The Hand on the Wall(14)

“Paul’s in a silent phase,” the girl said, as if this explained everything.

“Oh. I’m Stevie. I am . . . was . . . a friend of Ellie’s. . . .”

Stevie barely had the words out when the girl sprang from the floor and wrapped her in an embrace. The girl smelled of a sweet mix of body odor and incense. Her body was taut from what was probably daily, intensive yoga. It was like being wrapped in a warm, stinky garden hose.

“You came to us! You came! She’d be so happy! You came!”

Stevie had not known what kind of reception she would get in the Art Collective, but this was not on the list of possibles.

“I’m Bath,” the girl said, stepping back.

“Bath?”

“Bathsheba. Everyone calls me Bath. Sit. Sit!”

This was weird, because when Stevie first met Ellie, Ellie got into the bath with all her clothes on to dye her outfit pink, probably for this very cabaret. The word bath would always remind Stevie of Ellie.

Bath pointed at another pile of cushions on the floor. They looked faded and stained and vaguely bedbuggy, but Stevie sat down anyway. Once on the floor she noticed that almost one entire wall of the upstairs was lined with empty French wine bottles with melted candles in them.

“From Ellie,” Bathsheba said, sitting cross-legged on the bare floor. “Of course. French wine. French poetry. German theater. That was my girl.”

With these words, Bath broke into tears. Stevie shifted on the cushions and fussed with the bag for a moment.

“I’m glad you came,” Bath said as she sniffed and calmed down. “She liked you. She told me all about you. You’re the detective.”

This made something catch in Stevie’s throat. Right from the start, Ellie had taken Stevie seriously when she said she was a detective. Ellie seemed to have so much confidence in Stevie that Stevie had more confidence in herself. Ellie had taken her in, made friends with her from the start, much like Bathsheba was doing now. Now that Stevie was looking at Bathsheba, it occurred to her that Ellie may have copied her look a bit, as well as some of her behaviors.

“How did Ellie end up here?” Stevie asked. “This is part of the university, right?”

“Not part of,” Bath said. “Most of us who live here go there. The house is owned by a patron who wants to support local arts. It’s an open place for artists. Ellie found us the week after she got to Ellingham. She showed up at the door and said, ‘I make art. Are you going to let me in?’ And we did, of course.”

“I’m here because I’m trying to figure out . . .” Such a rookie mistake. Always have your questions ready. Then again, as a detective, you might not always know who you were going to end up talking to. So talk, she thought. Get talking and the rest will come. “. . . about Ellie. About what she was like, and . . .”

“She was real,” Bath said. “She was Dada. She was spontaneous. She was fun.”

“Did Ellie talk to you about Hayes?” Stevie asked.

“No,” Bath said, rubbing her eyes. “Hayes is the guy who died, right? That was his name?”

Stevie nodded.

“No. She said she knew him, but that was it. And that she was sad.”

“Did she ever mention helping him make a show?”

“She helped make a show? Like a cabaret piece? Hey, did you ever see our cabaret?”

“No, I—”

Bath was already on her laptop and pulling up a video.

“You need to see this,” she said. “You’ll love it. It’s one of Ellie’s best performances.”

Stevie dutifully watched ten minutes of dark, confusing footage of tuneless saxophone, poetry, handstands, and drumming. Ellie was in there, but it was too dark to really see her.

“So yeah,” Bath said as the video ended. “Ellie. I haven’t been able to do much since she died. I try to work, but I mostly stay in a lot. I know she would want me to make art about it. I’ve tried. I’m trying. I don’t want to let her down.”

Me either, Stevie thought.

“When I think of her . . . ,” Bath went on, “how she died. I can’t.”

Neither could Stevie. The idea of being trapped in the dark, underground, with no one able to hear you—it was too horrible. Her panic must have risen as she felt her way down that pitch-black tunnel and realized there was no way out. At some point, she would have known she was going to die. Stevie was thankful for the Avitan gliding through her bloodstream, holding down the pulsing nausea and air hunger she felt whenever she conjured this image in her mind.

Ellie’s death was not her fault. It really wasn’t. Right? Stevie had no idea there was a passage in the wall or a tunnel in the basement. Stevie certainly hadn’t sealed the tunnel. All Stevie did was lay out the facts of the matter in Hayes’s death, and she’d done so in public, in a place that seemed perfectly safe.

Bath had reached over and taken Stevie’s hand. The gesture caught Stevie off guard, and she almost recoiled.

“It’s good to remember her,” Bath said.

“Yeah,” Stevie replied, her voice hoarse.

She looked around the room for a new point of focus. What did she see? What information was there? Splattered paint, Christmas lights, a guitar, glitter, some laundry in the corner, canvases stacked against the wall, a load of wine bottles . . .