,” he said.
Well, yeah. It did. He was right. Stevie felt her defenses snap back into place.
“What’s the big secret?” she snapped back. “You’ve met my family. You just got in the car and came along. You’ve had a look at me.”
“And you wanted a look,” he said. “Did it ever occur to you there’s a reason I don’t want to talk about my family?”
“We all have reasons,” she said. “You’re not special in having a weird time with your parents.”
“My parents are dead,” he said. “Does that count as special?”
One time, when she was little, Stevie was outside playing on a cold day. She caught some speed on a patch of ice and went, full speed, into a wall. As her abdomen made contact, she remembered the feeling of all the air being violently forced out of her body, scraping her throat as it exited.
It sort of felt like that now. The angles had come back into David’s features, and something else.
Hurt.
“Just get out,” he said.
“I . . .”
“Get out,” he said quietly.
INTERVIEW BETWEEN AGENT SAMUEL ARNOLD AND ROBERT MACKENZIE
APRIL 17, 1936, 7:10 P.M.
LOCATION: ELLINGHAM PROPERTY
SA: Just a few more questions, Mr. Mackenzie. We have to go through these things several times.
RM: I understand.
SA: When did you start working for Albert Ellingham?
RM: When I left Princeton, eight years ago.
SA: And you are his personal assistant in business matters?
RM: Correct. I am his personal business secretary.
SA: So you see quite a number of Mr. Ellingham’s transactions.
RM: I see nearly all of them, if not all.
SA: Do you find it odd, running the business from up here in this mountain location?
RM: I don’t think any of us expected to be here this long.
SA: What do you mean?
RM: The school was just another project. Mr. Ellingham has a lot of projects. It seemed like he was planning for this to be a retreat, maybe to be used a few weeks in the summer. But he’s been here since September. We all seemed to be waiting for him to say, “All right! Back to New York.” But it never happened. We were here all winter. Do you have any idea what winters are like up here?
SA: Cold, I’d imagine.
RM: Half the time you can’t leave the house for all the snow. The locals don’t seem to mind, but everyone else had wild cabin fever. Mrs. Ellingham . . .
[Pause.]
SA: What about her?
RM: Mrs. Ellingham is lively. She likes society and athletics. She did some skiing, but that wasn’t enough. You could see it wearing on her.
SA: Did this cause friction between Mr. and Mrs. Ellingham?
[Silence.]
SA: I know you feel a sense of loyalty, but there are things we have to know.
RM: I realize that. Yes, maybe a bit. They are very different people. A loving couple, of course, but very different people. I think being up here has been hard on her at times. She has Miss Robinson to keep her company. That seems to help.
SA: They’re close?
RM: Like sisters.
SA: And what is Mr. Nair like?
RM: Mr. Nair is a brilliant artist and an inebriate.
SA: A frequent drinker?
RM: Often and in high quantities. I once watched him drink an entire case of champagne by himself. I was surprised he didn’t die.
SA: Is he aggressive in that condition?
RM: On the contrary, he usually just paints or talks and eventually we find him somewhere on the grounds, asleep. The students once pulled him out of the fountain. If you’re asking if he’s capable of arranging a kidnapping, I don’t think Leonard Holmes Nair is capable of arranging breakfast. This was organized.
SA: You’re an organized man.
RM: Which is why I know organization when I see it. I’m professionally dull, Agent Arnold. It’s why I was hired. I’m a foil to Mr. Ellingham’s exuberance.
SA: It sounds like you’re sensible. On the night of the thirteenth, you advocated calling the police.
RM: And I regret I didn’t do it, even though I was told not to.
SA: You obeyed orders.
RM: I obeyed orders.
SA: Can you tell me about the letter that was received on April eighth, the Truly Devious letter? What did you make of it?
RM: We get, on average, two or three threats a day in with the regular correspondence. The vast majority of it is nonsense and a lot of it from the same people. At first, this one struck me as a bit of a joke.
SA: Why a joke?
RM: The cutout letters. The poem. But then I noticed a few things. I noticed it was postmarked from Burlington. And then I noticed the address. You see, Mr. Ellingham has business correspondence from all around the country. As I’m sure you can imagine, mail delivery here is difficult. So we have all business correspondence directed to an office in Burlington, and we have it delivered by car every day, weather providing. If the weather is too bad, we have a secretary there who can read it to me over the telephone. What was unusual was that the letter didn’t come to any of the business addresses—that’s where most of the abusive mail goes to. It was addressed here, to this house. This one seemed much more personal.
SA: But you didn’t show it to George Marsh.
RM: I was going to. But there was a great deal going on over the weekend. I was going to show him the next time he came by.
SA: So there was a party over the weekend?
RM: For Maxine Melville, yes.
SA: Did you attend?
RM: Only in the sense that I was in the house. I was very busy finalizing the paperwork on an important deal Mr. Ellingham has been working on. He’s purchasing a newspaper in Philadelphia.
SA: Was there anything out of the ordinary about the weekend or Monday morning?
RM: Absolutely nothing. We went to Burlington on Monday morning to do some business and send some cables. We came back in the evening.
SA: Let’s talk about this house and the school. Did you feel this location was insecure?
RM: Absolutely, considering the threats and the attempted bombing.
SA: Did you speak to your employer about this?
RM: I tried.
SA: You seem like a smart man, Mr. Mackenzie. Your instincts were always to reach out to law enforcement. You have your eyes open. Where do you feel Iris and Alice Ellingham and Dolores Epstein might be?
RM: Nowhere good. To be honest with you, I think . . .
SA: Yes?
RM: I hate to say the words, Agent Arnold. I think that letter was from the kidnappers and Truly Devious meant every word on that page. I think they’re dead. God help me, I think they’re all dead.
[Interview terminated 7:32 p.m.]