STEVIE BELL HAD A SIMPLE DESIRE: SHE WANTED TO BE STANDING OVER a dead body.
She didn’t want to kill people—far from it. She wanted to be the person who found out why the body was dead, that’s all. She wanted bags marked EVIDENCE and a paper boiler suit like forensics wore. She wanted to be in the interrogation room. She wanted to get to the bottom of the case.
Which was all well and good and probably what a lot of people wanted, if only people would be more honest. But her old high school was not the kind of place where she felt like she could fully express this desire. Her old high school was a fine high school, if you liked high school. It wasn’t bad or evil. It was just like it was supposed to be—miles of linoleum and humming lights, the warm funk of cafeteria stink too early in the morning, the flashes of inspiration that were quickly quashed by long stretches of tedium, and the perpetual desire to be somewhere else. And while Stevie had friends there, there was no one who fully understood her love of crime. So she had written a passionate essay, poured it all onto the screen, and sent it away almost as a joke. Ellingham would never take her.
Ellingham liked what they saw. They had given her this room.
The furniture was wooden and surprisingly big. There was a big dresser that wobbled when Stevie touched it; the polish couldn’t cover the many nicks on its surface. Some were just scratches from use, but a few were clear words and initials. Stevie opened the drawers and found, to her surprise, that there were already some things in there: a plaid flannel blanket, a heavy purple fleece with the Ellingham Academy crest on the breast, some kind of military-grade flashlight with a new pack of batteries, a blue flannel robe, and some rackets with clamps on them. These Stevie had to remove and examine for a while before she determined that these must be the snowshoes, and the pegs she’d seen by the door were likely places to hang them.
Stevie had known that she was going to Vermont, and she knew Vermont could get cold, but these items suggested survivalism.
She started opening up her boxes and bags. She pulled out her old gray sheets, the striped comforter that she’d had since she was ten, two of the less-yellowed pillows from the closet. As she looked at these objects in the clear Vermont sunlight, they all seemed a bit—drab. She had a few new items, like the requisite bath caddy and flip-flops for trips to the bathroom, but these things didn’t exactly liven up the room.
But it was fine. In her imagination, her dorm room was going to look like Sherlock Holmes’s residence on Baker Street—shabby, but genteel.
She put in her earbuds to finally continue listening to her podcast. This one was about H. H. Holmes, the Chicago serial killer: “. . . they would discover the many rooms of Holmes’s murder castle: the rooms fitted with gas lines, the hanging chamber, the soundproof vault . . .”
She’d marked one of her boxes with stars, and she opened this one now. This box contained the bare necessities of her life: her mystery novels. (At least, a carefully curated selection of a few dozen essentials.) These were lovingly arranged on the bookshelf in the order in which she needed to see them.
“. . . the chute to the furnaces in the basement where the bodies could be . . .”
Sherlock Holmes on top with Wilkie Collins. Then Agatha Christie spread over two shelves, leading into Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers. She worked her way down to the modern era and ended with her books on forensics and criminal psychology. She stood back and examined the overall effect, then tweaked until the arrangement was just right. Where her books were, she was.
Get the books right and the rest will follow. Now she could address the rest of the room.
“. . . acid, a collection of poisons, a stretching rack . . .”
Stevie was less concerned about the day-to-day items like her clothes. Stevie had very little interest in clothes and no money to buy them anyway, so her wardrobe tended to jeans and plain T-shirts. She coveted a heavy fisherman’s sweater, because the detective in her favorite Nordic Noir wore one, and preferred a sensible cross-body bag like the one worn by her favorite English TV detective.
She did have one prized possession in terms of clothes—a vintage red vinyl raincoat, straight out of the 1970s, which she had found at the back of her grandmother’s closet. It fit Stevie as if it had been made for her, and she decorated it with a selection of tiny lapel pins honoring her favorite bands, podcasts, and books. The coat had deep pockets and a thick belt, and when she was wearing it, Stevie felt powerful, prepared, and extremely waterproof. Even her mother, who disliked Stevie’s taste in clothes, was on board for the red raincoat. (“Finally, some red.”)
She was hanging the coat in her closet and had just closed the door when she turned and saw the zombie.
Stevie often read that actors look a little different from the general population because the camera distorts appearances. Someone who looks good on camera looks so good in person that reality starts to bend a bit. This was the case with the figure standing in Stevie’s doorway. It was a guy dressed in a white linen shirt and a pair of bright-blue shorts, looking like a wandering J. Crew ad in search of a glossy spread.
His face was unmistakable. When she had seen it last, it was grim, covered in dirt, frequently crying. Now it was smiling gently. His features were soft and rounded—happy cheeks, a small, playfully rounded nose, a dimpled chin. His brown hair was longish on the top and fell in easy waves. His brows had to be artificially shaped. No arch that arched existed in nature. He looked toned all over, but his calves were particularly so. His calves, in fact, had outgrown the rest of him. Beefy calves.
“Hey,” he said.
His voice was deep and smooth and rich, like what gravy might sound like if gravy could talk. (Which, luckily, it cannot. Gravy might have a nice voice, but the conversation would probably be dull.)
“You’re Hayes Major,” Stevie said.
“Yeah.” He chuckled in a soft, self-deprecating way that Stevie was pretty sure wasn’t truly self-deprecating.
Hayes was a YouTube star. At the start of the summer, he had released a ten-part online show called The End of It All about a survivor of a zombie invasion. All of the videos were shot from a basement bunker, just Hayes to the camera, discussing his survival in something called the Hungry City, a beachside town that had a few pockets of human resistance. His show was one of those things that wasn’t there one moment and was everywhere the next.
Stevie had known Hayes went to Ellingham and that she might see him at some point. She did not expect to see him standing in her doorway as she unpacked. She didn’t know he would be in her house.
“Sorry, I was on the phone,” he said. “I was talking to some people in LA.”
He held up his phone, as if indicating the presence of tiny Los Angelenos inside of it. It wasn’t clear to Stevie why he was apologizing or even explaining why he had been on the phone before she had seen him. But she nodded anyway, like this made sense. Maybe this was something celebrities—Hayes probably counted as an actual celebrity—did. They talked on the phone, and then they told you about talking on the phone.
“So, hey,” he said. “Is there any chance you could give me a hand?”
Stevie blinked in confusion.
“With what?” she asked.
“My stuff.”
“Oh,” Stevie said, feeling the cold hand of panic on her neck. Already she sounded like a slack-jawed idiot. “Sure.”
She followed him to the common room, where his bags and boxes (nicer than hers and more of them) were waiting. He gestured to a box.
“You have to be careful with that one,” he said.
Stevie took this as a cue to pick that box up. It was a bit on the heavy side, full of some kind of equipment that was unevenly packed and slid around when she moved it.
“Yeah,” he said, taking a smaller bag and heading back down the hall to the right circular stairs at the end. “It’s been a weird summer. That’s why I was on the phone.”
“Oh,” Stevie said, “yeah. Sure.”
She tried to maneuver the box into the twisting space. The steps creaked loudly, and the box caught. Hayes moved ahead, but Stevie was stuck trying to pivot and angle without shaking the box too much. She paused for a moment, expecting Hayes to come back and give her a hand, but when he did not appear she took a deep breath and persevered, letting the box scrape along the wall.
Hayes’s room was Minerva Six, at the very end. It was much like hers, but hotter and with an extra window.
“Oh, great,” he said. “Set it anywhere. Thanks.”
“Your show is good,” she said. “I really liked it.”
This wasn’t entirely true. The show was okay at best.
In preparation for coming, Stevie had watched all the episodes. They weren’t long, maybe ten minutes each, and they were fine. The story was pretty good. Hayes’s acting, less so. Most of it was cheekbones and a low, sultry voice. Sometimes, that’s all that was required. Stevie always tried to be truthful, but she didn’t want to make her first acquaintance in her new house and say, “Your show was mediocre and overrated but I see why you are valued: for your looks and deep voice.” People tended not to warm to that kind of thing.
“Thanks,” he said, leaving the room in a way that suggested she was to come with him and get more stuff.
This was good. This was Hayes Major, internet star, talking to her. Also, this was Hayes Major, internet star, getting her to carry most of the heavy stuff, but still.
Another weird thing, Stevie thought, as she made her way back down the twisting steps—she knew about Hayes’s love life. Hayes had been involved in a publicized altercation over the summer at some convention when he got involved with another YouTuber named Beth Brave, star of a show called Beth Isn’t Here. Beth had been dating Lars Jackson from a show called These Guys. Some kind of argument broke out when Hayes got together with Beth that had been widely recorded, and the three of them had a screaming fight in a hallway. There was online chatter after speculating that Beth would be involved in a second season of The End of It All.
This was the kind of life Hayes led. It was very different from Stevie’s life.
“People in LA,” he said unprovoked, as they picked up some more boxes. “There’s been a lot of interest in the show for movies, so . . .”
He let that hang in the air until Stevie said, “Wow.”
“Yeah,” he said. “My agent wants me to make another series right away because there’s a lot of interest right now.”
Another trudge up the tight steps.
“More zombies?” Stevie asked as she caught her breath.
“I don’t know. . . . You can just put that on the bed. . . . I mean, I did that already?”
“You turned into one at the end,” Stevie said. “I think? It was kind of open-ended.”
“Yeah . . . ,” he said, and his tone indicated that he was no longer really warming to the conversation. “So, I just have to make a few more calls now that I’m here? Thanks a lot. I’ll see you around?”
“Yep,” Stevie said, wiping the sweat from her brow as she backed out of the room. “I’ll see you . . . you know . . . here.”
He was already dialing.
As she stepped out into the hall and went down the stairs, two things occurred to Stevie.
The first was that it was eight in the morning here, so five in the morning in LA. On a weekend. While they may keep strange hours in Hollywood, it seemed unlikely that Hayes was doing a bunch of important business at that time.
The second was that even though he lived in the same building as she did, Hayes Major had never asked her name.