“How did you get involved?”

“He came and he asked me to help him make it.”

“And why did he ask you?” the detective said.

“Because I know a lot about it.”

“About the Ellingham kidnappings, you mean?” the detective clarified. Stevie nodded and admonished herself internally. You were supposed to be clear. It wasn’t clear.

“I know a lot about the Ellingham case. It’s what I came here to study. The crime . . . the history of it.”

“So Hayes wanted to make a show about the Ellingham kidnappings, and he came to you because you know about it. And you asked Nathaniel because he’s a writer?”

“Hayes asked me to ask him,” Stevie said.

“So it sounds like Hayes was assembling a group of people, all with different areas of knowledge. There was also Maris Coombes, who has theater experience, and Patrick Dashell, who studies film. And together, the group of you put this project together.”

“Correct,” Stevie said.

“How did you access the tunnel?”

Stevie’s heart lurched a bit.

“I opened the lock,” she said.

“How did you open it?”

“I picked it,” Stevie said.

The detective raised one of her well-groomed eyebrows, her only tell in this interview.

“You picked it?” she clarified.

“That’s right,” Stevie said. There was no denying it. She picked a lock. Good-bye, Ellingham. It was fun while it lasted.

“How do you know how to pick a lock?”

“YouTube,” Stevie said, shrugging. The shrug was supposed to make it look like this was no big deal and just something that people did, but she wasn’t sure how it came off.

“Any reason?”

“No? It’s easy? No. People do it. It’s a thing. Just a hobby.”

This did not sound good. Nothing to see here! I just pick locks for fun.

“Larry told me your interest is in law enforcement,” the detective said.

“Yes,” Stevie said.

“We usually don’t pick locks.”

“No,” Stevie said. “I know.”

Detective Agiter scratched her ear for a moment, then moved on.

“When you were finished, did you all leave the tunnel together, or in groups?”

Strange. She didn’t ask about the hatch opening at all. Stevie’s heart skipped and her brain glitched for a second.

“We left together,” she said. “Maris and Hayes . . . they stayed behind.”

“Do you know what they were doing?”

“I can guess,” Stevie said.

“What is it you would guess they were doing?” the detective said.

“Making out?” Stevie said. “Something like that?”

The detective half smiled and consulted her notebook.

“During the filming, there was theatrical fog. Do you know how this was created?”

“We had fog machines.”

“Did you use anything else?” the detective asked.

This was a weird question.

“No,” Stevie said.

“Just the three machines.”

“Correct,” Stevie said.

Seriously. Why was she asking about fog machines?

“I think that’s about it, Stevie,” she said. “Unless you can think of anything else that happened that was out of the ordinary?”

Stevie looked around her brain attic. There was, of course, the note on the wall. The note she probably imagined. You couldn’t tell the police about stuff you thought you probably imagined.

Except, could you? People did that in murder mysteries all the time, and it was always important.

“Nothing,” Stevie said.

“Okay. Interview complete at ten twenty.”

She stopped the recording and Stevie pulled herself out of the deep chair.

“What happened to Hayes?” Stevie asked.

The detective looked up at her.

“We have to wait for the coroner’s report,” she replied.

“No,” Stevie said, her face flushing. “Sure. Sorry.”

She made her way to the door and had just put her hand on the sharply edged crystal knob when she had a thought.

“There was one thing,” she said. “Janelle’s ID.”

Detective Agiter looked up from her notebook.

“What’s that?”

“My friend Janelle,” Stevie said. “Someone took her ID to Minerva. When we went to yoga class on Thursday, she had it. But when she went to leave, it wasn’t in her bag. Then the next day, it was on the path in front of our building.”

“Why do you say someone took it? Couldn’t she have lost it?”

“It was clipped into the front pocket of her bag,” Stevie said. “I saw it myself. She tapped us into yoga and put it back in the front pocket. When we left class, it was gone. And then it just showed up Friday morning outside.”

“What’s Janelle’s last name?”

“Franklin,” Stevie said.

The detective wrote this in her notebook.

“Thanks, Stevie,” she said, dismissing her. “Why don’t you head back to your house?”

There were two people from security in the main hall talking to police. Neither seemed to pay any attention to Stevie when she came out of the Ellingham office. Up on the landing, she saw Charles deep in conversation with Dr. Quinn and a few other faculty members. Stevie walked outside unaccompanied.

Outside, a cloud cover had come by fast. The campus was disturbingly quiet, as everyone was largely in their houses. There were many things to worry about at the moment, many things to feel and fear. But the thing that was currently at the forefront of Stevie’s mind was fog. Why ask about the fog, of all things? Who the hell cared about the fog? There had to be a reason. She asked twice.

Stevie combed through anything she knew about the fog machines. They were rentals. They spat out fake fog. They stank, kind of.

There was a little echo in the back of her mind. Fog. It had come up in another context. Fog . . .

Dry ice. She had just been around dry ice. It was in the workshop, when Janelle and Dash got into it about the poles, and Dash looked into the container with the dry ice and said that the fog machines were easier to work with.

Stevie stopped halfway back to Minerva and pulled out her phone and Googled dry ice, paging through the various search results until she landed on one that also contained the words safety hazard.

Dry ice is solidified carbon dioxide . . . not normally dangerous but caution should be used in handling . . . sublimates into carbon dioxide . . . must be used in ventilated spaces or else there is danger of hypercapnia, as carbon dioxide displaces oxygen, especially in low-lying structures such as basements, due to its weight. This can lead to unconsciousness and death, which can be rapid. . . .

Stevie swallowed hard.

The dry ice was in the workshop. Janelle’s pass was taken. Janelle’s pass opened the workshop.

She was supposed to go home. She’d already broken enough rules.

She should go back to Minerva.

So why was she turning away from Minerva and heading back toward the workshop area? Her pass wouldn’t let her in. What did she even think she would find? Her every instinct pressed her on, though.