“This is the art barn,” Kaz said. “This is the only building that was added to the original campus, and it keeps getting bigger. They’re adding to it now.”

The ground around one side was dug up, and the construction looked new. Stevie couldn’t help but note that the building bordered closely on the walled garden—the famous walled garden that held the lake where the Ellingham ransom drop had occurred.

The garden gate was open, and people wearing hard hats were passing through. Stevie craned her head to look, but the tour was moving on into the art barn. There would be time. She would get in.

“The art barn isn’t just for art,” Kaz said, while walking backward. “Everything kind of happens here. Yoga and dance, meetings, some classes.”

Kaz was never so excited as when he was talking about the eco friendly construction of the art barn, the bamboo floors and the locations of composting toilets. Stevie began to twitch from anticipation. After what felt like an hour-long lecture on sewage, they left and walked back to the Great House.

When they stepped inside, Stevie stopped breathing for a moment. The house was built around a massive foyer, with balconies on the upper floors looking down over the space. Before her were the master stairs, sweeping up to the balcony of the second floor, and from there twisting elegantly up to the third. On the wall at the top of the first level of stairs was a massive painting, done by the famous painter and Ellingham family friend Leonard Holmes Nair. The setting was the lake and the observatory in the background, at night. Though that much was clear, the style was borderline hallucinatory. Iris and Albert loomed in the foreground of the picture—mythical figures in swipes of blue and yellow. Iris’s short black hair seemed to spread from her head and weave into the branches of the trees. Albert Ellingham’s face was merged with the full moon that hung over the observatory and spilled light onto the lake. They looked away from each other, their expressions stretched, their eyes pulling long, their mouths almost rectangular.

Stevie had seen many images of this painting. Online, it wasn’t that impressive. But in person, it gripped her and held her attention. It was disturbing. There was something about it, something that seemed to haunt the shadows in the background, something that seemed to be behind the observatory. This was painted two years before the kidnapping, but it seemed to foretell the doom that was on the horizon, and that the observatory would be part of it.

The painting seemed to preside over everything.

“Meet Larry,” Kaz said, indicating a man who sat at a large desk next to the front door. He was an older, uniformed man with salt-and-pepper hair clipped into a crew cut.

“I’m Security Larry,” he said. “It’s what people call me. It’s what I answer to. I’m head of security for all of Ellingham. I already know all of your names. I get to know everyone before they arrive.”

“Security Larry knows everyone!” Kaz said.

Security Larry didn’t look excited by this interruption.

“We’re very secure up here, but if you ever need us, you can hit the blue button on the alarms you’ll see in the campus buildings and on some light poles. The rules here aren’t hard, but you have to follow them. If you don’t, I’ll show up. I live just down the path at the gatehouse, so I’m always here. If something says Keep Out, that means Keep Out. It doesn’t mean go in because someone dared you or because you heard about other people going in. Some of the original features of the property are no longer structurally sound. You may get in, but you may not get out. We’ve had people stuck for days, so they were starved and terrified before they were expelled. You’ve been warned.”

“What does that mean?” Janelle said quietly as Kaz waved them toward one of the front rooms. “Original features aren’t sound?”

“He means the tunnels,” Stevie said. “And the hidden passages.”

On the right side of the front door, opposite Larry’s desk, was a dayroom with magnificent painted panels depicting twisting vines and pale roses, all decorated in delicate raised plaster patterns in silver. The furniture was upholstered in violet silk and the floors were covered in a massive decorative rug. This was an eighteenth-century room the Ellinghams had imported from Lyon, France—the furnishings, the rugs, the curtains, and wall decorations—all of it had been boxed up, shipped to America, and resized and assembled here.

The next room, the ballroom, had a set of glass double doors, the panes set in an elaborate art nouveau–style. The doors were partially open, so Stevie pushed them all the way and stepped into a massive room in front of them that stretched up two stories. The floor was patterned in black-and-white marble diamonds; the walls were slashed with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, sculpted and framed in delicate silver. The wall panels depicted scenes of costumed players in masks. The floor-to-ceiling rose-pink curtains were like theater curtains. The ceiling was painted in the light blue of early evening with the constellations and their representative figures all in gold. Most of America’s high society danced in this ballroom in the 1930s.

“And this,” said Kaz, leading them to a massive oak door, “was our founder’s office.”

The office had massive proportions—it was two stories high—but unlike the echoey main hall, this room was thickly carpeted from end to end in a lush, deep green, and over that there were Persian rugs. By the fireplace, there was a leopard rug, head and all, that was obviously and disturbingly real. Long windows stretched up to the ceiling and were covered in heavy satin drapes that blocked the sun. The second story of the room was entirely bookshelves, with just a walkway around for access.

The fireplace in this room was made of a rose-colored marble. Two massive desks filled one side of the room. One held six sleek black rotary telephones. There was a spinning globe that Stevie guessed contained the names of countries that had long ceased to exist, giant wooden file cabinets, and a strange piece of furniture with tubes coming out of it that Stevie recognized as being a Dictaphone—an early-twentieth-century recording device. Dictaphones were big in a lot of mystery stories.

This was where Albert Ellingham worked out the plan to try to save his family. They had counted the ransom money on this floor. She could have spent forever in this room.

But they were being ushered out again into the foyer. A man in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit with an Iron Man T-shirt underneath came bounding down the steps in a slow-motion run. His fine blond hair was swept to the side and bounced a bit as he came down each step.

“And now,” Kaz said, “to welcome you all, the head of the school, Dr. Charles Scott!”

“Welcome, welcome!” he called. “I’m Dr. Scott. Call me Charles. Welcome, you all, to your new home. I say I’m the head of the school, but I like to think of myself as the Chief Learner . . .”

“Oh my God,” Nate mumbled under his breath.

“As you’re at the end of your tour,” Charles said, we need to say a word about Alice. Alice Ellingham was the daughter of our founder, Albert Ellingham. Alice is technically the patron of our school, and we open each school year with a thank-you to her. So please join me in saying, Thank you, Alice.”

It took a moment and some gesturing for everyone to realize that this was serious, and literal. Eventually, there was a mumbled, “Thank you, Alice.”