The Box in the Woods

THE REST OF THAT AFTERNOON WAS A FREE ONE, AND ACCORDING TO Nate, most of the counselors were going over to the public side of the park to go swimming and cook out. Nate and Stevie attempted to dodge this, but Janelle managed to convince them that some kind of effort had to be made to ingratiate themselves with the people they would be spending the summer with.

The counselors of Camp Sunny Pines set out in a formless parade, people walking in random groups toward the road that separated the camp from the public park. Once you crossed, there was a thick wall of trees and a great deal more shade. The ground was gnarled with roots, so in places the path was raised up on slatted wooden walkways and tiny bridges, before twisting and splitting into dirt and wood-chip paths, staked with trail markers. Janelle, Nate, and Stevie followed along as the group meandered down the path marked in red, which led down and around the water’s edge. Stevie found that she was getting a bit winded from the walk and realized they had been going up a slow and steady incline, which then dipped down sharply to get to the water’s edge. The trees opened up, and there was a big parking lot in the distance, fairly full of cars. Some RVs and tents dotted the area. The journey ended at a small sand and dirt beach, bordered by rocks and reeds.

On the Sunny Pines side, the ground had been cleared for the camp. Here, all was still wild, and the trees and reeds clustered around the lake like a halo. The lake was wide here, and Stevie finally saw the falls that gave it its name. It wasn’t quite a wonder, but it was impressive enough. This side of the lake was the real deal; their little lake below was the spillover, the children’s pool. On this side, the green-and-blue dragonflies ruled the waves, or the ripples. They buzzed the water’s surface like drones. Stevie wasn’t sure if dragonflies bit, so she shirked away when they landed nearby, twitching their many wings.

This was definitely where the snakes hung out.

Across the lake, a rock jutted up like a big, angry tooth, high above the water. It looked like something Jurassic, or like one of those views from exotic vacations where people would dive into crystal waters below. Except, in this case, any jumpers would have gone into the brackish water of Lake Wonder Falls, or perhaps into one of the smaller rocks tucked in below it.

The heat was thick and humming, enough that the lake looked inviting, despite the lily pads and dragonflies and thousands upon thousands of snakes Stevie was certain were slithering around them. Many of the other counselors had brought over inflatables, which they pumped up and used to float out on the water. Others jumped off the short dock. Only a few lingered on the side like Nate and Stevie. Janelle, being a social creature, immediately started chatting with two girls who had brought a large inflatable unicorn raft. She took off her coverup and got into the water with them, her bright yellow bathing suit making her easy to spot.

Dylan, Nate’s new co-counselor, was having someone take pictures of him doing backward falls off the dock into the water.

“He’s trying to become an influencer,” Nate said grimly.

“It’s nice that you guys have something in common,” Stevie replied.

Nate gave her a long side-eye.

“It’s only for a few days,” she said.

“Easy for you to say.”

Stevie sighed and looked around, debating with herself whether to try to swim. Her relationship with swimming was much like her relationship with biking—she’d done it as a kid. In the case of swimming, she’d never learned how to do it properly. She didn’t have a solid crawl, and she didn’t do laps. Her move was a kind of doggie paddle mixed with a fervent thrashing and treading, but it kept her afloat.

Still, it was too hot not to at least try. She got up and pulled off her T-shirt, revealing the old bathing suit she’d gotten at Target a year or so before. It was a hair too small, riding up her butt and cutting into the tops of her thighs. At first, the water was pleasant, and the ground sandy under her feet. By the time she got knee-deep, she felt the first wave of chill. She braved a bit farther, because running out of the lake when you were in up to your knees was a bad look. The ground dipped away and was replaced by a tangle of slime. The temperature dropped at once, and she was suddenly up to her mid-torso in cold swampland. She flailed a bit, her feet finding only slimy rocks. Her head filled with images of underwater snakes and strange creatures. She felt something brush her ankle, and that was the end of that. She lurched back in the direction of the beach, which was only about ten feet away. It made her struggle to return less than heroic.

“That looked fun,” Nate said as she flopped down next to him.

“So you don’t like to swim?”

“I swim,” he replied, not looking up from his phone. “I’m really good at it. Captain of my junior high team. Varsity my freshman year.”

“Shut up,” Stevie said, reeling.

“It’s true. I stopped because I don’t like competing, but I swim really well. But that . . .” He nodded out at the expanse of lake in front of them. “Looks cold and gross. I like pools. They’re managed.”

“How come you never mentioned this before?”

“Never came up,” he said.

“We once spent the night in the pool house at Ellingham.”

“Not to swim, though,” he replied.

The concept of Nate the Athlete was so astonishing that Stevie found she had nothing more to say. People could be surprising, and that unnerved her. She wanted to believe she could see to the bottom, spot the hints. But she had never so much as suspected that Nate was a secret champion swimmer. She had failed this one.

Dylan and some others came out of the water and sat down not far from them. The gesture was entirely normal and friendly; they were making an effort to be social. Stevie knew this, and even appreciated it on some level. On another level, though, and one closer to her surface, she shied away from such approaches. She was never sure why. It’s not like she had trouble talking to people. Maybe it was more the fact that her parents had always pushed her in that direction, told her to make friends, as if the quantity of friends somehow determined your worth. She already had friends—Nate and Janelle. She was with one of them now.

So instead of looking at the new people, she looked over at the imposing rock on the other side of the lake.

“That’s Point 23,” Dylan said, following her gaze. “They call it that because twenty-three people have died jumping off of it.”

“It wasn’t twenty-three people,” said a girl. “People have died, but not that many.”

“It’s twenty-three,” Dylan repeated. “Why else would they call it that? I jumped it last summer. It was awesome.”

“You’re an idiot, Dylan,” the girl replied. “Besides, if you get caught jumping off that rock, they kick you out of camp.” She snapped her fingers dramatically. “Like, you’re gone.”

“Raptured?” Nate said in a hushed whisper.

The girl wrinkled her nose, indicating that the joke was not all it could be. It was time to turn the conversation to something more Stevie’s speed.

“Do people ever talk about the murders?” Stevie said.

The girl poked out her lower lip a bit in thought. Another girl, dressed in a black bathing suit, with black hair and nails to match, leaned in.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “The Box in the Woods thing. That was a serial killer from the seventies called the Woodsman.”

Stevie fought back the urge to editorialize.

“They caught the guy,” the girl went on, wrongly. “You can go out into the woods and see where it happened, but there’s not much there. I went the first year I worked here. It’s really weird. You can still see stuff that was there from when they were murdered.”

Again, this was not true. Stevie twitched internally.

“You know you want to,” Nate whispered.

She elbowed him.

Perhaps sensing that Nate and Stevie were not the chatty kind, the group talked among themselves. There was a public grill, and several of the counselors had brought over hot dogs. Dylan and that group got some and sat back down to eat.

“Hold my camera,” Dylan said to one of the girls.

While she did so, he took a hot dog roll and pressed the entire thing into his mouth, squashing it in and making himself gag. Nate watched blankly, too defeated to comment.

Stevie, however, was transfixed.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

This came out a bit louder than intended and got the attention of the group, including Dylan.

“Son of a bitch,” Stevie said again, jumping to her feet and scrabbling for her phone.

“Not you,” she heard Janelle say behind her. “She’s . . . um . . .”

Stevie was already marching off toward the parking lot, looking for a clearer phone signal, and waiting for someone on the other end to answer her call. Finally, they did.

“We have to talk,” she said. “Now.”