AFTER A FEW MOMENTS OF NOT CRYING (BUT A LOT OF BLINKING) AND staring at her medications before stashing them in a drawer, Stevie emerged from her room to find that Janelle Franklin had arrived, and Nate was nowhere to be seen. Janelle was shorter than Stevie had pictured. She wore a red floral romper and her braided hair was wrapped in a scarf of yellows and golds. She wore a light, summery perfume that trailed in the air behind her as she hurried over to wrap Stevie in a hug.
“We’re here!” she said, clasping Stevie’s arms. “We’re here! Are your parents here?”
“They left a few minutes ago. Are yours . . . ?”
“No,” Janelle said. “They’re both on call today, so we did all my good-byes this week—family dinners and friends, we had a picnic . . .” Janelle happily chatted about the many events that had led up to her departure. She came from a big family in Chicago and around Illinois. She had three brothers, two in MIT and one at Stanford. Her parents were both doctors.
“Come see my room!” She grabbed Stevie by the wrist and led her next door, to a very similar room, but with everything flipped around. Their fireplaces were back to back.
“I’m probably going to need more space to build on,” Janelle said, “but I think I can use that table in the common room. Pix said I could solder out there. Can you believe we’re here?”
“I know,” Stevie said. “I feel kind of dizzy.”
“I think that might be altitude,” Janelle said. “We’re not super high. The highest point in Vermont is only forty-three hundred feet, and altitude should really become an issue at five thousand, but you may still need to compensate for the lower oxygen levels by drinking a little extra water. Here.”
She opened her bag and removed a fresh bottle of water, which she pressed into Stevie’s hand.
“I think I’m just nervous,” Stevie said.
“Also possible. Water is still the answer. And deep, slow breathing. Drink.”
Stevie opened the bottle and took a long sip, as instructed. Water never hurt.
“Is Nate here?” Janelle asked.
“He was. I guess he went upstairs.”
“How is he in person?”
“Kind of like he seemed in his messages,” Stevie said.
“Well, we’re here in person now. Come on. Let’s go see him.”
Janelle had entirely changed the energy of the place. She was movement, she was action. Stevie found herself carried along in Janelle’s wake as she hurried down the hall and up the tight circular stairs. Nate was in Minerva Four, the first one along the hall. The door was shut but he could be heard moving inside.
Janelle knocked. When there was no immediate answer, she texted.
A moment later, the door opened a bit and Nate’s long face appeared. He didn’t do anything for a moment, and then, with a barely audible sigh, he opened the door enough to let them in.
“Do you do hugs?” Janelle said.
“Not really,” Nate replied, moving back.
“Then no hug it is,” Janelle said.
“How about salutes?” Stevie said.
“Those are tolerable.”
Stevie gave him a salute.
Nate’s room was more or less identical to theirs, except it was already a mess. There was a rat’s nest of cables on the floor, and a pile of books. He’d been organizing his books, just like Stevie had.
“The Wi-Fi here sucks,” he said, by means of a greeting. “Cell signal too.”
He kicked at the pile of cords with a Converse-clad foot.
“I haven’t tried yet,” Stevie said.
“Well, it sucks.”
The box nearest to Stevie looked to be full of . . . parts. Just parts of things. Chair legs. Some kind of metal disk. Janelle went over and had a look at it.
“What’s this?” she asked. “Do you build too?”
Nate swooped down on the box defensively.
“I go to . . . flea markets,” he said, waving his hand as if this was just something that needed to be dealt with. “I collect things. I like clocks. And stuff.”
He closed the box lid, and with it, any invitation for further comment.
Stevie enjoyed Janelle’s brisk, confident positivity and she also liked Nate’s grumpy demeanor. She had a little bit of both of these qualities, and she fit between them very comfortably.
“Tour’s starting!” Pix called up the stairs. “They’re waiting outside! Come on, you guys!”
Nate looked hesitant, but Janelle was not giving up.
“I think it’s mandatory,” she said.
Janelle, Nate, and Stevie made their way outside where a large group of people was milling around in wait. Hayes and Ellie, being second years, obviously did not have to go.
It looked like the group went from house to house collecting members, and Minerva may have been the last stop. Stevie looked at her fellow first years. She wasn’t quite sure what she had expected—if she thought the students at Ellingham would all show up wearing lab coats, or they would all look like Ellie.
In general, they looked like any assortment of people from any high school. There were a few people with glossy, perfect hair who had already clumped together through that strange alchemy that joins all people with perfect, glossy hair. There was one girl in a bright red-and-white-check vintage dress with cat-eye glasses, winged eyeliner, a red vintage purse, and a tiny red fascinator. She was the most dressed up, and her heels sank into the grass as they walked. There was another girl with green hair and a NASA T-shirt who handled the grassy terrain in her wheelchair with deftness. There was a girl with a sharply cut black bob, pale skin, and vibrant red lipstick who looked like some kind of silent movie star dressed in a formless but somehow unmistakably fashionable gray dress and thick black belt. There was a girl in a stunning floral hijab who took a lot of pictures of the campus on her phone. There was a guy who never took off his cat-ear headphones during the entire tour.
Their tour was led by a student named Kazim Bazir, who spoke quickly and excitedly. Kaz had bright, excited eyes and the upbeat tone of a salesman who really wanted to sell you your very own deranged mountain retreat.
“Ellingham Academy was built between 1928 and 1936 by Albert Xavier Ellingham and his wife, Iris Ellingham,” Kaz said. “The right side of the campus, where our houses are, is known as wet campus, because the creek turns and borders the property. The fields and classrooms and most of the other buildings are on dry campus. Of course, it’s all a dry campus . . .”
No laughs. Tough crowd.
Ellingham was splendid in the sunshine. That was the only word for it. The light fell like rain in droplets that hung in the air. A cloud of them surrounded the fountain that gushed merrily on the green, creating its own ecosystem of rainbows. The light found every nook and crook of the bright redbrick buildings. It made the gargoyles seem to smile. It deepened the green of the trees. It made the statues—well, it didn’t do anything to the statues except reveal just how many of them there were.
“Do you think these get less creepy with time?” Nate asked as they passed yet another cluster of naked Greeks or Romans.
“I hope not,” Stevie replied.
Kaz led the group around the pathways, pointing out all the buildings and their uses. Albert Ellingham had been a massive admirer of Greek and Roman culture. This was evident from the names of the buildings: Eunomia, Genius, Jupiter, Cybele, Dionysus, Asteria, and Demeter.
As they walked through the green, Stevie looked up at the Great House. Its name was simple and accurate. The Great House was a character in this tale—the first building erected on this spot, designed to meet the whims of the family who inhabited it, while serving as the center of a seat of learning. This was the home Iris and Alice Ellingham left that morning, down this very drive. Stevie counted the windows on the second floor.
“What’s up there?” Janelle asked. “You’re looking up there really intently.”
“Right there,” Stevie said, pointing at two of the windows on the left. “Those are the ones Flora Robinson said she was looking out of the night of the kidnapping.”
“Who’s Flora Robinson?”
“A friend of the Ellinghams’. Iris Ellingham’s best friend. She was suspected for a long time because she gave a weird story that night. Her interview was really odd.”
There was no time to linger on Flora and her story. The tour was moving toward the Ellingham library, a stone structure that looked a bit like a church, with a large rose window, a spire, and a rounded set of red double doors.
“It’s designed this way on purpose,” Kaz said. “Albert Ellingham said knowledge was his religion and libraries were his church, so he built a church.”
Inside, the library was cool and still, with colored light streaming through the stained-glass windows. All of the buildings were impressive, but there was something majestic about this one. There was an overhang that filled about half the space, but once you got past this, much of the building was open, and you could see up three stories to the bookshelves that lined the structure. Elaborate spiral staircases made of wrought iron woven into patterns of twisting vines led up to the other levels. Out of all the buildings, this one should probably have been the quietest and the stillest, but this one seemed a bit . . . Stevie struggled to catch the right word. Wild? There was a loose wind spinning around and whistling near the ceiling. The iron vines seemed to genuinely crawl up the steps. The librarian, who seemed to have just run in, was out of breath. She wore a very professional-looking biking outfit, and her short black hair bore the imprint of a recent bike helmet.
“Hey!” she said, sounding a bit winded. “I’m Kyoko Obi. I’m your librarian. I also run a cycling club. We all do double duty around here. Sorry. One second . . .”
She took a long drink from an Ellingham-branded reusable water bottle.
“We have about half a million books on site,” she said, “both here and in storage. We have access to millions more digitally. We’re partnered with most of the Ivy League libraries, so we can get you more or less anything you require. It’s my job to get you anything you need.”
Stevie turned that over in her mind for a bit. One good thing about being from Pittsburgh was that the Carnegie Library was one of the best in the country. She had been able to get loads of books and materials there. But here there might be things related to the case, things not available anywhere else. Stevie wanted to stay, but Kazim was moving them on, all the way across the campus, to a large, circular tent structure that looked semipermanent.
“This is the study yurt,” Kaz said, pushing back a heavy flap that served as the door. The floor of the inside was covered in a mix of beautiful woven rugs and piles of pillows and beanbags.
“A lot of people sleep in here,” Kaz said. “It’s for studying, but . . . it has all kinds of uses.”
The girl with the bob laughed knowingly. A girl with short silver hair, a longer chunk of which poked straight up at the forehead, was lingering nearby. She wore round glasses, white overalls, and a short tank top underneath. She had been trailing Janelle, Stevie, and Nate for several minutes. The sun came out from behind a cloud, bathing all of them in strong, burning summer light. The girl tapped on her glasses and the lenses darkened.
“Magic,” she said.
“Transition lenses,” Janelle replied with a laugh. “Photochromic plastic.”
“Vi Harper-Tomo,” the girl said to Janelle, extending a hand. “And I am magic.”
Something flashed between these two that was almost visible to the naked eye, which caused Stevie a second of panic. She had just met Janelle, Janelle was her best bet at a closest friend, and already someone else was coming into the frame.
Which was a crazy thought.
Stevie tried to push it out of her mind and focus on the prize of this tour—an inside look at the Ellingham Great House, the Ellinghams’ former residence. She had studied the photos of the house for so long. Seen the floor plans. Knew the history. But instead, Kaz walked them right past it.
“Aren’t we going in?” Stevie asked.
“End of the tour!” he said, walking them past the walled garden, and back into a clearing in the trees to a large, sprawling modern building of raw Vermont wood and stone. It had a high, peaked roof like a ski lodge.
“This is the art barn,” Kaz said. “This is the only building that was added to the original campus, and it keeps getting bigger. They’re adding to it now.”
The ground around one side was dug up, and the construction looked new. Stevie couldn’t help but note that the building bordered closely on the walled garden—the famous walled garden that held the lake where the Ellingham ransom drop had occurred.
The garden gate was open, and people wearing hard hats were passing through. Stevie craned her head to look, but the tour was moving on into the art barn. There would be time. She would get in.
“The art barn isn’t just for art,” Kaz said, while walking backward. “Everything kind of happens here. Yoga and dance, meetings, some classes.”
Kaz was never so excited as when he was talking about the eco friendly construction of the art barn, the bamboo floors and the locations of composting toilets. Stevie began to twitch from anticipation. After what felt like an hour-long lecture on sewage, they left and walked back to the Great House.
When they stepped inside, Stevie stopped breathing for a moment. The house was built around a massive foyer, with balconies on the upper floors looking down over the space. Before her were the master stairs, sweeping up to the balcony of the second floor, and from there twisting elegantly up to the third. On the wall at the top of the first level of stairs was a massive painting, done by the famous painter and Ellingham family friend Leonard Holmes Nair. The setting was the lake and the observatory in the background, at night. Though that much was clear, the style was borderline hallucinatory. Iris and Albert loomed in the foreground of the picture—mythical figures in swipes of blue and yellow. Iris’s short black hair seemed to spread from her head and weave into the branches of the trees. Albert Ellingham’s face was merged with the full moon that hung over the observatory and spilled light onto the lake. They looked away from each other, their expressions stretched, their eyes pulling long, their mouths almost rectangular.
Stevie had seen many images of this painting. Online, it wasn’t that impressive. But in person, it gripped her and held her attention. It was disturbing. There was something about it, something that seemed to haunt the shadows in the background, something that seemed to be behind the observatory. This was painted two years before the kidnapping, but it seemed to foretell the doom that was on the horizon, and that the observatory would be part of it.
The painting seemed to preside over everything.
“Meet Larry,” Kaz said, indicating a man who sat at a large desk next to the front door. He was an older, uniformed man with salt-and-pepper hair clipped into a crew cut.
“I’m Security Larry,” he said. “It’s what people call me. It’s what I answer to. I’m head of security for all of Ellingham. I already know all of your names. I get to know everyone before they arrive.”
“Security Larry knows everyone!” Kaz said.
Security Larry didn’t look excited by this interruption.
“We’re very secure up here, but if you ever need us, you can hit the blue button on the alarms you’ll see in the campus buildings and on some light poles. The rules here aren’t hard, but you have to follow them. If you don’t, I’ll show up. I live just down the path at the gatehouse, so I’m always here. If something says Keep Out, that means Keep Out. It doesn’t mean go in because someone dared you or because you heard about other people going in. Some of the original features of the property are no longer structurally sound. You may get in, but you may not get out. We’ve had people stuck for days, so they were starved and terrified before they were expelled. You’ve been warned.”
“What does that mean?” Janelle said quietly as Kaz waved them toward one of the front rooms. “Original features aren’t sound?”
“He means the tunnels,” Stevie said. “And the hidden passages.”
On the right side of the front door, opposite Larry’s desk, was a dayroom with magnificent painted panels depicting twisting vines and pale roses, all decorated in delicate raised plaster patterns in silver. The furniture was upholstered in violet silk and the floors were covered in a massive decorative rug. This was an eighteenth-century room the Ellinghams had imported from Lyon, France—the furnishings, the rugs, the curtains, and wall decorations—all of it had been boxed up, shipped to America, and resized and assembled here.
The next room, the ballroom, had a set of glass double doors, the panes set in an elaborate art nouveau–style. The doors were partially open, so Stevie pushed them all the way and stepped into a massive room in front of them that stretched up two stories. The floor was patterned in black-and-white marble diamonds; the walls were slashed with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, sculpted and framed in delicate silver. The wall panels depicted scenes of costumed players in masks. The floor-to-ceiling rose-pink curtains were like theater curtains. The ceiling was painted in the light blue of early evening with the constellations and their representative figures all in gold. Most of America’s high society danced in this ballroom in the 1930s.
“And this,” said Kaz, leading them to a massive oak door, “was our founder’s office.”
The office had massive proportions—it was two stories high—but unlike the echoey main hall, this room was thickly carpeted from end to end in a lush, deep green, and over that there were Persian rugs. By the fireplace, there was a leopard rug, head and all, that was obviously and disturbingly real. Long windows stretched up to the ceiling and were covered in heavy satin drapes that blocked the sun. The second story of the room was entirely bookshelves, with just a walkway around for access.
The fireplace in this room was made of a rose-colored marble. Two massive desks filled one side of the room. One held six sleek black rotary telephones. There was a spinning globe that Stevie guessed contained the names of countries that had long ceased to exist, giant wooden file cabinets, and a strange piece of furniture with tubes coming out of it that Stevie recognized as being a Dictaphone—an early-twentieth-century recording device. Dictaphones were big in a lot of mystery stories.
This was where Albert Ellingham worked out the plan to try to save his family. They had counted the ransom money on this floor. She could have spent forever in this room.
But they were being ushered out again into the foyer. A man in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit with an Iron Man T-shirt underneath came bounding down the steps in a slow-motion run. His fine blond hair was swept to the side and bounced a bit as he came down each step.
“And now,” Kaz said, “to welcome you all, the head of the school, Dr. Charles Scott!”
“Welcome, welcome!” he called. “I’m Dr. Scott. Call me Charles. Welcome, you all, to your new home. I say I’m the head of the school, but I like to think of myself as the Chief Learner . . .”
“Oh my God,” Nate mumbled under his breath.
“As you’re at the end of your tour,” Charles said, we need to say a word about Alice. Alice Ellingham was the daughter of our founder, Albert Ellingham. Alice is technically the patron of our school, and we open each school year with a thank-you to her. So please join me in saying, Thank you, Alice.”
It took a moment and some gesturing for everyone to realize that this was serious, and literal. Eventually, there was a mumbled, “Thank you, Alice.”
“That was cultlike,” Nate said as they walked back to the green, where a picnic was being set up. “Why did we just thank a dead child?”
“It’s all in the rules,” Stevie said. “The school belongs to Alice Ellingham, if she ever turns up. We’re all technically here on her dime, so we have to thank her. She’s supporting us.”
“But she’s dead,” Nate said.
“Almost definitely,” Stevie replied. “She was kidnapped in 1936. But this place is hers . . . if she is alive and if she appears. She’d be old, but she could be alive, technically.”
“That really is a thing?” Janelle said. “I thought that was a myth?”
“Really a thing,” Stevie said.
“You said you know a lot about it?” Vi said. Vi had drifted out with them.
“Oh, Stevie knows it all,” Janelle said. “Go on. Tell us.”
Stevie had the strange feeling that she was being called on to perform, like a dog that knew how to use an iPad. At the same time, she now had an audience of people who wanted her to talk about the thing she loved, and that was a foreign and delightful feeling. The sun was warm and the grass was springy and all around her was the scene of murder.
They were heading toward the green, but the walled garden was just there, behind them. Stevie turned to have a look. The garden door was still open just a bit and there was no one around.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
“Are we supposed to go in there?” Nate asked.
“It’s open!” Vi said, stepping ahead.
The garden door was heavy and black, and passing through it had the quality of a dream. They stepped into a massive, lush garden surrounded by a high, perfectly spaced ring of trees. The grass was a brilliant, saturated green. The Great House stood at one end, with the low stone patio leading down to the lawn. There were small fountains and elaborate benches and planters. It was a regal garden, designed by people who took cues from the royal gardens of England and France. But there was one major thing that really stood out.
Most of it was a giant hole, covered in lush grass.
“What the hell?” Nate said.
“That,” Stevie said, “was a lake. Iris Ellingham was a champion swimmer. This was her pool. Albert Ellingham rerouted a stream to fill it, and there used to be rowboats to go out to that.”
She pointed to a knoll in the middle, where there was a round structure with a domed glass roof.
“That’s the place the kidnappers had him go to drop off the money,” she said. “After Iris and Alice were kidnapped, people used to contact Albert Ellingham with all kinds of theories. I think a psychic told him that Alice was in the lake, so he drained it. She wasn’t there. But he never refilled it. It probably reminded him too much of what happened. He left it just like this.”
“They call it the sunken garden on the map,” Vi said. “I see why.”
“Explain the dead child thing,” Nate said.
“The deal is this,” Stevie said. “The school and all the Ellingham fortune belong to Alice, but Ellingham kind of knew she was dead, even if he couldn’t admit it to himself. When two years had passed, he reopened the school.”
“And people came?” Vi said. “After the murders?”
“It was a one-off,” Stevie replied. “And it was still the Depression. And this was one of the most famous places in America. Free school from one of the richest men in the country . . . that was a huge deal. And no one thought the kidnappers were coming back. They’d kind of taken everyone there was to take. So this school was supposed to be a beautiful thing for Alice to come back to. Albert Ellingham wanted the place to be lively. He was sort of . . . making sure there were people for Alice to play with.”
“That’s really grim,” Janelle said. “Sweet, but . . . grim.”
“So how many millions of people said they were Alice?” Nate said. “Before DNA testing, everybody must have claimed they were Alice.”
“That was a thing,” Stevie said, nodding. “But Ellingham had a plan. Alice’s nanny was devoted to her and the family. She refused to give up any details about Alice. Ellingham had a secret file made of information about Alice, so that if anyone came forward, they would be able to check.”
“What, like a birthmark or something?”
Stevie shrugged. “That’s the point. No one knows except the people in the trust, and they can’t inherit. The people who run the trust are Alice’s keepers. I mean, now they’d just use DNA, so the secret Alice file doesn’t really matter as much.”
“It’s good to know we’re going to the most morbid school in America,” Nate said. “Now let’s go. I’m hungry and I’m still pretty sure we weren’t supposed to come in here.”
“Again,” Vi said, “gate was open.”
“We probably should go,” Janelle said. “But this is amazing.”
And it was amazing. For so many reasons.