“Don’t be afraid. You can come out.”
Dottie looked at the things he had put on the floor—the rope, the binoculars, the handcuffs.
“Those are for the game,” he had said.
“What kind of game?”
“It’s very complicated, but it’s going to be a lot of fun. I have to hide. Were you hiding in here too?”
He had started sweating profusely at that part of the conversation, as he felt it all unraveling. How had he sounded so calm?
“To read,” she had replied.
The kid had a book with her. She was clutching it like it was a shield.
“Sherlock Holmes? I love Sherlock Holmes. Which story are you reading?”
“A Study in Scarlet.”
“That’s a good one. Go ahead. Read. Don’t let me stop you.”
At that point, he had decided nothing. His brain was spinning. What to do with her? Dottie had looked at him, and he could see it in her eyes—she knew. Somehow, she knew.
“I need to get this back to the library. I won’t tell anyone you’re here. I hate it when people tell on me. I have to go.”
“You know I can’t let you leave,” he had replied. “I wish I could.”
The words came out of his mouth, but he had had no idea what they meant.
“You can. I’m good at keeping secrets. Please.”
She had hugged the book.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
George Marsh put his head in his hands for a moment. He couldn’t play the rest in his mind, the part where Dottie dropped the book and made her heroic, doomed leap toward the hole. The sound she made when she hit the ground below. Scrabbling down the ladder—all the blood. The way she moaned and dragged herself along the ground.
He blinked, stood, and shook it off. He lowered his lantern with a rope, then dropped the shovel and climbed down. The shelves had been emptied of liquor bottles. The little space was empty, cold. He pushed on, through the door, into the tunnel. The crew had started filling in the tunnel in the middle, so that is where he would go. He walked into the pitch-black, his little halo of light barely cutting into the shade.
It was like he was going to the underworld. To hell. To the place of no return.
The smell of earth was getting stronger, and soon some was underfoot. He stopped, set the lantern down, and tested the space with the shovel. Then he began to dig, shoving the earth to the sides, creating an opening. When the space met his satisfaction, he picked up the lantern and returned the way he had come, back into the world of the living. He walked out of the dome, back through the sunken pit, all the way to his car. He opened the back door.
There was a small trunk inside. He opened that as well.
There were ice cellars in Vermont, packed with ice and snow and hay. That was where he had been keeping Alice. She was not frozen solid, but she was stiff.
“Come on,” he said to her quietly. “I’m taking you home. It’s okay.”
He closed the trunk and removed it from the car. George bore his sad burden back the same way, moving carefully so as not to drop it as he made his way down the slippery side of the once-lake. He lowered the trunk with a rope, taking care to put her on the ground as delicately as possible. Then he carried her into the tunnel and into the space he had excavated. He packed the earth around her by hand. Once she was mostly covered, he began to fill with the shovel, until he had put several feet of dirt between her and the world.
It was nearly midnight when he emerged, his face slick with cold sweat. He moved silently toward the house, taking a route where he would not be seen from Montgomery’s window.
As soon as he was inside, there was a movement from behind a tree at the edge of the garden patio, the sound of a striking match, and the small glow of the tip of a cigarette. Leonard Holmes Nair emerged and watched as George Marsh walked out of sight.
“What have you been doing?” he said to himself as the door closed.
Then he moved silently through the garden, tracing the path that Marsh had just come.
18
IT WAS MORNING, NOT THAT YOU’D KNOW IT.
The snow obliterated the horizon. There was no sense of where the sky ended and the world began. There were hints of trees, but they were shortened in perspective by the depth of the snow, and their spindly, bare branches wore white gloves. Only the dome on the little mound seemed to be in the right place. The sunken garden was being refilled. The world was being erased and reset.
The morning room, where everyone was camped, managed to be both cold and stuffy at the same time. Stevie woke, stiff and still tired, and stared out from her sleeping place. The rubber mat and blankets didn’t do much to keep out the hard chill of the floor. She had a limited view under the sofa and could see Janelle’s extended arm reaching in Vi’s general direction, though Vi was several feet away, sleeping upright, tablet still in hand. Nate was curled into his blankets, which he had pulled over his head. There was a gentle, soft snoring coming from someone.
Stevie wiped away some drool and pushed herself up quietly to a standing position. Even David was asleep, draped over the chair, legs hanging off the side, a tablet next to him. Hunter, the lightly snoring one, was flat on his back on the sofa, his knit hat pulled over his eyes like a sleeping mask. There was something odd and intimate the way the soft light fell on her sleeping friends; it was almost as if the Ellinghams had even planned a room where the light would come down gently on any revelers sleeping off a party.
She tiptoed out into the main hall, where Call Me Charles was by the fire with his computer and a stack of folders. Call Me Charles was a lot to take at what her phone informed her was six in the morning, but there was no avoiding it.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, waving her over, “but I didn’t sleep much. I caught up on some work. Reading applications for next year’s class.”
Applications. More people would be coming, taking the same chance Stevie had—writing to Ellingham about their passions, hoping someone would see a spark and admit them. It was so weird to think of people coming after her.
“I hope we have a school then,” he said.
“You think the school won’t reopen?” Stevie said.
Charles sighed and shut his computer.
“The cat only has so many lives,” he said. “We’ll do our best. We could live to fight another day. We have to be hopeful.”
He sipped his coffee and gazed into the fire for a moment.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “The Ellingham case. Do you think you understand it any better since being here?”
Stevie could have said, I solved it. So, yeah, kind of better. But it wasn’t time, and Charles was not going to be her official way of getting this out into the world.
“I think so,” she said noncommittally. “Why?”
“Because,” he said. “That’s why you were admitted.”
“Did you really think I could solve it?” she said.
“What I thought and what I still think,” he replied, “is that I saw someone with a passionate interest. In fact, I thought you might be bored here, so I went up to the attic last night and got you something.”
He indicated the small table next to him, where four large green volumes sat. She recognized them at once, with their gold lettering on the side, indicating years and months.