Truly Devious: Chapters 5–8

There were a few people with glossy, perfect hair who had already clumped together through that strange alchemy that joins all people with perfect, glossy hair.

There was another girl with green hair and a NASA T-shirt who handled the grassy terrain in her wheelchair with deftness.

The tour was moving toward the Ellingham library, a stone structure that looked a bit like a church, with a large rose window, a spire, and a rounded set of red double doors.

Elaborate spiral staircases made of wrought iron woven into patterns of twisting vines led up to the other levels.

“This is the study yurt,” Kaz said, pushing back a heavy flap that served as the door.

“End of the tour!” he said, walking them past the walled garden, and back into a clearing in the trees to a large, sprawling modern building of raw Vermont wood and stone.

The painting seemed to preside over everything.

Two massive desks filled one side of the room. One held six sleek black rotary telephones.

A man in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit with an Iron Man T-shirt underneath came bounding down the steps in a slow-motion run.

She pointed to a knoll in the middle, where there was a round structure with a domed glass roof.

“It’s good to know we’re going to the most morbid school in America,” Nate said.

It was George Marsh, a close family friend and member of the intimate Ellingham circle.

Several years before, he had saved Albert’s life when an anarchist placed a bomb in his car.

George Marsh was Albert’s de facto security man, and tonight, Flora could see he was here on business.

Off duty, George was loose and gregarious.

Within a few seconds, he was ensconced in Albert’s office along with Montgomery.

She started at the mirrored makeup table, where Iris’s extensive collection of cosmetics were kept in rigorous order by her maid—lipsticks lined up like soldiers, French perfumes pleasingly arranged, silver hairbrushes and mirror tidily side by side.

It was the nexus of Albert’s business, his private area.

The motley black-and-white floor still felt rough and dirty from the weekend’s revels; the staff had not yet cleaned it.

The motley black-and-white floor still felt rough and dirty from the weekend’s revels; the staff had not yet cleaned it.

Iris had shown Flora a trick about these rooms: the mirrors in the room were interspersed with panels covered in wallpaper, in a pattern depicting the characters of the commedia dell’arte.

On the last panel on the left side, there was a wall sconce in the form of a Venetian mask.

She indicated a pile of wet, used towels on the floor next to her as if it was a comfortable divan.

“I do,” Janelle said. “Well, some. I think it means...my heart is a palace...something...?”
“...debased by the crowd.”

“Can’t help you,” Ellie said, proffering the bottle again.

“I don’t watch TV at all. Never have. We never had one growing up. My house was always about making art. I grew up in an art colony in Boston, then in a commune in Copenhagen, and then in New Mexico, and then we went to Paris for a while.”

The party outfit was going to be black shorts and black tank top. Her concession to the occasion was a pair of red flip-flops.

Random, discordant bleating came from upstairs. Ellie was playing her saxophone, and one thing was clear—she did not know how to play.

A first year was in this group, striking in black lipstick and a shaggy red dress. Her name, Stevie would pick up as the evening went on, was Maris Coombes, and she was an opera singer. Stevie learned this because she kept emitting high, clear snatches of arias.

A girl came in through the flap with a kind of queenly bearing.

“You don’t like meeting new people,” Stevie surmised.

Hayes was sidling up to Maris.

Nate shifted in commiseration, but Janelle gave an obliging smile.

She opened her eyes and looked over at her bureau.

Maybe most people wouldn’t be soothed by reading about the acid bath murders, about Lizzy Borden or H. H. Holmes, about highway murders, about the quiet neighbor with the dark secret, about bodies in walls and latent fingerprints, about thirteen guests at dinner when you know they can’t all live....These things were problems for her mind to work on, and when her mind worked on the mystery, it couldn’t panic.

She got into the Websleuths world online. There, she found people like herself, people who spent their time looking into cold cases. It was there that she became transfixed by the Ellingham case.

Mackenzie huddled in his coat, but Ellingham didn’t appear to feel the chill at all. He rushed to the car door and was taken aback at the sight.

The electricity on the mountaintop was often erratic.

He was wearing the same clothes he had been in the night before, and there were still one or two wayward feathers stuck in his hair.

“Didn’t sleep much last night,” Hayes said with a roguish smile.