Greg was barely a mile away when he left the road and went right into the trees and a wall of rock.

10

“WHAT THE HELL?” JANELLE SAID. “THE HELL?”

It was a good question.

Stevie turned first to the door, which was shut. She walked over and rattled it. It was still locked from the inside. She went over to the window, stepping onto a chair to examine it. The screen and the internal safety grate were intact. There was nowhere for someone to be, but they still looked under the beds. Janelle examined the screws of the window guards up close and found that they were tight, and that there would be no way to remove or replace them from outside. Since the cabin sat on a concrete base, there was no way to come from under the cabin. The only thing that was even slightly open was small hole in the screen, maybe an inch and a half in diameter, which was large enough to let in the mosquitoes, but certainly not large enough to allow a person through.

In short, someone had done the impossible.

They sat on the cold concrete floor and looked at each other.

“Well,” Stevie said, “someone’s been reading about me.”

Not long after Stevie had arrived at Ellingham Academy and announced that she would be working on the long-cold Ellingham murder case, someone projected an image onto the wall of her room in the middle of the night—a terrifying version of the Truly Devious letter but rewritten to reference Stevie. Stevie had long kept this to herself, with only Janelle and David knowing most of the details. But after the case was over and Stevie was getting press, she had talked about it with Germaine Batt, Ellingham’s resident student journalist. Germaine had helped Stevie solve the case, and Stevie owed her an exclusive.

So someone knew about messages appearing on Stevie’s bedroom wall at night.

“But that one was projected,” Janelle said. “That’s paint. Someone painted our wall, while we slept, when there was no way in.”

“So what does that mean?” Stevie asked. “It means it didn’t happen.”

“But it did happen.”

“No,” Stevie said. “It means that there’s a message on our wall now. But it had to have been there before we came in last night, because there’s no other way it could have gotten there.”

“It wasn’t there,” Janelle said. “We would have seen it.”

“How can you make something like that appear?”

Janelle fell silent in thought for a moment, then got up and returned to the wall. She climbed up on Stevie’s bed and examined the word up close, scratching at it with her nail and testing the residue with the tip of a finger.

“That’s really dry,” she said. “No tackiness to it at all. There are paints that go on one color and dry another, but . . . say that someone came in when we were out at the picnic and painted that on the wall. One, we would have smelled it. Paint stinks. And two, we were still awake for a while and paint dries quickly, at least initially. I don’t think it would be that dry, though.”