Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,106

be apart from each other.”

“Did he mention,” Stevie said carefully, “the video? Doing an effect with dry ice?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing. I wish he had. I mean, I talked to him the night he took that stuff.”

Stevie felt a tingle on the back of her neck.

“Wait,” Stevie said, “you spoke to him on Thursday night?”

“Yeah, we usually Skyped before bed. I was probably the last person he talked to that night,” she said.

“You talked to him late?”

“Oh yeah,” Beth said.

“Do you know when?”

“I don’t know . . . late.”

“The thing is,” Stevie said, “it would be so amazing if . . . if you talked to him late that night and it was . . . like the romantic high point of this tribute. I mean, do you have the time on Skype?”

“Let me look.” Stevie got a close-up of Beth’s nose as she leaned in to read. “Here it is. It was . . . ten twenty.”

That made no sense. Hayes had been with Maris then.

No, stupid, Beth was in California. That was 1:20 in the morning.

But Janelle’s ID had been used at 1:12 in the morning. There was no way Hayes could have used it and gotten back to his room by 1:20.

Either Hayes went into the workshop or he was speaking to Beth at 1:20 a.m., but he wasn’t doing both. And the one he was most likely doing was the one someone saw him do.

Which meant someone else put that dry ice in the tunnel but made it look like Hayes did it.

Which sounded a lot like murder.

27

THAT NIGHT, IT RAINED. IT WAS NOT A GENTLE RAIN, THE KIND THAT lulled Stevie to sleep. It was a sideways, angry rain that threw itself haphazardly at the walls and windows and roof. It was a rain that made Hayes’s empty room feel even more vacant.

It was a rain that pounded Stevie Bell into alertness.

What you lack in any investigation is time. With every passing hour, evidence slips away. Crime scenes are compromised by people and the elements. Things are moved, altered, smeared, shifted. Organisms rot. Winds blow dust and contaminants. Memories change and fade. As you move away from the event, you move away from the solution.

This is why no one found Dottie and Iris until it was too late. The days dragged on. If someone had called the police that night. Maybe it would have all been different for the Ellinghams. But they didn’t.

Stevie had information now—real information. She could take it to Larry, but Larry had already warned her off playing detective. She could go to him when she knew something, when she understood what she knew. So she started making lists.

Facts:

Someone took Janelle’s ID from the art barn when we were in yoga.

Someone used that ID to get into the workshop at 1:12 the next morning. At the same time, seven pieces of dry ice were removed from the storage unit.

Hayes’s fingerprints were on the ID.

Hayes was Skyping with Beth at that time.

Hayes lied about The End of It All.

Strong possibilities:

Hayes did not write The End of It All, at least not alone.

Conclusions:

Hayes had that ID at some point, but he was not the one who went into the workshop.

Question:

Why did Hayes turn around and go into the tunnel?

Did he know the dry ice was there?

Did he ask someone to get it for him?

That morning, she sat in anatomy lab in her oldest T-shirt and hoodie, glassily staring as Pix worked the skeleton. She was entering the too-awake stage. The head of a femur looked like a strange mushroom. Stevie turned it around in her mind, working her way around the bone. The greater trochanter. The lesser trochanter. The head that articulates with the acetabulum and that thing in the pelvis, the tuberosity of ischium . . .

She was drooling a bit. She slapped her hand to her chin and looked down at her notebook and the names of bones she had scrawled there as they were written on the board. It was all gibberish. She thought of Hayes, his knees, seeing his feet on the floor.

In Lit, she nodded off, only to be jerked awake to answer questions about the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (“And what do you think it means, Stevie, when Eliot writes that the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table?” Answer: “He’s . . . tired?”)

She ate lunch alone and listened to people discussing the Silent Party that