1
No matter the weather, it would always be raining.
No matter the season, always late fall.
No matter which way she turned, she always ended up back here. Always in this big black cab. Always on this London street
in the misting rain. Always with Izzy by her side, breathing assurances and hope. Always pulling up to a pub called the Seven
Bishops and walking through the crowd around the bar, through the fug of human humidity in close spaces, full of hope and
a swelling heartbeat. David Eastman had broken up with Stevie Bell on a London street around twelve hours before, but he had
just admitted to Izzy in a series of drunken texts that it was all a mistake. A pointless, baffling mistake. David thought
Stevie was already on a plane back to the US, but she wasn’t. She had missed the plane to solve a murder, as one does, and
now she was pushing her way through this pub to make it all right again, and she and David would embrace and she would feel
him press against her and . . .
Always reaching the point where Izzy tried to pull her back, to keep Stevie from seeing the back of David’s head as he pressed his face to another in a passionate kiss.
“Stevie,” Professor Potts said, “can you tell me what the term Watergate refers to?”
This endless, looping ride went on, even if she was in Vermont, at Ellingham Academy, and had been for over three weeks. Even
if it was four in the afternoon and she was taking her oral final for Modern American Political History that she had barely
studied for because an imaginary cab wound on a route around her brain, strangling her thoughts, blocking everything else
out.
Professor Potts (whose name was Abel Potts, because this was Ellingham, so why not have a professor who sounded like someone
who had been accused of witchcraft in 1692 because his cat had six toes on one foot) waited expectantly for her reply. Stevie
had deliberately taken the seat at the end of the row of chairs knowing this would buy her some time as everyone else answered
their questions, and maybe listening to other people give coherent replies would kick-start her brain into action. But no.
It was just the cab going around and around.
“Stevie?” Professor Potts prompted. “Watergate?”
Watergate. Watergate. She knew this one.
Under ordinary circumstances, Stevie’s history knowledge was good.
History and mystery were interlinked. Both were about looking back, pawing through the evidence, trying to figure out why things are the way they are now.
You crawled through the details. You remembered the dates and the players.
Not so much this afternoon. Oh, she vaguely remembered reading about Watergate.
There were burglars, and something happened somewhere.
So much of history is something happening somewhere, though.
“Watergate,” she repeated. “It was a break-in. Richard Nixon was, um, president . . .”
Professor Potts raised his eyebrows slightly, indicating that more information had better be coming.
“Who broke in and why? What was so important about the Watergate complex?”
All good questions. Names and concepts dribbled from her mouth: reporters, the president, bugging devices. She knew there
was a crime in there somewhere, and that it happened in 1972, and had to do with an election. But the words coming out of
her mouth, while technically in sentence form, didn’t add up, and the more she spoke, the quicker the chains of thoughts fell
apart. She glanced over at Nate Fisher, one of her best friends, who was slumped in a chair on the other side of the room,
wearing his baggy brown corduroy pants and a T-shirt that read If I Can’t Bring My Pipe Organ, I’m Not Coming. He was using his overgrown hair to cover his eyes and protect himself from the sight of Stevie going under.
“Okay,” Professor Potts said when Stevie had petered out of words. “I think we’re at time. Your grades will be posted on EllingDrive later today. Check after seven or so. Stevie, hang back a second.”
Everyone else hurried away, making sure not to catch the visible stink lines of failure coming off Stevie. Professor Potts
indicated she should shut the door.
“Stevie,” he said. “I’m giving you a twenty, and the only reason you’re not getting a zero is because you got the year right.
What’s going on?”
Twenty percent. That was worse than getting a zero. Zero percent had an unhinged majesty to it. Twenty percent said that no,
you tried.
What was she supposed to say? That even though Stevie thought she knew what the songs and the poems and the books were saying
about the horror of breaking up, nothing—nothing—should have felt like this? That the minute David kissed another person, every window in the house in her head had shattered
at once?
“I’ve been sick,” she said.
Professor Potts leaned against one of the high cherrywood bookcases that lined the walls of the exam room and pressed his
index finger into his chin for a moment.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said.
“I’m not going to post that grade tonight.
Over the holiday break, you’re going to make the Watergate story your job.
You’re going to double down on all the studying you should have done for this exam.
When you get back, you’re going to come to my office and I’m going to ask high-level questions that I would ask university-level history majors.
If you can handle that, then you’ll get a new grade. One chance, Stevie. Do the work.”
Stevie stepped into the gray December early evening expecting to see Nate waiting for her outside, but he had gone off, leaving
her on her own. The smart thing would be to go to the library or hole up in one of the hundreds of ideal study spaces provided
by the school to get at least some semblance of her shit together for her remaining exams.
Ridiculous, of course. That kind of thing was for other people.
No. Stevie was going for one of her walks. This was what she had been doing with her time. It had turned into a kind of liturgy,
this meandering lonely walk. She took a particular path, one that wound in a perverse way through the campus. Ellingham Academy
was a twisty place to begin with; paths apparently designed by the whims of cats. It was a good place if you needed to get
lost. She avoided the green, because sometimes people were there. Fewer on the dark and cold December days—still, a few straggled
through, mostly to care for the rescue sheep that had been brought to campus by a first-year student named Valve. You could
hear them bleating plaintively at night.
When you are broken up with someone, you re-map the world around them.
Every part of Ellingham meant something.
The brick path between two buildings was where she saw David walking one time, his coattails flapping behind him.
There was the library David had once filled with squirrels.
The roof he’d slept on. The statue he’d climbed.
She could see his long fingers against the stone, the fabric of his old Yale sweatpants gripping the shoulders of the figure.
In love and crime, every contact leaves a trace.
A detective needs a mystery. Any mystery. The theft of the countess’s diamond. The cryptic, threatening letters in block print
that keep appearing under the door. The girl who vanishes at the end of the dark hallway. The body on the edge of the lawn
with the broken golf club next to it.
These were mysteries Stevie Bell would have been fine working on. Nice, evil things in packages, knots she could untangle
and things she could put right. She’d worked out who killed four teenagers at a camp in 1978 and left their bodies in a box
in the woods. She’d made waves solving the coldest case of all—the 1936 murders and kidnappings that had taken place right
here, at Ellingham Academy.
The thing was—these were all other people’s mysteries. Other people’s mysteries were easier. When it’s your mystery, it’s not a mystery, it’s a tragedy.
Why had David broken up with her? He went to all kinds of lengths to get her an invitation to come over to England, and to extend
it to Nate, and to Janelle Franklin and Vi Harper-Tomo. David, being the son of a disgraced senator, had enough connections
to get the four of them a chance to stay in student housing in London for a week, all under the thin veil of learning.
She even got a sex hoodie. Things were that serious.
Everything that week had been going great (murder aside—between them it had been great). Then, just as she was about to go to the airport, he asked to meet her. There he was, all tall and perfectly haggard, looking down, never at her, and pulling at the lapels of his coat.
“You and me,” he had said. “I don’t think we should do this anymore. It’s not working out.”
But there was no hint of what, exactly, was not working. There was nothing, nothing at all that suggested that was about to
happen. They went from full throttle to dead in the water, with no warning signs.
But surely, there must have been signs. Clues.
Stevie sucked in the cold Vermont air, forcing it to burn her lungs. The burn helped. Freeze it out of her. She pulled off
her gloves and let the wind have her hands as she opened the metal latch of the door to the walled garden behind the Great
House, the mansion that squatted in the middle of the school—a dead center, mostly hollow murder scene. Behind it there was
a massive hole where there used to be a large swimming pond with an island. That island was now a lump of earth supporting
a geodesic dome. She stretched out on the hard, cold ground and stared up at too many pale stars, out too early, and then
at her phone.
Time to study the evidence again. David’s social media. Three days after the breakup: he posted a picture of curry spread
on a table with other people’s hands in the photo, but no faces, no indications as to who they were. Caption: The best part about being in England.
Seven days after: a bike with a deflated tire. Caption: Turns out, you can’t bike over the broken bottle in the road you’re too lazy to go around.
Twelve days after: a massive blackbird with only one eye sitting on the sill of his open window. Caption: I’m sure this is fine and not an omen.
Stevie had, of course, checked and cross-referenced every single comment and like on his posts. Some were from Izzy. Some
from people she eliminated as suspects for the faceless person from the pub. Two people had been solid candidates, but Stevie
then found pictures of them with significant others, so she removed them from her list for the time being.
So she kept watch, waiting for that next post, the next scraps of data. He had not messaged her, and at Janelle’s urging,
she had not messaged him, because apparently that would be a disaster. Every time she tried to add up the events and work
out what was happening, she got a cloud of smoke and dust as a result.
“Hey.”
Stevie rolled the crown of her head back to look behind her. Mudge, her lab partner in anatomy and physiology, was standing
over her. Mudge was six foot two of solid goth, with dyed black hair under a black pom-pom hat, platform combat boots, violet-colored
contacts with snake pupils, and a black leather jacket encrusted in Disney enamel pins.
“I’m finishing up my astronomy notes for the semester,” he said, answering an unasked question. “What are you doing?”
“Just lying here on the ground.”
Mudge was one of the few people around Stevie who had no idea about David and what had happened in the pub.
He accepted her answer. If Stevie wanted to stretch out in a cold pit in the ground on a freezing-cold evening and look at the sky, she should have at it.
He sat down next to her and played with the rips in the knees of his black jeans.
“I got my early admission to USC today,” he said.
Oh, right. College applications. Another loose thread in the gaping hole in her life. Failed exams. No David. Unfinished applications
and almost-done essays.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s in LA, so I can get to Disney at least once a week, get an internship there. Or a job as a cast member
to start. Guess I’ll need a car.”
Mudge’s goal was to become a Disney Imagineer, and it seemed that he was moving toward it smoothly. He looked thoughtful as
he worked out the transportation plans for his well-organized future. Stevie could only see a few hours into her future at
this point, and in a few hours, it would be a new day. A big day. One that would have been a bigger cause for celebration
had events not turned out this way.
“It’s my birthday tomorrow,” she said. “I’m eighteen.”
“Oh yeah. Shit. Happy birthday.”
She hadn’t really meant to come out with that fact.
It had just been floating around in her head.
She would cross the invisible, arbitrary dateline into adulthood.
Mudge looked down at his coat, removed one of the pins, and handed it to her.
It was of an old-fashioned Mickey and Minnie Mouse in a red car.
“That’s from Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway,” he said. “That’s my favorite ride after Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. It starts
with Mickey and Minnie having the perfect day. They sing a song about how nothing can go wrong. You get on a train with Goofy
at the control and they ride alongside you in their car. You end up in a tornado, down a waterfall, getting sucked into the
sewer . . .”
Stevie squinted at the little pin.
“. . . the use of projection mapping techniques is incredible. The only reason Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is better—well, there
are a bunch of reasons—it’s an original ride, and you’re driving drunk . . .”
Stevie looked back up at the uncaring sky.
“. . . you drive through a courtroom. You get hit by a train. And you die in that ride. You go to hell. Second ride, though, definitely this one. Take it. Happy birthday.”
He pushed himself off the ground and went back toward the patio of the Great House, to where he had set out a telescope.
Stevie put the pin on her red vinyl coat and wished he had given her the one from the ride where she simply went right to
hell.