The Box in the Woods

STEVIE HAD AN INDIFFERENT RELATIONSHIP WITH BIKES. SHE KNEW how to ride one. At one point in her childhood she had owned one, but she never really rode it and the tires deflated, so her parents sold it at a yard sale. Bikes, however, were now her main mode of transportation.

Allison Abbott may have been able to do the ride in fifteen minutes, but for Stevie it was a sweaty forty-five-minute ride around the dirt trails that said they were excellent for biking but were actually uneven and pitted and unexpectedly narrow at times with surprise rocks. Also, where Allison lived at the far end was almost entirely uphill. By the time Stevie arrived, it was almost seven in the morning, which felt to her like a win. Judging from Allison’s face when she opened the door, she did not feel the same way.

“I thought you would be here a bit earlier,” she said, holding the door open for Stevie to come inside.

“Took . . . a while.”

“Would you like a drink?”

Stevie nodded heavily, sweat running down her face. Allison got her a large glass of water. As she gulped it back, Stevie took in her surroundings. This was a clean kitchen. It was more than that—this was a precise kitchen. The handles of the mugs on the shelf all faced the same way. The stainless steel fridge had no marks on the outside, and the inside, which Stevie saw momentarily, looked factory-pristine. There was nothing extra on the counter, no weird piles of stuff, no random pieces of paper or notes. The dish sponge sat up straight like a soldier, drying in the optimal manner. There were clear containers of things like cereals and grains in an open pantry. This place had shades of Hercule Poirot, who always needed things to be of perfect size and in the right place.

“I wanted you to come here because I have something to show you,” Allison said. “This way.”

Stevie followed Allison into the hallway, which had dozens of carefully framed photographs of family and friends. At least a dozen were of Sabrina. Not one was crooked or unevenly spaced. Stevie followed on, up the carpeted stairs, past more framed photos. The house was like a gallery. There were Allison and Sabrina sitting side by side on a step, a black-and-white dog between them. Sabrina and Allison, the latter with a gap-toothed smile, opening Christmas gifts by a tree. Sabrina and Allison squinting into the sun at the beach. Sabrina and Allison by the lake. A whole wall of Sabrina Abbott, with her raven hair and big brown eyes, her wide, open smile. Sabrina was beautiful, there was no question about it. There was a brightness to her, a determination that shone through the decades and the poor seventies photo quality that tinged the world in sepia.

They passed by the open door of an immaculate if slightly impersonal master bedroom and went to a closed door near the end of the hall. Allison opened this, and Stevie followed her into a darkened, smaller room that seemed to be a guest bedroom, except there was no bed. The walls were lined with packed bookshelves, and there were dressers and a rocking chair, but nowhere to sleep.

Allison opened the curtains, and the room was suddenly airy and bright.

“Light can damage things,” Allison said. “That’s why I keep it so dark.”

With the sun pouring in, Stevie had a better look at where she was. While this room was neat as a pin, nothing here was curated or impersonal. Every surface was absolutely full of old paperbacks and textbooks, yearbooks, notebooks, photo albums. One entire set of shelves was filled with vinyl record albums, and a small portable turntable sat next to them. There were white archival boxes, and colored and clear bins, and wicker bins—everything precisely labeled: MAKEUP, HAIR SUPPLIES, JEWELRY, SCHOOL SUPPLIES, MISCELLANEOUS DRESSER CONTENTS. . . dozens of these. Sitting around and among these things were knickknacks: a stuffed Snoopy doll, a pink rotary telephone, a small figure of a monkey, a lumpy pottery bud vase. And all over, there were turtles—a large stuffed one; a pillow; a print; an oversize ceramic figurine of one, as big as a stuffed animal.

“My parents kept all of Sabrina’s things in boxes,” she said. “They tucked them away in the attic. When I got them, I brought them out and gave them a space of their own. I know it may be odd to keep these things, but it comforts me. I come in here sometimes to sit and read. I feel close to her in here.”

This room was Sabrina Abbott, right down to her hairbrush and her erasers. She looked at the spines of the books. Sabrina was certainly a serious reader—there were two shelves of paperback classics, textbooks on psychology and history, with a few romance novels sprinkled in for good measure.

“Part of me has always wanted to organize them by color and size,” Allison said. “But I’m a librarian. I can’t do that. Here . . .”

She indicated the top shelf of one of the bookshelves, which had about half a dozen small notebooks. She took one of these down carefully. There was a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock on the cover, along with 1977 in large cartoon print.

“Her last diary,” Allison said, opening it with care. “The last one I have, anyway. Look at this.”

She laid a hand over the actual entry, leaving a list exposed at the bottom of the page:

Piano: 1 hour 15 minutes

Calc: 50 minutes

German: 45 minutes

Physics: 30 minutes

History: 45 minutes

“She wrote it down every night,” Allison said. “How much homework she did that day. I’ve read these diaries so many times I have them memorized.”

She withdrew the book and set it back in its place on the shelf.

“You were asking the police about the last diary,” Stevie said.

“It’s my holy grail. I’d do anything to get it back. It would be a picture of her during those last months. It would feel like talking to her again.”

“And it wasn’t with her things?”

“We got everything from her bunk, and it wasn’t there. If the police don’t have it—I mean, I still think they may have had it at some point and lost it. The investigation, if you can even call it that, was a mess. But if they don’t have it, my guess is that she hid it somewhere and it was lost. She told me that the kids in her bunk were nice, but they went through her things, played with her makeup, things like that. She may have stashed it somewhere that the kids couldn’t get to it.”

A small but bright light illuminated Stevie’s mind. She would have to return to it later. There was still much to take in in this room.

“Here’s something else,” Allison said, removing a small blue plastic box from one of the shelves. She seemed to appreciate the fact that Stevie had a genuine interest in Sabrina’s belongings.

“These are interlibrary loan slips. I found these at the library at the bottom of an old file cabinet. Look at these books she requested. You can tell a lot about a person from what they read. Even after she graduated, she was still requesting books, getting ready for the fall semester. The last two she requested were in June: A Woman in Berlin and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This was my sister’s summer reading when she worked at a camp. She studied German and she was pretty good at it, and she always wanted to know why people behave the way they do. She was deciding between majoring in psychology or history. She wanted to work for justice.

“I keep anything at all I can find of Sabrina’s. Sometimes her friends from high school turn up something—a note from class, a picture, anything at all. They know I collect them. It’s like I’m putting together a puzzle, but there are an infinite number of pieces.”

She put the slips back in the box.

“I’m also an archivist,” she added. “I come by it honestly. But you see what I mean. Sabrina worked. She studied. She volunteered. I became a librarian because she loved the library. She took me there, and it always felt like home to me.”

She consulted her smartwatch.

“Almost seven thirty,” she said. “If you want to keep talking, you have to come running with me.”

Stevie absolutely did not run, but she had a lot more to ask, so it seemed that this morning was the day she took it up. She was dressed in black shorts and a black T-shirt, which seemed fine enough. It wasn’t the moisture-wicking, professional-grade outfit Allison had on, but it would do.

“Great,” Stevie said. “Would you mind if I took some pictures? Just for me? Not for Carson. I promise.”

Allison considered for a moment, then nodded. Stevie photographed the room from several angles, getting various shots of the shelves. When she was done, Allison closed the curtains before leaving, shrouding Sabrina’s things back in protective darkness.

“Partially I cope by running,” she explained as she stretched against her outside steps. “I started running when I was a teenager, and I’ve never stopped. It makes me feel clear, like I have some control. I run the lake every morning. It’s a beautiful view.”

Allison set off, her gait even, and Stevie followed. It took her all of two minutes to become winded and so sweaty that she thought her body would lose every drop of moisture it contained, but she attempted to keep up.

“Is . . . there anything . . . you remember . . . about that night?” she asked.

Allison puffed out easy, even breaths.

“I remember everything,” she said. “But nothing relevant. I was at home. I was twelve years old. We got a phone call. After that, it was like a nightmare that never stopped.”

“But . . . you never . . . left town?”

“When something horrific happens, you sort of feel like you have to stay? Until justice is done. Which it never was.”

Stevie found it hard to ask any more questions for a moment, as they started circling the lake. She tried to keep up with Allison, who was very obviously slowing her pace for her benefit. They continued on for another ten minutes or so, Stevie staggering alongside Allison, until she finally slowed to a stop in a break in the trees. She stepped forward, onto a lip of black rock that jutted out into the air.

“This is Arrowhead Point,” Allison said. “It’s the best view of the lake. I stop here every morning to take it all in—well, when the weather allows for it. You have to be careful in the winter.”

She stepped out onto the point. Stevie hesitated behind her. While the point certainly seemed stable and it stretched out about ten feet, it wasn’t very wide, and it had a gentle downward slope as it narrowed to its tip. Stevie took a few careful steps out onto the rock. Once she did, she could see why Allison stopped there. It was a stunning spot, the lake spread out below, winking in the morning sun. The trees wrapped around, like a hug. All of Barlow Corners and the camp stretched out below, partially visible through the trees. Allison rolled her shoulders, and Stevie managed to catch her breath enough to continue her questions.

“From everything I’ve heard,” Stevie said, “it seemed like Sabrina was kind of the odd one out that night.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Allison replied, sitting down on the rock to stretch her legs. “That’s the standard line. ‘What was good girl Sabrina Abbott doing out there?’ But that part never confused me. She was having fun, that’s all. She’d earned it. She was an incredibly hard worker, but she was also an eighteen-year-old kid in the 1970s, which were a really loose time.”

“She broke up with her boyfriend right around then, right?” Stevie asked.

“She did,” Allison said. “Shawn.”

“Why did they break up? Do you know?”

“It was a normal teenage breakup,” Allison replied. “Shawn was the kind of person who might go somewhere for college, but then he’d come home, get married, do exactly what his parents did. Sabrina was moving to New York City to go to Columbia in the fall. She was so excited about her new life. Looking back on it, I can see what happened. He was always around. Always really nice, but around . . . a lot. He was like an older brother to me. I was really upset when they broke up.”

“Did you ever think that—”

“It wasn’t Shawn,” Allison cut in. “It’s true that Shawn never gave up. I think he was convinced that Sabrina was going through some phase and that she would come back. He wasn’t supposed to be working at the camp that summer. His family had an outdoor sports business—they rented canoes and kayaks, things like that. He was supposed to be working there, but when Sabrina broke up with him, he got a job at the camp. That really wasn’t weird. Everyone worked at the camp. If he wanted to be with his friends, that was the place to be. It was an unwelcome surprise for Sabrina, but he never bothered her. Shawn was a lovesick kid, but a nice one. He wouldn’t have touched a hair on her head. And he was in all night with Paul Penhale, anyway.”

“Do you think Todd Cooper hit Michael Penhale?”

“Absolutely,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.

“Why would your sister hang out with someone who did that?”

Allison sighed deeply.

“I think she must have thought he didn’t do it. Sabrina was really principled, and really smart. Maybe it was too horrible to believe that someone you knew could have done something like that. Sabrina was smart, but . . . she was also young, and she thought the best of people.”

“Do you think what happened to Michael Penhale had anything to do with the murders, though?”

“That,” she said, “I don’t know.”

Allison stretched out one last time to reach for her toes and stood.

“I’m going to finish my run,” she said. “I don’t know if you . . .”

“I may walk back to your house,” Stevie said as casually as she could. “Get my bike. To get back to camp.”

Allison smiled and nodded, then continued on her way, picking up her pace. Stevie was unsure what to make of her morning with Allison, but at the very least, she now had an idea about how to focus her time here.

She had a plan.