“Fuck it,” she mumbled, barely able to make the words.
For no reason that she could think of, she started for the steps.
“Hey, wait,” Janelle said, holding her arm. “Maybe you should sit down.”
“Steps,” she said. The word popped out of her mouth like a strange bubble.
“Steps,” Janelle repeated. “Okay. Fine. Nate, get her arm. We’ll help you.”
Where do you look for something that’s never really there . . . Together, between her two friends, Stevie climbed the staircase.
The Ellinghams waited for her on the landing. Always on a staircase, but never on a stair. That’s where they were. She needed to look for something and hold on to it—something she could wrap her head around. Any rope would do. The Ellinghams. That’s why she was here. Albert. Iris. Alice. She repeated their names to herself over and over. Leonard Holmes Nair had preserved them here, in this bizarre painting, the one he had altered to include the dome, the pool of moonlight stretching over . . .
Where do you look for someone who could be anywhere?
The question popped up in the corner of her mind, distracting her for a moment.
The kid is there, Fenton had said on the phone. The kid is there. If George Marsh had committed the crime, what if he brought her back? What if he buried her out of guilt? What if Alice had been in the tunnel, and . . .
She looked at the painting again, forcing her eyes to focus. The pool of light, the moonbeam, it stretched over the point where the tunnel would have been. And the form of the light—it was vaguely in the shape of . . .
“Hey,” David said. He had joined them and was sitting in front of her. “It’s okay. It’s just panic.”
“Shut up,” she said. She could not articulate what was happening in her head, this massive word problem that was assembling itself in some part of her brain. Alice had been buried here. Alice was here. The kid was here. Alice had been found.
Point by point, things began to line up. Suddenly, it all made sense. All of it. The facts, which before had been falling from the sky like snow and evaporating in her memory, all sprang forth, solid, and put themselves in line. The tunnel. The excavation. Hayes in the tunnel . . . Fenton . . .
“It all makes sense,” she said to David. She could feel her eyes widening.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Your phone!” she said. “Give it to me.”
“Why?”
“Please.”
There must have been something in her tone. Though he looked confused, he pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her. She scrolled through until she found what she needed.
There it was—the one discordant note.
Of course, it wasn’t an accident that it ended like this. She had done the work, reading things for years. She had gotten herself to Ellingham. She had made herself a detective and put herself on this path. She had summoned this moment through work and falling down holes and running into the dark. It was time to gather the suspects, like they did at the end of every mystery.
“Get everyone,” she said to him. “Everyone in the building.”
“Why?” he asked. “What is going on? Are you okay?”
She looked up at him, her panic gone, her vision clear, the world starting to settle back into position.
“It’s time to solve some murders,” she said.
November 10, 1938
ANARCHISTS SUSPECTED IN EXPLOSION DEATH OF ALBERT ELLINGHAM
New York Times
Police and the FBI are investigating a local anarchist group in the death of Albert Ellingham and FBI agent George Marsh.
“We believe this may have been retaliation for the death of Anton Vorachek,” said Agent Patrick O’Hallahan of the FBI. “We are looking into multiple leads. We will not stop until the culprit or culprits are caught, mark my words.”
Vorachek, the man convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Iris Ellingham, and the disappearance of Alice Ellingham, was murdered by a gunman outside the courtroom after his sentencing. The gunman was never found.
Albert Ellingham had been the subject of many threats. Indeed, he met Detective George Marsh of the New York Police Department after Marsh discovered and foiled a bomb plot against him. In appreciation, Albert Ellingham hired Marsh as person security. When Marsh joined the FBI, Ellingham asked Director J. Edgar Hoover to station him in the area of Vermont around the Ellingham home and school. Despite this precaution, Iris and Alice Ellingham were taken . . .
Leonard Holmes Nair pushed the newspaper aside, but there was another underneath.
ALBERT ELLINGHAM BURIED AT MOUNTAIN RETREAT
Boston Herald
A private ceremony was held today for Albert Ellingham at his mountain retreat outside Burlington, Vt. Mr. Ellingham was killed on October 30 after a bomb exploded on his sailboat. An FBI agent, George Marsh, died with him. It is believed the two men were victims of an anarchist bomb plot. The funeral . . .
Leo got up and took his coffee to the window of the breakfast room and looked out at the kaleidoscope of color outside.
The funeral was a lie.
Parts had been found, enough to match fingerprints; the condition of the hands and the fingers the prints belonged to told authorities that the persons involved were no longer alive.
“There wasn’t much,” the one investigator told Leo. “We found three hands, a leg, a foot, some skin . . .”
The police could determine little about what had transpired, aside from the fact that they believed that the explosives were probably toward the back of the boat. Albert and George went out and never came back. They were most certainly dead, but there, the facts ended.
Iris had family, but Albert did not—not any he acknowledged. And while he had many employees and endless acquaintances, the only people who really counted as friends were Leo and Flora, and Robert Mackenzie, who was both secretary and confidant. The remains were still in a police mortuary, so these three were at the Ellingham Great House, going through a macabre pretense that there was some kind of remembrance ceremony going on.
So much of what was left was paperwork and packing. Like Iris before him, Albert was now being sorted into piles and boxes. Such a great life reduced to this. Leo thought about getting up and working on the family portrait some more. It was the one thing he was meant to be doing. It was only right to finish it. It sat under a sheet in the morning room. He had opened the door to the room a few times and seen it sitting there, like a ghost, frozen in a sunbeam in the center of the room. He couldn’t face it, or the warm light, or the echoes of the house. The Ellingham Great House was built for parties, for families, for friends—a house made as a centerpiece to a school that sat vacant around them. This terrible quiet was hard to take, so Leo decided to spend the morning in Albert Ellingham’s study, one of the few places truly set up to be quiet and soundproof. Even though the room was two stories high, with a balcony of books and shelving running around above, it managed to be snug with its rugs and leather chairs, the fire. With the curtains drawn, the room was muted. On the mantel above the fire was the green marble clock that Albert had purchased in Switzerland when they were there for Alice’s birth. It had belonged to Marie Antoinette, so the story went. It was a survivor of a revolution. The reality was probably much more mundane.