“Again, I need a reason.”
“I’ll owe you.”
He laughed out loud at that.
“And it dicks around with your dad a little more,” Hunter added. “If you made a guy, why not use him?”
Stevie could almost see the calculations going on behind David’s eyes.
“Fine,” he said. “You tell me what to say and I’ll send it, and you keep reading. We don’t have a lot of time.”
It took only a few minutes to come up with Jim’s wording:
I am writing on behalf of Senator King. The senator would like to see a copy of any legal documents that state that there is some kind of financial benefit for anyone who produces Alice Ellingham. This document has been long rumored to exist. The senator would like to know about any potential legalities or news stories that might involve the school, and obviously, any kind of windfall would be rich fodder for the press. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
“It’s short,” Hunter said. “Keep it brief. Sounds more important, like you’re entitled.”
“Relatable,” David said as he finished typing. “Fine. I’ll send it off as soon as I have a signal again. Are you going to read the stuff I gave you now?”
Hunter got up without a word, sat back on the sofa, and picked up the tablet.
Exhaustion dropped on to Stevie. The bubble burst, and the air was sucked back out of the room. David was twisting in the chair and the wind was howling. She was not needed.
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
As she got up to go, David trailed her loosely in the hall.
“Are you following me?” she said.
“I’m going to my room to get a power cord,” he replied. “Like I said, I was reading all night. Looks like you had fun, though.”
Stevie gripped her doorknob so hard she thought she might rip it off.
“Not everything is about you,” she said.
Then she went into her room and shut the door in his face.
15
THE WHOLE HOUSE WAS SHAKING.
Stevie opened her eyes. The light in the room was dim. She blinked a few times and reached for her phone. It was almost three in the afternoon. There were no texts or calls from her parents, which suggested that there had been no signal.
She found she had made a nest for herself to keep warm—all the blankets, her robe, her fleece, even a few towels. At one point, she remembered she had considered tipping out her bag of dirty laundry on top of herself. She pieced together the events that had gotten her here. She had been with Hunter and David in the common room until early in the morning, then the exhaustion had come down on her and she had gone into her room to rest for a minute. The minute had turned to hours, and the day had vanished.
She slithered out of bed and went to the window. Outside, the snow was coming down sideways, even blowing back up. It had so coated the trees and ground that it was hard to figure out what was outside at all. It was impossible to calculate how much snow had collected on the ground, but it looked like it was now a few inches below the window. So, two feet? Three feet?
What to do now? She returned to her bed and sat on the edge. There was no going outside—not outside-outside and possibly not outside this room. She looked at the wall, the gently lumpy, overpainted surface where the message had appeared all those weeks ago. Between the cottony view out the window and the post-nap fuzz in her head, reality distorted and a ball of adrenaline shot through her system. This place was dangerous. She should have heeded the warning on the wall. She kept brushing up against death’s sleeve, avoiding it by inches and moments. It was at the end of a tunnel, under the floor, at the other end of the phone. She should have gone home, left this terrible place, because her luck suddenly felt fleeting. Now there was no escape.
Just as she felt the first ramp up into an anxiety attack, there was a gentle rapping on her door, and Janelle poked her head in. She had her comforter wrapped around her like a regal cape. It dragged along behind her as she came in.
“I thought I heard you,” she said. “You’re up.”
The mental monsters ran away in Janelle’s presence. She had that effect, and Stevie almost welled up with appreciation.
“Where’s Vi?” Stevie asked, casually wiping at her eye.
“Up in David’s room. They’re reading. David, Hunter, Vi.”
“Nate?”
“He’s writing?” Janelle said. “I think? At least he has some sense. I’m surprised you’re not up there.”
“Yeah.” Stevie smoothed out her blanket. “I’m still not welcome.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Janelle said. “Forget him.”
There was an extra edge in her voice now, and a bit of a rasp. Stevie wondered if she had been crying this morning.
“Are you two fighting?” Stevie said. “You and Vi?”
Janelle sat on the bed and tightened the comforter cloak around herself.
“It’s not a fight,” Janelle said. “It’s a disagreement. Vi is an activist. I know this about them. They have strong opinions and want to do good in the world. That’s what I love about them. But I don’t think they should be . . . David’s ideas aren’t good. This isn’t good. Well, maybe the part where we all stayed. But . . . I mean. Yeah. We’re fighting.”
She put her head in her hands for a moment, groaned, then looked up.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at the wall,” Stevie replied honestly.
“Guess it’s as good as anything else,” Janelle said.
“Walls are more interesting than you think,” Stevie said, realizing that she may have just uttered the most boring statement anyone had ever uttered. “In mystery stories, a lot of things are behind or inside of walls,” she said. “But it’s true in life too. People find stuff in walls all the time. Letters. Money. Witches’ bottles. Razors. Mummified cats . . .”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s a thing that used to happen,” Stevie said. “Bodies have been found. There are stories of people who lived in walls—well, that happens in books more. People tend to live in attics, like this guy Otto who lived in his lover’s attic for years and used to sneak down when they were out, and eventually he murdered the husband. Or this guy they call the Spiderman of Denver who lived in these people’s house and murdered the owner one night and then kept living in the house for a while. You can usually tell when you hear strange noises at night and food goes missing. . . .”
“Oh,” Janelle said.
“I mean,” Stevie said. “Cases get solved because of walls. For instance, there was a case in England of a man who was accused of sexually assaulting lots of teenagers in the 1970s. They all talked about the fact that he had a wall in his house where victims wrote their names and phone numbers. So the police went to that house, in the present day, and they brought in some decorators to strip the wall, because decorators have the equipment to do that. They took off layer after layer of paint until they literally uncovered the 1970s, and there was the wall with all the names and numbers and dates, just like everyone said. The evidence was all there. They peeled back the past. I was thinking about it because this friend of Ellie’s in Burlington said that Ellie talked about stuff being in the walls here.”