Nate was cross-legged on the floor, looking at his phone. Vi was sitting on a pile of wood, gazing at their girlfriend with an undisguised You look hot with your tools look. Stevie fidgeted, sometimes leaning against the wall or sitting next to Nate or walking to the door. More than once she crossed the room to where the dry ice container had been, the one that had contained the substance that caused Hayes’s death. It had been taken away, possibly for good or maybe stashed somewhere else. A few loose rakes and shovels leaned against the wall in the spot.

There was the quick bzzzzzzzt of the drill as Janelle took out the screws that held the casing.

“It’s going to snow in a few days,” Nate said, looking up from his phone. “A lot. Some kind of monster blizzard is coming.”

“Oh, good!” Janelle said, setting the drill down on the floor. “I love snow. Bet it’s amazing up here.”

“Do you like a lot of snow?” Nate asked.

“Yes, but define ‘a lot.’ I’m from Chicago. It snows there.”

“Three feet. Possibly more with drifts.”

“That . . . is a lot of snow,” Janelle said approvingly. “You probably don’t like snow, right?”

“Oh, I like it,” Nate said. “Snow makes it socially acceptable to stay in.”

Janelle’s laugh rang from one end of the workshop to the other as she carefully turned the machine over and lifted off the casing, revealing the naked mechanism underneath. It was a gray-and-brown mess of spools and wires and grungy metal places.

“Pretty girl,” Janelle said. “Dirty girl. First thing, she needs a cleaning.”

“You think you can get it to work?”

“You gotta have a little patience,” Janelle said, lowering the goggles over her eyes. “I have to do my thing. I’m going to blast it with some air and clean it out.”

She retrieved something that looked like a clunky toy gun with a slender, hummingbird beak of a barrel. She poked it into the machine and began shooting air into it, releasing little puffs of dust and debris.

“Okay,” Janelle said, pushing the goggles back and stuffing the air gun into her belt. “This looks like it’s been preserved pretty well. I think what I need to do is switch out these capacitors and maybe wire on a new power cord. I have capacitors in my supply box, and I’ll find a cord and strip it down, wire it in.”

This was all having an effect on Vi, whose eyes had almost turned to heart shapes.

“Love is in the air,” Nate said quietly. “Love may be on top of your machine in a minute.”

After about an hour of work, Janelle replaced the casing on the machine.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see how this goes.”

She turned one of the dials and the reels began to spin. Stevie and Nate jumped from their places on the floor.

“You did it?” Stevie said. “Seriously?”

“Of course I did it,” Janelle said, reaching into her bra and producing a lip gloss, which she applied without looking. “I’m the queen of the machine.”

Vi wrapped themselves around Janelle.

“Okay,” Stevie said, handing over the wire. “How does this work?”

“Yeah, I was looking that up,” Vi said, detaching themselves from Janelle. “People collect these. Lots of tutorials. This is the best one I could find.”

They passed their phone over to Janelle, who watched a video. She picked up the wire and spooled it, consulting with the video a few times.

“I think that’s it,” she said. “I don’t want to record over it. I think that’s it. Want to try it?”

Stevie nodded and Janelle flipped the switch. The wire turned on the spools. For a moment, there was only a crackling and hissing noise, then a few muffled booms, as if something was hitting a microphone. And then . . . a voice. Deep, male. Albert Ellingham, unmistakably.

“Dolores, sit there.”

“Sit here?” A girl’s voice. Dolores Epstein, speaking. Stevie reeled in shock. Dolores was a character, a person from the past, lost. Here she was now, among them, her voice high and clear, with a very thick New York accent.

“Just there. And lean into the microphone a bit,” Albert Ellingham said.

Janelle looked to Stevie with wide, excited eyes.

“Good,” he said. “Now all you have to do is speak normally. I want to ask you a bit about your experiences at Ellingham. I’m making some recordings about the school so people know what kind of work we do up here. Now, Dolores, before I met you you got into all sorts of scrapes, didn’t you?”

“Is this for the radio?” Dottie asked.

“No, no. You can speak freely.”

“I like to look around, that’s all,” she said.

“And that’s a good thing! I was exactly the same way.”

“My uncle is a cop in New York. He says I’m like a second-story man.”

“A second-story man?” Albert Ellingham asked.

“A second-story man is a thief, who, as the name suggests, enters through a second-story window. Slightly more sophisticated than a snatch-and-grabber. But to be honest, it’s my uncle who taught me how to get into places. Police officers know all the tricks. And I’ve always been interested in locks and things like that.”

“What did you think when you first came here? It must be very different from New York.”

“Well, I was frightened, honestly.”

“Of what?”

“I’m used to the city. Not the woods. The woods are scary.”

“The woods are lovely!”

“And dark and deep, as the poet Robert Frost says. When I told my uncle I was coming here, he said it was all right because you have an attic man here.”

“An attic man?” he asked.

“Another colloquialism. What’s above the second story? The attic. My uncle always said cops who could get the drop on the second-story men—that means catch them in the act—needed to be right above them. You have a policeman here from New York. Mr. Marsh. I felt better after that. I like it up here now.”

Albert Ellingham chuckled.

“I’m glad to hear it. And what would you tell the world about Ellingham Academy?”

“Well, I’d say it was the best place I’ve ever been. It takes elements of the system developed by Maria Montessori, though I see elements of the work of John Dewey, who is from here in Burlington, actually, did you know that?”

“I did not. I learn something new every day here at the school. We learn from each other. Like I’ve also just learned about second-story men. Now, let’s talk about what you do every day here. Tell me about your studies. . . .”

Mudge’s voice was suddenly in Stevie’s head. They were looking at the cow’s eye. The one place where all the information goes in, you can’t actually see anything.

There was a kind of flash behind Stevie’s eyes. All the pieces that she had collected and seen over years of reading about this lined up in place. She wanted to move around a little, so she had to keep grabbing them, making sure they didn’t move. She walked quickly to the door. She couldn’t hear anything more, couldn’t talk to anyone or she would lose her grip on it.

“Hey,” Janelle said, stopping the machine. “Where are you . . .”

Stevie waved a hand. The sky had turned a candy-colored pink and the air had a wet, frozen note to it. Good, clear air for thinking. That’s the reason Albert Ellingham had bought this place to begin with—he thought the air was conducive to learning and thinking. Maybe he was right. Once you got used to having a little less oxygen, everything seemed to move a bit faster.

Think, Stevie. What was the thing she was missing? What had she seen?

The Ellingham library stood in stark relief against the pink sky, its spires dark. The library. Dottie left her mark in the library.

Stevie broke out into a run. She blew through the door as Kyoko looked like she was ending her shift for the night. Stevie almost skidded up to her desk.

“Kyoko . . . I need one thing.”

“Can it wait until tomorrow?”

Stevie shook her head.

“The book. Dottie’s book. The Sherlock Holmes.”

“That can’t wait?”

“Please,” she said. “I’ll be so quick. Five minutes. Two minutes.”

Kyoko rolled her eyes a bit, but she reached down and got the keys and opened the back office. Stevie followed her along, past the metal shelving and the boxes, back down to the row where the treasures of 1936 were kept. She removed the sepia-and-white book from the box.

“Be quick, but be careful,” she said, passing it over.

Stevie accepted it like it was a holy object, carrying it over to one of the worktables.

“What do you need this for in such a hurry?” she said.

But Stevie could not hear her. She was busy looking for something she knew she had seen, something so small, a blip . . .

There it was, in A Study in Scarlet. The mark in the book, one rough pencil line: Sherlock said, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

In A Study in Scarlet a body is found with the word RACHE written over it in blood. Rache, German for revenge. A victim-left sign of what had transpired.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Kyoko said, leaning over the table.

“Yeah,” she said, getting up. She was almost stumbling now, catching her foot on the table leg in her haste.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah . . . fine. Definitely fine.”

She hurriedly closed the book and passed it back to Kyoko, who placed it gently in a carrying crate.

“Thanks,” she said. “I have to . . . Thanks.”