“MY NAME IS LOGAN BANFIELD,” HAYES SAID. “AND I DON’T KNOW where I am. I don’t know if anyone can hear me. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if I’m alone. I don’t even know if I’m dead or alive.”
Stevie sat cross-legged on the floor of the Great House attic watching The End of It All and counting doorknobs. Two days had passed since Hayes’s things had gone away, since she had confronted David. For those two days, she was supposed to have resumed working, resumed studying. The pile of books next to her bed didn’t read themselves, and the essay she was supposed to hand in tomorrow remained unwritten, despite the number of times she opened up her computer and stared blankly at the screen before watching The End of It All again.
Each episode of The End of It All was about ten minutes in length. She started from the beginning, from the very first moments when Hayes’s character woke up, confused as to what was happening. All of it was filmed in the same location, some kind of bunker, except for the very last minutes. A lot of the show was rambling, reacting, listening. In some episodes, Logan got memories back of the zombie attack. In others, he found communications from possible survivors. It was all standard zombie apocalypse stuff. What made it popular, Stevie guessed, was just that Hayes was so intense. And good-looking. He was a good-looking guy hiding from zombies and slowly losing his grip on reality. In the last episode, Logan left his bunker. Was he being saved, or was he giving up?
Over and over she watched. And now she watched from row 39 of the Great House attic, which contained small household items, antiquated light fittings, boxes of hammers, cans of screws. And these doorknobs. This house had a lot of spare doorknobs.
Just a girl and her doorknobs and zombies.
Stevie had spent most of these last two days tuning out everything to the exclusion of these things. And now, as evening came and her stomach rumbled, she pulled out her earbuds. She couldn’t watch it again.
She got up and looked through the box of Albert Ellingham’s desk contents again, until she got to the Western Union slip with the last riddle.
Where do you look for someone who’s never really there?
Always on a staircase but never on a stair
She leaned against the metal racks for a moment and stared at the slip under the green fluorescent glow. Someone who’s never really there was sort of how Gretchen had described Hayes. There was no there there.
Always on a staircase but never on a stair could mean a lot of things. A rail. Something on the wall. The cracks between the stairs.
Albert Ellingham wasn’t coming back to tell her the answer to this riddle.
That musk of aged things was present, but the atmosphere had climate and humidity control, so instead of being stale and hard, there was a sweetness to the attic. The rich even decayed well.
Stevie set the little slip of paper on the ground and looked up at the shelves around her.
What the hell did it all mean? So what if he didn’t write it? What the hell was she doing, avoiding work and people and life to sit in an attic, staring at Hayes, counting dates and sorting doorknobs? She could work on that essay that was due, oh, tomorrow. She could . . .
What? Try to talk to David again? That had gone well.
She put the doorknobs back in their box. As she pushed the box back into position, she scraped her hand on the shelf above it. A thin trickle of blood came from the cut.
“You’re an idiot,” she said to herself. Once finished, she trudged down the steps of the Great House, her backpack hanging low. Larry sat at his station by the door, carefully going through something in a binder. She was going to walk right past without saying anything, but as she made the door, he called out to her.
“Not even a hello?” he said.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was distracted.”
“I see that. About what?”
She shook her head. He tipped back his chair and considered her for a moment.
“How’s it been going?” he asked.
“It’s going,” she said.
“You don’t seem too enthused.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Well, come sit down, then.”
Even though she didn’t feel like it, an order from Larry was still an order from Larry. She went to the chair in front of his desk and sat in it, perched on the edge so her backpack could fit and so she could get up quickly.
“Any new thoughts on the Ellingham case?”
“I haven’t had much of a chance to think about it,” she said.
“Well, if you want to solve a cold case, that’s what you’ve got to do. You don’t avoid the work. Cold cases get solved because someone goes to the trouble of doing everything. They read every file. They listen to every tape. They talk to every witness. They track down every scrap of evidence. And then they do it all again; they do it until something clicks, until it gets warm again. You do the work. And sometimes, you get lucky.”
“How much of it is luck?” Stevie said.
“Luck always plays a role. Something is eating at you.”
“Just school,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s just school. I think it has something to do with Hayes Major. Something is eating at you and it’s not grief. Something else.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Twenty years as a detective. I do know that.”
Stevie pushed back into the chair a bit and squared off to Larry.
“Can you just tell me what you know about his death and what happened?” she said.
“You mean, details?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t give you all of them,” he said. “I can give you a few. There was a lot of dry ice taken. There were ten units in that container, ten inches square in there, and seven of them were gone. Each one of those squares weighed over fifty pounds. We found Hayes’s fingerprints on Janelle’s ID and on a golf cart. Janelle’s ID tapped into the art barn at 1:12 a.m. We found the container the dry ice was moved in. We know Hayes went into the art barn when you were in your yoga class. We know from testing that the dry ice was in that space for about eighteen hours and that the level of carbon dioxide in the room was extremely high. It’s lucky we weren’t killed when we went in there. The door was open, so the room aired out a bit. Had Hayes been able to shut the door behind him, and then if one of us had gone in there after, we could have died as well.”
“So Hayes walked into the room that he’d left the dry ice in,” she said. “And died right away?”
“Probably almost immediately, or at least, he probably lost consciousness almost immediately. Death would have come quick. It was a death trap in there. It’s not a pleasant thing, but that’s what happened.”
“And you’re sure?”
Larry let the chair fall forward and leaned into the desk, folding his hands.
“What makes you say that?” he said. “Is there something more you know?”
Oh, just a dream I had about murder right before, when a ghostly note appeared on my wall. . . .
“No,” she said. “Just a weird feeling.”
He considered her for a moment, then he opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a Band-Aid.
“For your hand,” he said. “Look, you’ve been brave . . .”
Brave.
There was someone else she could talk to.
“Thanks, Larry,” she said, sticking the Band-Aid on. “Good talk.”
Beth Brave was sitting in her set in her apartment, wall of fan art on display in the background. Hers was more carefully curated than Hayes’s was, with framed prints sitting on white floating shelves.
Beth was a striking blonde, with stick-straight, shiny hair and giant eyelashes that Stevie assumed were fake. Her long nails, which Beth had constantly been examining during their conversation (seemed like a nervous habit) were grand examples of nail art, with the four houses of Hogwarts represented on the fingers of both hands, and the thumbs painted with a very tiny replica of Harry’s face. It was not the kind of thing you did yourself; it was the kind of thing you spent hundreds of dollars and several hours having someone else do.
Contacting Beth had not been as hard as Stevie thought. She had over a million followers, but all it took was Stevie sending a message and explaining how she had been at Ellingham Academy with Hayes, and how she worked on the show, and—and this part was where the fib came in—how they wanted to make a tribute and feature her. A reply popped up less than an hour later, and fifteen minutes after that, Beth and Stevie were looking at each other through Skype windows.
“Thanks for reaching out,” Beth said. She had blindingly white teeth, big as the doors of kitchen cabinets. “It’s been rough. I’m sure for you guys as well.”
“Definitely,” Stevie said.
“It’s nice that you’re making a video,” Beth said. “He would have liked that.”
Behind the Skype screen, Stevie could see the top of an unfinished (well, unstarted, really) essay peeping up, saying yoo-hooo! That was due tomorrow. It would get done. It would. She just had to talk to Beth for a minute.
“There’s something kind of . . . ,” Stevie said, “. . . there’s something . . . I just . . . I wish I could make you feel better but I’m just so afraid . . .”
“What?” Beth said.
“I just feel like someone should tell you because it’s going to come out,” Stevie said. “I mean, you saw that video . . .”
“You mean that girl?” Beth said.
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “That girl, Maris . . .”
“Oh, I know about that,” Beth said.
“And you’re okay with it?”
“The thing is,” Beth said, “and this isn’t for the video, right? You’re not recording?”
“No,” Stevie said. (She never had been.)
“Of course he was dating someone at school. I date someone else too. It’s not like either one of us is supposed to be single. We’re going to get together . . . we were going to get together when he got to LA. But we discussed that it was okay to see other people when we were apart. But that’s not for the fans. They’d be upset. We knew how to be apart from each other.”
“Did he mention,” Stevie said carefully, “the video? Doing an effect with dry ice?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing. I wish he had. I mean, I talked to him the night he took that stuff.”
Stevie felt a tingle on the back of her neck.
“Wait,” Stevie said, “you spoke to him on Thursday night?”
“Yeah, we usually Skyped before bed. I was probably the last person he talked to that night,” she said.
“You talked to him late?”
“Oh yeah,” Beth said.
“Do you know when?”
“I don’t know . . . late.”
“The thing is,” Stevie said, “it would be so amazing if . . . if you talked to him late that night and it was . . . like the romantic high point of this tribute. I mean, do you have the time on Skype?”
“Let me look.” Stevie got a close-up of Beth’s nose as she leaned in to read. “Here it is. It was . . . ten twenty.”
That made no sense. Hayes had been with Maris then.
No, stupid, Beth was in California. That was 1:20 in the morning.
But Janelle’s ID had been used at 1:12 in the morning. There was no way Hayes could have used it and gotten back to his room by 1:20.
Either Hayes went into the workshop or he was speaking to Beth at 1:20 a.m., but he wasn’t doing both. And the one he was most likely doing was the one someone saw him do.
Which meant someone else put that dry ice in the tunnel but made it look like Hayes did it.
Which sounded a lot like murder.