Dr. Velman looked to be about seventy and, after reading off the list of books he wanted Stevie to get—and finding she had read two of the major textbooks already—proceeded to spend half an hour talking about the art and craft of the hangman, and how the best of them knew how to tie a knot just at the right location so that the victim’s neck was broken quickly instead of suffocating. The next half hour, he talked about the breeding of dachshunds.

After class, Stevie lingered for a moment outside the building, the rain drilling down on her umbrella. Her next class was in two hours. Ellingham ran like a college—you went to your classes and your time between them was yours to make of as you wanted. No moving along with the crush of a high school hallway. No study halls that stank of Doritos and the dishwasher steam from the cafeteria. This was like being an adult.

So she stood there in the rain like an idiot. Everyone else seemed to have some idea. She wondered if she should go eat or sit in her room or maybe just stand there forever. She took a deep breath of the moist mountain air. She had time. Where did she most want to go? What felt right?

She turned toward the library.

When she entered, no one was there except Kyoko, who sat alone at her massive desk, eating an apple.

“Hey!” she called to Stevie. “Come in! You’re new, right?”

“Yeah,” Stevie said. “My name is Stevie Bell. And there’s something I’d like to see. . . .”

“You want to see Dolores’s book,” Kyoko said, balancing her apple on her desk and wiping her hands.

Stevie had been about to ask if they had materials on the case, so the offer of Dottie’s book stunned her into silence.

“I get a file on all the new students,” Kyoko said. “It’s the librarian’s job to know what materials are needed. You’re interested in the Ellingham case. Come on back.”

She waved Stevie around the desk station to a deep brown wooden door with the words LIBRARY OFFICE painted in gold.

Behind the door was a large but cozy room. Everything here was original—wooden tables and desks, wooden cabinets. There were large tables with books that were in the process of being bound or covered.

“So you know the book was returned to us in 1993,” Kyoko said. “We keep it out of circulation, because of its historical significance. Here.”

She pulled a pair of blue nitrile gloves from a box and indicated that Stevie should put them on, which Stevie was only too happy to do. There was nothing she really wanted more than the satisfying snap of the examination gloves. It was a small thing, but it made the investigation just a touch more legitimate.

“Here we go,” Kyoko said, putting on her own pair of gloves and opening up a glass-fronted banker’s shelf and removing a thick volume. She set it on one of the tables and waved Stevie to it.

The book was well preserved from years in evidence and library storage. It had a pristine dust jacket with a picture of Sherlock Holmes in a deerstalker with a meerschaum drawn in red on a white background.

The book made a faint crackling noise as Stevie opened it. The pages were faintly yellow and the type was very tight and dense. There was a slot for library cards that read ELLINGHAM ACADEMY LIBRARY, but there was no card inside. The book had been checked out, but never technically returned. Stevie turned the pages carefully, and as she got to the first story, A Study in Scarlet, she stopped.

There was a jagged pencil mark on one of the first pages, roughly underlining one line. It was a very famous line, one of the most famous in all the stories.

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.”

“Did Dottie do this?” Stevie asked.

“No idea. This particular book was checked out several times by students before her. Any one of them could have marked it up. But I noticed that as well.”

Stevie glanced through the book, but there was nothing else in it. It was simply a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. But it was the book. That was what mattered.

“As it happens, we know a lot about Dolores’s reading,” Kyoko said. “This may also interest you.”

She opened one of the wooden filing cabinets and removed an expanded file.

“The first Ellingham librarian, Diana Cloakes, was a remarkable person—one of the top research librarians at the New York Public Library. Albert Ellingham hired her to come work here. Everyone he hired was the best at what they did. She bought an incredible collection, and she took meticulous notes on everything.”

Kyoko pulled a thick stack of typewritten sheets from the folder and paged through them, then carefully set a few piles down on one of the big book tables.

“When Albert Ellingham set up the school,” she said, “it was the policy that any book a student wanted could be ordered, and we have all the records from that first year. This pile . . .”

She pointed at one of the stacks.

“. . . shows all requests from the 1935–36 school year. Dolores alone put in requests for over five hundred books. The school ordered four hundred and eighty-seven of them. The remaining thirteen were at a library in a university in Turkey that refused to sell them. If it’s one of Dolores’s, it will have the letters DE after the title.”

Stevie scanned down the list. Dolores had requested several works in Greek, a lot of novels Stevie had never heard of, some classics. There were all kinds of requests from other students, including a list of very intriguing titles.

“Gun Molls Magazine,” Stevie read. “Vice Squad Detective, Dime Detective, All True Fact Detective Stories . . .”

“Oh, those,” Kyoko said. “Yeah, I love those. All pulp magazines. Most libraries or librarians would never have ordered them, but Ellingham’s policy was clear—whatever they asked for. I so wish we still had these, but I think the students took them and didn’t give them back.”

Stevie felt like she would have gotten along with those students.

Two days at Ellingham Academy passed by in a series of flashes. First, there was just the weight of everything. The readings. The thought. The writing. The expectation of knowledge. It was kind of an academic monster-truck rally. Everything went so fast. Session to session, reading to reading.

Meals developed more of a rhythm.

The overall groupings started to make sense—some sat by houses. Some were gamers. Some read. Some people took food away and never stayed. Germaine Batt tended to sit apart from everyone, watchful, always on a device. Gretchen with the astonishing head of red hair frequently held court over a long table inside. Hayes moved away from the Minerva table to start sitting with Maris and a very assorted group of artsy-looking people. Vi was a regular feature at the Minerva table. Nate started to talk a bit more. Ellie came and went, as did David, but they didn’t come and go together. They didn’t seem to be a couple—more just two people who were really comfortable in their skin and not very conscious of what made other people uncomfortable.

After lit class on Wednesday, Stevie was walking across the green when a larger pair of ratty-sneaker-clad feet fell in step beside her. Actually in step, deliberate and rhythmic. Stevie didn’t need to look up, didn’t want to, but her neck craned in that direction seemingly of its own accord, like a flower bending toward the sun, if the sun was an annoying person who lived upstairs. She managed to avoid conversation with David for the last few days. If he was at her table, he sat at the other end. In Minerva, he stuck to his room. But now he was here, smiling, his hair flopping and unruly, his navy blue T-shirt looking conspicuously worn. There were holes in his shorts large enough to lose a phone.