ONCE UPON A TIME, A YOUNG GIRL NAMED DOTTIE FROM NEW YORK City came to Ellingham Academy and ended up dead from a knock on the head.
Once upon another time, an actor from Florida came to Ellingham Academy and found out dry ice was not so nice.
Third time’s the charm. A girl from Pittsburgh came to Ellingham Academy and she wanted to see a dead body.
She got her wish.
That same girl snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and got to stay at Ellingham Academy, but then, worried that defeat might be hungry, promptly fed the victory right back to its gaping jaws. That girl had a taste of something she didn’t know that she wanted or needed, and she had messed it all up.
And life went on.
Ellingham mourned and was counseled. There was an informal memorial in the cupola on the green, where people left candles and pictures and a small zombie doll. There were letters and phone calls from Charles and the other members of the board. Security tightened. Everyone’s passes were checked and upgraded. Curfew became a real thing, and rooms were checked and grounds patrolled. It wasn’t that anyone forgot about Hayes’s death—the subject was constantly talked about—it was just something that had happened. It was part of reality.
Though the investigation was not yet formally closed, information was made available to reassure everyone. Hayes seemed to have died in an accident of his own making. Hayes, a person known to make videos in dark corners, took something that didn’t belong to him. His fingerprints were on Janelle’s ID and the golf cart used to move the dry ice, and a hand truck. This was, it was pretty clear to everyone, a case of Hayes really messing up. And he had stolen property as well. He had gone to great lengths to break rules, so his parents could hardly sue.
The common wisdom was that Hayes had gone into the tunnel to film something new for The End of It All. Hence going back alone. Hence the secret. He’d seen the dry ice, looked in the tunnel, and had an idea that put it all together. He just put it together very badly.
It was back to piles of books and anatomy labs and essays. Something called the Silent Party was scheduled—a dance with no sound or something. It was going to be in the Great House. That would pass as entertainment. Back to school. Because that was what Ellingham was, a school. Stevie tried to do this, but found her concentration was broken. She couldn’t finish her reading, couldn’t write her essays. The weather turned resolutely gray. Mountains are not kind when the season turns. The leaves on the trees started to turn gold and red at the tips and a few overachievers made the trip to the ground.
David did not talk to her.
He was over Stevie’s head, literally. She heard his steps, but that was about all she heard from him. He made himself scarce from the common room and the kitchen, and if he and Stevie crossed paths, he looked away.
She would open books, stare at a page, and realize she hadn’t taken anything in. Then she would read it again, the words slipping in the front door and out the back. There were essays to write that never got past the note stage. There was some leeway in all of this because of recent events, but the leeway was not going to go on forever.
None of this escaped the attention of Janelle, who finally hooked Stevie by the arm and pulled her into her room and sat her on the bed.
“Are you going to tell me what the hell happened with the two of you?” Janelle said.
“What?”
“You and David,” Janelle said.
Stevie blinked.
“Do you think we don’t know?” Janelle said. “Everyone knows. There is nothing in the world as obvious as the two of you. So what happened?”
“We made out,” Stevie said.
“Yeah, I got that. And then what?”
Shame is a terrible thing. Janelle would never go through Vi’s room. Sure, Vi wasn’t a lying weirdo, but even if she was, Janelle wouldn’t do that. Janelle had standards. Janelle was loyal. Whereas Stevie was a cretinous person who had no principles.
Janelle waited for a reply, and when she realized none was forthcoming, Stevie saw a light go out in her eyes.
This left Nate and Ellie.
Ellie’s reaction to Hayes’s death was to go maximum Ellie. Minerva was woken in the morning by the terrifying cries of Roota. When painted makeup appeared on the Minerva gargoyles and some of the statues, it was fairly obvious who the culprit was. There was more drinking and bathing and French poetry.
Which left Nate, and Nate had retreated to the misty mountains in his mind. He was always reading now, turning away from every conversation, frequently eating alone. Stevie found him in the dining hall at one of the small, high-top tables, his face buried in a copy of The Earthsea Trilogy and his fork working a plate of turkey meatballs and pasta.
Stevie pulled up a chair and slid over her tray of lasagna and salad with maple dressing, because she had given up fighting the maple syrup.
“Hey,” she said.
Nate peered out of his book.
“Hey,” he said.
She waited for him to put the book down. It took him a moment to get the hint. He put a napkin carefully between the pages as a bookmark. Nate didn’t press books facedown and ruin their spines.
“Talk to me about writing,” Stevie said.
“Why do you hate me?” he replied.
“Seriously. Tell me about it.”
“Tell you what?” he said. “You write. That’s it.”
“But how do you do it?” she said. “Do you just sit down and write? Do you have to plan first? Do you just write whatever comes into your head?”
“Is someone paying you to do this to me?”
“It’s just . . . remember that first day when we were talking about zombies? And Hayes had no idea what the Monroeville Mall was?”
“Yeah?”
“That was weird,” she said.
He waited for her to explain what she was saying, but she had no explanation. Nate returned to his book and meatballs.
“It’s like Truly Devious,” she said after a moment.
Nate looked up with tired eyes, but he still looked up.
“What about it?”
“The person they arrested for the Ellingham murders,” she said. “Anton Vorachek. He could never have written that letter. His English was too rough. Anyway, who announces they’re going to commit a murder?”
“Pretty much every serial killer,” Nate said.
“Very few serial killers do that,” Stevie corrected him. “The Zodiac was one of the only . . .”
“In movies,” he said. “In books.”
“Here’s another thing,” Stevie said, warming to the topic. “There’s an old mystery riddle. A man is found hanging in an empty room, locked from the inside. There is no chair, nothing for him to stand on. How did it happen?”
“Stood on a block of ice,” Nate said. “Everyone knows that one.”
“Right,” Stevie said. “It’s just like the one about someone being found stabbed to death in a locked room and there’s no weapon. The weapon was an icicle. It’s so well known that no one can use that device in mystery stories. It’s like saying the butler did it, but worse. It can never be ice.”
“Yeah, well, this isn’t a mystery story.”
“Don’t you wonder what Hayes was doing in the tunnel?”
“We know what he was doing,” Nate said. “He was making a video or something.”
“That’s what everyone thinks he was doing.”
“What else would he have been doing there? No one else was down there with him, and even if they were, you don’t bring a few hundred pounds of dry ice along to make out. I’m not up to date on my kinks but I don’t think that’s one.”
Stevie sat back and picked at her lasagna. She looked around the dining hall. She saw Gretchen coming in—rather, she saw Gretchen’s hair, but Gretchen was with her hair.
Of all the people here, Gretchen possibly knew Hayes the best. She had been with him last year, definitely longer than Maris. And out of everyone at the school, she looked the most consistently shell-shocked. Maris was getting the sympathy, but Gretchen genuinely looked caved in. Stevie watched her at the counter getting a salad in a to-go box.
“Writing is a lot of sitting down,” Nate said, finally answering the question. “It’s a lot of trying things out and screwing up. You saw it when we worked on the script.”
“But we used things that existed,” Stevie said. “What if you’re totally making it up?”
“It’s either amazing or it’s the worst thing in the world,” he said. “Sometimes it goes well, and it’s all you think about, and then, it’s gone. It’s like you’re taking a ride down a river really fast, and then all of a sudden, there’s no water. You’re just sitting in a raft, trying to push it along in the mud. And then you’ve become me.”
“But you seem to be writing now,” she said.
“Yeah, and if I talk about it, it will all go away.”
He had finished talking, leaving Stevie with her thoughts. Her thoughts would not settle. The more she was alone with them, the more they whistled and spun.
There was no point in trying to eat. Stevie composted the remains of her dinner and went back outside, loosely trailing Gretchen. She headed back to the art barn, and Stevie followed. Once inside, she lost track of Gretchen, but a few moments later she heard thunderous piano playing coming from one of the rooms. Stevie peered along the hall until she saw Gretchen at one of the pianos. She played wildly, percussing against the elements themselves. She wore tight athletic clothing to play, sort of like something dancers might wear—black tights, ballet-style slippers, a tunic top that tied at the waist.
Stevie knocked at the window and Gretchen stopped playing abruptly. Stevie stepped into the practice room. She hadn’t planned what to say. Luckily, Gretchen spoke first.
“You were with Hayes the other night,” she said. “You’re Stevie, right?”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “Sorry. I heard you playing and . . . could I talk to you?”
“Weren’t you the one who found him?” Gretchen said.
“I didn’t find him. I was just there when they did.”
Gretchen nodded absently and looked at her salad container on the floor. She hadn’t touched it.
“The other day,” Stevie said, “I walked in on you guys talking . . .”
“Yeah,” Gretchen said. “Not a great last conversation to have. I was pissed.”
“I know you dated him,” Stevie said. “And I know you broke up. But I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Gretchen said. “Yeah. It’s weird, being the ex-girlfriend of the guy who dies. You’re actually the first person who’s said sorry.”
“Can I ask you about Hayes?” Stevie said, sliding in and sitting on the floor.
“What about Hayes?” Gretchen said.
“I just . . . I’m confused after what happened, and I feel like maybe if I knew more about him, I wouldn’t be.”
Gretchen considered this for a moment.
“You know what I am?” she said. “I’m pissed. I’m pissed that I can’t be pissed at him. It’s like he’s done it again.”
“Done what again?” Stevie said.
“Played me,” she said, shaking her head. “I feel stupid. And if I ever say anything bad about him, I’ll be a monster. And I don’t know what to do with that.”
“I don’t think it makes you a monster to tell the truth about someone.”
“It does if that person dies in a weird, tragic accident.”
“What was it he took from you that he wasn’t giving back?” Stevie asked. “That thing I walked in on?”
“Oh,” she said. “He borrowed five hundred dollars from me in the spring. That five hundred was money I got from teaching piano at a summer camp. It was pretty much all the cash I had. I wanted it back when we got back to school this year. I know he made money off that show. He’s been promising to pay it back, but I don’t think that was ever going to happen. You know, like . . .”
She shook her head and wiped away a tear quickly.
“God,” she said. “Why am I crying? I’m so mad.”
Stevie looked away as Gretchen settled herself.
“Hayes was one of those people who seemed like he had it all together,” Gretchen said, wiping her face. “He could act; that’s how he got in. But inside? There was no there there. People did things for him because he was handsome, and he has—had—that voice. You’d do him favors. You know when you like someone. You do dumb stuff. You do stuff you know makes no sense.”
Up until very recently, Stevie would not have known that. But now she had a pretty good sense of it. Maybe you go through their stuff, for instance.
“I was just so into him,” Gretchen said. “But last year . . . he used me. Like, really used me. First, he asked for a little help with his paper on Jonathan Swift. He asked me to read it, maybe make some edits. So I did that. Then he was doing a production of The Glass Menagerie and he was busy, and he said he didn’t have time to write an essay on Dryden, and would I help him out by just finishing a little of it? Then I was doing some of his French units so it looked like he was working on that. Then, one day, he asked me to write his ten-page midterm on Alexander Pope, and I realized just how much of Hayes’s work I had done.
“When I said no to that, he was annoyed at first, but then he was all apologies. He said he knew he’d asked too much. Everything went back to normal. Later, when we had broken up, I found out I wasn’t the only one doing his work. He met people online, other people around school. There were probably four or five of us doing everything for Hayes. Four or five of us.”
Gretchen sniffed for a moment.
“There was a week or two in there I thought I loved him,” she said. “When Hayes turned it on, it was on. But then things got bad. One night, we were all sneaking off campus to go to some party in Burlington. Ellie Walker had a few of her burlesque friends drive up along the back road with their lights off. We slipped out and were meeting them. There’s a spot where the cameras don’t work that well and if you time it right, you can get out. But it happened that some grounds guy was working out there that night because there was a report of a bear. He had a car on the road and was keeping watch and he caught us. The guy said he was going to report us. Hayes said to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be terrible if they found pot in your car? What if you got busted for dealing to students?’ The guy looked terrified, and Hayes smiled and said, ‘Just kidding.’”
“Seriously?” Stevie said. That was a side of Hayes she had not seen.
“Seriously. That was when I should have been done. I should have turned and gone back to my house. Ellie was so mad at him for that. She smacked him on the back of the head on the way to Burlington and yelled at him, told him that was no way to treat people. Hayes said sorry. Hayes always said sorry. He said it was a joke, but . . . you don’t get to say that, you know? You don’t get to frighten people and threaten them and say you’re only kidding. Because you’re not.”
A picture was developing, and it was not a pretty one.
“That guy, the security guy?” Gretchen said. “He left, maybe three weeks later. I don’t know why. I always wondered. That was it for me. I broke up with Hayes. It was on April first, so I think he thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. He took it really well. A little too well. He said he understood. Everything was good for a day or two, and then he texted me and said he wanted to talk for a minute, nothing serious. Could I meet him in the art barn? So I did. Once I was there, he suddenly goes into this whole performance. He starts saying how much he loved me and how he can’t believe I cheated. I mean, it was Oscar-worthy and it came out of nowhere. I didn’t cheat on him. He kept saying all this stuff I’d supposedly done, all made up. And there were lots of people in the room next door, so everyone heard it. When he was done, he nodded to the wall and smiled at me and wiped his fake tears. He was trying to get me back by making me look like a villain. He already had someone else lined up, by the way. Beth. That girl he hooked up with in Chicago? That was already going on.”
She stopped for a moment and shook her head.
“This is why I can’t talk about it,” she said. “No one wants to hear this about a guy who died.”
Stevie let this statement linger for a moment. A new idea popped into her head—suddenly she had the words for something that had been eating at her thoughts.
“Do you think he wrote his show?” she said.
Gretchen looked over in confusion.
“What, the zombie thing?” she said. “Definitely not.”
Stevie didn’t expect such a firm answer to a question that had just come into her head.
“I told you,” Gretchen said. “He didn’t do his own work.”
“He told me he wrote it,” Stevie said.
Gretchen gave her a what did I say face.
“Sorry to bother you,” Stevie said, getting off the floor.
“Are you with David Eastman?” Gretchen asked as Stevie was about to leave.
Stevie gulped.
“No,” she said after a moment.
“Oh. I thought you were. I was going to say, good luck with that.”
Stevie wanted to ask what this meant, but Gretchen had turned back to the piano and began playing again. It was passionate and powerful, the music drumming out of her furious hands.