Dr. Quinn waved her hand, indicating that Janelle should stop talking.
“You,” she said, “I’m not worried about. Let me hear from someone else.”
Vi stepped up.
“I want to concentrate on the impact of colonialism,” they said.
“That’s a broad remit,” Dr. Quinn said.
“I’m going to narrow it to the British Museum,” Vi said, “and the question of ownership of cultural artifacts.”
“What about you, Nate?”
“Book stuff,” he said. “Writers . . .”
“Can you be more specific?”
“British Library. Um, I’m going to . . . There are manuscripts there. I’m going to look at. Them. The originals. And there are literary tours.”
Dr. Quinn leaned back in her chair and rolled her fountain pen between her thumb and forefinger for a moment.
“And what about you, Stevie?” she asked. “This trip seems to be at the invitation of David Eastman, so I assume you have something significant planned and you’re not just making up an excuse to take time off school to visit your boyfriend. Or some other ill-advised reason.”
“Well,” Stevie said, “I was hoping to, just . . . the museums. The . . .”
She’d practiced. She had a whole list of places, justifications, full-bodied lies. But in the scorching rays of Dr. Quinn’s stare, her mind had become a dry and barren place.
“The . . . ?”
Use your words, Stevie.
“The . . . specific role that England plays in media portrayals of crime. Mysteries. Why we like English mysteries. How English mysteries got to be a thing, especially during the period between World War One and World War Two. Murder as a comfort activity. Reading about it, I mean.”
That was jumbled, but she got all the main concepts in there.
“I see. Well. You can understand why I’m a bit nervous to allow the four of you to travel as a group. Things tend to happen when you move as a unit.”
“It’s not really our fault,” Stevie said.
“A case could be made.”
“This is an academic trip,” Janelle said. “I mean, it’s also exciting. I want to see London. We all want to see London. We got an offer with a place to stay. This is the only way we can afford to do it. And because it’s Thanksgiving week, we’d only be missing about four days. It’s an opportunity we’re not going to get again.”
Smart. Well played. Janelle landed that last note with just the right tone of voice.
More pen rolling. Silence, except for the clank of the heating starting up from some dark corner of the Great House.
Tick. Tick. Hissssssssssss.
“All right,” Dr. Quinn said. “I understand this pitch you’ve put together is largely a ruse to get my approval, but it is a good opportunity. London is an amazing city. I’m giving this my tentative okay. But there are conditions. Once these plans are approved by your teachers, you will make a schedule and you will stick to it. You will stay together as a group. You will not deviate from the plan without permission from me. I have many, many contacts in London. My eyes and ears are everywhere. I will also be calling you. The calls will be at random times. And when I call, you pick up and show me where you are and what you are doing. Think of me as always being with you.”
Stevie Bell had faced murders, run for her life, fallen from great heights, and in various other ways looked into the abyss. None of those things quite brought the dread of the thought of Dr. Quinn hauling herself to an airport, boarding a plane, and going to another country just to bring Stevie home because she’d screwed up.
But she had her yes.
June 24, 1995
8:30 a.m.
THEODORA BAILEY PEELED HER HEAD AWAY FROM THE PILLOW AND looked at her watch. She rubbed her face hard. On one hand, she knew she should go back to sleep. She’d only crawled into bed three hours before. On the other hand, she knew trying to go back to sleep was useless. She was constitutionally unable to sleep past six in the morning, no matter what she had been up to the night before, so this eight thirty in the morning thing was decadent enough. When she started training in the hospital in a few months’ time, she would frequently be sleepless, but she would still have to perform her duties. This was good training. She pushed herself out of the wonderfully comfortable bed, considered throwing up, let the moment pass, and got to her feet.
Out of everyone in the group, she’d had the least to drink the night before, but that still meant four or five glasses of champagne. Or six. Who knew? Sebastian refilled them before they were empty, so it could have been any amount. On top of that, there had been the whisky. It felt like someone had pulled a woolly jumper over her thoughts.
It appeared she had tried to change her clothes before going to sleep—she was at least wearing an oversized Prodigy T-shirt as a nod to pajamas. She pulled on some tracksuit bottoms she found on the floor next to her. When she had started Cambridge, her hair was natural and long. With each passing year, she’d taken inches off it. Doctors needed something easy to manage, that didn’t get things in it, like your friends’ sick when you assisted them to the loo after a long night. It was now flat on top and close cropped; as she ran her hand over it, she found that it harbored a leaf and some organic detritus from crawling under a yew border a few hours ago. She plucked these out. The damage could be much worse—they were lucky none of them had been struck by a falling branch during the storm. Or an entire tree, for that matter. She could handle a leaf or two.
After a quick wee and a splash of her face, she made her way down the main staircase, taking care to step on the edges of the steps rather than the center. （The center of the step always creaked more than the edge.） Not that she was likely to disturb anyone in a house this size. Living packed together as they did in Cambridge, she was hardwired to step lightly and try not to wake her friends.
She went to the kitchen, drank a full pint glass of water, and washed it down with a cup of instant coffee and some loose Hobnobs she found on a plate. The kitchen had suffered a grave assault during the middle of the night feast. She soaked the oven trays with the carbonized remains of the burned fish fingers and chips. She threw wrappers in the garbage, swept the floor, and washed plates and mugs. Then she began the circuit to take stock of the wounded.
Sebastian and Sooz were still fast asleep on their sofas, so she padded back upstairs and made her way along the halls, peering inside bedrooms. Yash, Peter, and Angela were all in their bedrooms, in various stages of undress and in a variety of positions. Yash had burrowed under the blankets, with only a bit of his hair sticking out the top. Angela was facedown on the bed, fully clothed. Peter was in his underwear, sleeping sideways across the bed, his head and feet dangling. It took a bit longer to find Julian; he had decided to sleep on a chaise longue in the library. She put a throw blanket over him.
Wherever she looked, she could not find Rosie or Noel—not in the bedrooms they had claimed, or the empty ones, or any of the other rooms inside the sprawling maze that was Merryweather. The more she looked, the more determined she became to find them. She opened cupboards, she looked in closets, she went into the pantry, the cellar, all the bathrooms and anterooms. This was strange, but not even remotely the strangest outcome of one of their parties. One time she’d found Sebastian asleep on the front doormat. He’d walked all the way home from the pub, gotten to the door, and curled up and gone to bed. Another time, she found Sooz in a shopping trolley in the back garden. If Rosie and Noel were tucked away in a folly or outbuilding, there was nothing much in that.