“How did Ellie end up here?” Stevie asked. “This is part of the university, right?”
“Not part of,” Bath said. “Most of us who live here go there. The house is owned by a patron who wants to support local arts. It’s an open place for artists. Ellie found us the week after she got to Ellingham. She showed up at the door and said, ‘I make art. Are you going to let me in?’ And we did, of course.”
“I’m here because I’m trying to figure out . . .” Such a rookie mistake. Always have your questions ready. Then again, as a detective, you might not always know who you were going to end up talking to. So talk, she thought. Get talking and the rest will come. “. . . about Ellie. About what she was like, and . . .”
“She was real,” Bath said. “She was Dada. She was spontaneous. She was fun.”
“Did Ellie talk to you about Hayes?” Stevie asked.
“No,” Bath said, rubbing her eyes. “Hayes is the guy who died, right? That was his name?”
Stevie nodded.
“No. She said she knew him, but that was it. And that she was sad.”
“Did she ever mention helping him make a show?”
“She helped make a show? Like a cabaret piece? Hey, did you ever see our cabaret?”
“No, I—”
Bath was already on her laptop and pulling up a video.
“You need to see this,” she said. “You’ll love it. It’s one of Ellie’s best performances.”
Stevie dutifully watched ten minutes of dark, confusing footage of tuneless saxophone, poetry, handstands, and drumming. Ellie was in there, but it was too dark to really see her.
“So yeah,” Bath said as the video ended. “Ellie. I haven’t been able to do much since she died. I try to work, but I mostly stay in a lot. I know she would want me to make art about it. I’ve tried. I’m trying. I don’t want to let her down.”
Me either, Stevie thought.
“When I think of her . . . ,” Bath went on, “how she died. I can’t.”
Neither could Stevie. The idea of being trapped in the dark, underground, with no one able to hear you—it was too horrible. Her panic must have risen as she felt her way down that pitch-black tunnel and realized there was no way out. At some point, she would have known she was going to die. Stevie was thankful for the Avitan gliding through her bloodstream, holding down the pulsing nausea and air hunger she felt whenever she conjured this image in her mind.
Ellie’s death was not her fault. It really wasn’t. Right? Stevie had no idea there was a passage in the wall or a tunnel in the basement. Stevie certainly hadn’t sealed the tunnel. All Stevie did was lay out the facts of the matter in Hayes’s death, and she’d done so in public, in a place that seemed perfectly safe.
Bath had reached over and taken Stevie’s hand. The gesture caught Stevie off guard, and she almost recoiled.
“It’s good to remember her,” Bath said.
“Yeah,” Stevie replied, her voice hoarse.
She looked around the room for a new point of focus. What did she see? What information was there? Splattered paint, Christmas lights, a guitar, glitter, some laundry in the corner, canvases stacked against the wall, a load of wine bottles . . .
They had done some partying here. And so had David. That’s right. He’d told Stevie that he used to come to visit Ellie’s art friends in Burlington. These were those friends. So maybe these people knew something about where he was? Stevie latched on to this.
“I think another friend of ours came here? David?”
“Not recently,” Bath said. “He used to come with Ellie.”
“But not recently?”
“No,” Bath said. “Not since last year.”
So, no leads on Hayes, and no sightings of David. All she had really accomplished was making this girl cry and making herself late.
“Thanks for your time,” Stevie said, getting up and shaking out a sleeping leg. “I’m really glad I got to meet you.”
“You too,” Bath said. “Come back anytime, maybe for cabaret? Or whenever you want. You’re welcome.”
Stevie nodded her thanks and gathered up her things.
“I’m sorry for all you went through,” Bath said as Stevie reached the stairs. “With all this bad stuff. And that thing on your wall.”
Stevie stopped and turned back toward Bath.
“My wall?” she repeated.
“Someone put a message on your wall?” Bath said. “That was horrible. Ellie was so pissed about that.”
Had Bath said, “By the way, I can turn into a butterfly at will, watch!” Stevie would hardly have been more surprised. The night before Hayes died, Stevie had been woken in the middle of the night to see something glowing on her wall—some kind of riddle, written in the style of the Truly Devious riddle. Stevie felt her body physically tremble, partially at the memory of the strange message that had appeared that night.
“That was a dream,” Stevie said, ignoring the fact that her phone was buzzing in her pocket.
“Ellie didn’t seem to think it was a dream.” Bath leaned back, and her tank top revealed a little casual and confident side boob and armpit hair. “She said she was pissed at the person who did it.”
“She knew who did it?”
“Yeah, she seemed to.”
“I thought . . .” Stevie’s mind was racing now. “I thought, if it happened at all, maybe she did it? As a joke?”
“Ellie?” Bath shook her head. “No. Definitely no. Absolutely no. Ellie’s art was participatory,” she said. “She never worked with fear. Her art was consent. Her art was welcoming. She wouldn’t put something up in your space, especially if she thought it would scare you or mock you. It wasn’t her.”
Stevie thought back to Ellie bleating away on Roota, her beloved saxophone. She would not have described the sound as welcoming, but it also wasn’t aggressive. It was raw and unschooled. Fun.
“No,” Stevie said. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”
“That thing about the wall is messed up,” Bath said. “It’s like Belshazzar’s feast.”
“What?”
“The hand on the wall. You know—the writing? From the Bible. My name is Bathsheba. With a name like mine, you end up reading a lot of Bible stories. There’s a big feast and a hand appears on the wall and starts writing something no one can understand.”
Stevie’s knowledge of the Bible was not tremendous. She’d had some Sunday school classes when she was small, but that was mostly coloring pictures of Jesus and singing along while their Sunday school teacher played “Jesus Loves Me” on the piano. And there was a kid named Nick Philby who liked to eat handfuls of grass and would smile his big green teeth. It was not a complete education. But she had a passing memory of words written on a wall.
“Rembrandt used it as a subject,” Bath said, typing something on her laptop. She turned it around to face Stevie. There was an image of a painting—the central figure was a man, leaping up from a table, his face bug-eyed with horror. A hand reached out of a cloud of mist and etched glowing Hebrew characters on the wall.
“The writing on the wall,” Bath said.