The Box in the Woods

STEVIE FROZE, A FORKFUL OF COLD PANCAKE INCHES FROM HER mouth.

“What?” she asked.

“Arrowhead Point,” Carson said. “She fell during her morning run.”

Stevie felt everything slowly spin away from her. She’d just seen Allison, just gone on that morning run with her, seen that spot on Arrowhead Point, where all of Lake Wonder Falls spread out below in a glorious display.

“We have to go now,” Carson said.

“To do what?” Nate asked.

Stevie did not need an explanation. She had to go, to try to see, to understand. She set her fork and knife down automatically and grabbed her phone and bag. They were halfway across the dining area when Nicole stopped them.

“What’s up?” she said to Carson. “What are you doing?”

“I need Stevie.”

“She’s got a job here.”

“Not today,” he said.

He and Stevie continued on before Nicole could make any reply and were soon in the Tesla. A minute later, they were tearing (or at least going at a moderate speed in a more or less responsible manner in a nearly silent electric car) out of camp. They drove out of the main entrance and turned toward the public side of the lake. Up ahead, Stevie could see a police car blocking the entrance road by the ranger check-in cabin.

“How did you find out?” she asked numbly.

“I was out doing walking meditation this morning,” he said. “Two police cars and an ambulance went by, going toward the lake. So I ran in that direction. I tried to go in, but one of the cops stopped me on the path. I ran home and got a drone to have a look and a listen. I got some footage, but I couldn’t get that close . . .”

Stevie turned in disgust, but found she had nothing to say. The shock was still too strong and her head was fuzzy.

“They’re closing off the main entrances,” Carson said, continuing past the police cars. “But we can get in through the woods.”

Her phone buzzed. A text from David appeared:

Come over when you can.

David was here for five days. All their time for the summer. What was going to happen now? She couldn’t think about it. Her head was swirling. She texted back.

Is there anything weird going on there this morning?

No, he replied. Why?

That made some sense. The lake was big, and Arrowhead Point was at the far end. David was more near the middle, by Point 23.

Carson slid the Tesla to a stop on the side of the road.

“Here,” he said, handing her a tiny microphone. “Better audio for your phone. You go in through here and see if you can record any witnesses. I’m going to try to sneak in closer near Arrowhead Point and get video footage.”

Stevie didn’t actually care about what Carson was doing. She needed to get into the woods and see and hear for herself what had happened to Allison. She took the microphone and hopped out of the car, sprinting across the quiet country lane. Once she was actually in the woods, her phone lost all sense of where she was located. It put her position as either in the road or in the middle of the lake. So she picked her way through the trees until she could see the glint of the water, and then she found one of the paths that wound around the lake. She walked in the direction of Arrowhead Point, trying to keep out of sight of any police or emergency personnel that might be around. But she saw no one except a woman walking her dog, who seemed to have no idea that anything was going on. Strange how someone could die in these woods and everything would be normal and peaceful. These woods ate people up and were quiet about it.

Stevie felt cold despite the heat. She pressed on, in a haze, finding her way on the slatted-wood bridges over the hollows and the silent wood chips, always keeping the lake on her left-hand side, watching it out of one eye, scanning for activity.

Finally, she heard the sound of people talking up ahead. She left the path and wove through the trees until she could see a small group of older women gathered on a bit of sandy beach, speaking in a huddle. From here, she could see the rise of Arrowhead Point, and maybe some people walking around on top, but not much else. She slipped out of the trees, making a bit of noise so she didn’t just pop out of nowhere and scare these strangers. After fitting the microphone into the jack of her phone and tucking it as far into her pocket as she could, she tried to act like she was out taking a casual walk.

“Did something happen?” she said, approaching them and squinting up at the point.

“Woman fell,” said one of the swimmers. “From up there.” She nodded toward Arrowhead Point.

“She just . . . fell?”

“We heard a scream and she kind of tumbled off . . .”

“Like she tripped,” said another swimmer.

“Yeah, she must have tripped.”

This was why you weren’t supposed to let witnesses talk to one another before you spoke to them—when people all see something together and discuss it, details will start to merge. All that seemed to be known was that Allison had screamed and fallen, but the story had already become that she had tripped.

“Barbara—she’s Barbara—she went back to the dock because her shorts were close to the edge and she could get her phone, and I went up to wait for the police. Our friends swam over to try to help, but . . .”

“It was too late,” Barbara said.

“She fell onto those rocks. No one would survive that.”

“Was there anyone else up there?” Stevie said.

“You mean, did someone push her?” Barbara said. “Oh god. No. There was no one. We would have seen. We could see her clearly. There was no one up there but her. She was screaming. She must have tripped.”

“She must have tripped,” the woman who was not Barbara repeated sadly.

Stevie decided not to press Barbara and not-Barbara any further. They were upset, and they had conveyed what they had witnessed—a woman screaming and tumbling off a rocky point.

Not a woman. Allison Abbott. The librarian, the archivist of her sister’s life. The runner. The person who had been through so much, who loved her sister so fiercely.

Stevie felt nauseous and turned back into the woods, walking the way she had come, taking big gulps of soft pine-scented air, trying to let the curtain of greens and browns and pinpoint sunlight soothe her.

Screaming. Tumbling. Her brain, fueled by thousands of hours of absorbing true and fictional crime, painted the scene in vivid detail.

Then the rush came—the flush of anxiety and panic, the one that made the trees loom and the ground sinister. The one that twisted the morning into something that mocked her and separated her from all that was familiar.

“No,” she said out loud, stopping. She closed her eyes and practiced her breathing, in slowly, holding, releasing even slower. Breathe. Exhale. She let the world wobble and fall away for a moment.

When she opened her eyes again, all had not been fixed in its entirety, but things were a bit more stable. And she was going somewhere that would help. She tramped on, passing several camping areas, until she finally saw some tents she recognized, and beyond them, the red one she was looking for. She jogged up to it, then wasn’t sure what to do for a moment. You can’t knock on a tent.

“Hey,” she said, her voice coming out rushed. “Hey?”

There was a stirring within.

“Stevie?” said a sleepy voice.

A shuffling. Then the zipper opened itself from the inside and a tousled-haired David in a T-shirt and shorts peered out. He smiled, but this faded when he saw her face.

“What’s wrong?”

Stevie sat down in one of the portable camping chairs outside the tent and stared at the ground for a moment.

“Allison Abbott is dead.”

“Allison . . . Abbott?” he said, ducking to get out of the tent. “Who is Allison Abbott?”

“Sabrina’s sister. The librarian. She fell off the point at the top of the lake. Arrowhead Point.”

“Oh shit,” he said, rubbing at his jaw, taking this in. He didn’t know Allison or Arrowhead Point, but he knew Stevie, and he knew pain and confusion. He looked around for a moment, then opened a cooler and pulled out a can of coffee.

“You want this?” he said, offering her the can.

Stevie took it. He dragged over another folding chair and sat close to her.

“You okay?” he asked. He was asking that a lot now.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Neither do I, but I have no idea what’s going on.”

She had explained some of the case to him, but not every detail of what she had done here. The cool parts, of course, like busting Carson and things like that, but not what it felt like to be in Allison’s house, surrounded by Sabrina’s things. Not the feeling of being able to give Allison something her sister had made, however minor.

David studied her face for a moment.

“Someone’s died,” he said. “Someone connected to a murder that happened here. We’ve been here before.”

He meant back at Ellingham, when someone had died at a place that was so famous for murder. She took a sip of the coffee, which was bitter and strong. She didn’t love the taste, but it had a clarifying effect, so she gulped it down. “Your kayak,” she said. “Can it fit two people?”

“Just one. They have canoes, though. They can fit up to three.”

“Then we need to get one.”

David didn’t bother changing out of his sleeping clothes. He found a pair of shoes, and they walked to the little boat rental place a bit farther in, closer to Sunny Pines, and took possession of a canoe. When they helped lift it down and push it along the sand, it seemed much larger than Stevie thought it would be. And as they got it into the water, it was far wobblier than she’d hoped. But she was focused and got herself into the bench seat and worked out how to paddle. After a few minutes of confused splashing and going in circles, they were drifting out onto the placid waters of Lake Wonder Falls and headed toward Arrowhead Point. The police were moving people away from the shoreline under the peak, and they had hung a tarp over the area where Allison had landed so that nobody could view the body. But nothing stopped them from drifting closer on the water. A few people were doing the same—watching from canoes or rafts or floating tubes. Not that there was much to see. The tarp screened off most of the action. A few police officers were on the edge of the point, examining it. Stevie watched this activity for some time in silence, as David paddled a bit to keep them as stationary as possible. One of the police officers crawled along the point, then got up and walked back to the path. Presumably they would look for any sign of what had caused Allison to fall.

“I don’t get it,” Stevie finally said.

“I’m not sure what there is to get.”

“You don’t understand what I saw at her house,” Stevie replied. “Allison was precise. She made Janelle look disorganized. Everything exactly in the right place. Schedules followed to the minute. It was part of her coping mechanism to deal with her sister’s death. She ran that path at the exact same time every day. I went with her. She knew every bump on the ground. I stood on the point with her. She warned me about how it tapered.”

“It’s still a steep edge. People can fall off steep edges.”

“No,” she said firmly. “It wasn’t an accident.”

“You never think it’s an accident.”

It was true that there had been several “accidents” at Ellingham Academy that Stevie didn’t think were accidents. The thing was—she’d been right about those.

She was right now.

Stevie watched a blue dragonfly buzz the surface of the pond. The water was still, and though covered in a thin green algae haze, it managed to reflect the sky in patches and was somehow more beautiful for what marred it. If she didn’t see the police working on the rocks, she would never have believed that anything could happen here.

Carson called several times, and Stevie pushed them all to voicemail. She leaned back in the canoe and tried to understand how, somewhere between the puffy clouds above and their reflections below, Allison Abbott had ceased to exist.