She pushed.

It opened.

She was going farther. She was going in. This was like a dream.

The room beyond was small. Three sides of the space were composed of shelving. This had been the liquor room. The deliveries would come in through the tunnel, then come into this room for storage. A metal ladder went up to a hatch in the ceiling. Stevie tested it for a moment with a shake. It seemed to be firmly secured to the wall and in perfect repair. Could she do this? Could she actually go to the place where it happened?

The others were nowhere behind her. She was doing this alone.

She tested the ladder again, then tucked her flashlight into her bag. She was going up into the dark. She proceeded slowly, trusting in the ladder and knowing that at some point her head would make contact with the hatch above. She would use that sensation as a guide.

Up, up, up into the dark, moving more slowly as she went. She felt the hatch against her hair, against her scalp. She backed down a rung and reached up to test it. It didn’t give at first, but she pressed harder. There was an unholy squawk as the ancient springs were forced back into action, but the hatch popped open.

Some people want to go to see the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. Some people dream of their proms or their someday weddings. Some people dream of going up in a hot-air balloon or scuba diving in clear Caribbean waters. Everyone has a dream place, and Stevie Bell was climbing into hers.

The domed observatory seemed smaller now that she was inside of it. The thick glass triangles that composed most of the structure were encrusted with dirt, so all was dark. She shone her light around the stone floor, the bench that ran around the side. There was nothing in here now but some dead leaves and dirt. It smelled like a shed.

Dottie had been here. This is where they found her Sherlock Holmes book. Albert Ellingham had come right through that stout door. He’d been struck and fallen to the floor. Here? On this spot? Had the money been counted here? Was this where it all started to go so very wrong?

She closed her eyes for a moment. Maybe, if she breathed this air and felt this space, maybe she could go back. . . .

“Hey!” Dash’s voice cut through the silence as he yelled from below. “Come on. We need you.”

The moment was over.

The filming was very quick. All that was needed was for Hayes to recite the Truly Devious letter while walking down the tunnel length. He and Maris passed the camera back and forth to get some long shots, but it was dark and cold and hard to film, and time was not on their side. At eight thirty, they all crept back to the steps. A quick look outside showed that no one was waiting for them to pop out of the hole. The doors were closed.

“We can’t all go together,” Hayes said, holding the padlock in his hand. “If anyone sees us all coming from this direction, they might realize we were down here. Nate, Stevie, you guys go first. Dash, you should go the other way around. Maris, we can go last.”

As Stevie and Nate walked back through the dark, Nate glanced over his shoulder.

“I think they’re going to go back and bone in that tunnel,” he said.

“Bone,” Stevie repeated. “Did you have to say bone?”

“Tunnelboner,” Nate said. “A new fragrance for men.”

“They wouldn’t,” Stevie said. “They won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s . . . the tunnel. You don’t just tunnelbone in that tunnel.”

“Sometimes a tunnel is just a tunnel,” Nate said.

Stevie ground her jaw a bit and walked on, her hands deep in her hoodie pockets. The magic of the tunnel and the observatory was still on her, and she wanted to hold it as long as possible.

She thought of the letter that she had seen on her wall. It really had been so vivid. Dreams had a way of blurring and fading the moment they were over. The edges were sharp on this, the colors bright. Her mind had taken a screenshot.

Had it been real?

It was possible; most things are possible. It wasn’t likely, though. What was likely was that her anxious and excited brain, full of new stimuli, conjured up something bright and shiny for her, something so magical and odd that it stamped its impression on her brain cells for a little longer than normal. Thinking about it logically, who knew or cared enough about her to go to those kinds of lengths, and to what end?

It had been a dream, just as Janelle said. Janelle made sense.

Still, the feeling was there, and it felt like Truly Devious was calling out from the past. Truly Devious, the known ghoul, the laughing murderer.

But some things don’t stay buried—not tunnels, not secrets. Truly Devious was not immune.

* * *

WHO IS TRULY DEVIOUS? 80 YEARS ON

Postdetective.com

April 13, 2016

On April 8, 1936, a letter arrived at the Burlington, Vermont, office of Albert Ellingham. Albert Ellingham was, at the time, one of the richest men in America. He constructed an estate and a school in the mountains outside of Burlington, and it was there he lived with his wife and his daughter, breathing the sweet, clean air. A Burlington office collected his personal and business mail, and every day, a car would take sacks of correspondence from Burlington to the house, well up on Mount Hatchet, where it would be sorted and processed by his secretary.

That day, in with the hundreds of letters, one stood out. The envelope was postmarked from Burlington. The address of the Ellingham estate was written on the front in dull pencil, in heavy, square strokes. Inside was a single piece of writing paper that contained the words:

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

Threats to Albert Ellingham and his family were not new—in fact, Albert Ellingham had barely survived a car bombing several years before. This was during a time in which industrialists were often under threat. What made this letter so different?

For a start, it was constructed of colorful words and letters that would later be determined to come from popular magazines. In bright, cheerful print, it spelled out a diabolical poem, one that listed the many ways that Albert Ellingham might die. The letter writer gave themselves a name: Truly Devious.

Five days later, while out on a drive, Albert Ellingham’s wife, Iris, was kidnapped, along with their three-year-old daughter, Alice. Along with Iris and Alice, a young girl named Dolores Epstein, who was a student at Ellingham’s new academy on the site, also vanished.

A ransom demand was called in that evening, giving Albert Ellingham just a few minutes to bundle up the money in his safe and take it to a lake on his property. Ellingham was a bit short of cash, so the kidnappers beat up the person sent to collect Iris and Alice, and demanded more.

Robert Mackenzie, Ellingham’s thirty-year-old private secretary, begged to call the police. But Ellingham was convinced that doing so would put his family in more danger. Instead, along with family friend George Marsh by his side, Ellingham took two hundred thousand dollars in marked bills to a remote point in Burlington and lowered the money down to a boat waiting below on Lake Champlain.