STEVIE’S HEAD WAS THRUMMING AS SHE MADE HER WAY BACK TO Minerva. That was what was bothering her. What if Hayes hadn’t written The End of It All? What did that mean?
Well, for a start, that movie he was talking about—that could have gotten kind of complicated.
When she arrived home, she found Pix opening a number of boxes in the common room.
“What are those for?” she asked.
“Hayes’s things,” Pix said quietly. “His parents have asked me to box up his room so they wouldn’t have to do it. It’s the least I can do.”
There was a key on the table with a cardboard tag hanging off it that said 6. The key to Hayes’s room.
“Are you doing that tonight?” Stevie said.
“Tonight, tomorrow,” Pix said. “I have a meeting in half an hour and I’ll probably start afterward. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “Fine.”
Back in her room, Stevie considered this development. Hayes’s things would be gone soon. Which meant information would be gone. Not that she needed information. It’s just that something . . . something . . . something was wrong. And the answers to what was wrong might be up in his room. For example, maybe there was an answer about The End of It All?
What would that give her, though?
Stevie paced. She walked around the room, staring at the edge of her case board peering out from under her bed. No good had come of her looking in rooms upstairs, but . . .
Stevie returned to the common room.
“You know,” she said to Pix, “I feel like I need to help. Can I put together these boxes?”
“Sure,” Pix said. “Sure. That would be great, Stevie.”
Stevie smiled the smile of the lying and took Pix’s seat at the table. The key to Minerva Six was next to her.
“I’ll head off,” Pix said, grabbing her field jacket from the hook by the door and covering her peach-fuzz head with a woolen hat. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” Stevie said. “It’s just good to have a project.”
“I get that,” Pix said. “Back soon.”
As soon as she was gone, Stevie took the key.
Hayes’s room was dark when Stevie let herself in. The curtain was drawn. There was a towel hanging on the back of the door. She set this by the crack at the bottom of the door to keep light from escaping, in case anyone came by. She slipped her shoes off to lessen the sound of her steps on the floor, then stepped gently across the room to Hayes’s desk, turned on the desk light, swiveled Hayes’s chair toward the center of the room, and sat down.
Yes, she was going through another room. But her reasons were good, and that was what mattered. She was here because something about Hayes’s death was bothering her, and Hayes couldn’t do anything to help himself.
That sounded like a good excuse.
The first step was to take in the scene—not looking for anything in particular. Just to take it in, as it was. She allowed herself to gently spin in the chair, getting a panoramic view.
This was how Hayes left things in his life. He had come to his room to prepare for the show. His bed appeared to have been made, but then disturbed. The top blanket was twisted and pulled up. Hayes’s desk was a dumping ground for all kinds of things—computer, hair products, cables, camera, microphone, piles of fan mail and fan art. There was a bag from a bookstore sitting on the desk shelf. Stevie picked this up and pulled out the contents. Four books on acting, all apparently unread, a receipt sticking out of the top of one of them. The books had been purchased at a store in New York on August 26, just a few days before Hayes went back to school. There was another bag of books on the floor. These were all plays: David Mamet. Sam Shepard. Tony Kushner. Tom Stoppard. Arthur Miller. Shakespeare.
“What a dudely selection,” she said to herself. She ran a finger along the spines for cracking or signs of use. There were none.
Into the desk drawers. The first one contained sticky notes, packs of good-quality pens, three Moleskine notebooks. With the exception of one notebook and one pack of pens, all were still wrapped, and only one pen had been removed. The next drawer, a bigger one, contained mostly cables. The last drawer was empty.
She made her way around the room clockwise. The bureau was piled with bath and styling products, all in disarray. She had a brief look in the drawers. She examined a drawer of colorful boxers. She pushed these to the side, looked for anything underneath. Nothing remarkable. The same went for a drawer of T-shirts, another of socks. Around to the closet, which was already partially open. His clothes all looked fairly new, all normal labels like J. Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch. Mall brands, but the more expensive ones.
On the mantel were several containers of Ben Nye stage makeup—most still open, with powder spilled onto the black surface. There was silver-gray hair liquid, buff powder, spirit gum, bone wax, latex, pancake base, pencils of various colors, blood capsules, used sponges and brushes, and weird little pieces of fake skin. A comb was stained silver from the hair treatment. There was a kit on the floor that looked like a tackle box that had even more makeup inside. It was all messy, but it was professional.
The fan art—that was the main feature of the room. It took up two walls. Stevie examined it all under the tiny glow of her phone flashlight. Most of it was drawings of Hayes as Logan. So many drawings. Some in black-and-white pencil, some in color. Some were rough and amateur, but some were of a very high quality. There were also letters, poems, photos of Hayes with fans, hearts, cards . . . every variety of paper communication was there. The larger objects were on the floor or the fireplace—stuffed animals, cross-stitch, a model of the End of It All set with a tiny Hayes in clay.
Hayes’s room was, in short, a tribute to Hayes. Riddle, riddle, on the wall, who’s most famous of them all?
She took pictures of it all, starting in one corner of the room and working section by section. It took about half an hour to do it all. By the end, she had a fairly clear picture of someone who was interested in the business of being Hayes.
Stevie turned her attention to Hayes’s computer. The top had a thick patina of stickers—again, mostly for Hayes’s show, but a few for online channels and skiing. There was a scrape down the front as well. Hayes hadn’t been too careful with the laptop, clearly. There were very few files on the computer. One was marked IDEAS. She opened up a text document that simply read:
Summer camp that trains killers
Camp that trains spies
Spies who
Camp?
A world where you can
The list ended here.
“I think Hayes was out of ideas,” she said to herself.
She did a search on his computer for files related to The End of It All. There were loads of emails, but only a few video files—one long one and lots of short ones of similar size, as if the long one had been cut up. The main one was dated June 4, and the others June 9–14.
A quick Web search revealed that The End of It All had been released twice a week, starting on June 20. There were ten episodes in total. June 20, June 23, June 27, June 30, July 4, July 7, July 11, July 14, July 18, July 21. A quick check of last year’s schedule showed that Ellingham’s move-out day was June 6.
The main file had been made on June 4.
It was made here.
I went home to Florida last year, surfed for a few days, and it just came to me . . .
“No, it didn’t,” Stevie said aloud.
So why say it was? Why lie about where you made it?
There was a voice outside. Stevie froze in position. It wasn’t outside, though. It was coming through the wall, and it sounded angry.
David’s voice. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, so she set the computer aside and crept over to the wall. She could still only make out a mumble, and then one shouted word: “Allison!”
“Who is Allison?” Stevie whispered to herself.
She felt an anxiety rumble. Allison. A girlfriend? A real one? Not some idiot at school. Allison instantly developed a face, an entire profile. She had long hair and a surfboard. She looked good in shorts. She got waxings. She laughed in her sleep.
Stevie slapped herself gently on the forehead to make it stop and continued to try to listen, but all had gone silent on the other side of the wall. Now it was just her and her thudding heart in Hayes’s room.
Pix would be back soon. Stevie shut off Hayes’s computer and tucked it back where she’d found it. She turned off the light, picked up her shoes, and returned the towel to the door. Then, after making sure there was no noise in the hall or coming from David’s room, she cracked open the door.
The hall was empty.
She slipped out, shutting the door quietly behind her. She got all the way to the steps when she heard a door open behind her. She turned to see David looking at her.
“Hey,” she said.
He didn’t reply. Nor did he seem to know that she had just come from Hayes’s room.
“Come on,” she said. “Say something. You can’t not talk to me forever. We live together.”
“Something,” he said. But there was no humor in his voice.
“How about this,” she said. “Can you listen? You don’t have to talk. I’ll keep it short. Will that work?”
David considered this for a moment, then shrugged.
“Can I come in for two seconds?” she said.
He indicated his door was open, and then went back inside. Stevie steadied herself, then followed.
David did not sit down. He stood in the middle of his room, his arms folded.
“What?” he said.
“I want to say I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” he said.
Then, nothing.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Fine. If that’s it, you can go.”
“Seriously?” she said. The anger was building up again. All the feeling she had been pressing down for a few days shot up unexpectedly. “Come on. You won’t tell me anything about yourself. You lied at dinner.”
“I made a joke at dinner because I didn’t feel like talking about my dead parents.”
“I’m the worst. I know I am. But I’m also sorry. You don’t know how sorry.”
“Why are you holding your shoes?” he said.
Stevie had forgotten about the shoes.
“I just took them off,” she said.
He tilted his head to the side and looked at her for a long minute. She had an idea, which was probably a terrible idea. But lacking any other ideas, it was the one to go with. Radical honesty. Just tell him. Open up.
“I was in Hayes’s room,” she said.
He burst out laughing, but again, there was no humor in it.
“I know how that sounds,” she said, talking over him, “but I had a key. Listen to me. I had to go. Pix was about to box it up and everything would be gone.”
“And you just needed a few more minutes with his memory?”
“Something weird is going on,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on what it is. . . .”
“I think I can,” he said. “There’s someone in this house who keeps going through other people’s stuff. Someone should do something about it.”
That hurt. She felt her eyes sting.
“So why did you have to go in there?” he asked. “Do you have to get into every room in this hall? Is that your thing?”
“Hayes didn’t write The End of It All,” she said.
“Says who?”
“Says common sense. I worked on a show with him. He never did anything. And someone else did all of his schoolwork last year. And there is nothing on his computer that shows he did any of it or that he had any ability to write something new. And his ex-girlfriend thinks . . .”
“Gretchen,” David said, rolling his eyes.
“Gretchen,” Stevie replied.
“Gretchen was pissed at him. She broke up with him. It was a whole drama last year.”
“Hayes played everyone,” Stevie said. “Hayes used everyone. Hayes did none of his own work but took the benefits. And then Hayes dies doing the project that would have allowed him to go off to LA and reap the benefits of everyone else’s labor. Doesn’t it sound unlikely that Hayes would have gone to all that effort to do something that doesn’t even make any sense?”
“So what are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying someone did it on purpose? That someone murdered Hayes?”
The words were surreal said out loud. Hayes. Murdered.
“No,” she said, staggered by the idea. “No . . . like, an accident. Some kind of plan to screw up the filming.”
Now that the word had been introduced, it bounced around the hallways in Stevie’s head. Murder requires motive, and there was plenty of motive. For a start, all the people Hayes was dating and screwing over and using, the fact that he didn’t write his show, but he was about to get credit for it and make a whole lot of money. That was all very solid motive.
Murder? Was that what she really thought this was? Was this the reason she felt so restless?
“You know what’s weird?” David said as Stevie was lost in thought. “What’s weird is making a hobby out of the death of your classmate. You know what’s also weird? Going through people’s rooms, including the room of your dead classmate. Because you seem crazy.”
People might be dismissive of someone obsessed with mystery stories, as if the line between fiction and reality was so distinct. They didn’t know, perhaps, that Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, Dr. Joseph Bell, and that the methods Arthur Conan Doyle created for his fictional detective inspired generations of real-world detectives. Did they know that Arthur Conan Doyle went on to investigate mysteries in his real life and even absolved a man of a crime for which he had been convicted? Did they know how Agatha Christie brilliantly staged her own disappearance in order to exact an elegant revenge on a cheating husband?
They probably did not.
And no one was going to discount Stevie Bell, who had gotten into this school on the wings of her interest in the Ellingham case, and who had been a bystander at a death that was now looking more and more suspicious.
She was not crazy. And Hayes’s key was in her pocket and Pix was on her way back.
Stevie turned away and left David’s room without saying anything else. Because she was also not going to let him see her cry.
THE BATT REPORT
Internet Star Dies in School Accident
Hayes Major, star of the summer’s viral internet sensation The End of It All, died on Saturday night. Major, a student at the Ellingham Academy, was filming a video about the Ellingham kidnapping and murder case. He was found unresponsive in a disused tunnel that had recently been unearthed. The cause of his death was not immediately evident, but sources close to The Batt Report say that he died of asphyxia in what was likely an accident. Police have determined that Major removed a quantity of dry ice from the school’s workshop and maintenance area using a pass stolen from another student, most likely to produce a fog effect for the video. Left overnight, the dry ice melted in the contained underground space, filling the room with a lethal level of carbon dioxide.
The head of Ellingham Academy, Dr. Charles Scott, released a statement on Tuesday morning: “All of us at Ellingham Academy are heartbroken by the loss of Hayes Major, a promising actor and creator, and a beloved friend. Our hearts go out to his family, his friends, and his many fans. His loss is profound.”