It pleased her. Let them see.
She turned back to the items on the bed. She made sure the magazines were all stashed in the paper bag. She would burn them later. She shoved this under the bed. The notebook was the important thing. It always had to be secured. She scanned their afternoon’s work, reading through the riddle with satisfaction and checking the envelope that she had tucked between the pages. But something . . . something was missing. She flipped through the book in a panic.
“Francis!” Miss Nelson called.
“Coming!”
More frantic flipping. Her photographs were in this book. The ones Eddie took of them posing as Bonnie and Clyde. Their secret images. They had come loose from their photo corners and were gone. They must have fallen out in the woods when she ran. Damnable, stupid Eddie! This was why she needed to be in charge. He had no discipline. When you rush, you make mistakes.
“Francis!”
“Yes!” Francis shot back.
There was no time now. She opened the closet door and got down on the floor and pulled back a bit of molding. She shoved the notebook into its place inside the wall and pushed the piece of wood back. Then she smoothed herself as best she could and went back to face the world.
4
THE BURLINGTON ART COLLECTIVE ACTION HOUSE WAS A TEN-minute walk from the coffee house on Church Street, or a seven-minute race-walk with a giant bag of coats and boots. Stevie was very careful not to check the time, because it would inevitably be too short. She had no clearly articulated reason for going, except that something needed to be done, so the fewer impediments (like practicality and basic self-preservation) the better.
She didn’t have to check the house number to know she had arrived in the right place. The Art Collective was in the same general area as Fenton’s house—a neighborhood of large Victorians in various states of repair, some owned by the college, some turned into apartments. While the basic size, shape, and style of the Art Collective house matched that of its neighbors, everything else singled it out. The house was painted in a deep, somewhat dirty lilac, with a sunbeam of purples on the gabled roof. The front porch sagged. A dozen or more mobiles hung from the porch roof beams; these were made of tin cans, broken bits of glass and pottery, rusty cogs and machine parts, and, in one case, rocks. There was a macramé plant hanger that suspended a mannequin head, which spun gently in the wind. The leg part of the mannequin stood alone in the far corner of the porch and was used to support an ashtray. A wooden box by the door contained a snow shovel and cat litter.
Stevie pulled back the screen and knocked on the inner door, which was painted wine red. A shirtless guy in a pair of patchwork pants and a massive knit hat opened it.
“Hi,” Stevie said, almost blanking for a moment as she realized that she had come to a very strange house to talk to strange strangers about something she had not clearly defined in her mind. Having no prepared statement, she held up the flyer and pointed at Ellie in the photo.
“Ellie was a friend of mine, and I think she came here. . . .”
The guy said nothing.
“I was wondering if . . . I . . . I just wanted to find out . . .”
He stepped back and held open the door for her to come inside.
The Burlington Art Collective Action House was a big place. One wall was full of bookshelves from floor to ceiling, packed solid with books. There was a small stage in the back, with an old piano and a pile of other instruments. In every direction, there was stuff. There were feather boas and top hats, half-formed pieces of pottery, drums, yoga mats, art books, a stray flute sitting in an empty fish tank . . . Off to the side, there was a mattress on the floor with loose bedding; someone called this living area their bedroom. The second floor was open, with a large balcony sealed off with a white wrought-iron rail, from which several painted sheets were hung. The smell of sage lorded over the space.
Also, there was a tree in the house. It didn’t seem to be a live tree—rather one that had been cut down and somehow brought into the house whole. It dominated one corner of the first floor and stretched up over the second floor. Stevie had no question in her mind that these were Ellie’s friends. This was what the inside of Ellie’s head must have been like.
“So, I . . .”
The guy pointed at the second-floor loft. Stevie cocked her head in confusion.
“Should I . . .”
He pointed again.
“Up there?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Go? I should go up there?”
He nodded again and pointed toward a small spiral staircase in the back of the room, then he walked over to one of the walls and went into a headstand. As Stevie climbed the stairs, she noticed there were paper tags hanging from the tree branches with words on them, things like, “Think the sky,” and “This isn’t the time; this is the time.” Upstairs, sitting on a pile of cushions, was a girl. For one moment, Stevie almost mistook her for Ellie. Her hair was in small, matted bunches. She wore a stretched-out T-shirt that read Withnail and I and a faded pair of Mickey Mouse leggings. At Stevie’s approach, she looked up from her laptop and pushed her headphones off her ears.
“Hey,” Stevie said. “Sorry.”
“Never say sorry as a greeting,” the girl replied.
This was a good point.
“The guy downstairs let me in. He said to come up. Or, he pointed . . .”
“Paul’s in a silent phase,” the girl said, as if this explained everything.
“Oh. I’m Stevie. I am . . . was . . . a friend of Ellie’s. . . .”
Stevie barely had the words out when the girl sprang from the floor and wrapped her in an embrace. The girl smelled of a sweet mix of body odor and incense. Her body was taut from what was probably daily, intensive yoga. It was like being wrapped in a warm, stinky garden hose.
“You came to us! You came! She’d be so happy! You came!”
Stevie had not known what kind of reception she would get in the Art Collective, but this was not on the list of possibles.
“I’m Bath,” the girl said, stepping back.
“Bath?”
“Bathsheba. Everyone calls me Bath. Sit. Sit!”
This was weird, because when Stevie first met Ellie, Ellie got into the bath with all her clothes on to dye her outfit pink, probably for this very cabaret. The word bath would always remind Stevie of Ellie.
Bath pointed at another pile of cushions on the floor. They looked faded and stained and vaguely bedbuggy, but Stevie sat down anyway. Once on the floor she noticed that almost one entire wall of the upstairs was lined with empty French wine bottles with melted candles in them.
“From Ellie,” Bathsheba said, sitting cross-legged on the bare floor. “Of course. French wine. French poetry. German theater. That was my girl.”
With these words, Bath broke into tears. Stevie shifted on the cushions and fussed with the bag for a moment.
“I’m glad you came,” Bath said as she sniffed and calmed down. “She liked you. She told me all about you. You’re the detective.”
This made something catch in Stevie’s throat. Right from the start, Ellie had taken Stevie seriously when she said she was a detective. Ellie seemed to have so much confidence in Stevie that Stevie had more confidence in herself. Ellie had taken her in, made friends with her from the start, much like Bathsheba was doing now. Now that Stevie was looking at Bathsheba, it occurred to her that Ellie may have copied her look a bit, as well as some of her behaviors.