Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,120

needed sleep.

She sat next to David on the bed and stared at Ellie’s things. Her canvas backpack. The pile of dirty clothes in the corner. The scatter of pens on the floor. The little phrases she’d written on the walls. There was a framed picture next to her bed, one with dozens of people in it. That had to be the commune she had spoken of. Roota leaned against Ellie’s bureau, glinting in the sun and looking lonely.

“I’m sorry,” Stevie said, sort of to Roota and mostly to David.

“Sorry?”

“About going through your stuff. I’ve felt bad since the second I did it. I just . . . I don’t know. I just wanted to know. About you. And you were being weird . . .”

“This is a great apology.”

“Fine.” She started again. “I was wrong.”

The helicopter sounded like it was hanging overhead, beating the air. Ellingham would wake up and Ellie would be gone and there would be chaos again.

“Yeah,” he said after a long moment.

“Yeah?”

He shrugged.

“If this whole place closes down, I guess we shouldn’t be mad at each other.”

“Probably not,” she said.

The silence was long. Then David picked up her hand and, with one finger, he traced a small circle in her palm. Stevie was almost staggered by the flood of feeling. Could you kiss in the cool light of morning, when everything was visible? On the bed of your vanished classmate? Who probably killed someone?

He was leaning in a little, and in response, she leaned back just a bit. As she did so, her hand landed on something hard hiding in the bedding.

She pushed the quilt aside and revealed a small box. It was red metal, about eight by eight inches, with rounded corners. Age had taken a bit of a toll on it—it was dented and rusted, but still the artwork was fairly clear. It was marked OLD ENGLISH TEA BAGS and had a picture of a steaming cup of tea on the front. Some weird old junk.

There was something thrumming now.

Really thrumming.

Actually, that was the helicopter hovering very, very low. It was now impossible to ignore. David squinted at the window, then released Stevie’s hand and got up to have a look.

Stevie took a deep breath and steadied herself. She examined the strange box, prying off the lid and pouring the contents onto the bed. There was what looked like the remains of a white feather, a torn piece of cloth with some beading on it, a gold lipstick tube. There was a square rhinestone clip and a miniature red enameled shoe that turned out to be a very tiny pillbox. Stevie opened and closed this a few times, peering into the dulled bronze interior.

“This is weird,” she said. “Come look at this.”

“Hang on,” he said.

Stevie continued looking. Pressed on one side of the box was a piece of lined, folded paper and a dozen or so old black-and-white photographs, rough and unevenly sized. Stevie looked at the paper first. It was fragile along the sharp lines of the folds, but only a bit yellowed. Written in a neat but loose handwriting was the following:

The Ballad of Frankie and Edward

April 2, 1936

Frankie and Edward had the silver

Frankie and Edward had the gold

But both saw the game for what it was

And both wanted the truth to be told

Frankie and Edward bowed to no king

They lived for art and love

They unseated the man who ruled over the land

They took

The king was a joker who lived on a hill

And he wanted to rule the game

So Frankie and Edward played a hand

And things were never the same

The photographs pictured two teenagers, one male and one female, in a variety of poses that were both familiar to Stevie and utterly baffling at the same time. The guy wore a suit and hat with a loosened tie. The girl, a tight sweater and skirt set with a cocked beret. They posed in front of a car in one photo. In another, the girl had a cigar. In another, they were face-to-face, the girl holding the guy back at arm’s length. Stevie flipped the photos over. On the back of one was written 11/4/35.

Stevie stared at the photos for a long moment before it clicked. These people were posing like Bonnie and Clyde, the famous 1930s outlaw couple. They were cosplaying.

One of the photos was different; it was a touch thicker, heavier. Stevie examined this one more carefully and found that it was actually two photos stuck together. She ignored the sound of the landing helicopter out on the green. This—whatever this weird collection of photos and items was—was extremely important. She tried to pull the photos apart delicately, and when that failed, pulled with more force. They started to give way. There was something stuck between them. It looked like . . .

A word? From a magazine?

It was the clipped out word US in bright red letters on a yellow background. Tiny. Maybe a quarter of an inch.

Stevie’s hand began to shake.

A letter cut from a magazine in a box of things that were dated from 1935–36. Photos of two people her age cosplaying Bonnie and Clyde. And part of a poem—a poem not unlike the Truly Devious letter, written only days before the Truly Devious letter arrived. A rough, short poem about playing some kind of game with the king who lived on the hill.

This was Truly Devious. Whoever wrote this poem, whoever Frankie and Edward were. Stevie ran through her mind attic feverishly, tearing open boxes, looking in drawers. She was far away from this strange morning and David and Ellie’s room. There. She had it. She was looking at a page of a witness statement taken from Leonard Holmes Nair about a boy and a girl he thought showed some spark. They were a pair. She had hair like a raven and he looked like Lord Byron, and the girl asked him about Dorothy Parker. Two students from the first class at Ellingham Academy.

Students had written the letter. She had proof of that in her hand.

Had students murdered Iris Ellingham? Was Dottie’s murder committed by people who knew her well? Was this about Dottie? Stevie’s mind was whirring.

“David . . . ,” Stevie said. There was a tremble in her voice.

In response, David left the room. He was walking with some speed. His departure was so abrupt that Stevie couldn’t quite make the mental leap for a moment. She blinked, and then, still clutching the photos, she followed him. He was already out the door, walking toward the green. The helicopter was there, its rotors slowing. There were some people out now. Ellingham was awake.

It wasn’t a police helicopter. The lettering was dark bronze, faintly reflective. It said . . .

King?

David had stopped abruptly at the top of the path leading to the green and was staring at the helicopter.

“What the hell is happening?” Stevie said, catching up to him. “Is that what it looks like?”

David did not answer, but he didn’t need to. The helicopter door opened and someone stepped out.

In life, Edward King was smaller than he appeared on television, his expression more hassled, his hair blowing strangely in all directions. He ineffectively tried to smooth it down.

David still hadn’t moved. It was as if he had turned into one of Ellingham’s many statues, a stone replica of himself.

In myths, Medusa turned you to stone if you looked directly at her.

“How is this happening?” Stevie said. “Why is it happening? What is happening? David?”

David did not reply.

And then, the convergence. All the facts in Stevie’s brain attic assembled themselves in the necessary order. She did a number of tiny calculations, working out the proportions of his face. Her mind flashed back to that first moment she saw him in the yurt, that weird dislike, the thing that scratched-scratched at her mind. The angle of the nose, the bearing of the shoulders . . .

She couldn’t place it then. There was no way she could have. It was all so impossible.

Edward King was making his way across the grass in their general direction.

Now it was a torrent of calculations. David’s avoidance, his lack of social media, his lack of photographs, the move to California, the beaten Rolex . . .

“David,” she said quietly.

He did not look at her.

“David?” she said one last time.

He glanced sideways at her. He looked helpless, trapped.

“Remember when your parents got that position?” David finally said. “With him? Well. I told you I was trying to help.”

Stevie’s grip on the photos tightened, though she had forgotten she was holding them.

“Tell me what you mean,” she said.

David started to smile, but it was like the smile Stevie pasted on her face that night at dinner with her parents. With every second, her hope slipped a bit further, until she was scrabbling at the edge of hope, trying to gain a hold. And then she felt herself lose contact.

“Meet my dead dad,” he replied.

To be continued . . .