“Good point.”

It took only a minute or two to dump out the contents of Stevie’s closet onto the bed. Her room was completely in shambles. Janelle climbed into the closet and began running the machine over the walls.

“Oh,” she said. “I think we have a bunch more dead mice in here.”

“Cool,” Stevie said. “That’s fun to know.”

“When you open the door to knowledge, you have to take what you get— Wait.”

Janelle was down low, running the machine along the seam of the wall and the floor.

“There’s something there,” she said. “Not metal. It’s sort of . . .”

Janelle set down the scanner and felt around the base of the wall, around the molding.

“There’s a lot of paint on this,” she said. “We’re going to need to get through it. Hang on.”

She went to her room and returned a moment later with her crafting tool belt. She started with a utility knife, working the edges. She moved from there to a screwdriver, working slowly and methodically to pry the board loose. Stevie heard a few promising pops and cracks. Out came a larger flathead screwdriver. More pushing and tapping and wedging, then . . .

Pop. The molding cracked as it came off.

“Whoops,” Janelle said. “Oh well. It’s in the closet. Who cares. I need a . . .”

She made a pinchy-pinchy motion with her fingers.

“A crab?” Stevie said.

Janelle looked up and around, then stood and grabbed two empty hangers from the closet bar.

“Get the flashlight and hold it in there,” she said.

Stevie snagged her flashlight and shone it into the space Janelle was working in. Janelle delicately pushed the ends of two of the hangers inside and pressed them together, creating a claw. It took her a few tries, but she eventually fished out a small, crumpled paper. She pulled on it. It was a degraded pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. The pack still contained several cigarettes, which looked extremely fragile.

“These look old,” Janelle said. “Someone was using this to hide their stuff.”

She picked up the scanner again and ran it back over the spot.

“There’s still something else,” she said. “Higher up. About eight inches high, maybe five across? Perfectly rectangular.”

“Like the size of a book?” Stevie said.

Janelle craned her arm up into the space as well, but soon pulled back and dusted herself off.

“I don’t think we’re going to get at it that way,” she said. “I think we’re going to have to go through.”

“Through?”

Janelle got up and returned a moment later with a mallet and a large, heavy knitting needle.

“What don’t you have in your room?” Stevie asked admiringly.

“A circular saw. And I tried. Turn up some music. This may be loud.”

Stevie went over to her computer and looked around for something that seemed like passable music, pushing the volume as high as her laptop could manage. It rattled through the bass speakers. Janelle shrugged, as if to say that the poor sound would have to do. She tested the wall again, tapping until she found the spot she wanted. Then she set the knitting needle against it and gave it a hard whack with the hammer. This made a small pockmark. She did it again, and again, until a small hole appeared. She worked around the small hole, creating a series of small holes until there was a small honeycombed pattern. From there, it took only a few taps with the mallet before the patch dented, and one more before a hole about six inches across opened up.

“Flashlight,” Janelle said. “The good one, not a phone.”

Stevie scrambled over to her set of drawers and retrieved the high-powered flashlight the school provided for emergencies. Janelle shone this into the wall, revealing a small cavern of dust and dark. She reached her hand inside. This time, it took very little effort.

“Got it,” she said to Stevie.

After a minute of maneuvering, plus a few more taps of the mallet, Janelle pulled a small red book out of the opening.

The wonderful thing about reality is that it is highly flexible. One minute, all is doom; the next, everything is abloom with possibility. The terrible feelings of the night before were replaced with a glow, a heartbeat that shook her arm and hand as she took up the book. It was bound in red leather, which had probably been bright originally and now was a bit blackened with grime, but not so much as to mar its appearance too badly. The corners of the book were rounded, and the word DIARY was written on the front in gold lettering. The paper edges were also gold in color. Seeing it come out of the wall filled her with a sensation she had no words for. It was a kind of wild, high focus, a feeling that time was collapsing and the past was popping out to say hello.

“Open it!” Janelle said. “Open it!”

The book made a gentle cracking sound as the brittle binding and leather gave way for the first time in decades. Directly inside were several black-and-white photos. It was instantly clear that these were part of the set she had found in the tin. Francis and Eddie. Eddie was stretched out on the grass, looking into the camera, a naughty smile on his lips. There was another of Francis in her Bonnie Parker outfit. There were other scenes as well. Whoever took the photos was making an attempt at art. There was a dramatic photo of the Great House, another of the fountain splashing, Leonard Holmes Nair painting on the lawn. The book was thick with clippings, with writing.

“Holy shit,” Stevie said.

“See?” Janelle said. “You come to me for results.”

There was a quick knock on the door, and Pix peeped in.

“Dinner!” she said.

February 25, 1937

THE DRIVE LASTED ALL NIGHT—A WINDING PATH THROUGH THE Adirondack Mountains, past lakes, down roads that were thin paths through ice and snow.

As George suspected, Jerry knew where to go, generally speaking. He knew the town—Saranac Lake—and had a rough set of directions beyond that. Jerry was not bright, but even he wouldn’t completely misplace the most valuable kidnapped person on the planet.

The car struggled, and had the weather been a bit less temperate, there was no way they would have made it. As dawn approached, they were on the outskirts of Saranac Lake, and he seemed surer that this was the right area. He guided George to a series of small roads outside town.

“Tell me about Iris,” George said.

Jerry was in a stupor from exhaustion and fear. He lifted his head and lolled it toward the window.

“Andy thought we were being suckered,” he said tiredly. “That’s how it started. He said you got a big head since you’d been living with Ellingham. He showed me all the papers, all the stories about Ellingham. He said that he was one of the richest guys in the world and that a couple of thousand was nothing. He said this was the big score. This one-and-done. It was coming to us on a plate. We would take the woman and use you to get us more money. But then, we stopped the car, and there was a kid in there. It all went wrong right at the start.”

“You could have left the kid on the road.”

“I said that! But Andy said we had to keep going—that it would be even better with the kid. And it was at first. The woman—she was quiet; she wanted to make sure the kid wasn’t hurt. Everyone was behaving real nice. I thought we would let them go after the score we got that night on Rock Point, but Andy thought we could get a million. A million bucks is nothing to a guy like Albert Ellingham. He said we should hold out a little longer. He found this place, some farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. He said they couldn’t look in every farmhouse in the country. I think you turn right up here.”

George turned the car, watching Jerry out of the corner of his eye.

“It was a few days in,” Jerry said. “We kept them comfortable. I’d talk to them. I even brought in a radio for them to listen to. We kept the woman tied up, but the kid, I would let her play sometimes when Andy was out. As long as”—he couldn’t seem to say the name Iris—“she could see the kid, she would stay still. She saw I was feeding her. I even brought her a doll. I kept telling her it was all going to be okay. She was quiet for a while. She and the kid would sleep together. It was all going to be all right. But then, that day . . .”

Jerry had to stop for a minute.