Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,108

to find this person,” she said. “And because I don’t want to go home. But I guess now I’m going to dance. With my friend.”

She reached over and squeezed him by the arm.

“You did this for me,” she said.

“Yeah, I did this for you, but don’t make it a thing. And how do we go into a dance after what you just said?”

“We go in,” she said. “Because you brought me here, and because the answer may be here.”

“Are you really serious about all of this?” he said quietly. “You’re not messing with me?”

“I’m not messing with you,” she said.

“Do you think they knew it was lethal? Not an accident?”

“That,” Stevie said, meeting his gaze and feeling herself break out in a sweat, “I don’t know.”

“So we could be dancing with a murderer?”

“We might be,” Stevie said.

“And you really think this should wait?”

“Give me tonight, at least,” Stevie said. “To look around. I promise you, I’ll talk to Larry soon.”

Nate took a heavy breath.

“Okay,” he said. “If you say so. This is probably only the second stupidest thing I’ve done since I got here.”

August 13, 1937

THE BUTCHER FIGURED IT OUT FIRST. HE WAS THE ONE WHO NOTICED that the local anarchist, Anton Vorachek, was suddenly buying some better cuts of meat. He usually bought remnants and offal—whatever was going cheap—and not much of it. One day, he came in and bought some cube steak.

Or maybe it was the waitress at the diner. She said that Vorachek came in for his weekly single scrambled egg—he always did this on Sundays to try to talk to people at the counter and recruit. That Sunday, he ordered two eggs, hash-browned potatoes, a side of bacon, and toast. He even had coffee. And he tipped her a quarter on a thirty-five-cent check because “the worker deserves a greater share of the profits.”

Or maybe it was the bus driver, because Vorachek suddenly had money for the bus.

All of Burlington reported a man who, if not vying with the Rockefellers for wealth, was more flush than he previously had been.

He was not liked by many. He started strikes and handed out anarchist literature. He shouted “Death to tyrants!” when Ellingham’s name was mentioned. Albert Ellingham was much beloved in the area. He provided money for the police and the schools and the fire department and the hospital and any other cause that came his way, and had touched many thousands of lives in Burlington. This was a man who provided free ice cream for poor children. And now he had opened a school of his own.

So people took offense to calls for his death.

Officially, the police searched his house because a witness came forward and said he saw Vorachek scouting out telephone booths. Then someone else came forward and said that they definitely saw Vorachek place a call at 7:07 on the night of April 14. Seven separate witnesses from the night of April 14 who received fifty cents for their reports said they saw Vorachek heading for Rock Point. It didn’t seem to bother many people that it took a few months for these people to realize they had seen these things, or that the witness accounts didn’t match. Two of the people writing reports claimed that Vorachek went to Rock Point in a black car. Two said on foot. One said in a cab. One said on a bicycle. One could not explain the means of transport.

In any case, the Burlington police had enough to go and have a look in his house, where they found a pile of cash painted with Leonard Holmes Nair’s glowing paint, and even a cash bundle with Ellingham’s invisible fingerprint. More troubling, they also found a child’s shoe, the match to the one left on Rock Point.

Vorachek was arrested and charged with the kidnapping of Iris and Alice Ellingham and the murders of Iris and Dottie Epstein.

“I did it,” he said when handcuffed. “All tyrants will fall. This is only the beginning!”

The wheels of justice began to grind. All that fall and winter the evidence was examined, experts brought in. A famous attorney came in to represent Vorachek. In the spring, everything seemed ready to start, but then there were delays. The anarchists came to town to protest Vorachek’s arrest. There was talk of moving the trial, but that was quashed.

Finally, everything was set to start on July 15, during a devastating heat wave. Burlington was almost broken from the weight of it all. There were no hotel