“I had to follow him. I thought he might . . . I don’t know.”

“Did you find anything besides this, aside from . . . ?”

Larry held up the fragment of garbage bag. Stevie shook her head.

“There was . . . a smell.”

“The first time you experience that, you never forget it. You can get used to it, to dealing with it, but it’s hard.”

“Did she just get stuck down there?” Stevie asked. “When she left the Great House that night?”

“That would be my guess,” Larry said. “We tracked up to the other end of the passage. We had no idea it was there. Goes to a hatch in the Great House basement floor that blends in with the other stones. She went in, something blocked her way out.”

Stevie’s mind immediately went to the Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” about a murderer who lures his victim down to a vault, who is then shackled to the wall and bricked in. The horror of it was too much. Stevie inhaled the cool, clean air greedily. The smell was still there, molecules of it, clinging to the inside of her nose, her skin, her mind.

“What do I do?” Stevie said. “Do you have to tell the police I was there?”

Larry put his hand on his leg and tapped one finger. Then he inhaled deeply and let out a long sigh.

“Nate?” he asked.

“Nate didn’t go down,” Stevie said.

“He’s not as stupid as the two of you.”

“He told us not to go. He stayed at the top in case something happened.”

“Definitely not as stupid,” Larry said. “All right. This is about finding and reporting an accident victim. Technically, it sounds like David was the one who found her. You can’t report something you didn’t see.” This was wrong, but Stevie made no correction. “If anything changes, then you step forward. You do it at once. You don’t go in any tunnel here ever again, for any reason. You follow every rule down to the letter.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Don’t thank me. This isn’t about thanks. It sounds like you tried to follow someone who was doing something stupid, even if that meant doing something stupid yourself. I know enough about David Eastman to know he would jump in without looking. He’ll be all right, no matter what happens. I think you know why.”

Out of all the things that had happened, this was the one that made Stevie freeze.

“You’ve met his father,” Larry said. It wasn’t a question.

Stevie nodded.

“And his father played a role in you coming back?”

“He told you?” Stevie asked.

“No one needed to tell me,” he said. “That wasn’t a tough one to work out. The sudden change of heart, your parents work for the man, the sudden flight back, the fact that there are no flights back at that time of night and that you probably wouldn’t fly anyway . . .”

Stevie let out a loud exhale.

“What did he give you?” Larry asked.

“A ride.”

“What else?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“What did he want from you?”

“Just . . . to be here. Because of David. I just wanted to come back.”

She wasn’t sure if she was saying this to Larry or herself. Larry let out a low noise.

“It’s not you,” he said. “Edward King is a son of a bitch and his son is a piece of work. . . .”

She got the sense that there was a lot more he could have said, but unlike a suspect who starts talking and can’t stop, Larry shut the valve.

“So Edward King gave you a chance to come back if you kept an eye on David. Now things become clearer.”

“David doesn’t know,” she said.

“Well, I’m not going to tell him that. This whole thing . . .”

He shook his head and cut himself off again.

“Could I see him, though?” she said. “He did just find his friend’s body.”

Larry let out a long sigh.

“He’s at the library,” he said. “They took him over there because there are too many people in the Great House. I’ll take you over, because of what happened tonight. But you need to remember, it’s not your job to protect David Eastman. I feel bad for the kid, I do. But it is not your job. Do you understand?”

“I know.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think you do. Don’t follow someone into the dark, Stevie. I’ve seen it happen too many times.”

Stevie wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but the general idea was clear enough.

16

THERE WAS A THICK, FECUND SMELL OF DROPPING LEAVES THAT NIGHT as Stevie and Larry made their way over to the library. Why was Ellingham always at its richest at times like this, heavy with the smell of earth and air, extreme in light and shade? Why did the Great House loom higher with its orange lit windows, where the party was wrapping up and the school still unaware that another of its company had been lost?

What was the problem with this place? Maybe Nate had a point, she thought, her footsteps hard and clear on the path. It was called Mount Hatchet. Maybe that was a sign. Don’t go there. Don’t blow a chunk of the face of this place and build your empire.

And don’t come looking for death and murder, Stevie, because you’ll find it.

She was definitely not warm enough in her vinyl coat, even with the heavy Ellingham fleece underneath. Her jeans were too thin. She had no scarf, so the cold tickled the back of her neck.

Ellie, wrapped in garbage bags, underground.

She could still smell it.

It. Her. It.

A few people trickled out of the Great House, still in costume.

Of course Ellie was dead.

Of course she’d been found on Halloween. Sealed in a tunnel.

It was distilled Ellingham, pure as one of the streams that ran down the mountain.

It would have been dark for Ellie. Absolutely dark. She wouldn’t have known where she was. She would have had to feel along those walls, going back and forth, looking for a way out. How long? For hours? Days? Crying. Probably hyperventilating. Stevie thought of the depths of her own panic—the world-ending feeling of nothing. Ellie would have panicked. She would have gone back and forth and back and forth and screamed. Banged. Scratched and clawed. The thirst and the hunger and the confusion would have set in. . . .

No. She had to keep these thoughts out. Paint over them with gloss and let them harden. She had a job to do now: find David, who had found Ellie.

The Ellingham library was quietly buzzing. Several security officers were there, talking to the local police. There were no police cars parked out on the oval—they must have taken the service road and parked out back to keep people from freaking out. Despite the activity, the library felt like an empty cathedral. It had that strange architectural property of trapping any wind that came in through the door and spinning it up in a soft vortex that had nowhere to go. The higher you went, air whistled through the elaborate wrought iron of the circular steps and balcony guards, and loose pages trembled, as if alive. The noise of the conversations below swirled all the way to the ceiling, smashing against the books. Stevie looked straight up, noticing for the first time the constellations painted on the blue ceiling. The stars were inside, closer.

Larry had a quiet word with one of the security people.

“He’s upstairs in one of the reading rooms,” he said to Stevie. “With a counselor. Let me see what’s going on.”

Stevie watched Larry wend his way up to the second floor and disappear into the stacks. He reappeared on the balcony a few minutes later and waved Stevie up. The iron rail of the staircase was cold, and each of her footsteps reverberated as she climbed. It seemed like the library didn’t like this interruption of its peaceful routine.

“You can go and talk to him,” Larry said in a low voice. “The counselor said that would be helpful for both of you. But you remember what I said.”

He guided her to the end of a wide aisle between the geography and geology sections, a row of green-spined books that concluded in one of the library’s somber wooden doors with the gold painted lettering. The counselor was waiting by the door. Stevie recognized her from before, when Hayes died and Ellingham deployed therapists in all directions.

The reading room was a small spot, separated from the rest of the second floor by walls that were half-paneled in frosted glass. The original furnishings had been replaced with a gray love seat and four fuzzy beanbags and an equally fuzzy rug, just in case any of the other six hundred cozy reading nooks at Ellingham didn’t satisfy.

David had avoided all of these options and was sitting on the floor against the wall, once again wearing the two-thousand-dollar coat. His knees were partially bent and he was staring at his shoes. The counselor was hovering next to him on the arm of the love seat. She got up and came over to speak to Larry and Stevie in the doorway.

“Would you like to come in?” she said to Stevie, in that professionally calm way that therapists have.

Stevie stepped into the room cautiously, and David looked up. He was pale, his face all raw edges.

“Hey,” Stevie said.

“Hey.”