Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,85

time. We try to discourage it. And Hayes didn’t—it wasn’t the tunnel that hurt Hayes. What happened to Hayes was an extremely unfortunate accident. Extremely unfortunate. Should you have gone into that tunnel? No. But you didn’t take Hayes in there that night.”

Stevie looked at the pattern of the drops beating on the glass.

“Am I going to be expelled?” she asked.

“No,” Charles said. “But there is something I’m going to have you do. Come with me.”

Stevie followed him, almost in a trance, as he took her back to the attic entrance. She wasn’t being kicked out—and she was being taken to the attic?

“We’ve decided after what happened with Hayes to double up on all security,” he said, entering a new, longer security code into the panel. They made their way up the narrow stairs.

“When we spoke before,” he said, turning on the lights, “I said I wanted you to find a project that put a human face on the crime that happened here, the loss. You found a project. No one could have predicted the terrible lesson on loss you learned. Now that you know about the tunnel being opened, there’s something I can show you.”

He took her down several aisles and turned down one full of archival storage boxes and three shelves of identical long, green leather books with dates on them.

“This row contains a lot of the records and personal effects from Albert Ellingham’s office and the household management,” he said.

At the end of the row, near the window, he knelt down to the floor and pulled a beaten metal box, about three feet in length and a foot or so high, off the bottom shelf. The box was clearly very old. It had been painted red, and parts of the paint remained, but much was worn or rusted away.

“When the crew first went in the tunnel, they found this packed into the dirt used to seal up the tunnel. It was locked when the crew found it. . . .” Charles carefully lifted the old latch. “Everyone was excited. A buried box in the tunnel . . . it could have been anything. So we opened it and . . .”

He lifted the lid, revealing two side-by-side piles of yellowed newspapers. The headline of the top one read: ELLINGHAM FAMILY KIDNAPPED. Stevie knelt next to Charles to have a better look. The newspapers were all different, different cities, different dates, but all featured the Ellingham Affair in the headline.

“Someone buried a box of newspapers in the tunnel?” she said.

“We don’t know who put them there,” Charles replied. “But I think it was probably Albert Ellingham. Maybe he was trying to bury the past, bury his pain.”

“It must have been hard for a man who owned a newspaper to hide from the news,” she said.

“A good point,” Charles said, nodding. “But I think you understand, that tunnel was a sacred space. It’s seen so much death. People are going to sensationalize this.”

Stevie took this as a bit of an admonishment.

“So here is what you are going to do,” he said. “These rows . . .”

He took her back out and to another row, labeled 38.

“Thirty-eight through forty-five are full of household items. Things were gathered up in boxes but not well sorted. I want you to sort and catalog these seven rows of materials.”

“Is this my punishment?” she said.

“We don’t do punishments,” Charles replied. “We do projects. This is your project. Sort, organize, catalog.”

Stevie looked down the row. It looked like it contained bins of doorknobs, stacks of old magazines, bags of junk.

“You can start now,” he said, “if you feel up to it.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Then I’ll leave you to it. Just let security know when you’re done. You may need to do this over a few days, so I’ll arrange it that someone can take you up here.”

He left her alone with all of the treasures. As punishments went, this was about as good as it got. She wandered the aisles, taking in the view passively. She allowed the patterns to sink into her mind—clothes here, furniture there. Globes, books, dishes . . . It was her and the Ellingham items, and they became familiar with this repetition.

She spent some time standing in front of a massive cabinet with horizontally glass-fronted shelves before working up the courage to open it up and pull out a delicate soup bowl—white, with a pattern of pink flowers and tender green vines, edged in gold. At the bottom of the dish,