THE BURLINGTON ART COLLECTIVE ACTION HOUSE WAS A TEN-minute walk from the coffee house on Church Street, or a seven-minute race-walk with a giant bag of coats and boots. Stevie was very careful not to check the time, because it would inevitably be too short. She had no clearly articulated reason for going, except that something needed to be done, so the fewer impediments (like practicality and basic self-preservation) the better.
She didn’t have to check the house number to know she had arrived in the right place. The Art Collective was in the same general area as Fenton’s house—a neighborhood of large Victorians in various states of repair, some owned by the college, some turned into apartments. While the basic size, shape, and style of the Art Collective house matched that of its neighbors, everything else singled it out. The house was painted in a deep, somewhat dirty lilac, with a sunbeam of purples on the gabled roof. The front porch sagged. A dozen or more mobiles hung from the porch roof beams; these were made of tin cans, broken bits of glass and pottery, rusty cogs and machine parts, and, in one case, rocks. There was a macramé plant hanger that suspended a mannequin head, which spun gently in the wind. The leg part of the mannequin stood alone in the far corner of the porch and was used to support an ashtray. A wooden box by the door contained a snow shovel and cat litter.
Stevie pulled back the screen and knocked on the inner door, which was painted wine red. A shirtless guy in a pair of patchwork pants and a massive knit hat opened it.
“Hi,” Stevie said, almost blanking for a moment as she realized that she had come to a very strange house to talk to strange strangers about something she had not clearly defined in her mind. Having no prepared statement, she held up the flyer and pointed at Ellie in the photo.
“Ellie was a friend of mine, and I think she came here. . . .”
The guy said nothing.
“I was wondering if . . . I . . . I just wanted to find out . . .”
He stepped back and held open the door for her to come inside.
The Burlington Art Collective Action House was a big place. One wall was full of bookshelves from floor to ceiling, packed solid with books. There was a small stage in the back, with an old piano and a pile of other instruments. In every direction, there was stuff. There were feather boas and top hats, half-formed pieces of pottery, drums, yoga mats, art books, a stray flute sitting in an empty fish tank . . . Off to the side, there was a mattress on the floor with loose bedding; someone called this living area their bedroom. The second floor was open, with a large balcony sealed off with a white wrought-iron rail, from which several painted sheets were hung. The smell of sage lorded over the space.
Also, there was a tree in the house. It didn’t seem to be a live tree—rather one that had been cut down and somehow brought into the house whole. It dominated one corner of the first floor and stretched up over the second floor. Stevie had no question in her mind that these were Ellie’s friends. This was what the inside of Ellie’s head must have been like.
“So, I . . .”
The guy pointed at the second-floor loft. Stevie cocked her head in confusion.
“Should I . . .”
He pointed again.
“Up there?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Go? I should go up there?”
He nodded again and pointed toward a small spiral staircase in the back of the room, then he walked over to one of the walls and went into a headstand. As Stevie climbed the stairs, she noticed there were paper tags hanging from the tree branches with words on them, things like, “Think the sky,” and “This isn’t the time; this is the time.” Upstairs, sitting on a pile of cushions, was a girl. For one moment, Stevie almost mistook her for Ellie. Her hair was in small, matted bunches. She wore a stretched-out T-shirt that read Withnail and I and a faded pair of Mickey Mouse leggings. At Stevie’s approach, she looked up from her laptop and pushed her headphones off her ears.
“Hey,” Stevie said. “Sorry.”
“Never say sorry as a greeting,” the girl replied.
This was a good point.
“The guy downstairs let me in. He said to come up. Or, he pointed . . .”
“Paul’s in a silent phase,” the girl said, as if this explained everything.
“Oh. I’m Stevie. I am . . . was . . . a friend of Ellie’s. . . .”
Stevie barely had the words out when the girl sprang from the floor and wrapped her in an embrace. The girl smelled of a sweet mix of body odor and incense. Her body was taut from what was probably daily, intensive yoga. It was like being wrapped in a warm, stinky garden hose.
“You came to us! You came! She’d be so happy! You came!”
Stevie had not known what kind of reception she would get in the Art Collective, but this was not on the list of possibles.
“I’m Bath,” the girl said, stepping back.
“Bath?”
“Bathsheba. Everyone calls me Bath. Sit. Sit!”
This was weird, because when Stevie first met Ellie, Ellie got into the bath with all her clothes on to dye her outfit pink, probably for this very cabaret. The word bath would always remind Stevie of Ellie.
Bath pointed at another pile of cushions on the floor. They looked faded and stained and vaguely bedbuggy, but Stevie sat down anyway. Once on the floor she noticed that almost one entire wall of the upstairs was lined with empty French wine bottles with melted candles in them.
“From Ellie,” Bathsheba said, sitting cross-legged on the bare floor. “Of course. French wine. French poetry. German theater. That was my girl.”
With these words, Bath broke into tears. Stevie shifted on the cushions and fussed with the bag for a moment.
“I’m glad you came,” Bath said as she sniffed and calmed down. “She liked you. She told me all about you. You’re the detective.”
This made something catch in Stevie’s throat. Right from the start, Ellie had taken Stevie seriously when she said she was a detective. Ellie seemed to have so much confidence in Stevie that Stevie had more confidence in herself. Ellie had taken her in, made friends with her from the start, much like Bathsheba was doing now. Now that Stevie was looking at Bathsheba, it occurred to her that Ellie may have copied her look a bit, as well as some of her behaviors.
“How did Ellie end up here?” Stevie asked. “This is part of the university, right?”
“Not part of,” Bath said. “Most of us who live here go there. The house is owned by a patron who wants to support local arts. It’s an open place for artists. Ellie found us the week after she got to Ellingham. She showed up at the door and said, ‘I make art. Are you going to let me in?’ And we did, of course.”
“I’m here because I’m trying to figure out . . .” Such a rookie mistake. Always have your questions ready. Then again, as a detective, you might not always know who you were going to end up talking to. So talk, she thought. Get talking and the rest will come. “. . . about Ellie. About what she was like, and . . .”
“She was real,” Bath said. “She was Dada. She was spontaneous. She was fun.”
“Did Ellie talk to you about Hayes?” Stevie asked.
“No,” Bath said, rubbing her eyes. “Hayes is the guy who died, right? That was his name?”
Stevie nodded.
“No. She said she knew him, but that was it. And that she was sad.”
“Did she ever mention helping him make a show?”
“She helped make a show? Like a cabaret piece? Hey, did you ever see our cabaret?”
“No, I—”
Bath was already on her laptop and pulling up a video.
“You need to see this,” she said. “You’ll love it. It’s one of Ellie’s best performances.”
Stevie dutifully watched ten minutes of dark, confusing footage of tuneless saxophone, poetry, handstands, and drumming. Ellie was in there, but it was too dark to really see her.
“So yeah,” Bath said as the video ended. “Ellie. I haven’t been able to do much since she died. I try to work, but I mostly stay in a lot. I know she would want me to make art about it. I’ve tried. I’m trying. I don’t want to let her down.”
Me either, Stevie thought.
“When I think of her . . . ,” Bath went on, “how she died. I can’t.”
Neither could Stevie. The idea of being trapped in the dark, underground, with no one able to hear you—it was too horrible. Her panic must have risen as she felt her way down that pitch-black tunnel and realized there was no way out. At some point, she would have known she was going to die. Stevie was thankful for the Avitan gliding through her bloodstream, holding down the pulsing nausea and air hunger she felt whenever she conjured this image in her mind.
Ellie’s death was not her fault. It really wasn’t. Right? Stevie had no idea there was a passage in the wall or a tunnel in the basement. Stevie certainly hadn’t sealed the tunnel. All Stevie did was lay out the facts of the matter in Hayes’s death, and she’d done so in public, in a place that seemed perfectly safe.
Bath had reached over and taken Stevie’s hand. The gesture caught Stevie off guard, and she almost recoiled.
“It’s good to remember her,” Bath said.
“Yeah,” Stevie replied, her voice hoarse.
She looked around the room for a new point of focus. What did she see? What information was there? Splattered paint, Christmas lights, a guitar, glitter, some laundry in the corner, canvases stacked against the wall, a load of wine bottles . . .
They had done some partying here. And so had David. That’s right. He’d told Stevie that he used to come to visit Ellie’s art friends in Burlington. These were those friends. So maybe these people knew something about where he was? Stevie latched on to this.
“I think another friend of ours came here? David?”
“Not recently,” Bath said. “He used to come with Ellie.”
“But not recently?”
“No,” Bath said. “Not since last year.”
So, no leads on Hayes, and no sightings of David. All she had really accomplished was making this girl cry and making herself late.
“Thanks for your time,” Stevie said, getting up and shaking out a sleeping leg. “I’m really glad I got to meet you.”
“You too,” Bath said. “Come back anytime, maybe for cabaret? Or whenever you want. You’re welcome.”
Stevie nodded her thanks and gathered up her things.
“I’m sorry for all you went through,” Bath said as Stevie reached the stairs. “With all this bad stuff. And that thing on your wall.”
Stevie stopped and turned back toward Bath.
“My wall?” she repeated.
“Someone put a message on your wall?” Bath said. “That was horrible. Ellie was so pissed about that.”
Had Bath said, “By the way, I can turn into a butterfly at will, watch!” Stevie would hardly have been more surprised. The night before Hayes died, Stevie had been woken in the middle of the night to see something glowing on her wall—some kind of riddle, written in the style of the Truly Devious riddle. Stevie felt her body physically tremble, partially at the memory of the strange message that had appeared that night.
“That was a dream,” Stevie said, ignoring the fact that her phone was buzzing in her pocket.
“Ellie didn’t seem to think it was a dream.” Bath leaned back, and her tank top revealed a little casual and confident side boob and armpit hair. “She said she was pissed at the person who did it.”
“She knew who did it?”
“Yeah, she seemed to.”
“I thought . . .” Stevie’s mind was racing now. “I thought, if it happened at all, maybe she did it? As a joke?”
“Ellie?” Bath shook her head. “No. Definitely no. Absolutely no. Ellie’s art was participatory,” she said. “She never worked with fear. Her art was consent. Her art was welcoming. She wouldn’t put something up in your space, especially if she thought it would scare you or mock you. It wasn’t her.”
Stevie thought back to Ellie bleating away on Roota, her beloved saxophone. She would not have described the sound as welcoming, but it also wasn’t aggressive. It was raw and unschooled. Fun.
“No,” Stevie said. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”
“That thing about the wall is messed up,” Bath said. “It’s like Belshazzar’s feast.”
“What?”
“The hand on the wall. You know—the writing? From the Bible. My name is Bathsheba. With a name like mine, you end up reading a lot of Bible stories. There’s a big feast and a hand appears on the wall and starts writing something no one can understand.”
Stevie’s knowledge of the Bible was not tremendous. She’d had some Sunday school classes when she was small, but that was mostly coloring pictures of Jesus and singing along while their Sunday school teacher played “Jesus Loves Me” on the piano. And there was a kid named Nick Philby who liked to eat handfuls of grass and would smile his big green teeth. It was not a complete education. But she had a passing memory of words written on a wall.
“Rembrandt used it as a subject,” Bath said, typing something on her laptop. She turned it around to face Stevie. There was an image of a painting—the central figure was a man, leaping up from a table, his face bug-eyed with horror. A hand reached out of a cloud of mist and etched glowing Hebrew characters on the wall.
“The writing on the wall,” Bath said.
The phone was buzzing again. Stevie put the shopping bag on top of it to muffle the noise.
“But she didn’t say who did it?” Stevie asked.
“No. Just that she was mad that someone was trying to mess with you.”
Buzz.
Someone projected a message. It happened. And if it wasn’t Ellie, who? Hayes? Lazy Hayes who did nothing on his own? Who else would even care enough about her to want to get her attention like that?
Only David. David could have done it. And now David was gone.
“Yeah,” Bathsheba said, nodding to herself. “Ellie always talked about the walls.”
“The walls?”
Buzz.
The phone could have stood up and walked over to her at this point. It could have exploded. It would not have mattered.
“Yeah. She said that there was weird shit in the walls at Ellingham. Things and hollow spaces. Stuff. She’d found things. Shit in the walls.”
Shit. In. The. Walls.
She had a clue now, a point of focus. There were things in the walls. She wasn’t sure what that meant, or what she might be looking for. But so much of this had been about walls. Writing on them. Disappearing into them.
And, at some point, a hand had written on her wall.