Back at school she tells Janelle and Nate what happened and clues Janelle in on David’s father. He says he has his reasons for getting himself beat up but they don’t involve Stevie, so they’re not important. That the last thing Albert said was “it’s on the wire.” Outside of Fenton’s house, David is filming himself getting the shit beat out of him by guys he paid to do it. Stevie finds information from Robert Mackenzie but not about the codicil. Hunter lets her in and they look at her files. She’s upset but asks Larry to take her down the mountain to town so she can go to Fenton’s house. Security Larry comes to find Stevie to tell her that he’s been fired because two students died on his watch. Ellie just doesn’t seem like she’s capable of doing all that. Security Larry takes her down into the basement to show her the secret tunnel where Ellie escaped and the window she probably climbed through. Could Ellie really have done that? Unlikely. Someone stole Janelle’s card, someone put too much dry ice in the tunnels. She thinks more about Ellie and if she could possibly be a murderer and about all the clues in the Hayes case. She gives her an assignment about finding menus and things, which she can already do we know from the last book, and then she meets Fenton’s nephew who lives with her and possibly takes care of her because we’re all pretty sure that she’s an alcoholic and not allowed to drive.

She meets with Fenton who quizzes her about the case and deems her worthy enough to take on.

Lots of the other students had been thinking about it, too, but it’s hard to run away when you have nothing and grew up on a commune. Fenton, thinking about where Ellie could have gone. Security Larry picks her up after her flight with Edward King and says he expects her to follow the rules a little more when she gets back to school. He wants Stevie back at school to keep an eye on David, to keep him in line and to keep him from getting expelled. He has ulterior motives, of course, the sleazebag that he is. Now she’s stuck on the outside, until she returns home and finds sleazy senator Edward King in her living room, convincing her parents to let her go back to school. Stevie is upset that as soon as she found this major clue, she was taken out of the school because of a report that Germaine Batt, another student at the school, wrote about Hayes’s death and Ellie’s disappearance. She knows that the students in the pictures, the one dressed as Bonnie and Clyde, are the same students that Leonard Holmes Nair mentioned in his police interview. Stevie is back in her hometown in a coffee shop looking through the first piece of real evidence in the Ellingham Affair in 80 years, the tea tin she found in Ellie’s bedroom filled with photographs, the first draft of a poem, a magazine cut out of the word US and some other things like lipstick, a pill box, a feather, some cloth.

The vanishing staircase