go together,” Hayes said, holding the padlock in his hand. “If anyone sees us all coming from this direction, they might realize we were down here. Nate, Stevie, you guys go first. Dash, you should go the other way around. Maris, we can go last.”
As Stevie and Nate walked back through the dark, Nate glanced over his shoulder.
“I think they’re going to go back and bone in that tunnel,” he said.
“Bone,” Stevie repeated. “Did you have to say bone?”
“Tunnelboner,” Nate said. “A new fragrance for men.”
“They wouldn’t,” Stevie said. “They won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s . . . the tunnel. You don’t just tunnelbone in that tunnel.”
“Sometimes a tunnel is just a tunnel,” Nate said.
Stevie ground her jaw a bit and walked on, her hands deep in her hoodie pockets. The magic of the tunnel and the observatory was still on her, and she wanted to hold it as long as possible.
She thought of the letter that she had seen on her wall. It really had been so vivid. Dreams had a way of blurring and fading the moment they were over. The edges were sharp on this, the colors bright. Her mind had taken a screenshot.
Had it been real?
It was possible; most things are possible. It wasn’t likely, though. What was likely was that her anxious and excited brain, full of new stimuli, conjured up something bright and shiny for her, something so magical and odd that it stamped its impression on her brain cells for a little longer than normal. Thinking about it logically, who knew or cared enough about her to go to those kinds of lengths, and to what end?
It had been a dream, just as Janelle said. Janelle made sense.
Still, the feeling was there, and it felt like Truly Devious was calling out from the past. Truly Devious, the known ghoul, the laughing murderer.
But some things don’t stay buried—not tunnels, not secrets. Truly Devious was not immune.
* * *
WHO IS TRULY DEVIOUS? 80 YEARS ON
Postdetective
April 13, 2016
On April 8, 1936, a letter arrived at the Burlington, Vermont, office of Albert Ellingham. Albert Ellingham was, at the time, one of the richest men in America. He constructed an estate and a school in the mountains outside of Burlington, and it was there he lived with his wife and his daughter, breathing the sweet, clean air. A Burlington office collected his personal and business mail, and every day, a car would take sacks of correspondence from Burlington to the house, well up on Mount Hatchet, where it would be sorted and processed by his secretary.
That day, in with the hundreds of letters, one stood out. The envelope was postmarked from Burlington. The address of the Ellingham estate was written on the front in dull pencil, in heavy, square strokes. Inside was a single piece of writing paper that contained the words:
Look! A riddle! Time for fun!
Should we use a rope or gun?
Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty
Poison’s slow, which is a pity
Fire is festive, drowning’s slow
Hanging’s a ropy way to go
A broken head, a nasty fall
A car colliding with a wall
Bombs make a very jolly noise
Such ways to punish naughty boys!
What shall we use? We can’t decide.
Just like you cannot run or hide.
Ha ha.
Truly,
Devious
Threats to Albert Ellingham and his family were not new—in fact, Albert Ellingham had barely survived a car bombing several years before. This was during a time in which industrialists were often under threat. What made this letter so different?
For a start, it was constructed of colorful words and letters that would later be determined to come from popular magazines. In bright, cheerful print, it spelled out a diabolical poem, one that listed the many ways that Albert Ellingham might die. The letter writer gave themselves a name: Truly Devious.
Five days later, while out on a drive, Albert Ellingham’s wife, Iris, was kidnapped, along with their three-year-old daughter, Alice. Along with Iris and Alice, a young girl named Dolores Epstein, who was a student at Ellingham’s new academy on the site, also vanished.
A ransom demand was called in that evening, giving Albert Ellingham just a few minutes to bundle up the money in his safe and take it to a lake on his property. Ellingham was a bit short of cash, so the kidnappers beat up the person sent to collect Iris and Alice, and demanded more.
Robert Mackenzie, Ellingham’s thirty-year-old private secretary, begged to call the police. But Ellingham was convinced that doing so would put his family in more danger. Instead, along with family