The Box in the Woods

STEVIE SPENT THE MORNING NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO THE RULES and safety walk and talk. She did not learn what to do in the case of a fire emergency at the campfire pit area. She did not learn where the lifeguard stations were along the lake. She paid no attention to where the first aid boxes were. As she walked, she mentally turned their cabin every which way, trying to work out how the message could be there and also not be visible. By the time the group headed to the dining pavilion for lunch, Stevie somehow managed to know less than she had when she’d started out that morning.

“You didn’t hear any of that, did you?” Janelle asked her as they headed for lunch.

Stevie shook her head.

“Me either. Have you worked it out? I haven’t.”

She shook her head again.

Carson texted as they entered the dining pavilion, so Stevie peeled off and went to meet him in the parking lot. He was standing by the Tesla, shifting nervously from foot to foot.

“You weren’t the only one who got something,” he said. “Look at this.”

He popped the trunk, which opened slowly. Inside, there was a plain cardboard box, about the size of a shoebox, with the words OPEN ME, CARSON written in black Sharpie. He opened the lid, revealing three dolls—one raven-haired girl, one plasticky boy, and one girl with red hair. They were bound in red string and had red slashes of paint all over them, and they were positioned exactly as Sabrina, Todd, and Diane had been found. They were all dressed in approximations of the clothes they’d been found in. The word SURPRISE was written inside the lid.

“I found this on my morning run,” he said, rubbing his hands together nervously. “It was in the middle of the path. It was on my property, but out of the range of the cameras.”

“Someone’s done their homework,” Stevie said. “I got a message on my wall, like I got at Ellingham. And someone knows where you run and where the cameras are.”

“Yeah. And I’m the Box Box guy who owns the camp where the Box in the Woods murders were, so they sent me a box.”

By the last box, the word had lost all meaning for Stevie.

She reached into her backpack and pulled out a nitrile glove. She had always been in the habit of carrying a few. It was probably a mockable trait until the Ellingham case, when they had come in handy on several occasions. She had actually brought them to camp in case she had to touch something gross. She snapped on a pair and carefully lifted the Sabrina doll out of the box. The shirt had the old Camp Wonder Falls logo painted on, and the hair had even been cut to resemble Sabrina’s shoulder-length style. It wasn’t a close match, but it was a good effort.

“Someone’s trying to stop us from making this show,” Carson said.

“Or someone’s being an asshole,” Stevie replied. “Still.”

“I don’t think we go to the police with this,” he said. “I don’t know if these things are crimes, or if they are, they aren’t serious ones. Criminal mischief or something. Is criminal mischief a thing? It sounds like a thing. Anyway, I don’t think it’s the kind of thing anyone is going to take very seriously. I think I pissed someone off last night. Here.”

He handed Stevie a reusable bag in a very realistic fish-scale pattern. Inside, there were half a dozen doorbell-size cameras.

“Put them somewhere that Nicole can’t see them,” he said. “Otherwise she’ll start asking questions.”

“Can I keep this?” she said, indicating the box of dolls. “I want Janelle to look at it. She’s the craft expert.”

“Sure,” he said. “But be careful about . . . what am I saying? The police aren’t going to dust this for prints.”

“Probably not,” Stevie said. “Unless one of us dies, I guess.”

Carson’s eyes grew wide.

“Kidding,” she said.

He went into the back seat of his car and produced a box full of reusable bags in dozens of different patterns and colors, all bundled into tidy little pockets.

“Take one to carry it,” he said. “Or take as many as you want. I have a lot of bags.”

Back at the dining pavilion, Janelle was being social and chatting with a group of people at one of the tables. Stevie headed for her.

“Taking lunch to go,” she said to Janelle. “Cameras to put up and something to show you.”

Stevie went to the food line and grabbed a hot dog and a soda. Ellingham had an ever-changing menu of organic, often vegan meals, with seltzer water on tap and maple syrup in every possible form. Sunny Pines did not have this kind of elegant variety. The menu appeared to consist of boiled hot dogs, boiled veggie dogs, hamburgers, veggie burgers, chicken nuggets, and a sad and lonely salad bar. As the former caretaker of a salad bar, Stevie felt for it, though it was not as complete as at the grocery store. This was some iceberg and salad mix, shredded carrots, and ranch dressing. There was milk, water, soda, and sugary red bug juice to wash it all down. This was actually fine with Stevie. She would happily eat a hot dog every night for the entire summer, and she would guzzle bug juice and soda until all her teeth fell out of her head. Nate looked over anxiously as she passed by, like a drowning man. He was seated with Dylan, the other counselor, and a group of other new people. Stevie held up a hand of greeting and pointed, indicating that they were going back to their cabin.

“Bag of cameras,” she said, handing it over to Janelle when they got back to their cabin. “How quickly can we get these up?”

Janelle examined the packages.

“Give me twenty minutes,” she said.

“There’s more,” Stevie said, presenting the other bag to Janelle. “Carson found this when he went out for a run this morning.”

“Oh god,” Janelle said. “What? Stevie . . . this is messed up.”

“It’s crafty, though. Anything you notice about them?”

Janelle grimaced but peered inside the box, then removed the Sabrina doll and examined the clothing.

“Well,” she said, pinching the material and looking at the stitching, “looks like a pretty well-made doll outfit.”

She examined each doll in turn, checking cuffs and seams, looking inside and out.

“No labels,” she said. “I think these are custom-made.”

“So someone would have to know how to sew.”

“You can buy them,” Janelle said. “Off Etsy or other places. People sell doll clothes. It would be easy enough to ask for a few outfits. The logo looks like it was painted on the shirt with fabric paint, and not very well. You could probably source all this stuff pretty easily. But why would you do this to us, and also to Carson? Has to be the podcast.”

There was a tinge of anger in her voice now.

“You seem mad,” Stevie said.

“I am mad! We need to find the freak who did this.”

“Cameras,” Stevie said, taking the box of dolls and closing it up. “And you have to hide them as best you can so Nicole doesn’t see them.”

Janelle picked up the bag and got to work. By the time Stevie had eaten her hot dog and drunk half her soda, Janelle had gotten out some industrial sticky strips and had the first camera attached under the light fixture by the door. She placed another one on the inside of the window with the hole in the screen, tucked in between the wrought iron guards. She got up on top of a dresser to put a third high up near the ceiling, pointed toward the inside of the door. She downloaded the app and had most of the setup complete by the fifteen-minute mark. She brushed off her hands and examined the feed for a moment, walking back and forth in front of each camera to ensure she was satisfied with the placement.

“That should cover all the angles,” she said. “It’s got smart detection, so we’ll know if anyone comes in. Most of the other counselors are doing orientation games. We’re the special ones, so we get to spend the day unpacking art supplies and setting things up. Apparently supplies just arrived.”

They headed over to the art pavilion, where Janelle stopped short.

“Oh my god,” Janelle said when she saw the many piles of boxes. “So much to unpack and put in order.”

The joy in her voice couldn’t be hidden.

“Do you need a moment alone?” Stevie asked.

“Maybe?”

Janelle set about her dream job, while Stevie set about to work on the problem.

Stevie took the dolls out of the box and set them on the little table in front of her. Doll Sabrina. Doll Diane. Doll Todd. All slashed with red paint. This was easy and direct enough. The message on their cabin wall was different, clever.

Since she didn’t know how the latter had been done, she switched over to asking why. Why leave the message? Why leave a box of murder dolls on Carson’s running path? What would these things do?

Well, cause fear. That seemed like the obvious answer.

It would have taken time to get the dolls, time to make the outfits, time to do whatever it was that was done to their cabin. These things hadn’t been knocked together in the short space of time between Carson’s announcement last night and when they got back to the camp. Someone had been planning this for a few days, at least.

So someone knew she was coming and had taken the time to look her up.

It was entirely possible that some people in town had gotten wind of Carson’s plans before he announced them. Did they think this would stop the podcast from happening? There was no message attached to these things, nothing that said stop making your podcast.

Maybe it was a question of how. But the how still eluded her. How did you paint a message on a wall well in advance and have that message be invisible? She spent the next hour looking up paints, dyes, and invisible inks, but absolutely nothing turned up that explained how the thing could be done.

“It had to be something with the paint, right?” she said, coming up behind Janelle and startling her as she was organizing pipe cleaners by size and color. She pulled out her earbuds, leaking music out into the art pavilion.

“The paint,” Stevie said, sitting down on the concrete floor opposite her. “It had to be something with the paint. But I can’t find any paint online that would do what we experienced. I think it was meant to freak me out.”

“And me,” Janelle added.

“. . . us out. But I mean, it also feels like a gift to me? It’s an impossible puzzle. It’s the kind of thing I’ll obsess over.”

“Maybe you have a fan,” Janelle said.

This had something to it. A fan? Some true-crime creep who wanted to mess with the student sleuth. It didn’t explain what had happened with Carson and his box, but it made a lot of sense in terms of the cabin.

“A fan,” Stevie repeated. “Someone wants to play? Then we’ll play.”

“Oh god, no.”

Stevie’s phone buzzed, and she checked her texts. There was one from Nicole.

COME TO THE DINING PAVILION, it read.

“I’ve been summoned,” Stevie said. “If I don’t come back, avenge me.”

She walked over to the dining pavilion with a vague sense of dread. Nicole was working on her laptop at a picnic table at one end.

“Someone wants to talk to you,” she said. “She’s over there.”

Allison Abbott sat alone at one of the picnic tables at the far side, pensively tapping her chin with her fist. When Stevie approached, she looked up and straightened. Stevie braced herself. The relative of a victim had come here to chastise her. She felt sick but walked on and sat down.

“Hey,” Stevie said.

“Stevie,” she replied. “I wanted to apologize for last night.”

Stevie could not hide her surprise at this turn of events.

“People always talk about this like it’s some lurid slasher movie,” Allison went on. “I lost my sister. Some bastard took my sister from me. I feel like Carson used her memory, gave us that reading room, to try to worm his way in. He can go to hell. But I didn’t mean to catch you in the crossfire.”

She leaned back a bit, taking Stevie in. Stevie was unsure what to do or say now that this announcement had been made. There was a heavy pause, full of the scent of boiled hot dog water.

“Why did you come here?” Allison asked.

“Because I got a message that—”

“I mean here, to Barlow Corners, to this camp. Carson clearly brought you here specially, which is why you were at the event last night and why he keeps introducing you to everyone as the girl from Ellingham Academy and as his partner in this project of his. I know what he wants. Why did you come here?”

Stevie considered her words carefully.

“Because . . . I want to . . . because people need answers. Because someone should do something.”

Allison cocked her head very slightly to the side. For a moment, she said nothing at all. Stevie felt a clammy nervousness brewing.

“You know,” Allison said, “I remember so much about her. So many little details. I remember sitting outside that summer, eating cherry twin pops. I rode bikes with her all over town. She drove me to the roller rink and skated with me. She helped me with my homework. And one of the last things I remember about that summer, right before she went off to camp . . . I remember sitting next to her in her room one afternoon while she played me Fleetwood Mac albums. She got up and wrapped a long scarf around herself and started doing a Stevie Nicks dance. She loved Stevie Nicks. She would have loved your name.”

“My name is Stephanie,” Stevie replied. “I’ve always been called Stevie. I don’t know why. But I prefer it anyway.”

“Well,” she said, “she would have loved it. If she had lived, she would have been great at whatever she did. She would have done it all. She was one of those people, full of life. She was a force of nature.”

She tapped her fingers on the plastic tablecloth.

“As it happens, I know Kyoko, your school librarian. We met at a library conference. I got in touch with her last night, and she told me about you. She told me about what you did at Ellingham. I read up about it last night and this morning. It sounds like you do the work, like Sabrina did. I talk to Sabrina all the time. Well, I mean, I imagine talking to her. I think about what she would tell me to do. She would have said to give you a chance. I have to get back to the library. I’m busy all this week after work, but why don’t you come over tomorrow morning? I have some things I’d like to show you.”

“Sure,” Stevie said. “Definitely.”

“I live on the far side of the lake. You can walk the path around, which takes awhile, or if you take a bike, it’s about fifteen minutes. Here . . .”

She wrote her address on a napkin from one of the dispensers.

“Come at six thirty,” she said. “We’ll have breakfast. I leave for my run at seven thirty. You’re welcome to run with me as well.”

Stevie had not been expecting a six thirty in the morning meeting time, but she nodded confidently as if that was how she always started her mornings. Allison gave Stevie the address and left. Nicole watched this from the other end of the dining pavilion.

“Everything all right?” she asked as Stevie passed. Her tone suggested that there was no way she thought that was the case.

“Fine, actually,” Stevie said, herself surprised.

Nicole seemed a touch disappointed.

When Stevie returned to the art pavilion, she saw that Janelle had made a display of paint jars on the shelves. She had been joined by a sweaty and defeated Nate, grass stains on his shorts, his hair sticking up on top and slicked around his face with perspiration. He was resting on the smooth concrete floor and staring up at the ceiling.

“What was that about?” Janelle said.

“Allison Abbott came to apologize. She wants me to come to her house in the morning to see some things. Are you alive?”

“No,” Nate said. “And I heard your creepy message situation is now a creepy doll situation. Have you worked it out yet?”

“Not yet,” she replied. “I will. It’ll come to me.”

It did not come to her. It didn’t come to her that afternoon, or over hamburgers around the campfire. Instead of socializing, she watched the feed from the cameras and picked at the problem in her head, finally going back to the cabin early. She approached with care, finding that she was unnerved by the shadows. She opened the door quickly, to surprise anyone who may have been inside, but there was no one, as the cameras told her. She sat in the middle of the floor and looked up at the message, three-quarters of the way up the wall, with its neatly wiped paint. She stared at it until her eyes went blurry, then she groaned out a loud sigh and called David.

He picked up immediately.

“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” he said. “Everything okay?”

“Basically,” she replied, rolling onto her stomach. “Still no idea who left the message, but whoever it was also left a box of creepy murder dolls outside of Carson’s house, so I have that going for me.”

David was quiet for a moment.

“You there?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know this is what happens to you, but I really don’t like this. Are you okay?”

“I’m annoyed,” she said. “I can’t figure out how it was done. It’s not possible.”

“I was going to wait to take my time off,” he said, “but how about I do it now? I’ll ask for the week and then I’ll go there. I could be there in a few days. There’s a public camping side. I’m going to stay over there and camp. Do some swimming. Get in touch with nature.”

Stevie felt a light, floating feeling rising up from her heels, shooting through her spine and out the top of her head. David was coming. David was going to be here.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously.”

“When will you be here?”

“Couple days,” he said. “A friend of mine is going to lend me her car.”

“A friend? Who will lend you her car?”

“Jealous? You should be. She’s hot. She’s also sixty-three and has two grandkids. Does yoga every day. She’d put my back out.”

A feeling like warm, spreading sunshine crept over Stevie’s body.

She had a cold case, she had a locked-room mystery, she had her friends, and now, she would have David.

In that moment, it was possible that Stevie had never been happier.