The Vanishing Stair

The first Truly Devious book ended with a murder, a disappearance, and a very deliberate cliffhanger, so I picked up The Vanishing Stair expecting answers. What I got was a middle book that is more interested in the questions than in the answers, and a heroine who is starting to understand that solving a crime is not the same thing as repairing the damage around it. It is a tense, quick read. It is also a book that withholds, sometimes elegantly and sometimes just because it can.

Back to Ellingham

Stevie Bell is a true-crime obsessive who got into Ellingham Academy because she wanted to solve the school's founding mystery. In 1936, Albert Ellingham's wife, Iris, and daughter, Alice, were kidnapped. A student named Dottie Epstein died. Alice was never found. The case became a national obsession, complete with a taunting ransom letter signed "Truly Devious." Stevie has spent years reading about it. In the first book, she also had to deal with a present-day murder: Hayes Major, a student, was killed, and Ellie Walker disappeared.

At the start of The Vanishing Stair, Stevie is back home in Pittsburgh. Her parents pulled her out of Ellingham after the murder, and she is miserable. She has a tea tin that belonged to Ellie, and inside it are photographs of two students dressed as Bonnie and Clyde, an unfinished poem called "The Ballad of Frankie and Edward," and a cut-out word: "US." The word looks like it was made by the same person who made the Truly Devious letter. Stevie wants to know who Frankie and Edward were and how their game connects to the 1936 kidnapping.

Senator Edward King visits her family. King is David's father, and David is the boy Stevie kissed at Ellingham. The senator is charming in public and cold in private, and he wants Stevie to return to school. He also wants something: David has been acting out, and King wants Stevie to keep an eye on him. Stevie agrees because she wants to go back. She does not tell David about the arrangement, which is the kind of decision that looks reasonable in the moment and becomes a betrayal later.

The school with cameras

Ellingham is not the same place. There are new security cameras, a new security chief named Larry, and a general atmosphere of adults pretending that everything is under control. Charles Scott, the head of the school, arranges for Stevie to work with Dr. Irene Fenton, a professor from the University of Vermont who is revising a book about the Ellingham case. Fenton has boxes of documents, photographs, and objects, and she wants Stevie to help verify them. She also insists on working without phones or laptops, which gives the investigation an old-fashioned, tactile quality.

Fenton's nephew, Hunter, is friendly and suspicious in equal measure. He warns Stevie that his aunt may be chasing the ten-million-dollar reward that Albert Ellingham offered for information leading to Alice. The will has conditions: the person who finds Alice cannot have been involved in the kidnapping and cannot be on the school board. Hunter's warning plants the idea that Fenton is not a neutral scholar. She is a woman with a financial motive, and Stevie has to weigh that against the fact that Fenton is also the only adult taking the case seriously.

Stevie's friends are still there. Janelle is steady and smart. Nate is anxious, funny, and more perceptive than he lets on. David is erratic, angry, and increasingly difficult to reach. He releases squirrels into the library as a distraction, helps Stevie search Ellie's old room, and then pulls away. His father's attention is a poison in the book. David is trying to become a person his father cannot use, and he is not very good at it yet.

The 1936 story

The novel alternates between Stevie's investigation and the 1930s. The historical sections are the best part of the book. Francis Crane is a wealthy sixteen-year-old student who likes crime, chemistry, and secrets. She and her boyfriend, Edward Davenport, decide to become the next Bonnie and Clyde. After hearing an FBI agent talk about how cut-out letters make a message memorable, they compose the Truly Devious letter as a prank. They want to give Albert Ellingham a taste of his own medicine. They wear gloves and mail it from Burlington. They have no idea that a real kidnapping is about to make their joke look like a confession.

On the night Dottie disappears, Francis sees Miss Nelson, the housemistress of Minerva House, looking alarmed. Francis uses a hidden passage beneath the spiral staircase and meets Edward in the tunnel. They follow Albert to the unfinished gymnasium and overhear him tell Miss Nelson that Iris and Alice have been kidnapped. Albert gives her a gun. The flashbacks also reveal that Albert and Miss Nelson were having an affair. Francis is sent home before she can retrieve the prank materials, and she never comes back. Edward dies by suicide in Paris in 1940.

Johnson is good at the texture of the period: the clothes, the telephones, the casual cruelty of the rich, the way a school can be both a sanctuary and a surveillance state. The 1930s sections also do something the present-day sections struggle to do. They make the mystery feel like it happened to people rather than to a set of clues. Francis is reckless and privileged, but she is also a girl who realizes too late that her game has consequences.

The tunnel

On Halloween, Stevie connects one of Albert's riddles to the spiral staircase in Minerva House. The riddle says "Always on a staircase but never on a stair." With David's help, she finds a hidden entrance. Nate keeps watch. Stevie and David go into the tunnel, and David tells her about his father, the violence in his family, and the way King has used him. They kiss in the dark.

Then they find Ellie's body. She is in a branching passage, decomposed, with black garbage bags nearby. She had entered through a hatch in the Great House basement, become trapped, and died there. It is a horrible, mundane death. Ellie was not murdered by a mastermind. She was a girl in a tunnel who could not get out.

The discovery changes the emotional weather of the book. Stevie has been treating the case as a puzzle, and Ellie's body makes the puzzle literal: a person she knew, in a place she walked past every day. David tells Stevie and Nate to go back to their rooms and says he will take responsibility. He is trying to protect them, and he is also trying to control the story. Larry finds the fake moustache Stevie dropped and tells her he knows she was in the tunnel. He does not report her, but he warns her.

The bargain comes out

David figures out that Stevie has been watching him for his father. He is furious, and the fight is ugly. Stevie tries to explain that she needed to get back to school, that she did not mean to betray him, that the arrangement was about the case. David does not care about her reasons. He has been treated as a project by his father for years, and now his girlfriend has been doing the same thing.

He responds by paying other teenagers to beat him while someone films it, then uploading the video. It is a performative act of self-destruction, and it is hard to watch. Stevie wants to help, and he will not let her. Larry leaves the school. Hunter keeps warning Stevie about Fenton. The present-day plot becomes a series of closed doors.

This is where the book's middle-book nature is most visible. David's arc is compelling, but it is also frustrating in a way that feels designed to keep him unavailable until the next book. Stevie makes some of the same mistakes she made in the first book, and the adults continue to withhold information for reasons that are not always convincing. The investigation relies on a few convenient discoveries. A hidden passage, a riddle, a recording: Johnson is good at making these feel earned, but the seams show if you look closely.

The boat and the wire

The historical plot reaches Albert's last day. He places legal documents in his desk, including the reward offer for Alice. He wants the offer publicized so that people everywhere will search for his daughter. His secretary, Robert Mackenzie, thinks the plan is dangerous. Albert then invites George Marsh, the former detective who worked on the case, onto his boat. He tells Marsh that the boat is rigged to explode and demands the truth.

Marsh confesses. He had gambling debts. He planned the kidnapping for ransom and hired criminals to carry it out. The plan went wrong. Dottie saw him and recognized him as the "attic man," a term her uncle used for police officers who get the drop on criminals. When she tried to run, she fell and cracked her head. The hired criminals demanded a larger share and killed Iris against Marsh's wishes. Marsh says he knows where Alice is. Then the boat explodes, killing both men. The novel leaves the cause ambiguous. It could have been Albert's device or Marsh's cigarette.

In the present, Stevie finds the phrase "It was on the wire" in Mackenzie's notes and realizes it may refer to a wire recorder. She finds a miniature machine in a dollhouse replica of the Great House, then an old recorder in the attic. Janelle repairs it, and the recording preserves Albert's interview with Dottie. Dottie talks about "attic men," and a marked passage in her Sherlock Holmes book compares the brain to "a little empty attic." The clues come together, and Stevie has a breakthrough about Marsh's identity.

She calls Fenton. Fenton answers in a slurred, frightened voice and says, "The kid is there!" before the line goes dead. Stevie calls Larry, who checks Fenton's house and finds it burned. Fenton is dead. Hunter was found inside, and Larry does not know his condition. The novel ends with Stevie holding a major piece of the historical puzzle while the present-day danger is still unresolved.

What works and what does not

The best thing about The Vanishing Stair is its sense of place. Ellingham is a school built on a fortune, a mystery, and a lot of hidden architecture. Johnson makes the tunnels, the archives, the spiral staircase, and the snow feel real. The 1930s sections have a melancholy that the present-day sections sometimes lack, because the past is finished and the present is still a cliffhanger.

The weakest thing is the pacing of the present-day mystery. Stevie is a great detective in theory, but she spends a lot of this book waiting for adults to give her access. The reveal of Ellie's body is powerful, and then the plot has to pause while David self-destructs. The book is more interested in Stevie's relationships than in the mechanics of the crime, which is fine, but the balance tilts. I wanted more of Fenton, more of the documents, and more of the historical case.

The ending is a cliffhanger, and that is a real limitation. It does not resolve the present-day threat. It does not tell us what happened to Alice. It sets up the third book and stops. If you are reading the series straight through, that is fine. If you are reading this one on its own, it will feel incomplete.

Still, I enjoyed it. It is a smart, atmospheric middle book with a strong historical thread and a heroine who is allowed to be awkward, obsessed, and wrong. It does not have the freshness of the first book, but it deepens the mystery and raises the emotional stakes. I would recommend it to anyone who read Truly Devious and wanted to know what was in the tunnel. The answer is worse than you expect, and the book knows it.