George killed Jerry and buried him in the hole where Alice was, taking her body with him when he left.Ī year after the kidnapping, Albert planned to have the tunnels blocked, he had already had the lake drained, and there was no use for the tunnels anymore.

Instead, he found her buried under a tree.

They make it to the house and the man living there says she’s in the back. Iris had trained Alice to run one day and Iris tried to fight, but they shot her. They drive to the house, the guy tells the story of how Iris died and how they couldn’t watch the kid anymore. He finds one of the guys, Jerry, who says they took Alice to a nice family in the mountains in New York. For a few more months now, George has been doubling down his efforts to find Alice and one day, after shaking down thugs, he gets a note under his door. Now more than ever he wants to find the men he hired to kidnap Iris and Alice, his daughter. A couple months later, as Albert is setting up Alice’s doll house replica of the Great House, Flora tells George her secret. He says George is the father and Flora says their relationship didn’t last long and he doesn’t know. But Leonard watches Flora closely, sees her eyes going to George Marsh and sees Alice’s blue eyes and jaw line. What if the father is involved in the kidnapping? He didn’t know because Flora won’t tell. It wasn’t important then, but it could be now. There would be time… There wasn’t time.Ī week after the kidnapping, Flora and Leonard are talking about the adoption and that Iris asked Leonard who Alice’s father is. She’d give them back before the end of the school year. Dottie found the photographs after following Francis and Edward, seeing them disappear into a secret hole in the ground underneath a statue. When Francis gets back to her room, she realizes that her Bonnie and Clyde photographs have fallen out of her notebook somewhere, which is frustrating, then she hides the notebook inside the wall of her closet. While in this grotto, they write the poem and craft it with their magazine cutouts.

She wrote about this place in her diary and all the Bonnie and Clyde-style plans they’ve devised. A couple months later, Francis and Edward are in a secret grotto she found underneath a statue on the grounds filled with bags of cement, a painting of a Valkyrie, a swan boat and dynamite. He likes these students, thinks they’re interesting enough. Two students approach Leonard then, looking a little sexually disheveled, and ask him for a photograph, then go on their separate ways. In 1936 on the grounds of Ellingham Academy, Iris and Leonard are sitting outside, Leonard painting Iris’s portrait, and she asks him for something that ends up being cocaine and goes back inside the house.

The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson