By the time this was all over, it was almost midnight. They returned to Craven House with a heaving bag of junk food from Tesco Express and a sense of having done something in this general effort. When they reached the lobby, David and Stevie looked at each other.
“Want to hang out?” David asked.
She did, in fact, want to hang out.
They decided to go to his room. It was much like Stevie’s in layout, with a few more personal touches. But not, Stevie noted, as many as she expected. He hadn’t been able to bring that much with him to England, so most of his things were new to her, and the room was sterile and blank.
Which mattered not at all. The door was no sooner closed than he was kissing her, backing her carefully toward the bed. She was reaching for it, trying to find it so she knew where to sit and when to lean back. He was on top of her, kissing along her chin, down to her chest. He was reaching up under her shirt, running his still-cold hands over her stomach, up higher.
“All night,” he said. “We’ve been out there all night and . . .”
She silenced him by putting her mouth on his, tugging her shirt up. They were working with frantic speed. And then came the fervent rapping on the door. David broke off the kiss. He closed his eyes and shook his head, then pulled down his shirt and leaned back as if nothing was going on. Stevie did the same.
“Come in,” he yelled.
“There have been developments,” Izzy said, rushing in, paying no attention to the close atmosphere in the room. “Two things. One, Julian got information. On the night she disappeared, my aunt got a call from an unknown mobile number at 9:53. That’s right in the middle of the chain of texts. Here.”
She pulled up Angela’s texts and pointed to the spot.
9:46 p.m. ANGELA: She had the button
9:47 p.m. THEO: ?
9:48 p.m. SOOZ: What Theo said.
9:48 p.m. YASH: Button?
9:49 p.m. PETER: what?
9:50 p.m. SOOZ: I have to go back onstage. Please someone explain to me what is happening.
9:51 p.m. SEBASTIAN: Can you ring me?
9:55 p.m. THEO: Ange?
9:57 p.m. THEO: Ange can you pick up?
9:58 p.m. PETER: I just rang as well and it went to voice mail.
“So she mentions the button. That’s the last time she speaks on this chain. The call comes right after Sebastian asks her to ring. And Peter says down here that her line is engaged and goes to voice mail. An unknown mobile number.”
“That’s not hard to do,” David said. “Set up an online burner account.”
“But someone went to the trouble,” Stevie said.
“That seems bad.” Izzy wrapped her arms around herself. “Very strange. She gets this unknown call and then she’s gone. But there’s more. Tonight, they all kept talking on the chain. They’ve all decided to meet at Merryweather. Tomorrow. They’re going to spend the night. I had an idea. I texted Sooz separately, pretending I didn’t know about their going. I was saying how scary this situation is and talked my way into being invited. And then I asked to bring you. All of you. To Merryweather.”
“Us?” Stevie said. “Where is it?”
“Gloucester. Outside of Cheltenham. Only two hours or so on the train. I’m going mad here and there’s nothing more I can do. The answer is there, isn’t it? With them? We need to go where they are, and it will be all of them!”
Stevie felt stupid having to explain that tomorrow they had a boat tour of the Thames to learn about the work of someone named Isambard Kingdom Brunel who was apparently a very important Victorian-era engineer who made tunnels and bridges but who looked like the kind of guy who had a basement full of urchins. Stevie didn’t particularly care about this, but Janelle was eager and had been planning to do an essay about it.
“There’s a train at noon that would get us there by midafternoon,” Izzy said. “Please. This may be the chance to find out what’s going on.”
Stevie ran through the math in her mind.
On one hand: missing person.
On the other: limited time in England, every second of which was dripping away. And they had a schedule to follow or else.
On the third hand: missing person who was present at a murder at a country house and thought something was up with that murder.
On the fourth hand （officially too many hands now）： it wasn’t that she came here to be with David, but . . . manor house. With David.
Minutes later, Stevie walked back over to the other side of Craven House. She found everyone still awake, sitting in Vi’s room and eating their feast of chips and cookies.
“So,” she said. “Something’s come up. Hear me out.”
She started with the positive approach. Didn’t they all want to go to a manor house? They’d been invited by a viscount, for whatever that was worth. She expected more enthusiasm than the tepid silence she was getting. Vi picked at the dust at the bottom of a bag of pickled-onion-flavored chips and Nate wrinkled his nose as if holding back a sneeze. Janelle met Stevie’s eye.
“Stevie,” she said, “I don’t know if we can, or should, for a bunch of reasons. We only have two more days here. We still have all of Vi’s and Nate’s stuff to do. I mean, a manor house sounds cool, but it’s just a house, and we have things here in London. Vi has an interview with a curator from the British Museum tomorrow. It’s a big deal for them. They need it for their applications.”
“The answer is there,” Stevie said with increasing desperation. “Angela was on to something, or at least she was working on something. We show up, Izzy brings up the fact that Angela was talking about the lock when she was high, Angela sends a text to the others saying she needs to talk to them and they should go to Merryweather, and now she’s gone. Wherever she is, it has something to do with what happened at Merryweather, and the way to find her is to find out what happened.”
“We all get it. It’s important that Izzy finds her aunt. We really do understand that. But her aunt vanished here, right? That’s why we just helped with the posts.”
“Well, she was last seen here . . .”
“But what are the chances she’s at Merryweather?”
Nate and Vi had gone silent and watched this back-and-forth warily.
“Quinn isn’t going to let us go,” Janelle said. “She’s already on edge with us here. We’re supposed to follow the plan. If we say we’re going to some manor house, she will look up that manor house. She will find out there was a murder there once. She will realize what is going on.”
This had already occurred to Stevie. She’d taken a few minutes back in David’s room to look up Merryweather. The first link was to the official site, which was designed to entice couples looking for wedding venues and production crews looking for locations. It had a Wikipedia page, and various mentions of Christmas parties and weddings and gatherings held there. The gardens were apparently famous, and people came to visit them to see the flowers changing over the seasons. Sebastian had done a lot to make sure the murder stuff stayed out of the searches as long as possible. But if you kept looking, it was there, buried in the lines of a few old news articles. If you put in “Merryweather” and “murder,” it came up right away. It wouldn’t be natural to do that, unless you were Dr. Quinn and you knew Stevie and her ways.