Speaking of flappers . . . Maris was just coming into the dining hall. She was wearing a big shaggy coat of fake black fur. Maris had a lot of shaggy, fringy things. She wore lots of darks, smudgy eyeliner and strong lipsticks. Dash was with her in his oversized coat and long scarf.
Maris and Dash were the theater people—Ellingham had only a few, and they were definitely in charge of all things dramatic now that Hayes was gone. It looked like Maris had shaken off some of her gloom after Hayes’s death. For a few weeks, she’d walked around like the town widow, wearing black on black with black lipstick, crying in the library and in the dining hall and tending to the impromptu shrine for Hayes that had sprung up in the cupola. It seemed like a lot of mourning for someone you had been dating for about a week, maybe two at the most. Maris had shed the widow’s weeds for a yellow dress—a vintage-looking one, which she wore with black fishnet stockings and chunky heels. She was doing blue lipstick now, as she transitioned back to her signature bright red.
On the other side of the dining hall, Stevie saw Gretchen—a pianist with a head of fiery red hair. She had been Hayes’s girlfriend last year. Hayes had used her to do his work, to write his papers. He’d even borrowed five hundred dollars from her, which he’d never repaid.
In theory, both Maris and Gretchen would have had something against Hayes. Hayes had screwed Gretchen over in several ways. And Hayes was dating Maris while also having a long-distance relationship with fellow YouTuber Beth Brave. Was that enough to kill? Also, Maris could have helped if Hayes had wanted to project that message on Stevie’s wall. Maris was smart. Maris knew theater things, so she would likely have been able to put something together to project a message.
This thing about the message on the wall was nagging at her. What did it even mean? It was a harmless prank at best. Well, not harmless. It had caused her to have a massive panic attack. But in the scheme of things at Ellingham, it was harmless. It had not killed her.
It wasn’t the severity of the thing; it was the why. Why do it?
She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she could figure out the mystery of the hand on the wall, she would understand everything.
Almost all of the incoming class took Dr. Quinn’s literature and history seminar, a class in which everyone read a novel and then learned about the historical period and context that surrounded it. The Great Gatsby was about the 1920s, a period that vaguely interested Stevie, as it had a lot of good crimes and it butted up against the Ellingham Affair in the 1930s.
“Much is made of the green light at the end of the dock,” Dr. Jenny Quinn said. Dr. Quinn was the associate head of the school and a generally terrifying person. She strode around in front of the room. She was dressed in high, glossy pumps, a pencil skirt, and an oversized white blouse that was definitely fancy in a way Stevie could not classify. “Everyone talks about the green light at the end of the dock. But I want to focus on the circumstances around Gatsby’s death at the end. About his murder.”
Stevie looked up. The Great Gatsby was a murder mystery? Why had no one mentioned this before? She looked at her copy of the book in a feverish sweat.
“Stevie,” Dr. Quinn said.
Dr. Quinn could smell sweat and fear, probably from at least a mile away if the wind was right. She narrowed her focus to Stevie, who felt her spine shrink under the pressure. “You’re our resident detective. Did you feel that Gatsby’s death was expected? How do you feel it served the narrative?”
She had to say something, so she went with what she knew.
“Murders don’t normally happen at the end of a book,” she said.
“Perhaps not in murder mysteries,” Dr. Quinn said. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be much for the reader to do. How does the murder function in this story?”
“Can I say something?” Maris said, sticking up her hand.
Stevie felt a wave of gratitude spread over her and in the direction of Maris and her blue lips.
“It’s a discussion,” Dr. Quinn said noncommittally.
“I felt like his murder was a cop-out.”
“How so?”
“I think Gatsby should have had a chance to live through the outcomes,” she said. “I mean, Tom—he’s a racist and an abuser. He and Daisy, they get to live.”
“And Gatsby pays for their misdeeds,” Dr. Quinn said. “But what I’m asking is, when do you think Gatsby really died—when the bullet went in, or at some other point in the story?”
It was like all of this was designed to pick at Stevie’s brain. When did Hayes actually die? When he decided to follow the path to that room filled with gas? And what about the others? When Ellie first made her way into the tunnel? When Fenton looked at the cigarettes on the table? Everything had been lined up for them by some hand, disembodied as the eyes on the cover of this book . . .
“So what do you say, Stevie?” asked Dr. Quinn.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I don’t know how to tell where it all starts or stops. It’s like a loop.”
Her answer was sufficiently weird enough to make Dr. Quinn pause and consider her. At first the lingering look predestined a dressing down in front of all her classmates, one that would cause the varnish to drip away from the mahogany bookshelves from the pure shame and embarrassment of it all. But then something changed. Dr. Quinn shifted her weight to her other heel and drummed her manicured hand on the desk. Her examination of Stevie deepened. It felt like Dr. Quinn wanted to pick her apart and examine her clockwork.
“A loop,” Dr. Quinn repeated. “Something going around in circles. Something that moves back as it tries to move ahead. Something that returns to the past to find the future.”
“Exactly,” Stevie blurted out. “You have to make sense of the past to figure out the present, and the future.”
Stevie had no concept at all of what Dr. Quinn was saying, but sometimes, quite by accident, you find yourself vibrating on someone else’s frequency. You can follow the sense of the thing, if not the literal meaning. Sometimes, this is more important and more informative.
“But are the answers there?” Dr. Quinn said. “That’s certainly what Gatsby thought, and look how he ended up. Dead in his pool. Think about this passage, from right before the shot, as his killer approaches: ‘He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.’”
Even without context as to their meaning, the words hypnotized Stevie. Ghosts breathing dreams like air, a figure of ash moving forward with, if Stevie was following along, a gun. The person seeking meaning in the past ended up dead.
Stevie looked at her teacher, swathed in designer clothes and pedigree. She was a woman who knew a lot of important people, had been offered jobs in presidential administrations—and here she was, teaching The Great Gatsby on a mountain. Why turn those things down to teach, to work under Charles, a man she appeared to dislike?
Was Dr. Quinn warning her—sending her a message? Or was Stevie losing her marbles, one by one?