The Box in the Woods

“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.”

Stevie stood up and faced the wall.

It wasn’t that Stevie had no fears. Stevie had a lot of fears and anxieties. There had been times when they had ruled her life. Someone was playing a game. Someone had presented her with a locked-room puzzle. And this wasn’t scary as much as it was perplexing. If she had a mental puzzle to work on, her fears took a back seat.

Face the problem. Look at it hard. What did she see?

The message was painted on the top third of the wall, not the eyeline. The word was painted in blocky, sloppy capitals. The paint had run a bit, like a spooky horror font. She climbed back up on the bed next to Janelle and looked at the brushstrokes closely. There was something weird about how the paint ran down the wall.

“Look at how the drips all cut off at the same point,” Stevie said, pointing. “Like a clean line.”

Janelle leaned in to look. “Someone wiped the paint,” she said. “You can see the trace where they wiped it to keep it from dripping too much. How considerate.”

Stevie gave a long exhale and stepped down. “Let’s check under the bed,” she said.

They pulled the camp bed away from the wall. Stevie got down on the floor, examining it with her phone’s flashlight, looking over every inch. She found two dead flies, a small piece of used tape, a leaf, a spiderweb, and then . . .

“Here,” she said, pointing to a small spot of white paint. “Look.”

Janelle got down next to her.

“So the bed wasn’t there when that message was painted on the wall,” Janelle said.

“Exactly. This didn’t happen last night, unless we can sleep so soundly that someone can drag my bed away from the wall, set up some kind of stepladder, paint a message, and then push me back again.”

“That makes it a little better,” Janelle said, nodding. “At least someone wasn’t in here with us. So what do we do now?”

“Well . . .” Stevie sat on the edge of her squeaky camp bed. “We can’t tell Nicole about this. She doesn’t really want us here, and she’s definitely not going to like this, especially on the day the other counselors are coming. She might tell Carson we have to leave.”

“But I think we should make sure this place is secure. What if Carson could get us some plug-and-play cameras?”

Stevie pulled out her phone to text him.

“He’ll be thrilled about this,” she said grimly. She took a few pictures of the message and sent the texts. His reply came within a minute.

Will be there as soon as possible with cameras. Have something to show you.

“Cameras are coming,” Stevie said. “You shower and I’ll stay here. Then I’ll go.”

Janelle quickly gathered up her shower basket, towel, and clothes and headed off to get ready. Stevie went outside to sit on the tiny concrete porch of the cabin, hanging her legs over the side and letting her bare toes tickle the dirt. It was early, but she needed to make a phone call.

To her surprise, David answered right away.

“You’re awake?” she said.

“Long drive today,” he said. “We left at six. How’s camp treating my princess?”

“Could be better,” she said. “Someone wrote the word SURPRISE above my bed last night.”

“Is this . . . some kind of sex joke?”

“No. Someone painted a message on our wall. It’s the thing that was written at the crime scene in 1978.”

“Okay,” David said, sounding maybe not so okay. “First of all . . . are you all right?”

“It’s fine,” Stevie said, shielding her eyes from the bright morning sun. “Just a prank.”

“Some fucking prank. What happened? They went into your cabin when you were out, or . . . ?”

“It’s sort of more complicated than that,” she said. “We don’t really know when they did it, except it wasn’t while we were asleep. Somehow they did it before and we only saw it when we woke up.”

“What?”

She shook her head. It was complicated even if you were there, looking at it, and felt impossible to explain over the phone.

“Someone’s playing a game,” she continued. “Maybe someone knows about me, about how at Ellingham someone left a message on my wall.”

“I don’t want to keep bringing up what happened last time, but last time? That person was a murderer.”

“This feels different,” she said.

“Oh good.”

“We’re getting some security cameras. I don’t know what happened, but I’m going to find out.”

“Yeah, I hate this,” he said. “How does this keep happening to . . . Scratch that. I know exactly how this keeps happening to you.”

If Stevie was being completely honest with herself—and she preferred not to be—David’s concern felt very good. He was really worried about her, possibly more worried than she was about herself. He cared. It sent warm bubbles of pleasure through her system.

Then a voice broke through the haze of romantic bliss.

“Welcome, counselors!” Nicole said over the loudspeaker. “Please bring your things to the dining pavilion.”

“I have to get ready and get going,” she said.

“Okay, but text me. Call me. Both. Let me know what’s going on, okay?”

“I promise,” she said.

She couldn’t help but break into a smile as she said it.

When Janelle returned, dressed in a flowing blue sundress, Stevie grabbed her things. The bathroom area was only a few yards away. The toilets and sinks were in a concrete and wood building (with no doors, so the air and flies could get in without difficulty). The showers were wooden stalls outside of this main structure, with no ceilings. It was basically a fancy hose in an open box, raised slightly off the ground to allow for drainage. Stevie would have much preferred it if the shower had been flush with the ground, because it seemed like a low, dark space under a shower would be an ideal spot for a family of snakes. Something had to live under there.

She tried not to think about it.

Though no one could see inside, it felt weirdly exposed to be able to see the sky and the trees above her as she undressed and showered. The water wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either. It was already so muggy that it made no difference. She washed quickly, barely taking the time to rinse all the shampoo out of her hair. There were definite advantages to having short hair you cut yourself—all she needed to do was rub it a few times with her hand to dry and style it. She tugged on a shirt and a pair of black shorts, stuffed her feet back into her flip-flops, and took a leap out of the shower box to make sure the imaginary snakes couldn’t bite her heels.

When she returned to the cabin, Nate was there, sitting next to Janelle on the concrete step.

“I heard,” he said grimly. “It’s not a party until someone writes you a threatening message, is it?”

“You have your treehouse,” Stevie pointed out.

“I liked it better before you told me this, but yeah, I do.”

“We should go,” Janelle said. “I wish we could do more than just lock the door.”

Stevie responded by reaching down and snapping off a blade of grass. She took it over to the door and slid it gently between the door and the frame, so that if the door was opened it would be displaced.

“People really do that?” Nate said.

“It works,” she said. “It’ll do until we get the cameras.”

Camp Sunny Pines was springing to life. The parking lot was full of cars, and their fellow counselors were unloading bags, greeting each other with big hugs and squeals, and taking pictures. It reminded Stevie of watching the second years at Ellingham greeting each other when she first arrived, a new student, knowing no one. She had Nate on one side of her now, and Janelle on the other. With them, and with David, she could do anything. Even figure out how someone had snuck into their cabin and left a magically appearing message.

Nicole and her assistant were greeting counselors and staff and checking them in. She gave them a terse nod and presented them each with a bag containing a reusable water bottle, sunscreen, a mini first aid kit, and a shockingly white camp T-shirt that she would never wear. Stevie was pleased to see that breakfast was being served, and soon had a plate filled with pancakes, bacon, and sausage. Nate and Janelle got the same, but Janelle also accepted the cup of fruit, because she cared about things like balanced meals.

They had just sat down at a picnic table when Nicole approached them.

“Fisher,” she said.

Nate looked up from his sausage.

“Small change of plan. One of the counselors got sick. He’s going to be delayed by a day or two. I need you to sub in until he gets here.”

“What?” Nate said, blinking.

“It’s the Jackals, cabin 12. The kids are nine years old. You’ll be working with Dylan and staying in that cabin until the other counselor gets here. Can you go join him over at that table when you’re done eating? And you’ll be needed at group orientation this afternoon.”

She indicated a guy who was two tables over who wore what looked like high-end surf clothing in bright yellow and blue. He was taking multiple selfies with a group of girls, lowering and raising his sunglasses for each one.

“You two,” she said to Janelle and Stevie, “can begin setup in the art pavilion. You don’t have to go to the afternoon session. That’s for counselors working in bunks. You’ll go to the campfire this evening.”

She strode away, leaving a shell-shocked Nate.

“Oh no,” he whispered dryly. “No. How did everything fall apart so quickly?”

“Sounds like it’s just for a day or two,” Janelle consoled him.

“A lot can happen in a day or two,” Nate replied.

Considering how the morning had gone, Stevie was inclined to agree.