“Stephanie?” the woman asked.

“Stevie,” she corrected again.

“Dr. Nell Pixwell,” the woman said, extending a hand to each member of the family. “Call me Pix. I’m the Minerva faculty housemaster.”

Stevie chanced a better look at the tiny objects by the tackle box. On closer examination, Stevie realized that these weren’t crafting supplies—they were teeth. Lots and lots of loose teeth. Here. On the table. Whether they were real or fake, Stevie didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure it mattered. A table full of teeth is a table full of teeth.

“Did you have a good drive?” Pix asked, quickly sorting the remaining teeth into compartments.

(Plink, said a tooth, hitting the plastic. Plink.)

“Sorry, I was just sorting a few things out. You’re definitely the earliest . . .”

(Plink, said a molar.)

“Can I get anyone a coffee?”

The group was herded into the tiny house kitchen, where cups of coffee were distributed and Pix could explain the eating situation to Stevie’s parents. Breakfasts were provided in-house and all other meals were in the dining hall. Students could come in and make food whenever they wanted, and there was an online grocery-ordering system. As they came back into the common room, Stevie’s mother decided to address the obvious.

“Are those teeth?” she asked.

“Yes,” Pix said.

No other answer was immediately forthcoming, so Stevie jumped in.

“Dr. Pixwell is a specialist in bioarchaeology,” she said. “She works on archaeological digs in Egypt.”

“That’s right,” Pix said. “You read my faculty bio?”

“No,” Stevie said. “The teeth, your shirt, you’ve got an Eye of Horus tattooed on your wrist, the chamomile tea in the kitchen has packaging written in Arabic, and you have a tan line on your forehead from a head covering. Just a guess.”

“That’s extremely impressive,” Pix said, nodding. Everyone was quiet for a moment. A fly buzzed around Stevie’s head.

“Stevie thinks she’s Sherlock Holmes,” her father said. He liked to make these kinds of remarks that sounded like jokes, and may have been well-intentioned on some level, but always had a hint of shade.

“Who doesn’t want to be Sherlock Holmes?” Pix said, meeting his eye and smiling. “I read more Agatha Christie when I was younger, because she wrote about archaeology a lot. But everyone loves Sherlock. Let me show you around. . . .”

In that moment, with that one remark, Pix won Stevie’s everlasting loyalty.

The six student rooms of Minerva House were all located on a single hallway to the left side of the common room: three rooms downstairs, three up. There was a group bathroom on the first floor with tiles that had to be original, because no one would make anything that color anymore. If that shade required a name, Stevie would have to go with “queasy salmon.”

At the end of the hall was the turret with a large door.

“This is a bit special,” Pix said, opening it. “Minerva was used for the Ellinghams’ guests before the school was open, so it has some features you don’t find in the other dorms. . . .”

She opened the door and revealed a magnificent round room, a bathroom, with a high ceiling. The floor was tiled in a pearly silver-gray. A large claw-foot tub took center stage. There were long stained-glass windows depicting stylized flowers and vines that bathed the room in rainbows.

“This room is popular during exams,” Pix said. “People like to study in the tub, especially when it’s cold. It doesn’t get a lot of use otherwise because there is a bit of a spider issue. Now let’s show you your room.”

Stevie decided to ignore what she just heard about spiders and moved on to her room, Minerva Two. Minerva Two smelled like it had been slowly baking for a few months, thick with the scents of closed space, new paint, and furniture polish. One of the two sash windows facing the front had been opened to try to air it, but the breeze was being lazy. Two flies had come in and were dancing around near the high ceiling. The walls were a soft cream color; a black fireplace stood out in stark contrast.

As they moved Stevie’s things in, there was talk about where the bed should go, and could people get in that window, and what time was curfew? Pix handled these questions easily (the windows could be opened from the top and all had good locks, and curfew was ten on weeknights and eleven on weekends, all monitored electronically through student IDs and by Pix in person).

Her mother was about to unpack Stevie’s bags herself when Pix intervened and dragged them off on a personal tour of the campus, leaving Stevie with a moment of stillness. The birds chirped outside and the breeze carried a few faraway voices. Minerva Two made a gentle creak as Stevie walked across its floor. She ran her hand along the walls, feeling their strange texture—they were thick with years of paint, one coat on top of another, covering up the previous inhabitant’s marks. Stevie had recently seen a true-crime documentary on how layers of paint could be peeled back, revealing writing that had been hidden for decades. Since then, she had desperately wanted to steam and peel a wall, just to see if anything was there.

These walls probably had stories.

April 13, 1936, 6:45 p.m.

THE FOG HAD COME ON QUICKLY THAT DAY—THE MORNING HAD BLOSSOMED bright and clear, but just after four, a curtain of blue-gray smoke fell over the land. That was the thing so many people would remark about later, the fog. By twilight, everything was wrapped in a pearly dark and it was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead. The Rolls-Royce Phantom moved through this fog slowly, up the treacherous drive to the Ellingham estate. It pulled halfway up the circular drive in front of the Great House. The car always stopped halfway. Albert Ellingham liked to walk the drive when he got out of the car to survey his mountain kingdom. He stepped out of the back door before the car fully came to a rest. His secretary, Robert Mackenzie, waited the extra few seconds to make his exit.

“You need to go to Philadelphia,” Robert said to the back of his employer.

“No one needs to go to Philadelphia, Robert.”

“You need to go to Philadelphia. We should also spend at least two days at the New York office.”

The last busload of men working on the final stages of construction pulled past them, heading back to Burlington and the various small towns along the way. It slowed so the passengers could raise their hands to their employer in greeting as they left.

“Good job today!” Albert Ellingham called to them. “See you fellows tomorrow!”

The butler opened the door on their approach, and the two men entered the magnificent entry hall of the house. Every time he entered, Ellingham was pleased with the effect of the place, the way light played around the space, bouncing from every bit of crystal, tinted by a well-spent fortune’s worth of Scottish stained glass.

“Evening, Montgomery,” said Ellingham. His booming voice echoed through the open atrium.

“Good evening, sir,” said the butler, accepting the hats and coats. “Good evening, Mr. Mackenzie. I hope your trip was not too arduous in this fog.”

“Took us forever,” Ellingham said. “Robert was bending my ear about meetings the entire way.”