Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,104

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.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

“Well, come sit down, then.”

Even though she didn’t feel like it, an order from Larry was still an order from Larry. She went to the chair in front of his desk and sat in it, perched on the edge so her backpack could fit and so she could get up quickly.

“Any new thoughts on the Ellingham case?”

“I haven’t had much of a chance to think about it,” she said.

“Well, if you want to solve a cold case, that’s what you’ve got to do. You don’t avoid the work. Cold cases get solved because someone goes to the trouble of doing everything. They read every file. They listen to every tape. They talk to every witness. They track down every scrap of evidence. And then they do it all again; they do it until something clicks, until it gets warm again. You do the work. And sometimes, you get lucky.”

“How much of it is luck?” Stevie said.

“Luck always plays a role. Something is eating at you.”

“Just school,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s just school. I think it has something to do with Hayes Major. Something is eating at you and it’s not grief. Something else.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Twenty years as a detective. I do know that.”

Stevie pushed back into the chair a bit and squared off to Larry.

“Can you just tell me what you know about his death and what happened?” she said.

“You mean, details?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t give you all of them,” he said. “I can give you a few. There was a lot of dry ice taken. There were ten units in that container, ten inches square in there, and seven of them were gone. Each one