THAT NIGHT, IT RAINED. IT WAS NOT A GENTLE RAIN, THE KIND THAT lulled Stevie to sleep. It was a sideways, angry rain that threw itself haphazardly at the walls and windows and roof. It was a rain that made Hayes’s empty room feel even more vacant.
It was a rain that pounded Stevie Bell into alertness.
What you lack in any investigation is time. With every passing hour, evidence slips away. Crime scenes are compromised by people and the elements. Things are moved, altered, smeared, shifted. Organisms rot. Winds blow dust and contaminants. Memories change and fade. As you move away from the event, you move away from the solution.
This is why no one found Dottie and Iris until it was too late. The days dragged on. If someone had called the police that night. Maybe it would have all been different for the Ellinghams. But they didn’t.
Stevie had information now—real information. She could take it to Larry, but Larry had already warned her off playing detective. She could go to him when she knew something, when she understood what she knew. So she started making lists.
Facts:
Someone took Janelle’s ID from the art barn when we were in yoga.
Someone used that ID to get into the workshop at 1:12 the next morning. At the same time, seven pieces of dry ice were removed from the storage unit.
Hayes’s fingerprints were on the ID.
Hayes was Skyping with Beth at that time.
Hayes lied about The End of It All.
Strong possibilities:
Hayes did not write The End of It All, at least not alone.
Conclusions:
Hayes had that ID at some point, but he was not the one who went into the workshop.
Question:
Why did Hayes turn around and go into the tunnel?
Did he know the dry ice was there?
Did he ask someone to get it for him?
That morning, she sat in anatomy lab in her oldest T-shirt and hoodie, glassily staring as Pix worked the skeleton. She was entering the too-awake stage. The head of a femur looked like a strange mushroom. Stevie turned it around in her mind, working her way around the bone. The greater trochanter. The lesser trochanter. The head that articulates with the acetabulum and that thing in the pelvis, the tuberosity of ischium . . .
She was drooling a bit. She slapped her hand to her chin and looked down at her notebook and the names of bones she had scrawled there as they were written on the board. It was all gibberish. She thought of Hayes, his knees, seeing his feet on the floor.
In Lit, she nodded off, only to be jerked awake to answer questions about the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (“And what do you think it means, Stevie, when Eliot writes that the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table?” Answer: “He’s . . . tired?”)
She ate lunch alone and listened to people discussing the Silent Party that would be held that evening.
She continued stumbling through the day, trying to process everything her brain had accumulated. By the time she got to yoga, she was straining to keep herself awake. She took her slightly smelly purple mat from the stack in the corner and left a spot next to her for Janelle, but someone else took it. Janelle came in, saw that Stevie had set up without her, and quietly made a space for herself on the other side of the room.
She left class before Stevie could catch her.
That night, Stevie skipped dinner and went over her facts again. Her stomach growled as the rain beat on her window. Janelle and Ellie had gone over to the Great House for the dance. What David and Nate were doing, she had no idea.
Think, Stevie. Think.
But her thoughts had gone stagnant. She had gotten this far, but nothing more was coming up. She put her earbuds in and turned up some music, loud, trying to get her head somewhere else, somewhere she could see the pattern. So she didn’t hear the knocking and was surprised to see Nate standing next to her in a pair of loose corduroys and a plaid shirt and a tie. He was speaking, but Stevie couldn’t hear him with her earbuds in and her hoodie over her head. She jerked the buds out and the hood off.
“Huh?” she said.
“You,” he said. “Are coming with me.”
“I am? Where?”
“To the dance.”
“Dance?”
“Yes, dance,” he said. “There’s this dance tonight. And you are going with me. Not with me, with me. But we are both going.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Dance. Thing. At the Great House. Everyone. Over there. So come on.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Nate came into the room and kicked the door half closed behind him. “Here’s the thing. You’ve gone kind of psycho. I have never willingly gone to a dance in my life. But I am doing this because you are my friend, okay? And something is wrong with you. I don’t want to go to this, obviously. And you don’t want to go to this. I’m doing this for you, for your own good. This is the one and only time I’m offering to do something like this. Sometimes you have to leave the fucking Shire, Frodo. If we’re friends, get up, and come with me now. And you should take that seriously, because you are kind of losing friends all over the place.”
He extended his hand to her.
“You’re serious.”
“I’m serious.”
She looked down at her lists and up at Nate.
“You’re wearing a tie,” she said.
“I know.”
“Is that a dance thing?”
“How would I know? Do I look like I go to a lot of dances?”
Stevie felt like she was made of concrete and attached to the floor. But seeing Nate there, seeing the effort he was going to, she felt her moorings coming loose. She got off the floor. Her hoodie was dusty. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She had sneakers on.
“Like this?” she said.
“You look good to me. Not that I’m saying you look good. I’m saying come on before I lose the nerve to go to this.”
It was a strange walk over to the Great House. Stevie could see gently pulsing lights coming from the long windows of the ballroom.
“So what are you doing that’s making you so weird?” Nate asked.
“Solving Hayes’s murder,” she said, stuffing her hands deeper in her hoodie pockets.
“Say that again?” he said.
“I’m solving Hayes’s murder,” she repeated.
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Nope,” she said. “Hayes didn’t put that dry ice in the tunnel, and I can prove it.”
“How?”
Stevie sat Nate down under the portico of the Great House and explained all that she had discovered.
“Okay,” he said. “So this is why you’ve been weird.”
“Mostly,” she said, looking up at something flying past the cupola. A bat, probably. Ellingham was full of bats. Nate saw it too, and got right to his feet.
“So, you’re going to tell Larry, or someone, all of this?” Nate said after a silent moment.
“I think I need to wait,” Stevie said.
“Why? For what?”
“If I do this wrong, if I’m wrong, the whole school could be shut down,” she said. “If it’s an accident and Hayes did it, we’re okay. If there’s someone out there, we’re all in trouble.”
“But something has happened. You have proof that Hayes didn’t do this himself. So you want to find this person yourself because you don’t want to go home?”
“I want to find this person because I want to find this person,” she said. “And because I don’t want to go home. But I guess now I’m going to dance. With my friend.”
She reached over and squeezed him by the arm.
“You did this for me,” she said.
“Yeah, I did this for you, but don’t make it a thing. And how do we go into a dance after what you just said?”
“We go in,” she said. “Because you brought me here, and because the answer may be here.”
“Are you really serious about all of this?” he said quietly. “You’re not messing with me?”
“I’m not messing with you,” she said.
“Do you think they knew it was lethal? Not an accident?”
“That,” Stevie said, meeting his gaze and feeling herself break out in a sweat, “I don’t know.”
“So we could be dancing with a murderer?”
“We might be,” Stevie said.
“And you really think this should wait?”
“Give me tonight, at least,” Stevie said. “To look around. I promise you, I’ll talk to Larry soon.”
Nate took a heavy breath.
“Okay,” he said. “If you say so. This is probably only the second stupidest thing I’ve done since I got here.”