“Who’s being blackmailed?” Stevie asked. No matter what was going on, talk of private investigators and blackmail was going to interest her. She addressed most of this to Hunter and Vi, trying not to make eye contact with David after the events of last night.
“What seems to be happening,” Vi said, “is that whenever this person, who we found out is a private investigator, shows up in the files regarding these major donors to the King campaign, these donors suddenly give a lot more money, and on a regular schedule. They formed organizations to raise even more.”
“What is the private investigator doing?” Stevie asked.
“Something with financial documents,” David said, not looking up. “He delivers loads and loads of these spreadsheets. We can’t work out what they mean exactly, because we don’t have enough information, but it definitely seems like this is information about activities these people want hidden. Maybe it’s tax fraud or something. Whatever the case, my dad has this information on them, and then his campaign gets a ton of money. That’s blackmail.”
“And these people?” Vi said, breathless. “They’re the worst people you can imagine. This guy here”—she pointed at a line on the spreadsheet—“is almost singlehandedly responsible for the cover-up of a major oil spill.”
“Major, major oil spill,” said Hunter.
“This is how he did it,” David said, almost to himself. “He never had enough money to start his presidential campaign, and then it all comes rolling in as soon as he gets this material. And there’s no way this stuff was obtained legally. He’s getting information about things that are probably crimes, and he’s using it to power his campaign. Crimes to power crimes.”
“This is a treasure trove,” Vi said. “If you sent this stuff to a Dropbox for any media outlet, you could blow this all wide open. If we release this stuff, we could take down some of the worst people out there today.”
“Or you could destroy it,” Janelle said. She and Nate had come over to listen to this conversion. Janelle sat primly on the sofa. Even wearing cat-head pajamas, she looked serious.
“Destroy it?” Vi repeated.
“If the goal is to take down Edward King,” Janelle said, “you take away the thing he’s using to get his money. Once you destroy it, he has no leverage against these people.”
“And we have nothing on him,” Vi said. “Or them.”
“But you’ve completed your objective,” Janelle said. “If this material was obtained illegally, then destroy it. End the crime. Don’t go any farther down this path. If you want to do good, do it the right way.”
“But all these people . . . ,” Vi said.
“If the stuff was stolen,” Janelle said, “destroy it.”
“This is tough,” Hunter said. “Not sure what I would do.”
David leaned back against the wall and stared at the tablets.
“Honestly,” he said, “if this stops my dad, I don’t care how we do it. Vi, it’s your call.”
This left Vi, who gazed at the tablets and the bag of flash drives.
“There’s so much here,” they said.
“And these people will go down,” Janelle said. “But there are right ways and wrong ways.”
Vi looked to Janelle. Stevie could feel something pass between them, something palpable in the air. Vi got up and gathered all the tablets. They put them in the cold fireplace, then grabbed the poker and began to smash them. As they did so, Janelle sat up straighter, her eyes brimming with tears.
“I’ll flush these,” David said, picking up the flash drives and gathering the remains of the tablets.
Everyone in the room moved away to give Vi and Janelle a little space as Vi sat next to Janelle and took her by both hands.
As David left the room, Stevie almost thought she felt him give her a look as well. At least, someone was watching her. She could feel it.
19
BEING STUCK IN A MOUNTAINTOP RETREAT DURING A BLIZZARD SOUNDS fun and romantic, especially if you are talking about a place like Ellingham Academy, which was entirely made of nooks and views. It had ample firewood and food. It was big enough for everyone. It should have been pleasant, at least.
But snow does funny things to the mind. Everything felt close and airless. Time started to have no meaning. Now that the task many people in this particular group had stayed to perform was complete, there was a baggy confusion to what was supposed to happen next. At least Vi and Janelle were back together, sitting pressed up so close to each other that Stevie thought they might actually overlap. Hunter was napping. Nate was trying to sink into the sofa and be left alone.
And David? Well, he sat on his chair and played a game on his computer, looking at Stevie over the top occasionally.
She got up and left the room, taking her bag with her.
They weren’t supposed to go upstairs, but nobody had said they couldn’t sit on the stairs, so that’s where she sat, alone and in public, on the grand staircase. Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase, but . . .
“We’ll probably be able to get out in about twenty-four hours,” she heard Mark Parsons saying. He was up on the balcony walkway above with Dr. Quinn and Call Me Charles. Plans were being made. They would all leave this place, to go to an uncertain future.
She sat on the landing, wrapped in a blanket, and stared at the portrait of the Ellingham family. This would be her anchor. It made as much sense as anything else. The swirling colors, the distortion of the moon, the dark sky, the dome looming in the background. Her pulse surged and the world swam, so she dove into the painting. She was there, standing alongside the Ellinghams in their kaleidoscopic world. The doomed Ellinghams.
The painting. That photo of Leonard Holmes Nair painting on the lawn . . .
She pulled her bag over and removed the diary. She blinked away some of the spots from in front of her eyes and flipped it open, grabbing for the photos inside, flipping through the shots of Francis and Eddie in their poses, in the trees, and there . . .
There it was. The photo of Leonard Holmes Nair on the lawn. She looked at the photo and up at the painting several times. Then she got up and went over to the painting, examining it closely. She looked at the sky, specifically, the shape of it around the Ellinghams. The placement of the moon.
It was the same painting. The figures were precisely the same. The moon in this painting was in the same position as the sun in the one in the photograph. Where the Great House had been in the photograph painting, the scene had been converted into the background of the dome, into a halo of light.
Same painting. Different setting. Why had he repainted it like this? The moon was high in the painting, and the moonbeams dipped down around the dome, landing on a spot off to the side, right about where the tunnel was. And the pool of light . . .
There was something there, something she couldn’t put her finger on.
She turned away from the painting and opened the diary again, flipping through the now-familiar entries. Francis in love. Francis in misery. Francis bored. Francis making charts of ammunition and explosives. She glanced through the poems but kept coming back to the one that stood out from the others.
OUR TREASURE