The Box in the Woods

“LEARN ANYTHING?” DAVID ASKED AS THEY HEADED BACK TO THE CAR.

Stevie stuffed her hands into the pockets of her shorts and concentrated on the cracks in the sidewalk.

“Don’t know,” Stevie said. “I mean, on the surface it was all stuff that’s in all the articles. But there was something—I don’t know what. Something was weird.”

“Weird like she was involved?”

“No,” she said, turning toward him. “I mean, I don’t know, but I don’t think so? Something’s sticking out. There’s something about it that . . .”

Sometimes Stevie could see thoughts in her head—like little blocks, objects that arranged themselves, stuck themselves together. The words that Susan had said were moving around in a more or less orderly fashion, but one thing was trying to wriggle free. What was it . . . ?

“On another note,” David said, “you know, in September . . .”

“Huh?”

“September.”

“What about September?” she said. All the thoughts vanished into the corners of her mind, like mice scurrying away when a person turned on the light and came into the room. She frowned in annoyance.

“What?” he said. “Why are you making that face?”

“What about September? What are you talking about?”

“I’m saying that in September, it’ll be, you know, school.”

Stevie waited for clarification on this scintillating fact. She had been so close to placing her thought. Why did he have to start talking about school? School was far in the distance.

“Well,” he said, noting her irritation and responding with his infuriating smile, “you’ll be back on the mountaintop, and . . .”

Stevie turned her focus back to the street they were walking down. Sleepy, sunny Barlow Corners. Everything here was so snug in this town center. There was the library, sitting proudly on the green, with its stupid statue. There was the Sunshine Bakery and the Dairy Duchess. . . . There was the cute little store full of household novelties and gifts, like funny socks and mugs with inspirational sayings. . . . There was Dr. Penhale’s veterinary office . . . the drugstore . . . the dentist’s office, and Shawn Greenvale stepping out of the door. . . .

Shawn Greenvale.

“. . . and you’ll be busy, I don’t know, maybe murdering someone in the woods, and . . .”

David was still going on about school. Stevie grabbed his arm and tugged it.

“Up there,” she said. “That guy. The one in the blue shirt walking toward the truck. That’s Shawn Greenvale.”

“Shawn . . .”

“Sabrina Abbott’s ex-boyfriend,” Stevie said, already quickening her pace. Shawn had been on her list. Here was her moment. She race-walked along, trying not to draw attention to herself while making sure that Shawn did not get away before she caught up to him. She had to run the last half block.

“Excuse me!” She was out of breath way too quickly. Susan Marks, former phys ed teacher, would not have been impressed with her lung capacity. “Shawn?”

The man looked up at the blond, sweating girl dressed in all black who hurried up to him and was now pressing her palms into the hood of his truck and the lanky boy who followed behind her.

“My name is Stevie Bell and . . .”

“I know who you are.” His tone wasn’t warm or inviting.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

“About what?” he asked.

“About what happened here. In 1978. I just spoke to Susan Marks and . . .”

He reached into his car and took the silver sun blocker off the windshield, folded it, and threw it into the back seat.

“No,” he said.

“I . . .”

“No,” he said again.

Stevie bit her top lip, silencing herself. Shawn began to get into the truck. He was going to go away, and her chance would be gone. She had to try. She maneuvered herself a bit closer to the opening of the door, so it would be harder to shut it without swiping her.

“I don’t want to bother you,” she said quickly.

“Then don’t,” Shawn said shortly. “Could you move back, please?”

Stevie stepped away. He closed the truck door and drove off. Stevie rubbed at her face, annoyed with herself. She should have waited, taken her time, gotten a proper introduction—not just run down the street yelling his name.

“I think he likes you,” David said. “It’s because you play coy.”

She groaned and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

“Was he important?” David asked.

She nodded. He reached over and took her wrists, gently peeling her hands from her face.

“Live and learn,” he said. “It’s fine.”

It wasn’t, but there was nothing she could do about it now. Whatever she had been thinking about Susan was long gone, and Shawn was now up the road. She was back in the moment, with David.

“What were you saying about school?” she said.

A strange half smile spread across David’s lips.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just making conversation.”

When David dropped Stevie back at camp, the day was well underway, and it was punishingly hot. By the time she walked from the parking lot to the art pavilion, she was drenched in sweat. Janelle was holding court over a group of nine-year-olds who were filling bottles with colored sand under her watchful gaze. Stevie made her way around the room, trying to figure out how to assist, but there wasn’t much to explain about putting sand in bottles. So she planted herself at an empty table and pulled out her phone to listen to the recording she had made of the conversation with Susan. She began to jot the important points down.

– nothing special about night before

– Paul and Shawn in lake house playing Stairway to Heaven

– a scream

– ran, met Magda McMurphy (Magda and Susan married)

– gathered everyone in dining pavilion

– found three more missing

– Patty Horne knew location

– campers sent home

– went to football field on the night of the vigil, saw Patty Horne crying, saw light of the crash up the road

– doesn’t feel that it was a drug deal or the Woodsman but can’t explain why

Once she had gone over the recording, she stared at the list, unsure what to do next. She picked at a torn cuticle. “Stairway to Heaven.” She’d heard of the song, but she had no idea how it went. She sometimes tried to listen to things that would evoke the time or place of the thing she wanted to understand. Sometimes, at Ellingham, she listened to thirties music to try to get into the mindset of what it was like back when Albert and Iris had first moved to the mountain. Maybe the music would help her now. She found Led Zeppelin online, then found the song and hit play.

It started off as a plinky-plonky guitar song with a flute, gradually morphing into something more hard rocking. It had cryptic lyrics about magic staircases and laughing forests. This seemed like music for people who thought they might be wizards.

What were the seventies even about? Was it all smoking and listening to this kind of stuff and riding around in huge cars without wearing seat belts? This was the song everyone liked?

The song ground on:

And as we wind on down the road

Our shadows taller than our soul

There walks a lady we all know

But there was something, something, something in what Susan had said. The music summoned it out of hiding and Stevie saw its shadow flit across her thoughts. What the hell was it? Stevie ran down her list of notes again, reading them under her breath, letting them sink into her subconscious. Paul, Shawn, Magda, Patty, Patty . . .

Only one person’s name came up twice: Patty Horne. But Patty had the most ironclad of all alibis—someone literally had seen her all night long. Plus, she had absolutely no reason to kill her friends. Todd, Eric, and Diane were her people, like Nate and Vi and Janelle were Stevie’s people. But what about Greg Dempsey, who died later that week in a bright flash of light and a wall of rock and trees?

Another dead bike rider in Barlow Corners.

An idea took shape.

As Patty had said, if they hadn’t been busted in a makeup nookie session, they most likely would have been victims as well. Or perhaps the killer (or killers) wouldn’t have been able to attack a group of that size. Four people—that would have been hard enough. But six? What if you had wanted to kill someone in that group? And you knew that instead of six people, there would only have been four out there that night because Patty and Greg were under lock and key. Maybe you saw an opportunity.

But again, why? Why Sabrina, Diane, Todd, and Eric?

She flicked through the photos again, landing on Todd’s. She put her earbuds in and listened to the part of the recording where Susan talked about Todd:

“I never like to say kids are rotten, but . . . Todd Cooper, he was a rotten kid. Charming. Polite to your face, always. . . . He was guilty as sin, and everyone knew it. That was the shame of our town. . . .”

Todd Cooper had killed Michael Penhale, and everyone in town knew it. Out of the four of them, he was the only one who really made any sense as a target. The Penhale family was in the clear, and Paul Penhale had been seen in the lake house with Shawn. Susan had confirmed it. Even if Shawn and Paul wanted to team up to murder people they thought had wronged them, there seemed little chance that the woman she’d just met would have had any part in that.

But that didn’t mean that the Penhales were the only people in town who might want Todd Cooper to get what he had coming to him and wouldn’t be heartbroken to take out a few others along the way. Almost everyone noted that Todd was a dangerous driver.

Maybe Michael Penhale hadn’t been the first? Maybe someone else, someone walking along the side of the road—a hitchhiker? A drifter? Someone from the public camp? And maybe the others had all been there when it happened. Maybe that’s why they all had to die. . . .

She didn’t know. It all went around and around in her head. She saw, but she did not observe.

She looked around the art pavilion. No one needed her. She pulled out the Nutshell Studies book and flipped through until something spoke to her. The scenes all had simple names: Dark Bathroom, Attic, Striped Bedroom. . . . That was part of the genius of Frances: she did not glamorize. She did not go to the most high-profile crimes or scenes. She tended to show ordinary places, often inhabited by people without much money. These were people whose deaths might be overlooked or dismissed. She demanded that the investigator look and care. Look at the neatly folded towels with the single, tiny paring knife on top. Observe the worn clothing. (In fact, she often wore clothing over and over herself to wear it out enough, then cut it down to make the outfits for her studies, such was her dedication.) Examine the meat left out of the icebox, the position of the pillow, the contents of the garbage pail. Feel the textures, note the positions.

If Stevie could observe, she could make sense of it all. The word written on the inside of the hunting blind. The red cord that wasn’t the right type. The wounds on Sabrina’s hands. Eric Wilde’s position on the path. A missing diary. A boy knocked off his bicycle and killed. A brown Jeep that everyone in town knew. A seasoned runner falling from a spot she visited every day. Not all these things mattered—the point of the studies was to see that some of them did. She just had to figure out which ones. . . .

“Hey.”

Stevie looked up and pulled out her earbuds. Standing in front of her, inches away from her face, was Lucas. A new group of kids had come in and she hadn’t even noticed. Nate came in with the group, but hung back, far away from Lucas.

“What’s that?” He leaned in to look at her book. “Is that guy hanging?”

Stevie tried to close the book, but Lucas had his hand on the page.

“Why is that guy hanging? What is this?”

“Research,” she said.

“For what?”

Stevie looked around for Janelle to help her, but Janelle was busy demonstrating proper sand-in-bottle technique to some kids. Some would have called this “doing her job,” but to Stevie, this was abandonment.

“Have you read The Moonbright Cycles?” Lucas asked.

Stevie had read Nate’s book right before they started Ellingham. Her tastes ran toward true crime, and fictional crime, and fictional crime based on true crime, so an eight-hundred-page book about monsters that lived in caves and dragons and swords was not really in her wheelhouse. She’d thought it was fine. But mostly she cared because she loved Nate, and it seemed like a lot of work to write a book. She wouldn’t have been able to do it.

“Uh . . . uh-huh?”

“Don’t you think Moonbright should have stayed in Solarium? It was stupid to leave. He could have fought Marlak there.”

Nothing this child was saying corresponded to real words or ideas in her head.

“He doesn’t like suggestions,” Lucas said.

“That’s okay. He doesn’t like writing either.”

A strange look passed over Lucas’s face.

“He will,” he said, before drifting off to the opposite corner of the pavilion to fill his sand bottle. When he was gone, Nate approached Stevie and sat down.

“I think Lucas is going to Misery your ass,” Stevie said. “Sorry about your ankles.”

“I swear to god that kid has been watching me in my sleep,” Nate said, wrapping his arms around himself. He noted the book that Stevie had in front of her. “That’s terrifying,” he said, pulling it toward him and opening it up. He flipped through it, asking no questions about why Stevie was examining miniature scenes of horrible deaths.

“I’ve got to figure out something to do,” she said. “About Allison.”

“What’s there to do, though?”

“This case, this place—it’s too much, and at the same time, it feels like it all fits together. Like when you do a puzzle and you first open the box and it’s just a pile of random pieces, then as you go, they get easier to snap together. I feel it, but I’m not there yet. I feel how Allison’s death fits in. I feel that it wasn’t an accident. I feel like I’ve even seen how it happened, like I already know, but it’s in some part of my brain I can’t get to? Do you know what I mean?”

Nate nodded.

“Like when I write. I kind of know what it is I want to do, and I can’t write for so long because it feels out of reach and it drives me crazy, but when I see it I can . . .”

She tuned out for a moment, focusing on something happening over his shoulder. He turned to see what she was looking at. Nicole was striding toward them.

“Shit,” Stevie said. “I didn’t even do anything wrong this time.”

She put the Nutshell Studies book on her lap under the table. Nicole came over, but she wasn’t looking at Stevie.

“Fisher,” she said. “Josh Whitley, the other counselor, has arrived. You can move your things over to the treehouse now.”

Nate’s eyes grew wide.

“I can help you,” Stevie said. “Janelle’s got this.”

Nate was a new man as they went back over to his cabin to get his things. Stevie was amazed when she entered. The kids had stuff everywhere, and even though the place was well-vented, there was a strange funk in the air. She stepped over a pair of small, used underpants that were in the middle of the floor as she followed Nate back to his sleeping area. Nate had never unpacked. He’d been ready to flee at all times. Dylan, however, had spread his things far and wide. He had a ring light for selfies, plus loads of equipment. He had about nine pairs of sunglasses spread out over his bureau, several shady-looking dietary supplements, and many items that suggested a life of surfing, skateboarding, and influencing.

“Here,” Nate said, passing Stevie his computer bag.

There was a buzzing in Stevie’s pocket. She pulled out her phone to see a text from David.

The police are gone. They’ve opened the trail back up on the point.

That was all Stevie needed to hear.