Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,8
the kind of clean-cut person who made her parents relax, and therefore, Stevie relaxed.
“Stephanie Bell?” he asked.
“Stevie,” she corrected him.
“I’m Mark Parsons,” he said. “Head of grounds. You got Minerva. Nice house.”
Stevie’s things and the Bells themselves were loaded into the cart. Germaine and her family were put in another and sent off in the opposite direction.
“Everyone wants Minerva,” Mark added when they were out of earshot. “It’s the best house.”
The property was full of smooth, twisting stone paths between copses of trees. They rode along under the heavy shade, and Stevie and her parents were cowed into impressed silence by the school buildings. There were some large, grand ones of stone and red brick, with Gothic arches connecting them and tiny turrets softening their corners. Some were bare and grand, while others were wrapped so tightly in ivy it looked like they were being presented as gifts to some forest god. This wasn’t her local high school. This was clearly a Seat of Learning.
There were Greek and Roman statues of cold, white stone behind the trees, standing alone in the clearings.
“Someone’s been to the garden center,” her dad said.
“Oh, no,” Mark replied, steering the cart past a chorus of heads, their eyes blank and empty but their expressions determined, looking very much like some committee in the middle of an important decision. “These are all the real thing. A fortune’s worth of statues out in the open.”
There were, to be fair, maybe too many statues. Someone should have had a talk with Albert Ellingham and told him to maybe relax with the statue buying. But if you’re rich enough and famous enough, Stevie figured, you can do pretty much anything you want with your mountaintop lair.
The golf cart stopped in front of a low, dignified house built in alternating red and gold brick. It seemed to be in several parts—there was a large section on the right that looked like a normal house, then a long extension off to the side that ended in a turret. The entire structure was covered in a coat of Virginia creeper that obscured the bas-relief faces that peered from the roofline and from above the windows. The door was bright blue and hanging open, letting in the breeze and the flies.
Stevie and her parents stepped into what appeared to be some kind of common room, with a stone floor and a wide fireplace surrounded by rocking chairs. The room was cool and shaded and still smelled of wood and past fires. It was decorated in a slightly claustrophobic red flocked wallpaper and a mounted moose head that wore a crown of decorative lights. There was a hammock chair hanging by the fire, lots of floor cushions, a beat-up but exceedingly comfortable-looking purple sofa, and a massive farm table that took up most of the room. On the farm table was a tackle box and some small items that looked like craft supplies—beads, or the many mysterious things involved in the scrapbooking process. Right by the door, eight large pegs protruded from the wall. These were maybe nine or ten inches long—far too large for coats. Stevie touched one with the tip of her finger as a physical manifestation of the question: What are you?
“Hello!”
Stevie turned to see a woman coming out of the small kitchen area with a mug of coffee. She had a shaved head with just the smallest amount of peach fuzz and a petite but deeply muscled and tanned frame. Her arms were elegantly tattooed in sleeves of flowers. She was dressed in a loose T-shirt that read I DIG DIGS and cargo shorts, which showed off a pair of strong, hairy legs.
“Stephanie?” the woman asked.
“Stevie,” she corrected again.
“Dr. Nell Pixwell,” the woman said, extending a hand to each member of the family. “Call me Pix. I’m the Minerva faculty housemaster.”
Stevie chanced a better look at the tiny objects by the tackle box. On closer examination, Stevie realized that these weren’t crafting supplies—they were teeth. Lots and lots of loose teeth. Here. On the table. Whether they were real or fake, Stevie didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure it mattered. A table full of teeth is a table full of teeth.
“Did you have a good drive?” Pix asked, quickly sorting the remaining teeth into compartments.
(Plink, said a tooth, hitting the plastic. Plink.)
“Sorry, I was just sorting a few things out. You’re definitely the earliest . . .”