The Box in the Woods

STEVIE WOKE UP IN A BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL MOOD THAT BEFITTED Barlow Corners. Today, David would be here. Today, she had something she could give to a family member of one of the Box in the Woods victims. Today the kids were coming, and that seemed wonderful too.

Again, Stevie set out in the morning on a bike. The route to town was easy enough, with only two turns to make. Still, most of the country roads had no bike lanes, no sidewalks—you were supposed to ride along the edge of the street and trust. She wobbled at times and pumped the brakes anxiously, never really sure if she was about to skid off the side of the road or into traffic. No one else seemed to be having these problems. People on racing bikes whizzed around her, utterly sure of their command of the road.

When she arrived in the town center about half an hour later, she was a shattered husk of her former self, but she had grown in her own personal estimation. She rolled the bike up the sidewalk for the last few blocks of the journey and chained it in front of the library.

The library air was shockingly cool on skin that was slick with sweat. Allison was in the new reading room, organizing some picture books. She had on a cheerful yellow shirtdress with a matching necklace made of big yellow beads. Janelle would have appreciated the lemony color and the precision.

“Hey,” Stevie said quietly.

Allison turned.

“I have something for you,” Stevie said, reaching into her backpack and producing the typed paper of art supplies. “We found it when we were organizing the art pavilion. It was in a big box of junk, but . . . I know you like to have anything Sabrina made or wrote, so . . .”

Allison stared at the paper, then looked up at her, a strange expression on her face.

“The art pavilion?” she said.

“Yeah. We were cleaning it. Well, Janelle was, and she found this, and I thought . . .”

Allison turned her gaze back to the paper. Stevie couldn’t make out what she was thinking, but there was a lot of movement behind her eyes. Stevie was not great with intense emotions and felt the pull of the exit on her heels.

“I should get going,” she said.

“Yes . . . ,” Allison said distractedly. “Yes.”

Stevie was halfway to the library door when Allison hurried up to her and took her gently by the arm.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was . . . it was kind. Thank you so much.”

“It’s no problem,” Stevie said. Because really, it wasn’t.

“Sabrina was bad at typing,” she said. “It was a joke in our family. Sabrina could do everything, but she couldn’t type to save her . . . ”

Allison reconsidered finishing the sentence, blinked, and reset the conversation.

“How is your research going?”

“Not great,” Stevie said. “Most people probably won’t talk to us because of Carson.”

“They will if I ask,” Allison said, her eyes bright. “Who do you want to speak to?”

“Anyone who will talk to me,” Stevie replied. “People who were there. Shawn Greenvale, Susan Marks, Paul Penhale . . .”

“Do you have to be back right away?”

“Not really?”

“Come on,” Allison said. “Paul’s practice is only a few doors away.”

The Barlow Corners Veterinary Hospital was actually four doors down, next to the Pilates and barre studio. It was a brightly colored office, intensely cheerful, with many children’s drawings of their pets in crayon, almost all with messages thanking Dr. Penhale for caring for them. There was a coffee station and fresh-baked cookies on the side. A man with tidily trimmed gray hair and scrubs covered in cartoon puppies sat behind the desk. Stevie vaguely recognized him from the picnic.

“Hey, Joe,” Allison said. “Is Paul in with a patient?”

“He is but should be done in a second.”

As he said that, a door opened and a man in maroon scrubs stepped out, carrying a small curly-haired dog in his arms. The dog looked a little loopy and had a bandage on his ear.

“You can take that bandage off before you go to bed this evening,” he said, passing the dog to a woman in the waiting room. “But he’s going to have to wear the cone for a week, until the stitches heal. And no dog park for a while.”

Once patient and owner were checking out at the desk, he came over to greet them.

“Hey, Allison,” he said, looking between her and Stevie with some confusion. “What’s up?”

“This is Stevie from the event the other night,” Allison said. “You remember.”

“Hard to forget,” he replied, but he nodded a polite greeting to Stevie.

“Stevie’s okay,” Allison said. “It would mean a lot to me if you would give her an interview about the case.”

Paul raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Really?”

“Really,” she said. “She’s all right.”

The owner and the small dog left, and Paul waved his goodbye. Then he turned to the man at the desk, who was typing into a scheduling program with lightning speed.

“Hon, when’s my next?”

“You have forty-five minutes,” the man replied. “Your ten fifteen spaying appointment asked to bump to this afternoon.”

“Looks like I have some time now,” Paul said. “I could use a coffee. That okay with you, Joe?”

“Fine by me,” Joe replied. “Gives me a chance to unpack the surgical supplies.”

“My husband,” Paul explained. “Keeps everything going.”

Joe did not deny it. He peered over the desk to regard Stevie.

“So the Box Box guy owns the camp now, huh?” he asked.

Stevie nodded.

“And he also wants to make a podcast about the . . . about what happened? Seems like a broad remit. Still, I have to admit I like those boxes.”

Stevie shrugged, because Joe was right. It was a weird combination of interests.

“Joe likes organization,” Dr. Penhale explained. “I joked that he wanted us to take our honeymoon at the Container Store.”

Joe held up his hands, indicating that he was guilty as charged.

“So you’re set here,” Allison said. “If you need anything else, you ask me.”

With a nod, she exited.

“You seem to have made a big impression on Allison,” Paul said. “And if you’re all right with Allison, then you’re all right with me. Let’s walk over to Patty’s, get a coffee or a soda or something.”

They crossed the street to the Sunshine Bakery. Patty Horne was in the back, decorating a cake. She gave a wave but continued with her work as her assistant rang up the coffees and prepared them. Paul insisted on paying. All the tables were empty, so they took the one by the window. Sunshine Bakery was, true to its name, extremely sunny. Sunlight poured in over the cheerful yellow table, decorated with a red Gerbera daisy in a jar.

“So what can I help you with?” he asked.

“Do you mind if I record this?” Stevie said, getting out her phone. “Not for the podcast. For me. Just to remember.”

Paul gave an expansive gesture that indicated she should do as she liked.

“I guess . . . ,” Stevie said, and then regretted starting that way. She needed to sound more sure, more confident. But that was easier said than done. She was facing a man who had lost a brother, as Allison had lost a sister, and Patty had lost her friends. Everyone around here had lost, and she felt it in her bones.

Paul was waiting. She needed to stop sounding so unsure.

“Your brother,” she said. It was not a question, but Paul seemed to understand. “If that’s okay,” she added.

Paul nodded, his chin dipping toward his chest a bit.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve been talking about what happened to my brother—about everything that happened here—since I was seventeen years old. It’s been with me for most of my life. My brother died in December of 1977, about seven months before the murders. It was right before Christmas. He was in the junior high band. He played the trumpet. They were doing a special long rehearsal for a holiday concert. I was home. I was watching Starsky and Hutch downstairs and doing homework. The phone rang and I heard this . . . scream from upstairs . . .”

He stopped and looked down at his coffee for a moment.

“It was our neighbor, Mrs. Campbell, who called,” Paul said. “It happened right around the corner. He would have been home in a minute or two. Someone came around the corner and mowed him down. Mrs. Campbell heard it happen and ran out, she was with him when . . .”

He shook his head.

“He didn’t die right away. She stayed with him while the ambulance came. He died en route.”

“And people think Todd Cooper was the one who—”

“I don’t think,” he cut in. “I know Todd Cooper was the one who hit him. Everyone knows Todd Cooper was the one who hit him.”

His voice rose a bit and Patty looked up from her cake decorating. Paul cleared his throat a little. “Why don’t we step outside?” he asked. “It’s a nice morning.”

The temperature had climbed even in the short period they had been in the bakery, and Stevie felt herself immediately start to sweat.

“This is a small town,” he said as soon as they were clear of the door and any passersby. “Everybody really does know everyone. And it’s not like there are any secrets about what happened with Todd and my brother. Certainly Patty knows all about it. But it always feels best to maybe keep this conversation—well, I don’t know. It’s a reflex.”

They drifted toward the green and sat down on one of the benches by the statue.

“The town felt even smaller back then,” he said. “Everyone was in and out of everyone else’s house or yard. We all knew what everyone else was up to. I knew Todd. We were good friends. Todd drove a brown Jeep with a red stripe. He drove fast, with the music up loud. And he drove high, he drove drunk. Lots of people did back then. Todd did it a lot. I was in the car many of those times. There were near misses that we’d laugh off. That night, it wasn’t a near miss. Someone saw him. There was a girl named Dana Silverman, who was in band as well. She was walking home from the same rehearsal. She said she saw his Jeep turn the corner of Mason Road and Prospect Avenue right after the accident, and that it was going fast. She even saw the green fuzzy dice he had hanging from the rearview mirror. The next day, after the accident, Todd didn’t drive to school. He turned up in his girlfriend Diane’s car. That had never happened before.”

“Did anyone ask why?” Stevie asked.

“I asked Diane why, lots of people asked her why. She said Todd’s dad took the keys because he’d gotten a D on a major test. Like I said, I knew Todd. I rode in that car and I knew all about his life. His dad might have been pissed about a test, but his dad never took his keys.”

“Didn’t the police question him?” Stevie said.

“The police said they did. He said he was at home all night. His parents said the same thing, said they were all sitting in the living room watching TV.”

“But they would have looked at the car.”

“So you’d think,” Paul said, smiling mirthlessly.

“No one checked the car?”

“After the accident, the Jeep wasn’t in the driveway, where it normally would have been. No one saw that car for a week. And then, after a week, the police gave us some report, some form, that said that someone had gone out and looked at the Jeep and that it was fine and showed no signs of damage. It was dated the day after the accident, but no one—no one—thinks that’s when they actually went over and looked at it. Again, this is a small town. Todd’s father was the mayor. He said his son was home all night, so his son was home all night. The Jeep vanishes, the Jeep reappears a week later, and the police say the Jeep is fine. So the Jeep was fine.”

“Did anyone keep the bike?” Stevie asked. “They could check for paint.”

“I think about this all the time,” Paul said, shaking his head. “This was 1978. No one knew to ask about things like that. Years later I went back and asked about the bike, but there’s no record of what happened to it. It’s gone. I assume they got rid of it. I mean, it was a hit-and-run in a small town. It was sad, but not a lot could be done about it. That was the general attitude.”

“So if everyone knew it was Todd, what happened?”

“Well, there were basically three camps in town. There were people who thought Todd did it and supported us. There were some people who thought Todd was innocent—not many, but a few. Those people make me furious, but not as furious as the third group, which I think was the biggest group of all—the people who knew Todd did it and chose to do nothing. They knew Dana saw him. They knew the car was missing for a week. They knew it all, but they thought, It was just an accident. Why ruin a kid’s life over an accident? They knew the mayor was lying, but they put it down to protecting his kid. Being a good dad. Those are the people I could never forgive.”

He had to pause for a moment and shift in his seat. Stevie could see the weight he still felt, all these years later.

“I had to go back to school with the guy I knew had run my brother down and gotten away with it,” he said. “I had to see him every day. I avoided him, and he avoided me. I was also dealing with the fact that I was a gay, closeted jock in the late 1970s, so I was trying to compensate and seem really . . . whatever straight and manly looked like then. It wasn’t an easy time, but we got through it. My parents were amazing people. My dad wanted justice. Fairness. He didn’t want revenge. He wasn’t that kind of person. He wanted people to do the right thing. He never stopped trying to get someone to look into it. When the local police let him down, he tried the state police. When the state police couldn’t help, he went to the local press. He talked to everyone who would listen. He would have kept going, but seven months later, Todd was dead.”

He lifted his hands gently as if to say, And that was that.

“You were at the camp that night,” Stevie said. “The night of the murders.”

“I was, like every other teenager in town. Everyone knew that group was going out that night. It was an open secret when Eric was going to get the weed. Back then, it was both illegal and everywhere. I bought off him. Everyone did. Every week he would come around and ask you what you wanted, and you’d give him a few bucks, and he went somewhere and picked up the stash.”

“Who would have known where that was?” Stevie asked.

“Everyone knew it was in the woods somewhere—the whole thing was kind of an open secret. The only part Eric really kept quiet was the exact spot it was hidden, to make sure it wasn’t stolen. I mean, he took Sabrina out there, and she wasn’t really in that group of people for very long. It was in all other respects a totally normal night. There were three lifeguards—Todd, Greg Dempsey, and Shawn Greenvale. Todd was out in the woods, Greg was on house arrest in one of the camp admin offices, so I went over to the lake house to hang out with Shawn. I would never have gone in with Todd there, or Greg, really. Shawn was learning guitar, and he was trying to learn how to play Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ just like every other kid in the seventies. Susan checked on us. Then I went back to my bunk. I think I read a book or something for a while, then I went to sleep. I remember waking up to someone screaming the next morning. That’s really all I know. Obviously, people looked at my family because of what happened to Michael, but we got lucky in one respect—our neighbors were over at our house all the time after Michael died, bringing us food, generally taking care of us and keeping us company. On the night of the murders, our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Atkins, were over for dinner and stayed to watch television. My mom took medication every night to help her sleep, and she went to bed around nine thirty. Mrs. Atkins went home, but Mr. Atkins stayed until two in the morning having beers with my dad on the porch and playing cards. At least that left my parents out of it. And I was with Shawn up until the time I went to bed. The other counselor saw me come in. So we were spared that mostly. People still looked at us funny sometimes, but everyone knew we had nothing to do with it.”

“What do you think happened?” she asked.

“It was so chaotic,” he said. “The police were in way over their heads. Everything was botched from the jump. First they said it was something to do with drugs, but no one was going to murder four people over a bag of grass at a summer camp—and then, on top of it all, leave the grass there. So then they started talking about the serial killer. That was the big angle, and I guess most people thought that must have been what happened, but that’s fallen apart with time as well. So what do I think?”

He looked up and around at his town for a moment.

“There was too much wrong in our town,” he said. “I knew it. I’d experienced it. I don’t believe in curses. I’m not superstitious or anything like that. I just mean that ours was the kind of town where bad things could happen and everything could remain under the surface. Something about it always felt . . . personal. Local. Something about finding that spot in the woods, being there at the right time, something about the timing of it all.”

He crumpled his empty coffee cup.

“Hope that helps,” he said. “Honestly, I think too much time has passed. I don’t think we’ll ever know. Good luck anyway. I hope you get to enjoy camp at least.”

He smiled and left Stevie alone with her thoughts, sitting in the shadow of John Barlow and his horse.