Since his wife and daughter’s kidnapping, since the murder of Dolores Epstein, all during the trial of Anton Vorachek—Albert Ellingham kept the search going. Vorachek’s murder on the courtroom steps didn’t slow Albert Ellingham down, even if it appeared that the one person who may have known Alice’s whereabouts was dead and gone. Someone knew something. No expense was ever spared. He appeared on every radio show. He spoke to every politician. Albert Ellingham would go anywhere and meet anyone who might know where his daughter could be found.

But on November 1, 1938, the police and the FBI were dragging Lake Champlain, looking for Albert Ellingham and George Marsh. The pair had gone out for an afternoon sail on Albert’s boat, Wonderland. Just before sunset, a massive explosion ripped through the peaceful Vermont evening. Local fishermen scrambled into their boats to get to the spot. When they arrived, they found fragments of the doomed vessel—pieces of charred wood, singed cushions that had been blown into the air, small brass fittings, bits of rope. They also found something much more disturbing: human remains, in the same state as the boat itself. Neither Albert Ellingham’s nor George Marsh’s body would be recovered in their entirety; enough pieces were found to establish that both men had died.

There was an immediate investigation. Everyone had a theory about the death of one of America’s richest and greatest men, but in the end, no case could ever be made. That Albert Ellingham had been killed by a group of anarchists seemed the most likely answer; indeed, three separate groups claimed responsibility. With the death of Albert Ellingham, Alice’s case began to go cold. There was no father’s voice saying her name, no tycoon handing out cash and making calls. A year later, the war started in Europe, and the sad saga of the family on the mountain paled in the face of a much greater tragedy.

Over the years, dozens of women would come forward claiming to be Alice Ellingham. Some could be dismissed right from the start—they were the wrong age, had the wrong physical attributes. Those who passed the basic tests would be seen by Robert Mackenzie, Albert’s personal secretary. Mackenzie conducted a thorough investigation into each claim. All were proven to be false.

Passing years have revived interest in the case—not just about Alice but also about the kidnapping and what happened on that terrible day on Lake Champlain. With advances in DNA analysis and modern investigative techniques, the answers may still be within our grasp.

Alice Ellingham may yet be found.

LOCAL PROFESSOR DIES IN TRAGIC HOUSE FIRE

Burlington News Online November 4

Local professor Dr. Irene Fenton from the University of Vermont’s history department died in a house fire yesterday evening. Dr. Fenton, who lived on Pearl Street, was a twenty-two-year member of the faculty and the author of several books, including Truly Devious: The Ellingham Murders. The blaze began around 9 p.m. and was believed to have originated in the kitchen.

Dr. Fenton’s nephew, who lived with her, sustained minor injuries in the blaze. . . .

1

THE BONES WERE ON THE TABLE, NAKED AND CHALKY. THE EYE SOCKETS hollow, the mouth in a loose grimace, as if to say, “Yep, it’s me. Bet you’re wondering how I ended up here. It’s a funny story, actually. . . .”

“As you’ll see, Mr. Nelson is missing the first metacarpal on the right hand, which has been replaced with a model. In life, of course, he had—”

“Question,” Mudge said, raising his hand partway. “How did this dude get to be a skeleton? I mean, here? Did he know he’d end up in a classroom?”

Pix, Dr. Nell Pixwell, teacher of anatomy, forensic anthropologist, and housemistress of Minerva House, paused. Her hand and Mr. Nelson’s were lightly intertwined, as if they were considering the delicate proposition of dancing together at the ball.

“Well,” she said, “Mr. Nelson was donated to Ellingham when it opened. I believe he came via a friend of Albert Ellingham’s who was connected to Harvard. There are a number of ways that bodies come to be used for demonstration purposes. People donate their bodies to science, of course. That may have been what happened, but I suspect it’s not the case here. Based on some of the materials and techniques used to articulate him, I think Mr. Nelson is probably from the mid-to late 1800s. Back then, things were a bit looser in terms of getting bodies for science. Prisoners’ bodies were routinely used. Mr. Nelson here was likely well nourished. He was tall. He had all his teeth, which was exceptional for the time. He had no broken bones. My guess—and it’s only a guess—”

“You mean grave robbing?” Mudge asked with interest. “He was stolen?”

Mudge was Stevie Bell’s lab partner—a six-foot-something death-metalhead who wore purple-colored contacts with snake pupils and a black hoodie weighed down with fifty Disney pins, including some very rare ones that he would show off and explain to Stevie as they dissected cows’ eyes and other terrible things for the purposes of education. Mudge loved Disney more than anyone Stevie had ever met and had dreams of being an animatronics Imagineer. Ellingham Academy was the kind of place where Mudges were welcomed and understood.

“It was common,” Pix said. “Medical students needed cadavers. People called resurrection men—get it, rise from the dead?—used to steal bodies to sell to student doctors. If he was an old Harvard model skeleton, yes, I think it’s likely that he was a victim of grave robbing. This reminds me, I need to send him out to get him rearticulated. I need to get a new metacarpal, and the wire needs repairing here, between the hamate, the triquetral, and the capitate bones. It’s tough being a skeleton.”

She smiled for a moment but then twitched it away and rubbed her peach-fuzz head.

“So much for metacarpals,” she said again. “Let’s talk about the other bones in the hand and the arm. . . .”

Stevie knew exactly why Pix had stopped herself. Ellingham Academy was no longer the kind of place where you could make casual jokes about being a skeleton.

As Stevie stepped outside, the cold air slapped her in the face. The magnificent cloak of reds and golds that hung from the Vermont woodland had dropped suddenly, like a massive act of arboreal striptease.

Striptease. Strip trees. Striptrees? God, she was tired.

Nate Fisher was waiting for Stevie outside the classroom building. He sat on one of the benches, with slumped shoulders, staring at his phone. Now that the weather had turned more chill, he could cheerfully—or what passed as cheerfully in Nate-adjusted terms—pile on oversized sweaters and baggy cords and scarves until he was a moving pile of natural and synthetic fibers.

“Where have you been?” he asked as a greeting.

He put a cup of coffee in her hand, as well as a maple doughnut. Stevie assumed it was maple. Things in Vermont often were. She took a long drink of the coffee and a bite of the doughnut before replying.

“I needed to think,” she said. “I walked around before class.”

“Those are the same clothes you had on yesterday.”

Stevie looked down at herself in confusion, at her baggy sweatpants and black Converse sneakers. She was wearing a stretched-out sweater and her thin red vinyl coat.

“Slept in these,” she said as a small rain of crumbs fell from the doughnut.

“You haven’t eaten a meal with us in two days. I can never find you.”

This was true. She had not gone to the dining hall for a proper meal in two days, and instead subsisted on handfuls of dry cereal from the kitchen dispensers, usually eaten in the middle of the night. She would stand at the counter in the dark, her hand under the little cereal chute, pulling the lever to get another Froot Loops fix. She had a vague memory of acquiring and consuming a banana yesterday while sitting on the floor of the library, way up in the stacks. She had avoided people, avoided conversations, avoided messages to live entirely in her own thoughts, because they were many and they needed ordering.

Three major events had occurred to bring on this monastic, peripatetic activity.

One, David Eastman, perhaps boyfriend, had gotten his face punched in in Burlington. He had done this on purpose and paid the assailant. He uploaded video of the beatdown to the internet and vanished without a trace. David was the son of Senator Edward King. Senator King had helped Stevie return to school, with the proviso that she would help keep David under control.

Well, that had failed.

That alone would have occupied her mind entirely, except that on the same night, Stevie’s adviser, Dr. Irene Fenton, had died in a house fire. Stevie had not been close to Dr. Fenton, or Fenton, as she preferred to be called. There was one upside to this horrific event—the fire was in Burlington. Burlington wasn’t here, at Ellingham, and Fenton was identified as a professor at the University of Vermont. This meant that the death wasn’t attributed to Ellingham. The school probably couldn’t survive if there was another death. In a world where everything went wrong all the time always, having your adviser die in a fire off campus was one of the few “but on the bright side . . .” elements of her confusing new life. It was a terrible and selfish way of thinking about things, but at this point, Stevie had to be practical. If you wanted to solve crime, you needed to detach.