“OH MY GOD,” STEVIE SAID, LETTING OUT A LONG BREATH. “WAS that enough time? Because I was running out of stuff to say.”
“More than enough,” Larry replied.
“That was exhausting,” she said, leaning against the mantel. “Seriously. They make it seem so easy in novels, but you have to keep talking and talking . . .”
“Can I ask what you’re doing here?” Charles said as a greeting to the former head of security. “You’re no longer employed by this school.”
“I’m well aware,” Larry replied. “However, I’ve rejoined the local police department on a temporary basis. I’m up here officially, doing a welfare check on everyone. I started making plans to get here as soon as I heard the school was closing and a few idiots decided to stick around and wait out the blizzard. I definitely knew who one of those idiots would be. So I hitched a ride on an emergency vehicle with a plow, then hiked up from the road. Took me almost two days. Then that idiot emailed me to say what she was going to do, and that she’d left me a wall scanner and some very interesting instructions. It’s a good thing I trust you.”
Stevie looked down to keep herself from smiling.
“I’ve done most of the second-floor offices,” Larry said. “Dr. Scott’s office is the last room left to do.”
“I object to an illegal police search of Ellingham property—” Charles said.
“Larry,” Dr. Quinn cut in, “I authorize anything you’re doing.”
Charles spun around and faced Jenny Quinn, who seemed to rise out of the floor a bit.
“Jenny,” he said, “this goes against—”
“My authority is equal to yours,” she said simply. “And I am telling Larry he should do as he feels best.”
Her words were a wall that could not be scaled.
“Fine,” he said. “Go and look in my office if you want. But I would like to be there.”
“We’ll all go!” David said chirpily. Larry opened his mouth to object, but David was already out the door. Once David had gone, it seemed inevitable that the entire company would be coming along. Larry was not in a position to stop anyone.
The group made their way up the wide, sweeping stairs. Stevie paused a moment on the landing to acknowledge the Ellinghams. They made their way along the balcony, and through the door with the posters that had asked, so clearly, for someone to come in and issue a challenge.
Larry had emptied the bookcases and pulled them away from the walls. All of Dr. Scott’s books and pictures were piled in the center of the room.
“You’re going to put my office back together,” Charles said to Larry.
“I’ll get right on it,” Larry said. “Everyone sit down and make space. Any place you want me to start in particular?” Larry asked Stevie.
Stevie shook her head. She was running on instinct at this point. If Charles had opened the trunk that day and seen Alice inside, he would have had to figure out what to do with her fairly quickly. It was most likely that he would have had to hide her in the building. He would have had months to relocate her, and Ellingham was full of places where she could be hidden, but if you had a body that was worth seventy million dollars, you’d probably want to make sure no one else found it by accident. That meant keeping it close, in a place you controlled.
Larry began on the window wall, moving section by section. From there, he did the other wall that faced the outside. Then the third wall. The atmosphere in the room thickened, and Stevie tried not to notice anyone giving her concerned side eye. Larry moved to the last wall, working around the mantel. It seemed like he was about to finish when he stopped down by the floor, in the corner.
“Something over here,” he said. “It’s small, maybe a foot and a half square.” He stood and examined the wall up close. “There are some cuts in the wallpaper here,” he said. He knocked on the wall. There was a hollow noise. He knocked around the space, making an outline that was about four feet by four feet, about three feet off the floor.
“That could be where the jewelry safe was,” Stevie said. “This was Iris Ellingham’s dressing room. After the Ellinghams died, the safe was taken out and it was donated to the Smithsonian with all the contents. I’ve seen the pictures. It’s about that big.”
Larry pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and used it to gently work along the edges of the space. “We’re going to have to take a look behind this wall,” he said. “We’ll need some tools. We’ll have to wait . . .”
“You’re not putting a hole in my wall. You have no . . .”
Without a word, Janelle stepped forward, tapped the wall, then, with one seamless movement, drew her arm back like a bow and struck the wall once with the heel of her hand. It cracked loudly. She wiggled her fingers and returned to the loveseat, where Vi put a proud arm over her shoulders.
“Holy shit,” David said quietly.
“Force equals mass times acceleration,” Janelle said, checking her nail polish. “Or, more importantly, force times time equals mass times the difference in velocity over that time. Basic board-breaking physics. Takes about eleven hundred newtons. It’s more intention than strength.”
Charles openly gaped at this. He may have anticipated many things, but Janelle Franklin bashing in his office walls with her bare hands was probably not one of them.
“I love you,” Vi said.
Janelle grinned in a way that suggested this was not the first time she had heard those words.
“I gotta learn physics,” Stevie mumbled to herself.
“All right,” Larry said, pushing past this romantic interlude. He pulled his flashlight from a clip on his belt and stuck it into the hole. The sound of the clock drowned out everything else in the room. Stevie heard the hollow, heavy sound of her heart, thudding away in her chest. She couldn’t bear watching Larry staring into the void, so she looked at the clock instead, the one that had held the codicil, the one that had survived revolutions and beheadings.
What if she was wrong?
The idea was funny. She almost laughed. She was dizzy. The room seemed to go gray and white and spin a bit. Charles had the calm expression of someone watching something happening in the far distance—a storm, maybe an accident. Something that could not be helped. Germaine, she noted, was trying to video the whole scene without being noticed.
“I need gloves,” Larry said.
Stevie bolted upright like someone had yanked on her spine from above.
“Gloves,” she said, pulling a handful of nitrile gloves from the front of her backpack.
“Why do you have nitrile gloves?” Janelle asked.
“Same reason you know how to break a wall,” Stevie replied.
Janelle smiled with pride.
Larry put on the gloves and resumed work with the knife, picking at the cracked bit of wall until he had a large enough space to get his hand through. He reached in farther to get hold of a bit of the wall and pulled back hard, making a larger flap. He shone in his light once again, then shut it off and stepped in front of the opening.
“I need this room cleared,” he said.
“I’m not going to be tossed out of my own office,” Charles said. His face had lost some of its color.
“This is not your office,” Larry said simply. “This is a potential crime scene. You will go next door and wait in the Peacock Room, and Mark and Dr. Pixwell will wait with you. Dr. Quinn, if you wouldn’t mind taking the students downstairs?”
“I would not mind,” she said.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Charles said, but some of the conviction was draining from his voice. The Funko Pop! figurines on the windowsill seemed to make a mockery of him. When Pix and Mark stood up to him, he followed them without another word.
Stevie got up in a haze to follow everyone else out.
“Where are you going?” Larry asked.
“You said everyone go downstairs.”
“I didn’t mean you,” Larry said. “Shut the door.”
Stevie shut the door with a trembling hand.
“Do you want to see?” Larry said soberly.
“What . . . what’s in there?”
The words came out dry. After all of that—all she had done—she was out of wind. Out of air. She knew what was in there—who—but the words were too much to say. The concept was too large.
“It’s not easy to look at, but you have seen a lot.”
She had no choice.
The space between Stevie and the wall was only a few feet, but it seemed to expand to the size of a grand, mad ballroom. She stepped up to the dark opening and accepted the flashlight from Larry, as well as the hand on her shoulder.
At first, Stevie thought she was looking at a large gray bag, rough, frayed with age and exposure. But as the light worked the edges and her mind and eyes adjusted, she could see the shape of a hand. A head. There was a shoe.
It was too small a space, Stevie thought.
“We need to get her out,” she said.
“We will. We need to wait for the crime scene unit. We can’t go in without them.”
Stevie nodded numbly and turned back to the figure in the wall.
“Hello, Alice,” Stevie said. “It’s okay. It’s over.”