The best answer she had come up with was:
“What if we just . . . went? For a little? One night. If we don’t ask . . .”
“Without telling her?” Janelle said. “Oh, she’d kill us. She will get on a plane to come and kill us with her hair.”
She had a point, of course. If Dr. Quinn found out that they had taken off across England to bust into a murder mansion, she would, in fact, kill them all with her hair.
“Stevie . . .” Janelle brushed imaginary lint off her yellow sweater. It was the color of lemons—Janelle’s favorite. “We’re in another country. And . . . we need to graduate.”
“I need to graduate too,” Stevie said.
“I know that. I didn’t say you didn’t.”
“So I can go,” Stevie said. “On my own.”
“So Quinn can expel you? For real, Stevie, have you even started your applications? I haven’t seen you do anything. All that stuff is due soon. You have to make plans. You’re always running after whatever shows up in front of you, but you can’t do that forever.”
This was unexpected. Stevie felt it in her solar plexus. The thing that was never said, the thing she felt over her shoulder but kept telling herself wasn’t there, it was real. Her friends saw her for what she was. Janelle and Vi and Nate—they were doing the work, and Stevie was a free-floating object, pinging around, looking for focus. Looking at garbage.
Janelle was almost shaking with upset. She got up and left the room. Vi followed her. Stevie heard them go to Janelle’s room and shut the door.
“That didn’t go well,” Nate said.
“No.”
“If one of us was missing,” Nate said, “and you were worried, would you invite a bunch of strangers to come to your house when you were freaking out?”
“If one of those strangers solved things like that, I would.”
“I think it’s weird. And Janelle may have a point. Do you really think you can find her by going to Merryweather?”
Five minutes ago, Stevie had been sure, but her confidence had been shot out. Her best friend had just leveled a heavy blow.
A few minutes later, Vi came back with Janelle in tow. Janelle was quiet. There was still tension in her posture.
“I’m sorry,” she said. When most people apologized, they looked down. Janelle looked right in Stevie’s eye. “I’m just . . . I worry. And we’re on thin ice as it is. I have a proposal. If you call Quinn and she says we can go, I’ll go. And Vi said they would go. Nate?”
Nate shrugged a general acceptance of this plan.
“But if she says no, you’ll stay,” Janelle added. “We stick together. Deal?”
It was one in the morning there, which meant it was eight o’clock at night in Vermont.
“She might be gone for the day,” Stevie said.
Janelle shrugged as if to say, Not much I can do about that.
“Fine,” Stevie said. “It’s a deal. I’ll go call her.”
Stevie returned to her room, her face flush with anxiety. Having Quinn call you was bad enough—calling Quinn after hours was not a pleasant prospect. She had to be gone by now, off to some dinner or cocktail thing or a tryst with a lover or a meeting with a spy or whatever the hell it was Quinn did when not running Ellingham. Stevie called the number, clenching and unclenching her fist involuntarily, when . . .
“It’s late there, isn’t it?” Dr. Quinn said.
She was there, still at her desk, looking tired and puzzled.
“Yeah. Um. I wanted to ask something? Sorry it’s late.”
“What is it?” she asked, indicating that Stevie should get on with it.
“We’ve been offered a chance to go to this place called Merryweather? It’s a manor house. The owner invited us. He’s a . . .”
How did you pronounce viscount? She knew it wasn’t the way it was written, but she couldn’t remember the right way to do it.
“He has a title. And he’s a friend of someone here. And it’s really nice. It has a site. You can see it.”
“And he invited you to do what?”
“Just visit for the night. It’s sort of like a hotel, like a venue, so there are a lot of rooms.”
A tapping sound on the other end. She was looking it up.
“I see.”
“It has . . . really famous gardens.”
She could almost hear Dr. Quinn’s synapses firing. This was the problem with having a smart head of school—she knew something was up. But her game always recognized game. Stevie had presented a highly suspicious but ultimately reasonable plan. The flaw was not obvious. She was intrigued.
Tap. Tap. Click. Click. She was looking it over.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Dr. Quinn finally said. “But I think you should stick to your schedule.”
“Okay, but we . . .”
“Stick to your schedule. You have enough to do in London. No side trips. I believe you have a tour tomorrow that focuses on Brunel? I think that’s more important. Good night.”
She was gone.
Stevie sat on her bed, thinking.
Angela Gill was missing. She needed help. Stevie was sure—sure—that she could get at the answer at Merryweather.
She was pretty sure, at least.
It was a possibility. A strong one. But Quinn had said no.
Stevie got up, took half an anxiety pill, gulped back the contents of a can of some drink she’d bought the day before and forgotten about, then returned to her friends.
“She said yes.” Stevie arranged her expression into a mask of pleased disbelief. “It turns out she really loves gardens.”
It was so easy to lie. So frighteningly easy.
EXCERPT FROM THE WITNESS STATEMENT OF PETER ELMORE
24 June 1995
Q: Can you tell me where you went when the game began?
A: I went outside. Inside would have been nicer, but if you’re playing the game, you have to play it. There are more hiding places outside. More ground to move around.
Q: How did you exit the house?
A: Through the library—well, through the orangery that’s connected to the library. I started off trying to hide in the gardens out that end, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. I ended up going to the back gardens. Plenty more places there. It was bucketing down. I pressed myself under a bench.
Q: And did you see Rosie or Noel at any point when you were outside?
A: No. I didn’t see much aside from the ground.
Q: And who found you?
A: Yash. And quite pleased he was about it too. I was fine with it. I’d been there for ages and I was freezing and had a cramp.
Q: You became a seeker.
A: Yes, I was taken to the folly for my slicker and a torch. I managed to find Sooz almost straightaway.
Q: At any point did you approach or attempt to enter the woodshed?
A: I probably ran past it at some point, but I never went over to it. All the outbuildings were locked. Sebastian made sure we knew that.
Q: What happened after the game was suspended?
A: We went back inside. We lit some candles. The fire was going in the sitting room. It had gone down a good bit since we’d been out, so we put more logs on it, got it going again. Sebastian was talking about some whisky and was determined that we were going to drink it. He was making a tremendous fuss about it. That proved to be my undoing. I’d taken a bottle of champagne outside with me and I had the entire thing, plus the drinks from before, plus whatever else . . . the whisky was the last straw. I had to go upstairs and be sick. Then I got into bed. Theo came through with glasses of water. Then I woke up sometime around . . . eleven, I think, or noon. I felt all right, because you usually do after you’re ill, don’t you? Get it out of your system.