would be held that evening.
She continued stumbling through the day, trying to process everything her brain had accumulated. By the time she got to yoga, she was straining to keep herself awake. She took her slightly smelly purple mat from the stack in the corner and left a spot next to her for Janelle, but someone else took it. Janelle came in, saw that Stevie had set up without her, and quietly made a space for herself on the other side of the room.
She left class before Stevie could catch her.
That night, Stevie skipped dinner and went over her facts again. Her stomach growled as the rain beat on her window. Janelle and Ellie had gone over to the Great House for the dance. What David and Nate were doing, she had no idea.
Think, Stevie. Think.
But her thoughts had gone stagnant. She had gotten this far, but nothing more was coming up. She put her earbuds in and turned up some music, loud, trying to get her head somewhere else, somewhere she could see the pattern. So she didn’t hear the knocking and was surprised to see Nate standing next to her in a pair of loose corduroys and a plaid shirt and a tie. He was speaking, but Stevie couldn’t hear him with her earbuds in and her hoodie over her head. She jerked the buds out and the hood off.
“Huh?” she said.
“You,” he said. “Are coming with me.”
“I am? Where?”
“To the dance.”
“Dance?”
“Yes, dance,” he said. “There’s this dance tonight. And you are going with me. Not with me, with me. But we are both going.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Dance. Thing. At the Great House. Everyone. Over there. So come on.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Nate came into the room and kicked the door half closed behind him. “Here’s the thing. You’ve gone kind of psycho. I have never willingly gone to a dance in my life. But I am doing this because you are my friend, okay? And something is wrong with you. I don’t want to go to this, obviously. And you don’t want to go to this. I’m doing this for you, for your own good. This is the one and only time I’m offering to do something like this. Sometimes you have to leave the fucking Shire, Frodo. If we’re friends, get up, and come with me now. And you should take that seriously, because you are kind of losing friends all over the place.”
He extended his hand to her.
“You’re serious.”
“I’m serious.”
She looked down at her lists and up at Nate.
“You’re wearing a tie,” she said.
“I know.”
“Is that a dance thing?”
“How would I know? Do I look like I go to a lot of dances?”
Stevie felt like she was made of concrete and attached to the floor. But seeing Nate there, seeing the effort he was going to, she felt her moorings coming loose. She got off the floor. Her hoodie was dusty. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She had sneakers on.
“Like this?” she said.
“You look good to me. Not that I’m saying you look good. I’m saying come on before I lose the nerve to go to this.”
It was a strange walk over to the Great House. Stevie could see gently pulsing lights coming from the long windows of the ballroom.
“So what are you doing that’s making you so weird?” Nate asked.
“Solving Hayes’s murder,” she said, stuffing her hands deeper in her hoodie pockets.
“Say that again?” he said.
“I’m solving Hayes’s murder,” she repeated.
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Nope,” she said. “Hayes didn’t put that dry ice in the tunnel, and I can prove it.”
“How?”
Stevie sat Nate down under the portico of the Great House and explained all that she had discovered.
“Okay,” he said. “So this is why you’ve been weird.”
“Mostly,” she said, looking up at something flying past the cupola. A bat, probably. Ellingham was full of bats. Nate saw it too, and got right to his feet.
“So, you’re going to tell Larry, or someone, all of this?” Nate said after a silent moment.
“I think I need to wait,” Stevie said.
“Why? For what?”
“If I do this wrong, if I’m wrong, the whole school could be shut down,” she said. “If it’s an accident and Hayes did it, we’re okay. If there’s someone out there, we’re all in trouble.”
“But something has happened. You have proof that Hayes didn’t do this himself. So you want to find this person yourself because you don’t want to go home?”
“I want to find this person because I want