Did she realize she was dying, down there in the dark? Did she make friends with that dark, with the thing that came for her in it? That insidious friend in the shadows who came to take her pain and fear away. Had she heard them above, heard her friends passing overhead as the air grew stale, as she shivered, as she starved and dehydrated? The fear must have been extreme, beyond anything Stevie would ever know. Ellie had been under them all along, all that time. The remains of Hayes’s tribute crunched under her shoes. She looked at the cement she was standing on. Of course, people sometimes don’t answer their phones. The kid is there! Sure, people said stuff when they were drunk, but that was so specific, so insistent. Stevie lowered the phone from her ear and checked her messages again. The phantom circle vaporized into the night, leaving Stevie alone with the flower petals. The dark forms of trees, the pillars of the cupola, the statues all stood in witness.
She looked at George Marsh for a long moment, then turned to Stevie and nodded. She wore a plain brown wool dress and slightly crooked glasses. One more ghostly figure appeared in the circle-a girl, with curled hair and a gap between her teeth. You were seen by someone who loves mysteries.” He folded his arms and stared at Stevie, challenging her.
He was a large man, strongly built, with a square jaw. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a fedora. The figure of George Marsh materialized in the seat next to Francis. You take the stair away-that’s what he was saying. You weren’t the person who was never there, the one on a staircase but never on a stair. “But you wrote that before you left school,” Stevie said, “before it all went wrong. So Frankie and Edward played a hand and things were never the same.’” ‘The king was a joker who lived on a hill and he wanted to rule the game. “We were playing the game,” Francis said. “Everybody thought this was about Truly Devious. “Your stupid poem messed up the case for years,” Stevie went on, circling the space. There was no one in sight, and talking out loud helped.
“You,” Stevie said to them in a low voice.
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