“No fires, Ellie,” Stevie said out loud.

“What?” David said from the window.

“The first thing I heard about Ellie on the first day, before you got here. You were late and we were having the orientation talk thing . . .”

Stevie scanned the room from her vantage point—a vista of dust bunnies.

“Pix said to her, ‘No fires, Ellie.’ Ellie must have caused a fire?”

“Oh, yeah. Last year. She knocked a candle over.”

“In here?”

“Yeah. In here.”

“And yet she can’t light a match,” Stevie said, mostly to herself. She pushed herself back up to her knees. Where do you look for Ellie, the smoker who can’t light a match? Albert Ellingham was trying to find people too—he was always looking for his lost daughter. All of this was about his lost daughter. And now there was another lost daughter on the mountain.

Against a box by the door, Stevie saw Roota, Ellie’s beloved saxophone. Ellie could not play the saxophone, but that never stopped her. She had purchased Roota with the money Hayes gave her to write The End of It All, and that money came from Hayes’s ex-girlfriend Gretchen. The day Stevie met Ellie, she was playing Roota in the tub at the end of the hall while dying her dress, and herself, pink. It was there that Stevie discovered the bits of metal under the tub, the ones that had marked Hayes’s computer when Ellie stashed it there.

So much of this came down to Roota.

Stevie went over and picked up the saxophone. That’s when she saw it—a scorch mark leading up to the wall. The mark had been scrubbed over, painted away. And, something else. Something wasn’t right in that little patch of the room.

“Don’t you think it’s weird about the matches?” Stevie said, getting down to look at the wall.

“That’s why I said it.”

“No,” Stevie said. “You said it to explain to me why you didn’t think she would do well alone in the woods. Don’t you think that’s odd? Ellie’s an artist. She’s good with her hands.”

It looked like something had fallen—there was one dark mark that stretched out. But the weird thing was that something about the wall was . . . uneven? She got right up to it and ran her hand along it to the molding between the wall and the floor. There was a gap. A tiny, tiny gap, a few millimeters.

“Pass me my bag,” she said to David.

He pushed her bag in her direction. She yanked it over and shuffled through it until she found a pen. She pulled off the cap and used it to pry into the space. David made his way over to her and perched next to her, sitting on his heels.

“Turn on your phone flashlight,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said impatiently. “Flashlight.”

He turned on the flashlight function. By now, Stevie had wiggled the board free. It gave rather easily. It had been pulled loose before, clearly. Behind it was a hole in the base of the wall, about the size of a fist.

David had no snark now. He silently handed her the flashlight. Before she took it, she reached into the front pocket of her bag and pulled out a pair of blue nitrile gloves and snapped them on.

“Really?” he said. “You carry crime-scene gloves?”

“You can get them in any drugstore,” she said, taking the phone from him. “Treat yourself.”

She flattened herself on the floor as best she could and turned her head to the side to get a view into the space. It appeared to be a shallow space, dark, webby. She positioned the phone’s light to get the best illumination she could and reached in, slowly, in case there were wires or sharp edges. She poked finger by finger until she hit the back of the space. It was about as long as her hand. Almost big enough for the tin but not quite.

She lifted her neck and stretched it, then reached her fingers up.

There was space there. The hollow went all the way up. Plenty of space for the tin.

“So there’s a hole?” David said. “That’s pretty good. I mean, you never disappoint with your . . .”

“Shut up for a second.”

She craned her hand around to get a full sense of what might be there.

“Maybe Janelle has one of those laparoscopic little cameras,” she said. “Or . . .”

Her finger hit something. Something fabric.

“I’ve got something,” she said. She wormed her fingers into the space, looking for something she could hook on to. Was it more of the beaded fabric, or the thing the feather had come from? Was it more of the photos, a bag . . .

The thing pulled free and landed on the floor inside the hole. She wrapped her hand around it and was pulling it out when her brain sent her the alert that something was amiss with this object, but sometimes when you start a movement, you can’t stop. She pulled the thing out of the hole.

Whether it was a large mouse or a small rat, she did not know. It was dead, and had been for some time. It still had fur in places, but in others it was exposed to the bone. Overall, it was hard, possibly mummified by being in the wall.

“Oh,” she said, jerking away her hand. It was not an adequate expression of horror, but it was all she had. When you find yourself holding a mummified mouse-rat, words may fail.

“That’s not Ellie,” David said, looking over and grimacing.

Stevie got up and scooted away from the thing, ripping off her gloves. She shoved them in her hoodie pocket.

“Are you keeping those?” he said.

“I can’t put them in the trash in here,” she replied.

“You think they’re checking her trash?”

“I don’t know. You asked me to come in here.”

“Okay.” He held up his hands. “What do you think?”

Stevie surveyed the room again.

“What was she wearing that night?” Stevie asked.

“She had ballet shoes on,” he said. “I remember looking at them.”

“And a little dress. Ballet shoes and a little dress.”

He had a good point. It would be hard to get down the mountain in that.

The room told her about Ellie—that she was a freewheeling artist, an impractical dresser, a French speaker, messy. She liked wine and cabaret. She had a lot of colored pens and drawing books. Her medium was everything. She was color and glitter and chaos.

David was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to make some kind of proclamation, but she had nothing. The room had no secrets to share. The only thing it had given her was a dead rodent, and now she had to get rid of it.

“Let me think,” she said. “I . . .”

David’s phone buzzed. He looked at it.

“Looks like I have a date. Gotta go up to the Great House. Someone thinks I put a bunch of squirrels in the library.” He tucked his phone in his pocket. “Thanks for looking. Maybe it was stupid. I . . .” He shrugged. “Better go,” he said.

When he was gone, Stevie found herself quaking internally, and it wasn’t just because she had to scoop up the rat with some cardboard and take it out to the woods.

8

DETECTION HAS MANY METHODS, MANY PATHWAYS, NARROW AND subtle. Fingerprints. The lost piece of thread. The dog barking in the night.

But there is also Google.

After dumping the rat, Stevie sat down and looked up the names she had uncovered.

Francis Josephine Crane had lived long before the existence of social media, long before every moment and movement could be tracked, but she still lived in a time where the life events of a prominent young woman could be traced. That she was a prominent young woman was the first thing Stevie found out when she sat down in her own room.

Francis Crane was the daughter of Louis Crane, the founder and owner of a company called Crane Flour. The internet had plenty to say about Crane Flour, one of America’s most popular brands between 1910 and 1945. Many people collected Crane Flour tins. The most important fact about Crane Flour seemed to be that one of their factories exploded in 1927, killing eight people and wounding thirty. Crane was roundly denounced for insufficient safety precautions, and Crane Flour winked out of existence about twenty years later, purchased by some larger company that folded it into another company, and into another.

Francis hid among these stories, concealing herself in the depths of available information. Stevie caught a glimpse of her in a list of attendees at a ball held in New York on September 19, 1936. Then her name appeared in a list of the 1937 incoming class at Vassar. There was no mention of her in any list of graduates.

Finally, Stevie found herself reading selections from a book called Better Than Homemade! The Story of Baking in America, which was published in 1992 and patchily uploaded in the form of a bunch of bad scans. This was the longest piece of information she could find on Francis: