The Box in the Woods

WHILE STEVIE WANTED TO WASTE NO TIME IN GETTING OVER TO EXAMINE Arrowhead Point (and also to examine David—those feelings from the morning had not abated), she made a brief stop at her cabin. A shower would take too long, but she could manage a change of clothes. She was dismayed to discover that she had already worn all her T-shirts, due to the frequent changes of clothes. The only remaining one was the squeaky-white Camp Sunny Pines shirt she had been issued on arrival. She shrugged it on. The shirt was made of a thick, stiff cotton and was almost rectangular; it was like she was wearing a milk carton. Whatever sexy was—and Stevie had never claimed to hold this knowledge—she was sure this was the opposite. She considered borrowing Janelle’s lipstick, which she knew Janelle would be okay with, but decided against it. If Stevie put on lipstick, it would be so out of character that it would signal that something was up. It might seem like a cry for help. David might call 911. So she hurried out the door in her massive, rectangular shirt, bare-lipped.

She stopped at the bathroom cabin to fill her water bottle at the sink and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She was developing a patchy, uneven sunburn on her face—more on the left than on the right. The heavy, wet air made her short blond locks stick to her head.

“I’m a pretty, pretty princess,” she mumbled.

David was waiting for Stevie when she got over to the campsite. It seemed that he had been swimming—he was still wet, his hair flattened to his head. (This suited him. Maybe wet, flat hair was not so bad.) He wore only his swimsuit, and he was stretched out in one of the camping chairs, looking maybe better than Stevie had ever seen him. It was during moments like these that she realized what all those hard-boiled detectives meant when they were seemingly knocked into some kind of drunken oblivion when a woman in a veiled hat walked into their office. Human hormones were powerful drugs.

There was time, of course, to maybe visit the inside of David’s tent for a while, and she was feeling optimistic when he went in that direction, but he reached in and grabbed a shirt.

“I let you know as soon as I saw them drive away,” he said. “I was watching out for you.”

Which was really good and focused of him, and only a little disappointing in terms of the moment.

“Good,” she said, nodding. “Good, yeah . . .”

They began the walk around the lake, which again was riddled with opportunities to stop for a little light making out, but David was strangely quiet and seemed pensive. He did reach over and take her hand for a good part of the walk, which was very sweet, and also kind of weird. Something was up.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at her with his slow smile. “Fine.”

By the time they reached Arrowhead Point, she had turned her mind back to the matter at hand a bit. It was sobering to be here, at this beautiful spot that Allison had showed her.

“Wow,” David said, standing beside her. “It’s a good view.”

He made his way to the edge more quickly than Stevie liked.

“You could fall here really easily,” he said. “If she was distracted or something.”

Stevie began taking slow, measured steps forward toward the edge. Where would Allison have stopped? At the safest spot with the best view, most likely. Don’t just look at it—see it. What did she see? A dark jag of rock, a bit of a slope, but it was gentle. Stevie squatted down and opened her water bottle, letting a trickle of water flow out and down the point. It made a slow, meandering path. It picked up a bit of speed at a point about halfway in, where the ledge had a small dip and really started to tip down. Stevie got down on her stomach and pressed herself along, like a snake, until she could peek over the edge. It was a straight drop onto the rocks below, then a bit of path and some trees, and about ten feet out to the lake edge. There was no sign of the body or what had happened there, but she shivered nonetheless.

It was a bad way to die.

She scooted back, only standing when she felt grass against her ankles. She joined David, who was sitting on the ground.

“So what are you thinking?” David asked.

Stevie brushed at a dark muddy stain that had gotten on the front of her white shirt.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I know that depression isn’t something you can always see and you can’t always tell if someone is in crisis, but I don’t think she went over the edge on purpose. The people below described her tumbling over the edge, screaming.”

“Then she tripped. It would be super easy to do. You’re running. You’re tired. You’re distracted and looking around, and you trip and go over the edge.”

It made sense. It was not just possible—it was likely. It certainly fit the description of what the witnesses had seen.

There was a low rumble of thunder in the distance, and though there were still hours of daylight left, the sky grew dark.

“It’s going to storm tonight,” he said, resting on his back and looking up at the sky.

She rested next to him, tucking her head into his shoulder. He rolled toward her, and his lips were on hers.

If it was bad form to make out in the spot that Allison Abbott had fallen from, Stevie tried not to dwell on it. There was a rush to the moment, as if something pent-up was being expressed, and David rolled on top of her, and then she on him. They were more or less on the public path, but they were also alone with the woods and the sky. Soon they both had pine needles in their hair and were breathless. Then, as suddenly as the kissing began, it stopped. He smiled again, a questioning smile, and balanced himself up on his elbows.

“So,” David said. “Fall. School.”

He was back to whatever conversation he had started that morning when they left Susan’s house.

“Fall,” she repeated. “School.”

“You’re going back to Ellingham. I am a man without a plan at the moment.”

“I thought you were going to keep working with the group you work with now,” she said.

“That was my plan, yeah . . . but something’s come up. I’ve been offered something.”

She sat up as well.

“There’s someone who’s known me since I was little,” he said, looking at the ground between them. “He doesn’t like my dad—not a lot of people who know him do. He got in touch because he suspected that I had something to do with my dad’s fall from grace, and he knows that I’ve been cut off. He offered to help me out.”

“With money?”

“Kind of. More like with a future. He guessed, correctly, that it can be hard to be related to my dad and be in America sometimes. He has connections in England. He’s offered to make some calls and get me into a program at a university in England and would help cover the costs.”

Stevie blinked. Maybe it was the heat, or the rush of events, but her brain was not making a picture of the words coming out of David’s mouth.

“England?” she said.

“England,” he repeated. A nervous flicker flashed across his features.

“For school?”

“For school.”

“So what did you say?” she asked.

“I said I would think it over. I have to get back to them soon, though. Definitely by this week.”

Something Stevie had learned about herself in the months that she had been in some kind of relationship with David was this: she didn’t take emotionally taxing conversations well. It didn’t take much for her to spiral. She went from feeling completely connected to him and swimming in the warm waters of happy hormones, to a cold, frightened feeling. She had just gotten David back, and now he was going again, farther than before.

“So you’re saying this now?” she asked. “After a woman I met fell off a cliff?”

“That wasn’t my plan,” he said, a little archly. “I’ve been trying to tell you since I got here. It’s never the right time with you. I’m going to have to go soon, so . . .”

“So you’re dropping this news and leaving?”

“Stevie,” he said, a flinty edge coming into his voice, “I came out here as soon as I could. I’m trying to—”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she said, even though she had absolutely no idea what he was trying to do, or even what that meant. That’s the thing about speaking—you can talk and talk and have no idea at all what the words leaving your mouth mean, or where they came from.

“This is an opportunity,” he said. “I need to talk about it, think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?” she said. “It would be terrible if you had to pay for school like a normal person.”

He pushed himself up to his hands and stretched his arms long behind him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Like a normal person.”

The air between them chilled.

Stevie didn’t want to be saying what she was saying. She only sort of meant it. It wasn’t his fault that someone had offered to pay for his school, or that he could take it or leave it. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly fair that, once again, David had the world handed to him on a silver platter. People like David didn’t have to make their own luck. It was fair to bet that no one was going to offer Stevie a free ride to school in England, and she’d solved a murder.

It also meant he might be going far away, and just when they were happy. Was there some kind of law that said things couldn’t go well between them?

“I can’t deal with this right now,” she said, pushing herself up from the ground.

Shut up, Stevie, shut up, stop talking like you’re in a reality show. . . .

“I’m sorry things can’t always follow your schedule,” he snapped back, starting to match her tone.

She was walking away, and she didn’t even know why. She was crying. She walked faster, then she jogged, then she stopped jogging because she still was no good at running. Overhead, the sky continued to darken quickly, turning a kind of green color.

At some point, as she was reaching the road that divided the park with Sunny Pines, she decided to turn back. But that was also the moment the sky decided to open up, and in short order, it began to hail. Stevie had to run with all her might to get back under cover at the entrance of the camp, then dodge from building to building to reach her cabin.

It rained all that afternoon and night, more persistently than it had at any other point during their time at the camp. Things shifted entirely to indoor mode, which was clammy and close. Aside from dinner, all the other activities were off, and the campers retreated to any covered space to stare into their tablets and phones until they went cross-eyed.

Then, sometime in the evening, there was an almighty crack as a bolt of lightning fell close by. The kids screamed as one, at first out of fear, and then because screaming was awesome. In the next minute, the power was out, and it stayed that way all night. There were some generators, but not in the cabins. Stevie had not thought to charge her devices, and so everything she owned ran out of juice within the first hour, cutting off any communication with David on the other side of the lake.

That night, it rained with a kind of biblical ferocity, pounding the cabin roof and flicking in through the screened windows, misting Stevie’s face and sheets. She occasionally woke to mighty flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder that definitely landed somewhere not too far away. Janelle slept through it, her earbuds snugly in place. Many people might have enjoyed the sound and found it peaceful, maybe even Stevie under the right conditions.

These were not the right conditions.

She stood at the window a long time, then she went out onto the little porch of the cabin and watched the rain fall in the dark. She considered walking over to the campsite, but she had enough self-preservation to know that a walk through the dark murder woods in this kind of storm was not a good idea. So she paced the few feet of the porch so as not to wake Janelle. Sometime before dawn, her body wearied and she went inside and lay on top of the sheets. The next thing she knew, the awful, familiar crackle blasted her away.

“Good morning, Sunny Pines! Happy Fourth of July!”

From the bed, Stevie could see the sky through the screen window. It was big and blue, as if to say, “What? I didn’t do anything last night. What are you even talking about?” Janelle’s bed was empty—she had already greeted the day and gone off for a shower. Stevie had had the forethought to plug everything in before she finally went to sleep, and her phone and tablet had taken long, refreshing drinks of electricity during the night and were prepared for duty. She immediately checked for texts from David. There were none.

She wasted no time. The white T-shirt from yesterday had a long, angry black slash on the front, but she pulled it on anyway. There was no time to wait for Janelle to tell her where she was going, or even to text. She had to move, now, toward David. She half ran through the camp, across the path, and over to the public side of the lake.

Stevie had heard of this thing called forest bathing, where you went out into the woods or the wild and simply breathed it all in, made contact with nature. It was supposed to be good for you. This was the kind of thing she would have doubted before, but this morning, the woods did have a calming effect. That deep smell of leaves and soil after a rain, the cooling effect of morning shade—it soothed her and made her think more clearly. So they fought. They’d fought before. Arguments had punctuated their entire relationship. It would be okay. They would talk it out. They would kiss it out. It would be one of those makeup scenes she always heard about. It would be fine, except for one small problem:

When she reached the place his tent had been, she found that he was gone.