“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.”

“Do you?” she said, giving up and tossing her robe across the room, where it missed her bed by several feet and splayed dramatically on the floor.

“No,” Nate said, coming in and sitting down in her squeaky desk chair. “I don’t think anything is an accident anymore. Even I’m not that fatalistic. I do think it’s weird how someone or something hates this building in particular. It feels like we’re living in a parable.”

“What’s the message of this parable?” Stevie asked.

“I don’t know.” Nate spun the chair. “Don’t go to school?”

“It’s right here and I can’t see it,” Stevie said, shaking her head. “We’re famous for being the school with the murders. There’s all this legend around the place. Isn’t it easier to do bad things in a place where bad things are supposed to happen? All these people died here, and there’s a reason. Maybe even the same reason. Maybe there’s a line right from 1936 until now.”

She opened up her dresser drawer and pulled out the battered tea tin she’d found in Ellie’s room, the tin that had broken the Truly Devious case open for her. She opened it carefully and pulled out the contents, setting them on her dresser next to her brush and her deodorant.

“A bit of a white feather,” she said, holding it up. “A lipstick tube. A shiny clip. This little enamel box that looks like a shoe. A piece of torn cloth. Photos. And a poem. Someone collected these things back in 1936 and hid them. It’s junk. But that’s what clues are. Clues are junk. They’re things that fly off the car when it gets into an accident. Murder is messy, and you have to use garbage to figure out what’s going on. Somehow this shit takes us all the way to now, and these accidents with carbon dioxide and fire and people getting trapped. This school isn’t cursed. There’s no such thing. Unless money is a curse.”

“It kind of is,” Nate said. “Not that I have any. Well, I have some. From the book. Actually, I do. I don’t know what to do with it. I have to pay tax.”

“Money,” Stevie said. “The kidnappings were for money. If Fenton was right, if there’s something out there in a will that says someone gets a fortune if they find Alice dead or alive . . .”

“But didn’t Charles tell you that didn’t exist?”

Stevie stared at the items on her dresser. The beads glistened. She rolled the lipstick under her finger, back and forth.

“There’s something big that sticks all this stuff together,” she said. “I don’t know how to find it. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to investigate a case. I mean, I’ve read about it, but I don’t have a forensics lab. I don’t have access to police databases or the ability to question people. I can look at stuff in the past, but I’m not sure how to do this in the now. This is real. It’s ongoing.”

“Tell someone,” Nate said.

“Tell them I think a bad big murderer is sneaking around and show them all my Post-its?”

“I guess?”

There was a knock, and the door creaked open a bit. Hunter’s tawny blond head stuck in, and he bit his lip nervously.

“Can I come in?” he asked. “I feel weird because Janelle is really upset, and I don’t want her to think I’m ignoring her or staring at her . . .”

“Sure, sure . . .” Stevie stepped in front of her sticky notes and tried to do a casual lean. Hunter had seen the tin before, so that was no problem—but the conspiracy wall of death was something he might not be prepared for.