“Until midnight or something,” he said. “But I did lie to you. We weren’t smoking a bowl. We were just talking.”

“So you added that . . .”

“Just for fun,” David said.

The helicopter was now visible, circling back over the woods.

“I still can’t believe this,” he said. “Ellie’s not malicious. I get that something is happening here I don’t understand, but she’s not . . . she doesn’t hurt people. Not on purpose, anyway. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know anything.”

“Do you have any idea what she was saying at the end?” she asked. “About how Hayes knew things? When she kept saying this whole place and Hayes’s idea?”

“No clue.”

Stevie rubbed the grass between her fingers until she stained her fingertips green. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep. She’d put it together. Ellie had admitted to writing the show. Ellie had bolted. Why run if you haven’t done anything?

She thought of Hercule Poirot, and how he would hesitate when he lined up the facts and found that something did not tally. He always talked about the psychology of the crime. Things here were not clean. They were not clear.

Just like Vorachek. He had had the money in his possession. Vorachek even admitted to the crime. But there was no way it was Vorachek.

Two police officers came out of the trees from the direction of Minerva. One carried a box.

“It looks like they’ve gone through her stuff,” David said. “I guess we can go back.”

The both got up, stiff and tired, with wet-grass impressions on the backs of their clothes.

Minerva was silently creaky in the morning, filled with pale light and cool ghosts of old smoke. The moose had a more genial expression, and even the red wallpaper looked a bit less aggressive. The house felt hollow. It was empty of people at the moment, and at least two people were never coming back. Maybe no one was coming back.

Down the hall, Ellie’s door hung a bit open. Stevie stood there for a moment, looking in through the space. David was close behind her. She could feel the heat coming off his body.

“You’re going in, right?” he said. “That’s your thing.”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m not arguing this time,” he said, reaching over and pushing the door open wider.

The scene of their game hours before had been much disturbed. The police had pulled Ellie’s bed away from the wall and left it slightly crooked toward the middle of the room. The covers had been pulled straight. Books were tipped down or taken from the shelves and stacked in neat piles. The drawers were all closed, which meant they’d gone through them all—last night most of Ellie’s drawers were cocked or ajar with something sticking out of them.

“It actually looks cleaner in here after the cops went through it,” David said.

He poked around the edge of the bed before sitting down. Stevie looked over at him. In the morning light, his face looked gentle. There was something a little—angelic about David. His large eyes and the light curl to his hair.

She remembered her mother commenting on the way in to the property that the statues were strange angels, and she had said no, those are sphinxes. Angels or sphinxes?

She really needed sleep.

She sat next to David on the bed and stared at Ellie’s things. Her canvas backpack. The pile of dirty clothes in the corner. The scatter of pens on the floor. The little phrases she’d written on the walls. There was a framed picture next to her bed, one with dozens of people in it. That had to be the commune she had spoken of. Roota leaned against Ellie’s bureau, glinting in the sun and looking lonely.

“I’m sorry,” Stevie said, sort of to Roota and mostly to David.

“Sorry?”

“About going through your stuff. I’ve felt bad since the second I did it. I just . . . I don’t know. I just wanted to know. About you. And you were being weird . . .”

“This is a great apology.”

“Fine.” She started again. “I was wrong.”

The helicopter sounded like it was hanging overhead, beating the air. Ellingham would wake up and Ellie would be gone and there would be chaos again.

“Yeah,” he said after a long moment.

“Yeah?”

He shrugged.

“If this whole place closes down, I guess we shouldn’t be mad at each other.”

“Probably not,” she said.

The silence was long. Then David picked up her hand and, with one finger, he traced a small circle in her palm. Stevie was almost staggered by the flood of feeling. Could you kiss in the cool light of morning, when everything was visible? On the bed of your vanished classmate? Who probably killed someone?

He was leaning in a little, and in response, she leaned back just a bit. As she did so, her hand landed on something hard hiding in the bedding.

She pushed the quilt aside and revealed a small box. It was red metal, about eight by eight inches, with rounded corners. Age had taken a bit of a toll on it—it was dented and rusted, but still the artwork was fairly clear. It was marked OLD ENGLISH TEA BAGS and had a picture of a steaming cup of tea on the front. Some weird old junk.

There was something thrumming now.

Really thrumming.

Actually, that was the helicopter hovering very, very low. It was now impossible to ignore. David squinted at the window, then released Stevie’s hand and got up to have a look.

Stevie took a deep breath and steadied herself. She examined the strange box, prying off the lid and pouring the contents onto the bed. There was what looked like the remains of a white feather, a torn piece of cloth with some beading on it, a gold lipstick tube. There was a square rhinestone clip and a miniature red enameled shoe that turned out to be a very tiny pillbox. Stevie opened and closed this a few times, peering into the dulled bronze interior.

“This is weird,” she said. “Come look at this.”

“Hang on,” he said.

Stevie continued looking. Pressed on one side of the box was a piece of lined, folded paper and a dozen or so old black-and-white photographs, rough and unevenly sized. Stevie looked at the paper first. It was fragile along the sharp lines of the folds, but only a bit yellowed. Written in a neat but loose handwriting was the following:

The Ballad of Frankie and Edward

April 2, 1936

Frankie and Edward had the silver

Frankie and Edward had the gold

But both saw the game for what it was

And both wanted the truth to be told

Frankie and Edward bowed to no king

They lived for art and love

They unseated the man who ruled over the land

They took

The king was a joker who lived on a hill

And he wanted to rule the game

So Frankie and Edward played a hand

And things were never the same

The photographs pictured two teenagers, one male and one female, in a variety of poses that were both familiar to Stevie and utterly baffling at the same time. The guy wore a suit and hat with a loosened tie. The girl, a tight sweater and skirt set with a cocked beret. They posed in front of a car in one photo. In another, the girl had a cigar. In another, they were face-to-face, the girl holding the guy back at arm’s length. Stevie flipped the photos over. On the back of one was written 11/4/35.

Stevie stared at the photos for a long moment before it clicked. These people were posing like Bonnie and Clyde, the famous 1930s outlaw couple. They were cosplaying.