The Box in the Woods

THE REST OF THE DAY THAT ALLISON DIED SLIPPED PAST IN A STRANGE haze. Stevie went through the motions at the art pavilion, her brain churning. By dinner, she was tired from her circular thinking. She sat, her untouched food in front of her, repeating the story to Nate and Janelle for what had to have been the fifteenth time.

“From everything you’re saying, it really sounds like she fell,” Janelle said. “You know, most car accidents happen on roads people know the best. People go into autopilot and feel like they don’t have to pay as much attention. She could have been preoccupied.”

“No,” Stevie said again. “Something’s not right.”

“Did anything seem off about her when you gave her the list?” Janelle asked.

“No. She was happy to get it.”

She could tell from their expressions that, like David, they knew Stevie was quick to say that something was not an accident. They also knew better than to voice this in the state Stevie was in. She walked back to their cabin, feeling lightheaded and sleepy. She called David.

“Hey,” she said.

“You sound weird.”

“Just tired,” she said.

“The kayak thing didn’t work out so well. Do you want to walk over and I’ll meet you by the path?”

Stevie rubbed her face with her hand. She had so little time with David—every day counted—but she was leaden with exhaustion. Something about Allison’s death had knocked her sideways.

“I think I need to sleep,” she said.

She heard him sigh.

“Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, going up the steps to her cabin.

Once she got inside, she flopped onto her bed, not even bothering to take off her shoes. It was only seven in the evening—still light out—but Stevie was shutting down. She closed her eyes, letting the cabin and the camp and the confusion of the day slip away. Just as she was nodding off, her phone rang. It was an unknown local number.

“Is this Stephanie Bell?” said a woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“My name is Susan Marks,” she said. “I used to run the camp when it was Wonder Falls.”

Stevie knew the name and sat up.

“Allison . . .” The woman sounded pained. “Allison Abbott gave me your name and said I should contact you. As you knew her, I thought I should let you know . . .”

“I know,” Stevie said softly.

Susan was silent in acknowledgment.

“She asked me to talk to you about what happened here, before. . . . I was hesitant, but I want to honor her wishes. If you’d like to speak to me.”

“Definitely,” Stevie said. “Yes. Could I . . . come to town? In the morning?”

“Fine. Come by any time after eight.”

After giving Stevie her address, Susan Marks hung up. Stevie texted this update to David, then slipped into a deep, unbroken sleep.

“So who is it we’re going to see?” David asked as they pulled out of the camp the next morning.

David had come in the old gray Nissan to take Stevie into town, thus sparing her from the treacherous and sweaty bike ride. Stevie had made a show of going over to the art pavilion, but left as soon as Nicole had done the morning rounds. The day was almost unbearably humid. The air-conditioning in the car didn’t work, so they had the windows open. The morning was bright, but the sun shone through a haze of cloud. Some kind of wild summer weather was afoot.

The twelve hours of sleep Stevie had gotten seemed to have revived her. Her body had decided to shut down completely and reboot, and now she was alert, maybe even a little hyper. Sometimes anxiety did that—it could slow you down or speed you up.

“Susan Marks,” she said. “She was the head of the camp in 1978.”

“What am I supposed to be doing during this interrogation? When do I get to pound my fist on the desk? Or am I the one who offers the coffee? You tell me who I’m supposed to be.”

“I’m not interrogating anyone,” she said.

It was kind of weird being in a car with David. No one had a car at Ellingham. They had been in all kinds of places and spaces together there. They’d lived in a small dorm house together, cozy little Minerva, with its fireplace and old sofas. They’d been in each other’s rooms, eaten meals together, seen each other from dawn to dusk. They’d occupied closets together, slept in a ballroom, and crept side by side through tunnels and hidden spaces underground.

So a car should not have been a big deal. And yet, she found herself staring at his profile as he drove, one hand on the wheel, the other casually dangling partway out the window. The air knocked his wavy hair back from his forehead. He’d gotten a bit of a tan on the road, an uneven one.

Here was the thing about romantic feelings—the sensation was incredible, like a warm flood through every highway and byway of her body. Every good chemical she could produce turned up, like some kind of bountiful harvest. But the feelings and the chemicals blocked out everything else. They dulled logic and sense and focus. They made everything else seem kind of irrelevant and time started to move jerkily—too fast, then too slow. And they came on with no advance warning, like now, watching him drive. Everything went loose, and all the orderly thoughts in her brain were now just a bag of parts. She wanted to lean over, to kiss him on the soft hollow of his cheek, to pull over and forget going to see Susan. Susan could wait. They could go into the woods. . . .

“You’re staring at me,” he said, not turning his gaze. “Are you about to bite my face or something?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Thought so.”

She took a long gulp of thick air and told herself to get it together. David was smiling a knowing smile, like he knew precisely what was going on in her head.

They drove past Liberty High, with its giant blue billboard.

“They should get a bigger sign,” David said. “That one is too subtle.”

“I can barely see it,” Stevie said.

“Small towns really love their high schools. They seem to scream about them. Why do you think that is?”

“People love to scream.”

“That’s probably it,” he said, turning to her with a wolfish grin. “I know I do.”

Focus, she told herself. They were almost there.

Susan Marks lived in the center of town, on one of the side streets off the main road. They parked by the library and the green. Barlow Corners was quiet but not completely still. There were a few people going in and out of the shops. There were people in the Sunshine Bakery with coffee. Stevie followed the map on her phone, which guided them through the painfully quaint lanes that trailed back behind the main drag. The roads here were one lane only, with tidy little Victorian houses groaning under the weight of flower baskets, decorative flags, and wicker porch furniture. Susan’s was the last one on this particular lane. She had fewer flags, but many more flowers and shrubs.

A woman with sharply cut gray hair was on her knees in a flower bed in front of the house. As Stevie and David turned down her path, she rose and dusted off her knees. Susan Marks was in her midseventies, and despite a little stiffness as she stood, she had the look of someone who did an hour of yoga a day to warm up for the second hour of yoga she did each day.

“Stevie,” she said. She had the firm, commanding tone of someone who was used to doing roll call. “And you are?”

“Her assistant,” David said. “The one that asks the stupid questions.”

“Watson, huh?”

“That’s me,” David replied, smiling.

“It’s going to be a hot one today, so I wanted to finish up some of this weeding early. Come on in.”

She marched inside, and Stevie and David followed. The inside of the house was almost as plant heavy as the outside, with ferns and greenery of all sorts in dozens of pots. Two orange cats sat on a perch in a sunny window, lazily entwined around each other. There was a framed collage of photos of Susan and another woman. Stevie paused a moment to look at them.

“My wife,” Susan said, noting where Stevie was looking. “Magda. She passed away eight years ago.”

“Oh, I’m . . .”

“It’s all right,” Susan said. “I didn’t say it to make you feel bad. She was the nurse at the camp. That’s where we met. There are good memories of the camp too. She was also an artist. All of these are hers.”

Susan indicated the shelves and surfaces full of pottery. Stevie didn’t know much about whether pottery was good or bad, but these seemed nice enough to her, and the colors were vibrant.

They were led to the kitchen, which was decorated in a surprising pink color. Pink everything—walls, mixer, towels, floor mats.

“Magda liked a pink kitchen,” Susan explained. “Sit down.”

They did as they were told, and Susan put mugs of coffee in front of them.

“I’m sorry about Allison,” Stevie said.

“So am I,” Susan replied. “It’s a damn shame. Horrific. So many terrible things have happened here. She had been through so much and did so well. I used to stop at the same spot on my morning runs. A lot of people do. It’s got the best view. It’s a bad place to fall from. . . .”

“She seemed really careful to me,” Stevie said.

“Yes . . .” Susan’s gaze drifted a bit. “She was. Very careful. Not like her to make a mistake like that. People do, of course. Her head must have been somewhere else.”

Susan sighed deeply and seemed to collect herself somewhere in the bottom of her coffee cup.

“So,” she said, “why is it you—or that person at the event the other night—think you can solve this case when no one else has?”

“I don’t know if I can,” Stevie said. “It’s more that we’re trying to tell the story. . . .”

“People know the story,” Susan replied. “People have been coming here for years, making their shows, writing their books, making money off a tragedy. How are you different?”

“She’s pretty good,” David said, nodding at Stevie. “Never count her out. She succeeds where others fail. And she’s not about money.”

Stevie felt herself flush. This conversation had gotten off to a very weird start and was perhaps slipping out of her control. Susan regarded David with interest.

“And does she pay you to say that?” she joked dryly.

“Me? Oh yeah. I’m really cheap.”

Susan smirked and nodded. “I looked you up,” she said to Stevie. “And I know you were okay with Allison, so I suppose there’s no harm in going over things again. Where do you want me to start?”

Susan Marks was all business, so Stevie would be the same. She confirmed that it was all right to record, which got a terse nod but a slightly disapproving look.

“I guess . . .” She reminded herself to stop saying things like that. She had to sound more like she knew what she was doing. “How did you end up at Camp Wonder Falls?”

“Back in the seventies, I was the head of health and physical education at Liberty High,” Susan said. “I taught during the school year, and then there was an opening to run the camp in the summer and I took it. It suited me—I like to keep busy, and the camp had so many sports and activities to manage. That summer was my fifth one in the job.”

“So you knew all the . . . everyone involved . . . well?”

“Oh, I knew them all,” Susan replied. “Todd, Diane, Eric, Sabrina . . . they were all my students, all grew up in town. This town is a bit like a family, but even families . . .”

She let that statement hang for a moment.

“You didn’t like all of them,” Stevie said, trying to read Susan’s expression.

“No. I didn’t like all of them. I never like to say kids are rotten, but . . . Todd Cooper, he was a rotten kid. Charming. Polite to your face, always. But he was the son of the mayor, who was himself—pardon my French—a real son of a bitch.”

“Do you think Todd had anything to do with Michael Penhale’s death?” Stevie asked.

“Oh, I absolutely think so,” she said, her voice getting louder and her expression more animated. “I don’t think anyone doubts that. He was guilty as sin, and everyone knew it. That was the shame of our town. It was a disgrace, and that no-good sheriff we had did nothing, just like he did nothing when the murders happened. Then there was Diane McClure. You know, I liked Diane. She was a good kid, deep down. Her parents owned the Dairy Duchess, the ice cream place across the way. But she was a hard nut. Tough. Good athlete. I tried more than once to get her to join the track team, but she never would. I think Diane liked a good time and bad boys. Todd was a bad boy. I was unhappy to see those two together, but it wasn’t a surprise.”

“What about Sabrina?” Stevie said. “No one seems to understand why she was there.”

“Sabrina was everything people say she was. She was bright as hell. Hardworking. Nice kid. Really nice kid. She would have left town, done something special with her life. Her parents put a lot of pressure on her to be perfect, and that concerned me sometimes. She was hard on herself. I think she was probably trying to cut loose a little that summer, after graduation. She was starting to hang around with Eric Wilde. . . .” She trailed off. “Eric Wilde,” she said, smiling. “I knew him since he was a little boy. His father taught at the school, and his mom was the librarian in town. He was smart, funny. He was also mischievous, but not in a malicious way. It didn’t exactly surprise me to find out he was the one supplying the pot to the camp. There’s less of a stigma about that now—it’s legal here—but at the time, it was a bigger deal. When we found him on that path, it was . . .”

She sighed deeply and reached down to pet the orange cat who had come over and stretched up on his hind legs for a head scratch.

“Talking about it gets easier with time, but the feeling never goes away completely. Which is good, I suppose. It means it matters. It should matter. I was in charge. I ran that camp. I was responsible for them. No one ever blamed me, which I think was really generous. I don’t know where I stand on blaming myself. I ran a tight ship, for the time. You have to understand, never in a million years did we think anything like this could happen. Maybe it was a more innocent time. I’m not sure. There’s more monitoring now. Kids don’t play unsupervised. Everyone has a phone. Back then, even little kids went out to play on their own, sometimes all day. Kids rode their bikes all around town. I was considered a hardass for doing spot bed checks and having a lot of rules. So people in town were very good to me after it happened. No one thought I’d failed when those kids went out to the woods. Because that’s what kids did back then. We expected them to, to a degree. More coffee?”

Without waiting for a reply, she took the mugs and went to the counter to refill them.

“The night of the murders was very normal,” she went on as she put the mugs into her coffee machine. “It was a few days after the Fourth of July. Dinner was served between five and six, and then from six to eight the kids were allowed to play outside, with the counselors supervising them. At eight, everyone returned to their bunks for the night. One counselor always had to be present, but the other could have some free time. I’d walk around the camp at night, generally checking on things. Our biggest concern was the lake, that a camper or a counselor might try to swim at night and drown. That’s why we had the lifeguards stay in the lake house, and one of them was always up and around at night. So that night I stopped by the lake house and Paul and Shawn were in there. They were playing guitar, trying to learn that song that was all the rage—‘Stairway to Heaven.’ God, they played that song endlessly. I continued around the camp doing a few spot checks on bunks, then I returned to my cabin to go over notes for the day and set up for the next. I would often be awoken during the night for some reason or other, a sick camper or kids getting upset about a snake or something, but nobody came that night. It was quiet.”

She put fresh cups of coffee in front of Stevie and David, who now had the orange cat on his lap, sniffing his face.

“And the next day?” Stevie said.

“I’d just made the wake-up announcement,” Susan said, her gaze drifting as she remembered. “I was going over the schedule, and I heard a scream. It was one of those noises—you don’t hear them often in life, thankfully—where you know something terrible has happened. I went to find the source of it. As I walked, I called Magda on the walkie. She’d heard it too and was also heading in that direction. We both got to the path that led to the theater and the archery range. It was Brandy Clark who’d screamed. I’ll never forget her face; she’d gone completely gray. She pointed, and we went up the path and saw Eric. How detailed do you want me to get?”

She fixed Stevie with a firm look. David raised his eyebrows a bit.

“As detailed as you want,” Stevie said. “It’s okay.”

“Well, this isn’t about being salacious. I give details because people should know this was brutal. Those kids died terribly. Eric had big, curly blond hair. I could see that hair of his as we walked toward him. I remember—because we didn’t know what it was precisely that we were looking at—but Magda and I slowed a bit, then we ran. He was facedown. Cold to the touch. He had a wound on the back of his head—dark, bloody, coagulated. Then we saw the stab wounds.”

She took a moment as the cat climbed into her lap and immediately coiled up and began purring loudly.

“So that was around seven forty-five in the morning. We had a serious situation on our hands. At that point, of course, we had no idea the extent of it. We knew Eric had been killed, and we had to get all the kids and counselors in order and make sure everyone was safe, and then get them away from the area. Patty Horne came running up and asked about the others—that’s when we found out there were more missing kids. When I heard the names—Todd and Diane, that made sense to me. But the third was Sabrina Abbott, and that didn’t. I suppose Patty would have been with them, but she was in trouble and had to stay in the infirmary. We’d caught her and her boyfriend up to some—romantic business. Kids could have seen them. Magda had terrible insomnia. It came in very handy. Whenever we had a staff member who broke the rules, we would have them sleep on one of the infirmary cots and Magda would keep an eye on them. Because there were two of them, I made Greg spend the nights at home. That punishment also worked well because it put a burden on the other counselors. People were less likely to break the rules if it made things hard for all their friends as well. There was social pressure not to do that. Anyway, once we found out there were three more missing, the police went out in the woods to search. You know the rest about what they found.”

She inhaled through her nose, as if it was all happening again in front of her.

“Obviously, camp didn’t continue that year. We had to make a few hundred calls, get everyone home. I don’t think I slept much that week. As I said, I didn’t have a great deal of faith in our local sheriff. As soon as they saw there was pot there, he assumed that it was a drug-related case. Then the FBI came in some time that week, I think, when the talk of the Woodsman started. I mean, it was complete chaos. Everyone was terrified that the woods were full of murderous drug dealers or serial killers.”

Susan wrinkled her nose in a way that indicated she had not shared those feelings.

“It didn’t end there,” she went on. “Patty’s boyfriend, Greg, the one I said she’d been caught with? You know he died that week as well. All the kids had gathered on the playing field behind the school the night the town had a gathering. I was driving over in that direction. I remember Patty was standing at the end of the school driveway, crying and waving a flashlight around, really upset and beside herself. I was about to pull in and stop to check on her, and there was a kind of lightning flash up ahead as Greg crashed. I didn’t know what it was at the time. That’s how that week was, horror upon horror.”

“What do you think happened?” Stevie said.

“You don’t know what to think when four teenagers are stabbed to death in the woods. It makes no sense, so you assume it must be someone sick, some stranger, something like that. My gut always told me it had nothing to do with drugs or serial killers, but the truth is, I have absolutely no idea what happened in the woods that night. It was so barbaric, so confusing.”

“So,” Stevie said, “if not drugs or a serial killer . . .”

“I don’t know,” Susan said again, and her tone was final. She was done. Stevie glanced over at David, who drained his coffee in one gulp.

“One last thing,” Stevie said. “Sabrina’s diary . . .”

“Oh yes. Allison has been . . . Allison wanted that diary for years. She asked me about it many times. I packed up Sabrina’s things for the family, but it wasn’t there.”

“Could someone have taken it?”

“Of course,” Susan said, as if this was a stupid question, which it kind of was. Anyone can take anything.

“I mean,” Stevie said, “it sounds like Sabrina hid it to keep campers from reading it.”

“I had hundreds of hysterical kids and parents to take care of,” Susan said. “It took a few days—some people had gone on vacation, things like that. I got every single one of those kids packed up and home. Then I spent two full days packing up everything those four brought to camp. I made sure their parents got every last thing, neat and packed with care. Well, almost every last thing. Anything like cigarettes, drug related—I put those things in separate boxes.”

“Didn’t the police go through their things first?”

“No,” Susan said, smirking. “Never bothered to go through their stuff in their cabins. I asked them several times if they wanted to search the bunks, but they had no interest.”

“Do you still have the boxes?” Stevie asked.

“No. Eventually, maybe fifteen years later, the police asked for them. The whole investigation was a mess. But to answer your question, no. I cleaned out every inch of Sabrina’s cabin. The diary was not there. I told Allison that, and I’m telling you that.”

She picked up the cat, who was circling her ankles.

“Good luck,” she said. “It would be nice if someone did solve this case. I’d like to see whatever bastard did this get everything they deserve. We all would.”