is new; no one has put on the defenses of the day. All is reset and not quite real yet.
Whatever had happened between David and Stevie didn’t exist at this moment. Everything was dew and Larry’s instant coffee and the gentle, buttery morning sun.
“Well,” David finally said, “I guess the school’s fucked.”
Stevie took a long sip of the coffee. It was too strong and full of clots of powdered creamer, but it was wakeful.
“One student dead,” David said, looking up at the faint sound of chopping from above. “One student missing, presumed to have murdered him, I guess. This one is going to be hard to spin.”
“Yup,” Stevie said, taking another sip.
The wind was cutting sharply through the mountains like an audible gasp from nature. A helicopter was nearing.
“I guess they’re doing an air search,” David said.
“Yup.”
“You have a lot to say for someone who just busted open her first case. Aren’t you excited? Don’t you get a sheriff’s star?”
Stevie put the coffee cup on the grass. She watched it for a moment to see if it was going to tip over and scald her. It did not.
“Let me just ask you,” Stevie said. “The night that the dry ice went into the tunnel, you said you were with Ellie. You were, right?”
“Until midnight or something,” he said. “But I did lie to you. We weren’t smoking a bowl. We were just talking.”
“So you added that . . .”
“Just for fun,” David said.
The helicopter was now visible, circling back over the woods.
“I still can’t believe this,” he said. “Ellie’s not malicious. I get that something is happening here I don’t understand, but she’s not . . . she doesn’t hurt people. Not on purpose, anyway. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know anything.”
“Do you have any idea what she was saying at the end?” she asked. “About how Hayes knew things? When she kept saying this whole place and Hayes’s idea?”
“No clue.”
Stevie rubbed the grass between her fingers until she stained her fingertips green. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep. She’d put it together. Ellie had admitted to writing the show. Ellie had bolted. Why run if you haven’t done anything?
She thought of Hercule Poirot, and how he would hesitate when he lined up the facts and found that something did not tally. He always talked about the psychology of the crime. Things here were not clean. They were not clear.
Just like Vorachek. He had had the money in his possession. Vorachek even admitted to the crime. But there was no way it was Vorachek.
Two police officers came out of the trees from the direction of Minerva. One carried a box.
“It looks like they’ve gone through her stuff,” David said. “I guess we can go back.”
The both got up, stiff and tired, with wet-grass impressions on the backs of their clothes.
Minerva was silently creaky in the morning, filled with pale light and cool ghosts of old smoke. The moose had a more genial expression, and even the red wallpaper looked a bit less aggressive. The house felt hollow. It was empty of people at the moment, and at least two people were never coming back. Maybe no one was coming back.
Down the hall, Ellie’s door hung a bit open. Stevie stood there for a moment, looking in through the space. David was close behind her. She could feel the heat coming off his body.
“You’re going in, right?” he said. “That’s your thing.”
She didn’t answer.
“I’m not arguing this time,” he said, reaching over and pushing the door open wider.
The scene of their game hours before had been much disturbed. The police had pulled Ellie’s bed away from the wall and left it slightly crooked toward the middle of the room. The covers had been pulled straight. Books were tipped down or taken from the shelves and stacked in neat piles. The drawers were all closed, which meant they’d gone through them all—last night most of Ellie’s drawers were cocked or ajar with something sticking out of them.
“It actually looks cleaner in here after the cops went through it,” David said.
He poked around the edge of the bed before sitting down. Stevie looked over at him. In the morning light, his face looked gentle. There was something a little—angelic about David. His large eyes and the light curl to his hair.
She remembered her mother commenting on the way in to the property that the statues were strange angels, and she had said no, those are sphinxes. Angels or sphinxes?
She really