So Stevie became a mystery machine, with true crime playing in her ears between classes at school and while she filled bean containers at the coffee shop at the mall. She couldn’t get enough. She got into the Websleuths world online. There, she found people like herself, people who spent their time looking into cold cases. It was there that she became transfixed by the Ellingham case.

Yes, the idea of her solving this case sounded improbable. She was a sixteen-year-old from Pittsburgh. This case was decades old. Everyone had tried to solve it. The FBI hadn’t been able to do it. The scores of serious (and not serious) investigators had not been able to do it. Thousands of people obsessed over it all the time. Ellingham himself, a genius, had tried to find out what happened and the search had killed him.

You didn’t just solve the Ellingham Affair.

She stared at the walls with their thick paint and their possible secrets.

She wasn’t screwed. She was Stevie Bell, and she had gotten into Ellingham Academy on her own. They didn’t exactly admit people by mistake.

Unless it was a mistake.

What if they’d made a mistake? What if they’d made the first mistake they’d ever made? Why had they done this to her?

Nope nope nope nope.

Stevie put on a podcast and pushed across the floor and opened up a still-sealed box. She pulled out several thick folders full of perfectly organized printouts and copies, a roll of heavy-duty tape and a pair of heavy-duty scissors. Once the box was empty, she set about breaking it down into flat pieces, trimming off the flaps to make the rectangles nice and even. She worked quickly, her mind split between the podcast and her task.

In police procedurals, there was always a case board—a place to store the images of victims and suspects, maps and diagrams. A visual reference when you needed to think it all through. The box would serve as a board.

At the top, she put three photos: Iris Ellingham, Alice Ellingham, and Dottie Epstein. Here were the floor plans of the Great House at the time of the kidnapping. The case board began to take shape as it filled.

In the center of her board, Stevie put the most notorious piece of evidence of all, the one people always talked about: the Truly Devious letter:

Look! A riddle! Time for fun!

Should we use a rope or gun?

Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty

Poison’s slow, which is a pity

Fire is festive, drowning’s slow

Hanging’s a ropy way to go

A broken head, a nasty fall

A car colliding with a wall

Bombs make a very jolly noise

Such ways to punish naughty boys!

What shall we use? We can’t decide.

Just like you cannot run or hide.

Ha ha.

Truly,

Devious

The physical letter was lost in the mess of the investigation, so it could never be tested or fingerprinted. Only a photo remained—a stark, terrifying communication that arrived at the Ellingham house a week before the kidnapping. It had been composed with words cut out of magazines and newspapers, that creepy, classic style of hiding your handwriting.

Of the many intriguing aspects of the Ellingham Affair, this was the one she always came back to—this strange declaration from an unknown person that said, “I am bad. I intend to do harm. I’m harming you now by inspiring fear. I am the knife. I am Truly Devious.”

It was like trolling, kind of. Except so complicated. It took more effort to get under the skin of a famous person in the 1930s. They had to get a collection of magazines and newspapers, find the words they needed, clip them delicately and glue them with a crooked precision, then send it off in the mail, never knowing what effect it would cause.

Why announce yourself, Truly Devious? Why tell them you’re coming?

Stevie added another photo to the board—Anton Vorachek. It was the Truly Devious letter that always convinced Stevie (and other people) that Vorachek was innocent. Vorachek could barely speak English—he probably wouldn’t have written a poem in English, a poem modeled on the style of Dorothy Parker, no less. No one ever thought it made sense, but they found the marked bills on Vorachek, no one liked him, and he confessed on the stand.

Truly Devious hung over the case like a ghoul.

Over the next hour, Stevie assembled the images, organized the files. There were floor plans, copies of interviews, police reports. It had taken a very long time, a helpful librarian, and the assistance of other Websleuths to collect it all. She had run through two toner cartridges and a box of paper that belonged to the Edward King campaign (good) to print out this mass of information. And it was a mass. It was heavy. Stevie liked to hold the files and bundles of paper, to pore over it again and again until it all ran through her head like an ancient stream. Surely other people had come to Ellingham with an interest in the case. Some of those people came before the internet existed, so they wouldn’t have had access to all Stevie did. And the others . . .

No. None had her passion. You know when you’re the top fan—the one who knows the words and feels the gaps and senses the disruptions. You know when you are the one who gets it.

It was dawn when Stevie finished assembling her board and putting all of her documents in order on her desk and in the bookcase. She went to the window and found a soft, friendly morning with a light, sweet breeze. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

The critical scene of the mystery is when the detective enters. The action shifts to Sherlock’s sitting room. The little Belgian man with the waxed moustache appears in the lobby of the grand hotel. The gentle old woman with the bag of knitting comes to visit her niece when the poison pen letters start going around the village. The private detective comes back to the office after a night of drinking and finds the woman with the cigarette and the veiled hat. This is when things will change.

The detective had arrived at Ellingham Academy.

April 14, 1936, 4:00 a.m.

WHEN GEORGE MARSH PULLED UP TO THE FRONT GATES OF THE Ellingham estate, two men in overalls holding shotguns greeted him. They waved him along, and he steered his Model B along the perilous Ellingham road for the second time in only a few hours.

Albert Ellingham and Robert Mackenzie were waiting for him on the drive. Mackenzie huddled in his coat, but Ellingham didn’t appear to feel the chill at all. He rushed to the car door and was taken aback at the sight.

“What happened? Where are they? Your face! What happened?”

He was referring to the trail of bruises along Marsh’s jaw and around to his eye, and to a gash in his left cheek. His left eye was almost swollen shut.

“They weren’t there,” Marsh said, getting out of the car.

“What do you mean they weren’t there? You didn’t see them?”

“When I made the turn toward West Bolton, I got about a mile down before they blocked the road with a car. I got out and they ambushed me. They want two hundred thousand more. There was no sign of Iris or Alice.”

Robert let out a hissing sigh.

“You were right, Robert,” Ellingham said. “They want more. So we will get them more. How long do we have?”

“Twenty-four hours,” Marsh replied. “There’ll be another phone call. They said to have someone wait by the phone box on Church Street at eleven p.m. tonight. They wanted you to deliver it, but I got them to accept me as the deliveryman.”