Hunter looked up.

“All three of them died in ways that were different but shared a similar aspect—their deaths seemed to be accidents where they were trapped. Hayes was trapped in a room. Ellie in a tunnel. Dr. Fenton in a house on fire. It wasn’t personal or passionate. It was clinical. It could all be explained away. Somehow, Hayes, Ellie, and Dr. Fenton were all connected to getting the money. Nothing made sense until I put three things together—Janelle’s pass, the message on my wall, and what Dr. Fenton said on the phone. I’ll start with that last one. The night she died, Dr. Fenton was being strange when I called her. She said she couldn’t talk right then, and then she said, ‘The kid is there.’ What if she meant Alice? That Alice was here at Ellingham. If that’s true, everything starts to make sense. I had to go backward to make it all work out. Your aunt . . .”

She turned to Hunter. “She had a drinking problem,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She had no sense of smell.”

“Yes?” Hunter replied.

“She had vulnerabilities, but how much would you say she cared about the Ellingham case, deep down, really?”

“It was everything to her,” Hunter replied. “Everything.”

“Everything,” Stevie repeated. “On the night of her death, she stood up for the case. She stood up for Alice. And that’s why she died. Because she stopped going along with the plan. She knew that the money was real, and she knew where Alice was. That last bit, she’d just found out . . .”

The scene was incredibly clear in Stevie’s head—Fenton at her table, listening, deciding, picking up her cigarettes . . .

“It all started with the art barn construction,” Stevie said. “The money was coming in, and the building was being expanded. So they had to excavate the tunnel. The crew found Alice, but they didn’t know it. They found a trunk. The person who opened that trunk had a problem. They had opened something that they knew was worth about seventy million dollars. Seventy million, sitting there, free to take. Except he couldn’t have it.”

She turned and looked at Call Me Charles.

24

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THE BIG FOAM FINGER OF JUSTICE POINTS itself at you?

In books, the accused laughs, or mutters angrily, or knocks over their chair and starts running. That’s what Ellie had done, even though she was innocent. Charles regarded Stevie with the same expression one might have upon finding a particularly bright and beautiful butterfly sitting on the tip of their nose. He almost looked delighted by this turn of events, which was weird. It made Stevie rock back on her heels anxiously.

“I saw the trunk,” Stevie said to him. “You made a point of showing it to me when you took me up to the attic. You had filled it with old newspapers.”

“I did show you a trunk of old newspapers,” Charles said, smiling and nodding. “Yes.”

Stevie walked to the window and looked out at the sunken garden, white with snow. Don’t panic. Keep going.

“The workers pulled the trunk out of the ground and brought it to you,” Stevie said, touching a finger to the frosted glass. “They probably found all kinds of things in there—junk the workmen threw in as they went. You opened it up, expecting nothing, and instead, you found a body. It was old, in bad condition. You knew it could only be one person—Alice Ellingham.”

“It was a trunk full of newspapers,” Charles said, “but all right.”

“Maybe, before, you never thought much about the Ellingham case,” she said. “Maybe you were thinking of the school at first. The school was about to get all that money. If the workmen found the body, they’d get it, and the school couldn’t expand. So maybe at first you just wanted to tuck the body somewhere, bury it, let the matter go away. You take the body out of the trunk and you fill the trunk with some old newspapers. From there, you had to put the body aside until you could work out what to do next. But . . .”

Stevie began to move around the room, carefully avoiding stepping on the heads of the trophy rugs.

“ . . . it’s so much money. I mean, what would anyone do if they were handed a chance to get seventy million dollars? The codicil was clear—you couldn’t collect. But what if you had a partner, someone who could locate the body and technically get the money? You could arrange to split it. You needed someone who could plausibly find something buried on the grounds, someone you could manipulate. And you found her. Dr. Irene Fenton, someone obsessed with the Ellingham case. Someone with a drinking problem. You’d arrange it so that she would find the body. She’d collect the money and you’d divide it up. Hunter, you said your aunt was talking to someone up at Ellingham, but you didn’t know who.”

“She was,” Hunter said. “She wouldn’t talk about it.”

“We’ll get into Fenton later. First, there’s Hayes.”

Stevie stopped by the mantel and looked into the face of the clock.

“Hayes was mad,” Stevie said. “He was complaining all the time about not being able to go to California, about how you wouldn’t let him come and go and get credit for it. All of a sudden, Hayes was all smiles. You said that Hayes could have a flexible schedule and go to California if he completed a project about the Ellingham kidnapping. What made you change your mind?”

“The fact that he was driving me nuts,” Charles said. “He kept coming to my office to complain.”

Stevie turned around to face him.

“Which means he must have seen or heard something he shouldn’t have. Whatever happened, you worked out a deal with him—he could do a project and then he could go to Hollywood. But that wasn’t enough. Did he threaten you? Did he look into things more? Something happened, because you decided that Hayes had to die. So you gave him access to the tunnel.”

“Something I’ll never forgive myself for.”

“So here’s how it worked,” Stevie said. “The day before Hayes’s death, you took the first necessary step. You knew Janelle’s pass opened the maintenance building. When we were in yoga, you came into the art barn and slipped it out of her bag. No one would pay any attention to you walking around the art barn. No one was going to think you were going to take a pass. You made sure that at some point that day, Hayes touched the pass. Maybe called him to your office, handed him something, whatever. You had to make sure his fingerprints were on it. That night, you used the pass to access the dry ice and you put it in the room at the end of the tunnel and shut the door. The dry ice sublimated that night, filling the room with enough carbon dioxide to cause anyone to drop within a minute. The trap was set and locked. You just needed the bait.”

Again, Stevie’s mind traveled to the moment that night, when everyone making the video was walking to dinner, and Hayes turned back toward the sunken garden alone.

“After we had completed filming up in the garden that day,” Stevie said, “Hayes said he had to do something. He wouldn’t say what. What he had to do was meet with you. He went into the tunnel and he didn’t come out. You made it look like Hayes died as a result of his own stupidity. Everyone assumed it was an accident, except me. But you had thought about that too.”

“Thank you for thinking I did all of this well. If you’re going to be in a murder mystery, you don’t want to be a dud.”

For the first time, his smile had a brittle, forced quality.

“You—correctly—assumed I would take an interest. I mean, it only makes sense. I was the detective. I’m interested in crime. So you made your first big mistake. The night before all of this happened, you snuck outside my window and projected an image on my wall, a version of the Truly Devious letter. When the police came, if I started rambling about messages on my wall, I’d seem like someone who was making things up for attention, like I was a little crazy. The Hayes matter was settled, and you could move on and take care of finding the body. But then, there was another problem, on the night of the Silent Party, the night I confronted Ellie about The End of It All. That night we all came here to this room. Ellie sat right there . . .”

She pointed at the low leather chair that Hunter was currently occupying.

“Did you have any idea that Hayes hadn’t written the show by himself?” she asked Charles. “Were you shocked when Ellie starting crying and saying things like . . .”

She couldn’t remember the exact words for a second.