She leaned back and her hand struck something hard. She reached into the sheets and pulled out his laptop.

His laptop, just sitting there.

She looked it over for a moment. No stickers, no markings. She put her hands on the edge of the computer.

To open or . . .

The thing about looking just a little bit means it’s really easy to look a little bit more. Once you’ve touched it, well, you’ve touched it, and if you have the computer in your lap and you open it and a screen comes up, there you are.

Maybe this was what Pandora felt like when she got her famous box. Open it and the light pours out . . .

“What the hell are you doing?”

Everything stopped for a moment. How he had come upstairs without her hearing him was unknown. She must have been too into what she was doing—of course, what she was doing was going through his computer.

Answering his question would have been self-incriminating, so Stevie sat there, still and silent. Still things can sometimes appear invisible.

“What,” David said again, “are you doing?”

“I was just . . .”

He came over and put his hands out for the computer. She passed it over.

“I . . . didn’t even look.”

“It seems like you did,” he said.

Well, yeah. It did. He was right. Stevie felt her defenses snap back into place.

“What’s the big secret?” she snapped back. “You’ve met my family. You just got in the car and came along. You’ve had a look at me.”

“And you wanted a look,” he said. “Did it ever occur to you there’s a reason I don’t want to talk about my family?”

“We all have reasons,” she said. “You’re not special in having a weird time with your parents.”

“My parents are dead,” he said. “Does that count as special?”

One time, when she was little, Stevie was outside playing on a cold day. She caught some speed on a patch of ice and went, full speed, into a wall. As her abdomen made contact, she remembered the feeling of all the air being violently forced out of her body, scraping her throat as it exited.

It sort of felt like that now. The angles had come back into David’s features, and something else.

Hurt.

“Just get out,” he said.

“I . . .”

“Get out,” he said quietly.

* * *

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

INTERVIEW BETWEEN AGENT SAMUEL ARNOLD AND ROBERT MACKENZIE

APRIL 17, 1936, 7:10 P.M.

LOCATION: ELLINGHAM PROPERTY

SA: Just a few more questions, Mr. Mackenzie. We have to go through these things several times.

RM: I understand.

SA: When did you start working for Albert Ellingham?

RM: When I left Princeton, eight years ago.

SA: And you are his personal assistant in business matters?

RM: Correct. I am his personal business secretary.

SA: So you see quite a number of Mr. Ellingham’s transactions.

RM: I see nearly all of them, if not all.

SA: Do you find it odd, running the business from up here in this mountain location?

RM: I don’t think any of us expected to be here this long.

SA: What do you mean?

RM: The school was just another project. Mr. Ellingham has a lot of projects. It seemed like he was planning for this to be a retreat, maybe to be used a few weeks in the summer. But he’s been here since September. We all seemed to be waiting for him to say, “All right! Back to New York.” But it never happened. We were here all winter. Do you have any idea what winters are like up here?

SA: Cold, I’d imagine.

RM: Half the time you can’t leave the house for all the snow. The locals don’t seem to mind, but everyone else had wild cabin fever. Mrs. Ellingham . . .

[Pause.]

SA: What about her?

RM: Mrs. Ellingham is lively. She likes society and athletics. She did some skiing, but that wasn’t enough. You could see it wearing on her.

SA: Did this cause friction between Mr. and Mrs. Ellingham?

[Silence.]

SA: I know you feel a sense of loyalty, but there are things we have to know.

RM: I realize that. Yes, maybe a bit. They are very different people. A loving couple, of course, but very different people. I think being up here has been hard on her at times. She has Miss Robinson to keep her company. That seems to help.

SA: They’re close?

RM: Like sisters.

SA: And what is Mr. Nair like?

RM: Mr. Nair is a brilliant artist and an inebriate.

SA: A frequent drinker?

RM: Often and in high quantities. I once watched him drink an entire case of champagne by himself. I was surprised he didn’t die.

SA: Is he aggressive in that condition?

RM: On the contrary, he usually just paints or talks and eventually we find him somewhere on the grounds, asleep. The students once pulled him out of the fountain. If you’re asking if he’s capable of arranging a kidnapping, I don’t think Leonard Holmes Nair is capable of arranging breakfast. This was organized.

SA: You’re an organized man.

RM: Which is why I know organization when I see it. I’m professionally dull, Agent Arnold. It’s why I was hired. I’m a foil to Mr. Ellingham’s exuberance.

SA: It sounds like you’re sensible. On the night of the thirteenth, you advocated calling the police.

RM: And I regret I didn’t do it, even though I was told not to.

SA: You obeyed orders.

RM: I obeyed orders.

SA: Can you tell me about the letter that was received on April eighth, the Truly Devious letter? What did you make of it?

RM: We get, on average, two or three threats a day in with the regular correspondence. The vast majority of it is nonsense and a lot of it from the same people. At first, this one struck me as a bit of a joke.

SA: Why a joke?

RM: The cutout letters. The poem. But then I noticed a few things. I noticed it was postmarked from Burlington. And then I noticed the address. You see, Mr. Ellingham has business correspondence from all around the country. As I’m sure you can imagine, mail delivery here is difficult. So we have all business correspondence directed to an office in Burlington, and we have it delivered by car every day, weather providing. If the weather is too bad, we have a secretary there who can read it to me over the telephone. What was unusual was that the letter didn’t come to any of the business addresses—that’s where most of the abusive mail goes to. It was addressed here, to this house. This one seemed much more personal.

SA: But you didn’t show it to George Marsh.

RM: I was going to. But there was a great deal going on over the weekend. I was going to show him the next time he came by.

SA: So there was a party over the weekend?

RM: For Maxine Melville, yes.

SA: Did you attend?

RM: Only in the sense that I was in the house. I was very busy finalizing the paperwork on an important deal Mr. Ellingham has been working on. He’s purchasing a newspaper in Philadelphia.

SA: Was there anything out of the ordinary about the weekend or Monday morning?

RM: Absolutely nothing. We went to Burlington on Monday morning to do some business and send some cables. We came back in the evening.

SA: Let’s talk about this house and the school. Did you feel this location was insecure?