“It’s the truth.”

“You need to promise something to me right now—if he gets in touch, you tell me. I’m not saying he had anything to do with the fire—I’m saying he could be a danger to himself.”

“Yeah,” Stevie said. “I promise.”

The room was starting to throb a bit, the edges of things jumping out in her vision. There was a panic attack just under the surface, and it would arrive quickly. She surreptitiously reached into her bag, grabbing at her key ring. She kept a little screw-top vial on it. She got this off with a shaking hand and poured the contents into her palm under the table. One emergency Ativan, always there if needed. Breathe, Stevie. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.

“I need to get back,” she said, getting up.

“Stevie,” Larry said. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

He didn’t need to say what it was she needed to be careful about. It was everything and nothing. It was the specter in the woods. It was the creak of the floors. It was whatever was underneath all these accidents.

“I’ll keep in touch,” she said. “I’ll tell you if I hear from him. I promise. I just have to use the bathroom.”

She grabbed the bag and stumbled back toward the restrooms. Once inside, she popped the pill into her mouth and stuck her face under the faucet for a swig of water. She stood up, wiped the dripping water from her mouth, and looked at her pale face. The room throbbed. The pill wouldn’t work immediately, but it would work soon.

She left the bathroom but waited in the hallway for Larry to leave. As she waited, her eyes ran across the community bulletin board, with its cards for yoga instructors, massage therapists, music lessons, pottery classes. She was about to turn and leave when something about the blue flyer at the bottom right caught her eye. She stopped and read it more carefully: BURLINGTON CABARET VON DADA DADA DADA DADA

Come see nothing. Have a noise. Dancing is mandatory and forbidden. Everything is yum.

Burlington Art Collective Action House

Every Saturday night, 9:00 p.m.

You are the ticket

There was a picture of a person painted gold and blue playing a violin with a carving knife, another person with cardboard boxes on their feet and fists, and, in the background, holding a saxophone . . .

Was Ellie.

April 4, 1936

ELLINGHAM ACADEMY WAS RICH IN DYNAMITE.

There were boxes of it piled high, beautiful, dull beige sticks with warnings on the side. Dynamite to blast rocks and flatten mountain surfaces. Dynamite for tunnels. Dynamite ruled her heart. Not Eddie. Dynamite.

When she’d first arrived, Albert Ellingham teased her with a stick and then laughed at her interest. After that, Francis kept watch. There was less of it now that most of the campus was built, but every once in a while she would hear a workman say the word, and then she would trail along behind him. It was during one of these walks that she heard someone inquire about what to do with some bits of wood.

“Throw them down the hole,” his coworker replied.

She watched as the man went over to a statue. A moment later, he sat on the ground and was lowering himself into an opening.

Francis immediately investigated when the coast was clear. It took her some time to work out where the man had gone. Just under the statue, there was a bit of rock. This, she was sure, was a hatch in disguise. It took her some time to work out how it opened—Albert Ellingham liked his games and architectural jokes. She found it and the rock dropped, revealing an opening and a wooden ladder to aid her descent.

The space she entered had the look of an unfinished project—much like the time Francis’s mother decided she wanted a music room before she remembered that she neither played nor particularly liked music. The half-finished idea, the first blows of the chisel before the sculptor decided that the subject and the stone were not to their liking . . . rich people did this. They left things unmade.

This project was grander in scale than her mother’s music room. The first part of the space was hollowed out and walled up in rough rock to look like a cave. This space narrowed at the end and turned. There was a rough doorway made of rock. Once she passed through this, she found herself in an underground wonderland—a grotto. There was a vast ditch dug out, about six feet deep. Inside of this there were bags of concrete and piles of brick waiting to be used. Along the back wall was a fresco, that Eddie would later identify as being a painting of the Valkyrie. In the far corner, there was a boat in the shape of a swan, painted in gold and red and green, which was tipped over on its side. Half-constructed stalagmites and stalactites lined the area, so it looked like a mouth full of broken teeth. There was garbage strewn about the place—beer bottles, broken shovels, cigarette packs.

For months, the rock had been frozen over, but now the ground was yielding and Francis could introduce Eddie to the lair. They slipped into the grotto several times a week to go about their secret activities. There were the physical ones, of course; the grotto’s privacy was also very useful when working on their plan.

On the day they decided to leave Ellingham for good, it would be Eddie’s job to get the guns. Shotguns were easy to get—there were loads of them stored around the school. Francis would see to the dynamite. They would steal a car from the garage behind the Great House to make their initial escape, but they would quickly get a new one in Burlington. They got maps and spread them out on the ground of the grotto, plotting their route out of Vermont. They would go south through New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky . . . cut through coal country. Start with small towns. Get in at night—blow the safe. No bloodshed if they could avoid it. Keep going until they got to California, and then . . .

. . . jump off, maybe. Even Bonnie and Clyde hit the end of the road down there in Louisiana, when the cops ambushed and filled their Ford Deluxe with bullets until it was more hole than car. Bonnie and Clyde got it. They were poets, Eddie said, and they wrote with bullets.

All of this planning went into Francis’s diary: possible routes, homemade explosives, tricks she learned from reading true-crime magazines.

On this April afternoon, Francis and Eddie had come down into their secret place once more. Eddie set up a ring of candles on the ground and drew a pentagram in the dirt. He was always doing things like that—playing at paganism. This affectation annoyed Francis; this was a hideout, not some kind of subterranean temple. But Eddie had to have his fun if she wanted to have hers, so she tolerated it.

“Today,” she said, setting down a bag of supplies, “we play.”

“Oh. I like that.” Eddie rolled himself flat on the ground in the circle and pulled up his shirt a bit. “What game did you have in mind?”

“Today we’re playing Let’s Scare Albert Ellingham.”

“Oh?” Eddie pushed up to his elbows. “Not what I was expecting, but I’m listening.”

“He was rude to me,” Francis said. “When he showed me the dynamite. He laughed at me, as if I couldn’t handle explosives because I’m a girl. So we’re going to have a little fun with him. We’ll make him a riddle. He likes riddles. Only one like this.”

Francis reached into the bag and produced a pile of magazines. She pulled one off the top called Real Detective Stories and opened to a page with a folded corner with a picture of a ransom note made of cutout letters. Eddie rolled onto his stomach to examine the magazine.

“A poem,” he said.

“A warning in the form of a poem.”

“All good poems are warnings,” he said. (Francis resisted an eyeroll.) “We could start it, Riddle, riddle, time for fun . . .”

Francis got out her notebook and wrote this down. Riddle, riddle, time for fun. A perfect start. Eddie was good at this sort of thing.

“Then we could do something like Dorothy Parker’s poem ‘Resumé,’” Eddie went on. “It’s a list of ways to die. We could do ways to kill.”

“Shall we use a rope or gun?” Francis offered.

Lines were added . . . Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty . . . Poison’s slow, which is a pity . . . Ropes, car crashes, broken heads . . . The signature: Truly, Devious, that was both of them.