All of that would have been plenty to deal with. But the crowning item, the one that spun through her mind like a mobile, was . . .

“Don’t you think we should talk?” Nate said. “About what’s going on? About what happens now?”

It was quite a loaded question. What happens now?

“Walk with me,” she said.

She turned and headed away from the classroom buildings, away from people, away from cameras posted on poles and trees. This was to keep their conversation private and also so no one could see the devastation she was going to wreak on this doughnut. She was hungry.

“Ish olfed decaf,” she said, shoving a bite of doughnut in her mouth.

“You want decaf?”

She took a moment to swallow.

“I solved it,” she said. “The Ellingham case.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s what we need to talk about. That and the fire and everything else. Jesus, Stevie.”

“It makes sense,” she said, walking slowly. “George Marsh, the man from the FBI, the one who protected the Ellinghams . . . someone who knew the house layout, the schedules, when the money came in, the family habits . . . someone who easily could have set up a kidnapping. So, here’s what happens . . .”

She got Nate loosely by the arm and changed direction, turning them back toward the Great House. The Great House was the crowning jewel of the campus. In the 1930s, it was the Ellingham home. Today, it was the center of the school administration and a space for dances and events. Around the back, there was a walled garden. Stevie walked on autopilot to a familiar door in the wall and opened it. This was the sunken garden, so called because it was once an artificial lake and Iris Ellingham’s massive swimming pool. Albert Ellingham had drained it following the disappearance of his daughter, on the word of someone who thought her body was at the bottom. It wasn’t, but the lake was never filled again. So it remained, a great big grassy hole in the ground. And in the middle, on a strange little hill that had once been an island in the lake, was a geodesic glass dome. This dome was where Dottie Epstein had met her fate and where, under it, Hayes Major met his end.

“So,” Stevie said, pointing, “Dottie Epstein is sitting in that dome, reading her Sherlock Holmes, minding her own business. All of a sudden, a guy appears. George Marsh. Neither one of them expecting the other. And out of all the students from Ellingham George Marsh could have run into, he runs into the most brilliant one, and the one whose uncle is in the NYPD. Dottie knows who Marsh is. The whole plan is ruined, instantly, because George Marsh met Dottie in that dome. Dottie knows something bad is about to happen, so she makes a mark in her Sherlock Holmes, she does the best she can to say who she’s looking at, and then, she dies. But Dottie fingers the guy. Flash forward . . .”

Stevie turned in the direction of the house, toward the flagstone patio and French doors outside the room that had been Albert Ellingham’s office.

“Albert Ellingham spends the next two years trying to find his daughter, when something . . . something jogs his memory. He thinks about Dottie Epstein and the mark in the book. He gets out the wire recording he made of her—we know he did this, it was on his desk the day he died—and he listens. He realizes that Dottie could have recognized George Marsh. He wonders . . .”

Stevie could practically see Albert Ellingham pacing the office, walking across the trophy rugs, from leather chair to desk, staring at the green marble clock on the mantel, trying to figure out if what he had worked out in his mind was true.

“He writes a riddle, maybe to test himself, to see if he really believed it. Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair. He’s saying, take the word stair out of staircase. Who’s always on a case? A detective. Who’s never really there? The person you hired to investigate, the one who was by your side. The one you didn’t even think of or notice . . .”

“Stevie . . .”

“And then, that afternoon, he goes out sailing with George Marsh and the boat explodes. People always thought anarchists did it, because anarchists tried to kill him before, and everyone thought an anarchist kidnapped his daughter. But it can’t be that. One of them caused that boat to explode. Either George Marsh knew it was all over and took them both out, or Albert Ellingham confronted him and did the same. But it ended there. And I know whoever kidnapped Alice isn’t Truly Devious, because I know that note was written by some students here, probably as a joke. This whole thing was just a bunch of stuff that got out of hand. The note was a joke, then the kidnapping went wrong, and all those people died . . .”

“Stevie,” Nate said, snapping his friend back to the present, to the cold and marshy grass they stood on.

“Fenton,” Stevie replied. “She believed there was a codicil in Albert Ellingham’s will, something that said that whoever found Alice got a fortune. It’s some real tinfoil-hat, grassy-knoll stuff, but she believed it. She said she had proof. I didn’t see it, but she said she had it. She was really paranoid—she only kept paper records. She kept notepads in old pizza boxes. She had a conspiracy wall. She said she was putting something huge together. I called to tell her what I had figured out, and she said she couldn’t talk and something about ‘the kid is there.’ And then, her house burned down.”

Nate rubbed his head wearily.

“Is there any chance that was an accident?” he said. “Please tell me there is.”

“What do you think?” she asked quietly.

“What do I think?” Nate replied, sitting on one of the stone benches on the edge of the sunken garden.

Stevie sat next to him, the cold of the stone seeping through her clothes.

“I think I don’t know what to think. I don’t believe in conspiracies, usually, because people are generally too uncoordinated to pull off huge, complicated plots. But I also think that if a bunch of weird stuff happens in one place at one time, maybe those things might be connected. So Hayes died while you were making that video about the Ellingham case. And then Ellie died after she ran away after you figured out that she wrote Hayes’s show. And now your adviser is dead—the one you were helping to research the Ellingham stuff—and she died just as you said you figured out who committed the crime of the century. These are all some terrible accidents, or they’re not, but I am out of ideas and need to conserve my energy so I can freak out more effectively. Does that help?”

“No,” Stevie said, looking up at the gray-pink sky.

“What if—hear me out—what if you told the authorities everything you know right now and let all of this go?”

“But I don’t know anything,” she said. “That’s the problem. I need to know more. What if this is all connected? It has to be, right? Iris and Dottie and Alice, Hayes and Ellie and Fenton.”

“Does it?”

“I have to think,” she said, running her hand through her short blond hair. It was standing straight up now. Stevie had not gone to get her hair cut since she had arrived at Ellingham in early September. She had cut it a bit, once, in the bathroom at two in the morning, but lost her vision halfway through. What she had now was an overgrown crop that hung over one eye more than the other and often went right toward the sky like the quiff of an alert cockatoo. She had bitten her nails down to the quick, and even though the school had a laundry service, she wore the same unwashed hoodie almost every day. She was losing track of her physical body.

“So what is your plan, then? You just walk around all the time, not eating or talking to anyone?”

“No,” she said. “I have to do something. I need more information.”

“Okay,” Nate said, defeated. “Where can you get information that isn’t dangerous or misguided?”

Stevie chewed a cuticle thoughtfully. It was a good question.

“Back in the present,” Nate said, “Janelle is showing us a test run of her machine tonight. She’s worried that you’re not going.”

Of course. As Stevie went down these little lanes in her mind, life was going on. Janelle Franklin, her closest friend here and next-door neighbor, had spent all her time at the school building a machine for the Sendel Waxman competition. It was now complete, and she wanted to show her closest friends the test run. Stevie could remember that much through the haze in her mind—tonight, eight o’clock. Look at machine.

“Right,” she said. “I’m going. Of course. I’m going. I need to think some more now.”

“Maybe you need to go home and take a nap, or shower or something? Because I don’t think you’re okay.”

“That’s it,” she said, snapping up her head. “I’m not okay.”

“Wait, what?”

“I need help,” she said with a smile. “I need to go talk to someone who loves to be challenged.”

February 1936