“So what are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying someone did it on purpose? That someone murdered Hayes?”

The words were surreal said out loud. Hayes. Murdered.

“No,” she said, staggered by the idea. “No . . . like, an accident. Some kind of plan to screw up the filming.”

Now that the word had been introduced, it bounced around the hallways in Stevie’s head. Murder requires motive, and there was plenty of motive. For a start, all the people Hayes was dating and screwing over and using, the fact that he didn’t write his show, but he was about to get credit for it and make a whole lot of money. That was all very solid motive.

Murder? Was that what she really thought this was? Was this the reason she felt so restless?

“You know what’s weird?” David said as Stevie was lost in thought. “What’s weird is making a hobby out of the death of your classmate. You know what’s also weird? Going through people’s rooms, including the room of your dead classmate. Because you seem crazy.”

People might be dismissive of someone obsessed with mystery stories, as if the line between fiction and reality was so distinct. They didn’t know, perhaps, that Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, Dr. Joseph Bell, and that the methods Arthur Conan Doyle created for his fictional detective inspired generations of real-world detectives. Did they know that Arthur Conan Doyle went on to investigate mysteries in his real life and even absolved a man of a crime for which he had been convicted? Did they know how Agatha Christie brilliantly staged her own disappearance in order to exact an elegant revenge on a cheating husband?

They probably did not.

And no one was going to discount Stevie Bell, who had gotten into this school on the wings of her interest in the Ellingham case, and who had been a bystander at a death that was now looking more and more suspicious.

She was not crazy. And Hayes’s key was in her pocket and Pix was on her way back.

Stevie turned away and left David’s room without saying anything else. Because she was also not going to let him see her cry.

* * *

THE BATT REPORT

Internet Star Dies in School Accident

Hayes Major, star of the summer’s viral internet sensation The End of It All, died on Saturday night. Major, a student at the Ellingham Academy, was filming a video about the Ellingham kidnapping and murder case. He was found unresponsive in a disused tunnel that had recently been unearthed. The cause of his death was not immediately evident, but sources close to The Batt Report say that he died of asphyxia in what was likely an accident. Police have determined that Major removed a quantity of dry ice from the school’s workshop and maintenance area using a pass stolen from another student, most likely to produce a fog effect for the video. Left overnight, the dry ice melted in the contained underground space, filling the room with a lethal level of carbon dioxide.

The head of Ellingham Academy, Dr. Charles Scott, released a statement on Tuesday morning: “All of us at Ellingham Academy are heartbroken by the loss of Hayes Major, a promising actor and creator, and a beloved friend. Our hearts go out to his family, his friends, and his many fans. His loss is profound.”

* * *

26

“MY NAME IS LOGAN BANFIELD,” HAYES SAID. “AND I DON’T KNOW where I am. I don’t know if anyone can hear me. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if I’m alone. I don’t even know if I’m dead or alive.”

Stevie sat cross-legged on the floor of the Great House attic watching The End of It All and counting doorknobs. Two days had passed since Hayes’s things had gone away, since she had confronted David. For those two days, she was supposed to have resumed working, resumed studying. The pile of books next to her bed didn’t read themselves, and the essay she was supposed to hand in tomorrow remained unwritten, despite the number of times she opened up her computer and stared blankly at the screen before watching The End of It All again.

Each episode of The End of It All was about ten minutes in length. She started from the beginning, from the very first moments when Hayes’s character woke up, confused as to what was happening. All of it was filmed in the same location, some kind of bunker, except for the very last minutes. A lot of the show was rambling, reacting, listening. In some episodes, Logan got memories back of the zombie attack. In others, he found communications from possible survivors. It was all standard zombie apocalypse stuff. What made it popular, Stevie guessed, was just that Hayes was so intense. And good-looking. He was a good-looking guy hiding from zombies and slowly losing his grip on reality. In the last episode, Logan left his bunker. Was he being saved, or was he giving up?

Over and over she watched. And now she watched from row 39 of the Great House attic, which contained small household items, antiquated light fittings, boxes of hammers, cans of screws. And these doorknobs. This house had a lot of spare doorknobs.

Just a girl and her doorknobs and zombies.

Stevie had spent most of these last two days tuning out everything to the exclusion of these things. And now, as evening came and her stomach rumbled, she pulled out her earbuds. She couldn’t watch it again.

She got up and looked through the box of Albert Ellingham’s desk contents again, until she got to the Western Union slip with the last riddle.

Where do you look for someone who’s never really there?

Always on a staircase but never on a stair

She leaned against the metal racks for a moment and stared at the slip under the green fluorescent glow. Someone who’s never really there was sort of how Gretchen had described Hayes. There was no there there.

Always on a staircase but never on a stair could mean a lot of things. A rail. Something on the wall. The cracks between the stairs.

Albert Ellingham wasn’t coming back to tell her the answer to this riddle.

That musk of aged things was present, but the atmosphere had climate and humidity control, so instead of being stale and hard, there was a sweetness to the attic. The rich even decayed well.

Stevie set the little slip of paper on the ground and looked up at the shelves around her.

What the hell did it all mean? So what if he didn’t write it? What the hell was she doing, avoiding work and people and life to sit in an attic, staring at Hayes, counting dates and sorting doorknobs? She could work on that essay that was due, oh, tomorrow. She could . . .

What? Try to talk to David again? That had gone well.

She put the doorknobs back in their box. As she pushed the box back into position, she scraped her hand on the shelf above it. A thin trickle of blood came from the cut.

“You’re an idiot,” she said to herself. Once finished, she trudged down the steps of the Great House, her backpack hanging low. Larry sat at his station by the door, carefully going through something in a binder. She was going to walk right past without saying anything, but as she made the door, he called out to her.

“Not even a hello?” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was distracted.”

“I see that. About what?”

She shook her head. He tipped back his chair and considered her for a moment.

“How’s it been going?” he asked.

“It’s going,” she said.

“You don’t seem too enthused.”