The Box in the Woods

AFTER ANOTHER HOT AND EXCEEDINGLY SWEATY BIKE RIDE, MUCH OF which was down the edge of the road while cars whipped past her, Stevie turned down the drive to Sunny Pines. She dropped the bike in the bike rack, wiped her face on the edge of her T-shirt (possibly flashing some other counselors in the process), and hurried over to the dining pavilion for breakfast. It was good that most of her T-shirts were black—they hid the heavy sweat marks all over her torso. Unlike Ellingham, which was up in the mountains of Vermont and in session during the cooler months, everything about camp was moist in the heat. Her body—moist. Her clothes—moist. Her shoes practically stuck to the ground. Her towels were always damp. Her hair was never really dry. The constant tackiness gave the bugs something to stick to.

The first thing she noticed was that the camp as a whole seemed to have vanished. There was a man on a riding mower preparing the fields, and a few people were in the dining area cooking, but otherwise, no one. This was good for her current purposes, which were getting to her cabin and getting a shower before anyone saw her, or more important, smelled her. The cabin was still secure. The camera app alerted her that she was approaching, so that was working. The big SURPRISE was there to greet her in the morning sunshine.

“Surprise,” she said back to it.

She pulled off her disgusting clothes and tossed them into her empty suitcase that she decided would serve as a hamper. (Janelle had brought a pop-up laundry basket for this purpose, because she was Janelle, and Janelle planned her moves in advance.) No shower had ever felt as good as the fresh-air shower she had that morning, despite the fact that something was definitely moving around under the stall. When she emerged, clean and fresh, the camp was still silent but for the birds and the mower in the distance. She walked over to the art pavilion, where Janelle was up on a chair, hanging a mobile from a beam.

“Where is everyone?” Stevie asked.

“They went on a hike around the lake. I thought about going, but I need to get this done.”

Stevie looked around the art pavilion. It was a concrete shell structure, with three walls and a peaked roof, full of tables and chairs and cubbies and shelving for art supplies. The only private area was a room in the back to secure things when they were out of use. Janelle had already transformed it from the blank, rough space it had been to a cheerful, Insta-ready fantasia of crafting glory. She had made sample crafts of many types—jars full of colored sand, pot holders, woven bracelets, hanging ornaments made of colored beads—and had set up all the necessary supplies around them like a fancy store display.

“There was chalkboard paint,” Janelle said, hopping down from the chair. “I got permission to spray the back door and use that as a bulletin board. I’m doing that this afternoon. This morning I was organizing the back office. There was a ton of crap in there.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Stevie said. “You know you have a problem, right?”

“I can quit anytime I want. How was it?”

“Weird,” Stevie said, sitting down in one of the child-size chairs. “But informative. But weird. Allison has a kind of museum of her sister’s things. She kept everything of Sabrina’s. Everything. Brushes. Little slips of paper. But I get now why she wants the diary so much. So I’ve decided to focus on getting the diary for her. I’m not sure it gets the case anywhere, and it’s a long shot. But I guess finding diaries is kind of my thing.”

This was true. At Ellingham, Stevie had located the diary of a student from the 1930s, which was hidden in a space in the wall.

Something that Stevie said made Janelle lift her chin in interest. She turned on her heel and walked into the room in the back. Stevie could hear her shifting boxes along the concrete floor. She emerged a minute later holding one, which she set on one of the tables.

“This one has loads of old paperwork in it,” she said, removing the lid and pulling out handfuls of loose, dog-eared paper in a variety of colors and conditions. “Just order forms and things like that, but I feel like I saw . . .”

Janelle shuffled through the box until she found what she was looking for and passed it to Stevie. It was an old pink piece of paper.

“It caught my eye because of the name,” she said. “But I put it back because it’s nothing.”

Stevie took the paper and examined it.

EXTRA SUPPLY ORDER FORM

REQUESTSED BY SABRINA ABBOTT

JUNE 20, 1978

Paints: waterculors, acycilcs ($60)

Pencils and brshes: ($50)

Ceramics: ring boxes, earring stands, cats, dogs, cookie jars; trash cann, turtle, teddy bear, roller skate ($ 28)

String: leather, cloth ($18)

TOTAL: $156

“So much crafting, so cheap,” Janelle said wistfully. “I mean, adjusted for inflation it’s more, but I want to imagine it is this cheap for a second.”

Stevie examined the piece of paper in her hand. It was nothing special—a faded old supply list from a box of useless paperwork.

“How did they do anything with typewriters?” Janelle went on. “When they made a mistake, it was like, I guess that’s just how it’s going to be. Everything must have taken forever. Anyway, do you think Allison would want it?”

“Yeah,” Stevie said. “I do.”

“What about our problem?” Janelle said. “Any brain waves on that?”

“No.” Stevie shook her head. “But whoever it was has been leaving our cabin alone, which is good.”

Leaving our cabin alone . . .

The cabins were empty right now. Everyone was out. Stevie took out her phone and pulled up the digital files that Carson had sent to her.

“Map of the camp in 1978,” she said. “It’s in here somewhere.”

She flicked through the folders and documents before finding what she wanted.

“Carson, you magnificent weirdo,” she said. “You scanned everything. Where’s the camp map, map, map . . .”

They had been given printed copies the day before in their welcome bags. She had folded hers up and shoved it in her bag. She pulled it out and compared the two.

“Sabrina was in the Sparrow bunk,” Stevie said, glancing between the documents. “Sparrow bunk was . . . fourteen. What is it now? Here . . . Pandas.”

If there was ever a good time to have a look in another bunk, this was probably it. She knew where all the counselors were, and there were no kids around yet. Everything was quiet.

“I’ll meet you over at lunch,” she said to Janelle.

The cabins were all identical, and there were over twenty of them, so even with the map things got a little confusing. She soon found herself at the Panda bunkhouse. She bounced up the four concrete steps to the doorway. The heavier door was open, and the screen door was unlocked. She could see there was no one inside and no one around. She entered the cool cabin, which was considerably larger than where Janelle and Stevie were staying. Eight camp beds were all lined up and ready to go, with colorful cubbies and hooks for the campers’ supplies. An overhead fan beat the afternoon heat away without much enthusiasm, but this cabin was under tree cover and cool enough without it. Like Stevie and Janelle’s cabin, the screened windows here were high and covered by the same metal grates, attached from the inside. At the back of the room, there was a plywood wall; there was a doorway in the middle marked by a green privacy curtain. Stevie stepped into this area, which was darker and smaller. The counselor who would be staying here had dropped off a red suitcase and a large gym bag, along with several shopping bags’ worth of supplies. Stevie maneuvered around these, careful not to touch them. She felt the thin partition wall. It was a single layer of wood. She ran her hands along the outer walls, felt around the cubbies. Nothing.

She took several pictures, getting the bunk from every angle.

The floor was slightly more interesting. This cabin had a wooden floor. It felt to Stevie like there was nothing between the planks and the solid concrete the cabin rested on, but she got down on the floor and knocked, making sure all was solid. She crawled around, knocking and checking, picking at the boards with her fingers. Nothing gave.

“What are you doing?” said a voice.

Stevie jerked her head up and saw a redheaded girl standing in the doorway of the partition wall, a phone clasped to her head and a horrified look on her face.

Stevie could hear the person on the other end of the phone saying, “What? What?”

“There’s someone crawling on the floor of my bunk,” the girl said into the phone. “Hang on.”

“Oh hey,” Stevie said. “Sorry, I’m . . . looking for something.”

It was true, and she had no other excuse ready at hand.

“In my bunk? On the floor? Who are you?”

“I’m Stevie, I . . . I got here yesterday and I . . . came in here by accident and I dropped my . . . um, a key?”

“Hang on,” the girl said into the phone. “Hang on. So you were in here and you lost a key?”

Stevie nodded lamely.

The girl clearly didn’t believe her, but at the same time couldn’t seem to figure out why Stevie might be lying. She looked at her things, which had not been disturbed.

“It’s not here,” Stevie said, getting up and brushing off her knees. “Sorry, I . . . got the cabins mixed up before and . . . I must have dropped it somewhere else. Sorry to bother you. I’ll see you later.”

Stevie left as casually as possible, which was really not casual at all. She felt the girl’s eyes on her back. Her lie had been okay at best. What was she supposed to say? Don’t mind me. I’m just a weirdo who creeps into your bunk while you’re gone and crawls around on the floor by your bed. Why am I doing this? Oh, because of the murders.

She decided to skip lunch, even though she was hungry. She didn’t want to immediately face the redheaded girl again. She texted Janelle and asked her to bring a hot dog and soda to the cabin, where she was going to hide for a while with the door closed.

The red hair made Stevie think of Diane McClure, who in many ways was the least-documented victim. She wasn’t as bad as Todd, as good as Sabrina, or the well-meaning drug dealer who almost made it to safety. She was simply there, the girlfriend, the fourth victim. Stevie flopped onto her bed and picked up her tablet, paging through the files until she got to the very short one allocated to Diane. There was an excerpt from a book on the case about her:

Very few people had much to say about Diane McClure. Her school records show that she was a middling student, barely passing many of her classes but not quite failing out. She belonged to no clubs. Her yearbook photo shows a black-and-white image of a heavily freckled girl with a strange smile that looks neither happy nor sincere. Her thick red hair is long and straight, but the photo cannot capture how vibrant it was in life.

Diane was the daughter of lifetime Barlow Corners residents Douglas and Ellen McClure. Her parents met at Liberty High in the 1950s, marrying in 1956. Her brother, Daniel, was born in 1958, and Diane was born in 1960. In 1965, they purchased the Dairy Duchess, a local diner, from its owners. They would run the diner well into the 1990s. Diane worked there in the evenings and on weekends.

“Diane liked to have fun,” said friend Patty Horne. “She loved Led Zeppelin and Kiss. She loved going to concerts. She pretty much always wore a shirt from some band or other. That’s so much of what I remember about her—her red hair and her T-shirts from concerts. She had really strong feelings about which albums were acceptable listening. She was passionate. God, she loved Led Zeppelin so much.”

This was a time when high schools had smoking lounges, and Diane spent a lot of time in the one at Liberty High. Some of the only photos of her in the 1978 yearbook show her leaning out the window, cigarette in hand.

Diane began dating Todd Cooper early in their junior year, and by the end of senior year, they were considered one of the leading couples of Liberty High. But they were not king-and-queen-of-the-prom material.

“Diane was too much of a badass for that,” said another friend. “When I think of what happened that night, one thing that I always think is . . . Diane must have put up one hell of a fight. Whatever happened, she went down swinging.”

Stevie stared at the ceiling for a moment. Had Diane gone down swinging? Had any of them? She paged through the file that detailed the injuries. (Carson might have had some unfortunate quirks, but he put together a solid set of case files.) She got to the diagrams of the bodies, with the detailed notes. Todd, Diane, and Eric had head wounds. Todd was stabbed sixteen times. Diane nine. Only Sabrina had no head wound, and Sabrina was the only one noted for having defensive marks on her hands.

What this seemed to mean to Stevie was that Diane, Todd, and Eric were all struck, possibly to incapacitate them. In Eric’s case, he wasn’t struck hard enough, and he managed to run. Sabrina, again, was the odd one out. Maybe this was because she was the least threatening and didn’t need to be hit on the head.

Whatever the case, one of these things was always not like the other. Sabrina Abbott, again, the perfect girl, the special one—reaching up, fighting back the knife. . . .

Stevie jumped as the cabin door opened.

“Look who I found,” Janelle said, coming in with Nate, whose shirt was soaked through with sweat. She passed Stevie a hot dog and a Coke.

“I’m not going to be popular,” Stevie said. “Don’t ask questions.”

Neither of her friends seemed surprised.