Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,97
but even if she was, Janelle wouldn’t do that. Janelle had standards. Janelle was loyal. Whereas Stevie was a cretinous person who had no principles.
Janelle waited for a reply, and when she realized none was forthcoming, Stevie saw a light go out in her eyes.
This left Nate and Ellie.
Ellie’s reaction to Hayes’s death was to go maximum Ellie. Minerva was woken in the morning by the terrifying cries of Roota. When painted makeup appeared on the Minerva gargoyles and some of the statues, it was fairly obvious who the culprit was. There was more drinking and bathing and French poetry.
Which left Nate, and Nate had retreated to the misty mountains in his mind. He was always reading now, turning away from every conversation, frequently eating alone. Stevie found him in the dining hall at one of the small, high-top tables, his face buried in a copy of The Earthsea Trilogy and his fork working a plate of turkey meatballs and pasta.
Stevie pulled up a chair and slid over her tray of lasagna and salad with maple dressing, because she had given up fighting the maple syrup.
“Hey,” she said.
Nate peered out of his book.
“Hey,” he said.
She waited for him to put the book down. It took him a moment to get the hint. He put a napkin carefully between the pages as a bookmark. Nate didn’t press books facedown and ruin their spines.
“Talk to me about writing,” Stevie said.
“Why do you hate me?” he replied.
“Seriously. Tell me about it.”
“Tell you what?” he said. “You write. That’s it.”
“But how do you do it?” she said. “Do you just sit down and write? Do you have to plan first? Do you just write whatever comes into your head?”
“Is someone paying you to do this to me?”
“It’s just . . . remember that first day when we were talking about zombies? And Hayes had no idea what the Monroeville Mall was?”
“Yeah?”
“That was weird,” she said.
He waited for her to explain what she was saying, but she had no explanation. Nate returned to his book and meatballs.
“It’s like Truly Devious,” she said after a moment.
Nate looked up with tired eyes, but he still looked up.
“What about it?”
“The person they arrested for the Ellingham murders,” she said. “Anton Vorachek. He could never have written that letter. His English was too rough. Anyway, who announces they’re going to commit a murder?”
“Pretty much every serial killer,” Nate said.
“Very few serial killers do that,” Stevie corrected him. “The Zodiac was one of the only . . .”
“In movies,” he said. “In books.”
“Here’s another thing,” Stevie said, warming to the topic. “There’s an old mystery riddle. A man is found hanging in an empty room, locked from the inside. There is no chair, nothing for him to stand on. How did it happen?”
“Stood on a block of ice,” Nate said. “Everyone knows that one.”
“Right,” Stevie said. “It’s just like the one about someone being found stabbed to death in a locked room and there’s no weapon. The weapon was an icicle. It’s so well known that no one can use that device in mystery stories. It’s like saying the butler did it, but worse. It can never be ice.”
“Yeah, well, this isn’t a mystery story.”
“Don’t you wonder what Hayes was doing in the tunnel?”
“We know what he was doing,” Nate said. “He was making a video or something.”
“That’s what everyone thinks he was doing.”
“What else would he have been doing there? No one else was down there with him, and even if they were, you don’t bring a few hundred pounds of dry ice along to make out. I’m not up to date on my kinks but I don’t think that’s one.”
Stevie sat back and picked at her lasagna. She looked around the dining hall. She saw Gretchen coming in—rather, she saw Gretchen’s hair, but Gretchen was with her hair.
Of all the people here, Gretchen possibly knew Hayes the best. She had been with him last year, definitely longer than Maris. And out of everyone at the school, she looked the most consistently shell-shocked. Maris was getting the sympathy, but Gretchen genuinely looked caved in. Stevie watched her at the counter getting a salad in a to-go box.
“Writing is a lot of sitting down,” Nate said, finally answering the question. “It’s a lot of trying things out and screwing up. You saw it when we worked on the script.”
“But we used things that existed,” Stevie said. “What if you’re totally making it up?”