The Vanishing Stair

“With mysteries,” she said, “with crime, you get all this information—everything matters. The location. The time. The weather. The building. The ground. Every single thing that floats by. Every object in the room. Everything everyone says. It’s a lot of stuff. And you have to look at it all and find the pattern, find the thing that stands out, figure out the thing that means something. Is there a piece of thread stuck in the fence? Did someone hear a noise? Is there a fingerprint under the table? And there could be thousands of fingerprints—so which one means something? You take everything in the world and you figure out what matters. That’s what it is. And then you make things right.”

“So you want to find out the answers and I want to make up the answers,” he said. “I think we just saved a ton of money on therapy.”

“Also I want to wear the exam gloves,” Stevie said.

“We all want that.” Nate smiled a bit.

“It’s funny when you smile,” she said. “It’s like a rainbow on a cloudy day.”

“Don’t ever say that to me again.”

“What does the Pulsating Norb do?” she asked, trying to push down her thoughts.

“Nothing. It’s like a Jell-O wall. Well . . . you can put stuff in it and no one can see it.”

“It’s a wall that hides things? You didn’t tell me that before.”

“Mainly it pulsates,” Nate said. “It looks like it’s breathing. I’m not putting the Pulsating Norb in.”

“One day,” George Marsh said, his head down, “I saw one of the kids from the school out reading one of those crime-story magazines. I asked her about it, and she said she was reading one about a kidnapping. She wanted to know if I had ever worked on one. I said I had. She asked me if there were notes, trails of clues. The more she asked me, the more I realized that the kidnappings I had seen were simple. You take someone, you get paid, and you give them right back. As long as no one sees your face, the matter is largely settled. Then I thought about the money in the safe in your office. It all came to me. I’d ask for that money. Honestly, I thought Iris would . . .”

“Would what?”

George Marsh looked up from wringing his hands.

“Enjoy it,” he said.

“Enjoy it?”

“She was looking for thrills, Albert. She was using cocaine. You know that. You know what kind of company she kept. She wanted fun and adventure. She was bored up here. All that was supposed to happen was that she would be grabbed and put in a barn for a few hours. You could see Iris telling that story over dinner.”

If Albert Ellingham could picture this, he did not say so.

“That can’t be real,” George said. “The bomb.”

“Oh, it’s real. As is my promise to set it off if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

“Why would you . . .”

“Because I have nothing left,” Albert Ellingham said quietly. “The only thing I need is the answer. I know you have it. If you do not give it to me, then I will end us both. Think very carefully about what you will do next, George. Realize I did not get where I am in life by making idle threats.”

“I don’t know it all,” Albert Ellingham said as he waved. “That’s why we’re here. I’m going to tell you what I’ve worked out and then you’ll fill in the rest. I know that on the afternoon of the kidnapping you were in Burlington. You were seen at the post office, at the police station—you were all over Burlington when Iris took the car out. So you probably were not involved in the physical act of kidnapping, though I could be wrong. You must have come up to the house in the late afternoon. I imagine the fog helped—not a lot of cars out, hard to see. There were no unusual tire patterns, so I suspect you parked where you always park. You didn’t play around with anything silly, like wearing shoes that were too large and trying to leave fake prints. If any traces of you were
around—well, so what? You were at my house all the time. You are the person who is always and never there. You went into the tunnel. You went up into the dome, and there you were, face-to-face with one of the brightest girls in New York City. You had some kind of weapon, I’m sure, but she had something greater. She had her book. She looked at you and she recognized the attic man. Maybe she knew her time was limited. She wasn’t going to let you get away with it. Like the dying person in A Study in Scarlet, she left a message—a message for me. This is where I need you to take over, George. Explain it to me.”

“There is nothing to explain,” George Marsh said.

I found out so many things about so many people that I didn’t want to know, but I didn’t find anything that explained what happened to Iris or Alice. The most obvious thing is the thing I missed. You really never do see the thing that’s right in front of you. I wrote a little riddle to myself the other day. It went like this: Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair? I sometimes come up with my riddles automatically. My mind generates them and I have to solve them for myself. There are many things to try when solving riddles. Always on a staircase but never on a stair. In this case, the riddle is telling you to remove the word ‘stair’ from staircase. What word do you get? Tell me.”

“Case?” George Marsh said reluctantly.

“Exactly. Who is always on a case? An investigator. Who is someone who is never really there? The guest who isn’t a guest? The police officer, there to protect, never part of the crime. You were the person standing on that vanishing stair. Dottie told me. She told me in her own words. You see, when the students first arrived, I did some recordings of them talking about their experiences at the school. I was thinking of
putting together a little reel to show before films. Dottie said something very amusing. She said she had been frightened to come to the woods because she was from the city. Imagine that! For Dottie, the city was the safe space, and nature was wild and frightening. But her uncle the police officer told her not to worry. He said there was an ‘attic man’ at the school. I had no idea what she was talking about, so she explained that thieves are often called second-story men, and that the police were attic men, who were on the floor above—they’d jump down and catch the second-story men. Her uncle knew who you were—George Marsh, the famous cop who saved Albert Ellingham. And so did Dottie.”

She had no proof, of course. She couldn’t take it to court. She could not immediately write a book—not that she knew how to write a book. She had seen Nate trying to write a book, and the process looked terrible. She had never actually worked out what she would do once she solved the case. Who did she tell? Did she shout it at the moon? Tweet it? Update her Facebook status to “crime solver”?

“It could have been an accident,” George Marsh said. “She gets startled, or someone grabs her. She accidentally slashes the page with a pencil. . . .”

“No, I understand why you might think that, but no. An accidental mark wouldn’t have been so precise. This was deliberately underlined. I think Dottie Epstein was making an effort to send a message she was hoping I would understand. She was counting on me, and I let her down.”

“Albert,” George said, “you can’t do this to yourse—”

Albert Ellingham waved down this injunction.

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, George, but it’s true. I understood Dottie. She was someone who played the game. Her uncle was with the New York City police, actually, like you. She claimed that she learned many of the techniques for breaking into places from him.”

Albert Ellingham chuckled a bit, and George Marsh smiled.

“Yes,” Albert Ellingham said, “she was a very clever girl, Dottie, and she didn’t go down without a fight. Oh, do me a
favor. There’s a panel under your seat. Reach down between your legs and slide it to the left. Have a look inside.”

George Marsh bent down as instructed and slid the panel. Under his seat were tight bundles of dark sticks of explosive, firmly fastened to the body of the boat.

Albert Ellingham looked right at the sun.

“This boat is rigged,” he said calmly. “There’s four more like that one. I’ve just set the trip wire and it is connected to the rope around my hand. If I release it, we will both go up. I could have used a gun, but it’s too easy to get a gun away from someone, and I don’t like guns. Frankly, I couldn’t trust myself. My desire to shoot you is too strong. This requires me to have some self-control if I want to find out all I need to know. Your only option right now is to sit very still and tell me how it all happened.”

“You know,” Albert Ellingham said after a moment, “in that copy I saw she made a mark under a famous quote: ‘I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic.’ I got to thinking about this line she underlined. It wasn’t neat—it was scratched in, in pencil. Rough. Uneven. No other marks in the book. But who thinks about a mark in a student’s book? And I was so caught up with Iris and Alice. I was looking, like Watson, but I failed to observe. But something must have lodged in my mind. You know how your mind works on a problem? It ticks away in the background. That mark under that line. It bothered me.”

“You know,” he said as he worked. “When they found Dottie Epstein, she was reading Sherlock Holmes. She’s so
often forgotten in all this. That’s my fault. I focus on Iris, on Alice . . . Little Dottie Epstein from the Lower East Side gets swept aside in the shuffle. It’s not right. She deserved better.”

“That poor kid,” George Marsh said, shaking his head.

“Dolores Epstein,” Albert Ellingham said. “Dottie, that’s what she went by. Exceptional girl, truly exceptional. She was the first student I picked for the school. Did I ever tell you that?”

George Marsh shook his head.

“No?” Albert Ellingham said. “No. I suppose it never came up. I heard about her from one of the top librarians at the public library, this girl from Avenue A who read Greek and slipped into one of the rare books rooms three times. They said she was trouble, but good trouble. Good trouble. You understand me, George?”

“I do,” George Marsh said. “There’s some good trouble in you, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Not at all, not at all. I appreciate it. I went to her school, spoke with her principal. I could tell he was both happy to be rid of her and heartbroken at the same time. You don’t get students like that every day. I remember the joy on her face when she arrived at the academy—when she went to my library and found out she could have any book she wanted. . . . George, I’m a rich man. I own a lot. But I’ll tell you something—the best money I ever spent was on Dottie Epstein’s books. I was feeding a mind. She was a tremendous kid.”