“Go? I should go up there?”

He nodded again and pointed toward a small spiral staircase in the back of the room, then he walked over to one of the walls and went into a headstand. As Stevie climbed the stairs, she noticed there were paper tags hanging from the tree branches with words on them, things like, “Think the sky,” and “This isn’t the time; this is the time.” Upstairs, sitting on a pile of cushions, was a girl. For one moment, Stevie almost mistook her for Ellie. Her hair was in small, matted bunches. She wore a stretched-out T-shirt that read Withnail and I and a faded pair of Mickey Mouse leggings. At Stevie’s approach, she looked up from her laptop and pushed her headphones off her ears.

“Hey,” Stevie said. “Sorry.”

“Never say sorry as a greeting,” the girl replied.

This was a good point.

“The guy downstairs let me in. He said to come up. Or, he pointed . . .”

“Paul’s in a silent phase,” the girl said, as if this explained everything.

“Oh. I’m Stevie. I am . . . was . . . a friend of Ellie’s. . . .”

Stevie barely had the words out when the girl sprang from the floor and wrapped her in an embrace. The girl smelled of a sweet mix of body odor and incense. Her body was taut from what was probably daily, intensive yoga. It was like being wrapped in a warm, stinky garden hose.

“You came to us! You came! She’d be so happy! You came!”

Stevie had not known what kind of reception she would get in the Art Collective, but this was not on the list of possibles.

“I’m Bath,” the girl said, stepping back.

“Bath?”

“Bathsheba. Everyone calls me Bath. Sit. Sit!”

This was weird, because when Stevie first met Ellie, Ellie got into the bath with all her clothes on to dye her outfit pink, probably for this very cabaret. The word bath would always remind Stevie of Ellie.

Bath pointed at another pile of cushions on the floor. They looked faded and stained and vaguely bedbuggy, but Stevie sat down anyway. Once on the floor she noticed that almost one entire wall of the upstairs was lined with empty French wine bottles with melted candles in them.

“From Ellie,” Bathsheba said, sitting cross-legged on the bare floor. “Of course. French wine. French poetry. German theater. That was my girl.”

With these words, Bath broke into tears. Stevie shifted on the cushions and fussed with the bag for a moment.

“I’m glad you came,” Bath said as she sniffed and calmed down. “She liked you. She told me all about you. You’re the detective.”

This made something catch in Stevie’s throat. Right from the start, Ellie had taken Stevie seriously when she said she was a detective. Ellie seemed to have so much confidence in Stevie that Stevie had more confidence in herself. Ellie had taken her in, made friends with her from the start, much like Bathsheba was doing now. Now that Stevie was looking at Bathsheba, it occurred to her that Ellie may have copied her look a bit, as well as some of her behaviors.

“How did Ellie end up here?” Stevie asked. “This is part of the university, right?”

“Not part of,” Bath said. “Most of us who live here go there. The house is owned by a patron who wants to support local arts. It’s an open place for artists. Ellie found us the week after she got to Ellingham. She showed up at the door and said, ‘I make art. Are you going to let me in?’ And we did, of course.”

“I’m here because I’m trying to figure out . . .” Such a rookie mistake. Always have your questions ready. Then again, as a detective, you might not always know who you were going to end up talking to. So talk, she thought. Get talking and the rest will come. “. . . about Ellie. About what she was like, and . . .”

“She was real,” Bath said. “She was Dada. She was spontaneous. She was fun.”

“Did Ellie talk to you about Hayes?” Stevie asked.

“No,” Bath said, rubbing her eyes. “Hayes is the guy who died, right? That was his name?”

Stevie nodded.

“No. She said she knew him, but that was it. And that she was sad.”

“Did she ever mention helping him make a show?”

“She helped make a show? Like a cabaret piece? Hey, did you ever see our cabaret?”

“No, I—”

Bath was already on her laptop and pulling up a video.

“You need to see this,” she said. “You’ll love it. It’s one of Ellie’s best performances.”

Stevie dutifully watched ten minutes of dark, confusing footage of tuneless saxophone, poetry, handstands, and drumming. Ellie was in there, but it was too dark to really see her.

“So yeah,” Bath said as the video ended. “Ellie. I haven’t been able to do much since she died. I try to work, but I mostly stay in a lot. I know she would want me to make art about it. I’ve tried. I’m trying. I don’t want to let her down.”

Me either, Stevie thought.

“When I think of her . . . ,” Bath went on, “how she died. I can’t.”

Neither could Stevie. The idea of being trapped in the dark, underground, with no one able to hear you—it was too horrible. Her panic must have risen as she felt her way down that pitch-black tunnel and realized there was no way out. At some point, she would have known she was going to die. Stevie was thankful for the Avitan gliding through her bloodstream, holding down the pulsing nausea and air hunger she felt whenever she conjured this image in her mind.

Ellie’s death was not her fault. It really wasn’t. Right? Stevie had no idea there was a passage in the wall or a tunnel in the basement. Stevie certainly hadn’t sealed the tunnel. All Stevie did was lay out the facts of the matter in Hayes’s death, and she’d done so in public, in a place that seemed perfectly safe.

Bath had reached over and taken Stevie’s hand. The gesture caught Stevie off guard, and she almost recoiled.

“It’s good to remember her,” Bath said.

“Yeah,” Stevie replied, her voice hoarse.

She looked around the room for a new point of focus. What did she see? What information was there? Splattered paint, Christmas lights, a guitar, glitter, some laundry in the corner, canvases stacked against the wall, a load of wine bottles . . .

They had done some partying here. And so had David. That’s right. He’d told Stevie that he used to come to visit Ellie’s art friends in Burlington. These were those friends. So maybe these people knew something about where he was? Stevie latched on to this.

“I think another friend of ours came here? David?”

“Not recently,” Bath said. “He used to come with Ellie.”

“But not recently?”

“No,” Bath said. “Not since last year.”

So, no leads on Hayes, and no sightings of David. All she had really accomplished was making this girl cry and making herself late.

“Thanks for your time,” Stevie said, getting up and shaking out a sleeping leg. “I’m really glad I got to meet you.”

“You too,” Bath said. “Come back anytime, maybe for cabaret? Or whenever you want. You’re welcome.”

Stevie nodded her thanks and gathered up her things.

“I’m sorry for all you went through,” Bath said as Stevie reached the stairs. “With all this bad stuff. And that thing on your wall.”

Stevie stopped and turned back toward Bath.

“My wall?” she repeated.

“Someone put a message on your wall?” Bath said. “That was horrible. Ellie was so pissed about that.”

Had Bath said, “By the way, I can turn into a butterfly at will, watch!” Stevie would hardly have been more surprised. The night before Hayes died, Stevie had been woken in the middle of the night to see something glowing on her wall—some kind of riddle, written in the style of the Truly Devious riddle. Stevie felt her body physically tremble, partially at the memory of the strange message that had appeared that night.

“That was a dream,” Stevie said, ignoring the fact that her phone was buzzing in her pocket.

“Ellie didn’t seem to think it was a dream.” Bath leaned back, and her tank top revealed a little casual and confident side boob and armpit hair. “She said she was pissed at the person who did it.”

“She knew who did it?”

“Yeah, she seemed to.”

“I thought . . .” Stevie’s mind was racing now. “I thought, if it happened at all, maybe she did it? As a joke?”

“Ellie?” Bath shook her head. “No. Definitely no. Absolutely no. Ellie’s art was participatory,” she said. “She never worked with fear. Her art was consent. Her art was welcoming. She wouldn’t put something up in your space, especially if she thought it would scare you or mock you. It wasn’t her.”

Stevie thought back to Ellie bleating away on Roota, her beloved saxophone. She would not have described the sound as welcoming, but it also wasn’t aggressive. It was raw and unschooled. Fun.

“No,” Stevie said. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”

“That thing about the wall is messed up,” Bath said. “It’s like Belshazzar’s feast.”

“What?”