Maybe not.
Behind them, Germaine Batt made her silent, ever-watchful way into the room. She was wearing her semiprofessional-looking clothes again—the black pants and blazer. She had pulled her long hair into a low ponytail that hung down her back. She looked around, saw Hunter and Stevie, and sat down next to them. She had her phone out, with the recording function on.
“You going to report on this?” Stevie asked.
“No. I hate human-interest stories. You’re the nephew of that woman who died, right? You were in the fire.”
Hunter blinked in surprise.
“Oh my God,” Stevie said. “Really?”
“I was,” Hunter said.
“Would you consider being interviewed?” Germaine asked.
“I . . . guess?”
Stevie wanted to stop this slow-motion train wreck, but Janelle was stepping to the front of her machine and looked about ready to start. She was wearing her lemon-patterned dress with her hair wrapped up in a cheerful yellow scarf. She always wore her lemons for luck.
“So,” she began, “thank you for coming out to see my machine! Let me tell you about Rube Goldberg. He was an engineer who became a cartoonist . . .”
Stevie’s thoughts began to drift, following the twists and turns of the tubes and dishes and plates. They were taking an unexpected course. David was gone. David could never really be gone, because he kept coming into her mind over and over. Maybe she needed something to push him out. Was that something Hunter? Was that what people did? Got interested in someone new? She didn’t know how she and David had gotten together in the first place.
“. . . so he made a character called Professor Butts, who . . .”
It had been like magnetism. It could honestly not be explained. But once Stevie was around David, something in her became wobbly. The lines and edges blurred. Even now, she wrapped her fingers around her phone. Maybe he would call again.
“So,” Janelle said, “here’s the Danger Diner!”
She reached down and depressed the lever on the toaster. The balls began their journey around the cups and saucers and plates, down the half-pipes, over the little chef. The room responded well, with noises of appreciation and some laughs. Janelle stood to the side, her hands tightly wound together. She nodded as each part of the process functioned exactly as she had designed it, as each weight, each stack, each tube did its part. The last ball was coming to the end. The soda dispenser was triggered. The three plastic pitchers began to fill. This time, Stevie would be ready when the gun went off and the egg was shot down by a series of paintballs. She focused.
Except . . .
What happened next happened so fast that Stevie barely had a chance to register it. There was a loud clanking, a hissing. Something was moving, flying. There was an earsplitting shattering as the plates fell all at once, and some object was rocketing toward them. She fell back on someone as a scream broke out throughout the room.
When the clanking finally stopped, Stevie looked up from the pile of people she had landed in. A small canister was rolling on the floor. Aside from that, there was a heavy, confused quiet. Parts of Janelle’s machine lay in ruins, piles of glued-together plates and cups were shattered. From across the room, once voice cried out in pain. Then a few more gasped in alarm.
Stevie looked down at herself. There was some fine glass powder on her hoodie, but otherwise she was no worse for wear. Nate, Hunter, and Vi were all the same, more stunned than anything else. Vi immediately ran to Janelle, who stood in mute, confused horror.
Suda, the girl in the emerald-blue hijab, leaped up. She immediately ran to the hurt people and started assessing injuries. She proceeded quickly to Mudge and knelt down at his side. Stevie’s tall, goth friend, who always helped her in anatomy, was bent over his arm and weeping quietly.
The demonstration was over.
9
“SO,” HUNTER SAID, BREAKING THE SILENCE. “WEIRD NIGHT, HUH?”
“Not really,” Nate replied, picking through the bottom of a large bowl of popcorn, looking for any fully popped pieces that weren’t hard kernels in disguise. “This is pretty much how it goes. Something terrible happens and we all come back here and talk about how terrible it is. We don’t learn.”
Stevie elbowed him gently, but firmly, in the ribs. She sat next to him on the sofa, while Hunter was in the hammock chair, tacking softly from side as the fire crackled in the fireplace. On the other side of the room, Janelle sat with Pix. She had been crying almost nonstop all the way back to the house.
“They’re standard paintball-gun canisters,” she said tearfully.
“It’s okay,” Pix said, her arm over Janelle’s shoulders. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is my fault,” Janelle said, tears flying as she spat out the words. “I built it. I’m responsible for what I build. The tanks were correctly pressurized. The regulators were set at a very low level. I don’t understand what happened. Everything about this machine was safe. It’s all benign. I tested it dozens of times.”
Pix couldn’t think of anything to reply to this with, and for a moment, neither could anyone else. Then Hunter stepped in.
“Carbon dioxide canisters are really common,” he said. “People have them in their kitchens. Those home seltzer things?”
“Carbon dioxide canisters?” Stevie said.
“Is that what you were using?” Hunter asked. “Or some other kind of canister?”
“Carbon dioxide,” Janelle said. “Yeah, people use them for making seltzer.”
Stevie began to quake a bit.
“Be right back,” she said.
She stumbled frantically back to her room and pulled down the coat and robe and other clothes from the hooks, the clothes that were hiding the sticky notes she had put up the night before. She looked at the blue ones.
Hayes Major: CO2 poisoning/dry ice
Ellie Walker: exposure/dehydration/immurement
Dr. Irene Fenton: house fire
She reached for the blue sticky notes and added one more.
Janelle’s machine: CO2 tank accident
There could be no doubt about it now. There was some hand in this—some quiet hand that tipped things in the wrong direction. It moved the ice, shut the doors, turned the knob, and now, perhaps the hand altered Janelle’s machine.
Why the hell would anyone want to ruin a Rube Goldberg machine? She glared at the four notes, demanding that they speak to her, that they make the picture clear. What did Hayes, Ellie, Dr. Fenton, and . . . some random students have in common?
Well, in two cases, Janelle.
Janelle’s pass had been used to take the dry ice. Janelle had that access because she was building her machine, a machine that was now destroyed. But those two things had no connection to what happened to Ellie or Dr. Fenton, unless there was a killer out there with the goal of messing up a few Ellingham student projects.
Stevie pulled off a few more sticky notes, listing all the things that played on her mind.
Janelle’s pass
The message on the wall
CO2 accidents
There was a light knock at her door, and Nate slouched his way in. Stevie grabbed her robe and some towels and made a half-hearted attempt to hang them back up to cover the wall, but Nate had already seen it.
“You don’t think that was an accident,” Nate said. “Whenever you leave a room like that it means you think the bad thing that just happened wasn’t an accident. It’s your move.”