The Box in the Woods

SPIDERS HAD IT MADE. THIS ONE, FOR INSTANCE. ALL DAY NOW, SHE (Stevie was sure she was a she even though she was a daddy longlegs) had been chilling in this corner under the window bench, watching over a loose weave of webbing, waiting for a snack to show up. It looked like a good life under there, shooting your own house out of your butt, food flying over to you, everybody basically leaving you alone.

“You have to stop that,” Nate said.

“Stop what?”

Stevie’s voice was flattened by her position on the floor, her face tilted toward the wall.

“Whatever it is you’re doing. You look like a Blair Witch remake.”

She had been here for almost an hour. Maybe more. Maybe even a lot more. Who even knew? She was on Spider Time now.

When she’d left David’s campsite, she walked around the lake for a while, her thoughts unmoored. She must have arrived back at camp sometime after lunch, then come right up here to the treehouse, where Nate had been on his laptop, alone and content. Then she got down on the floor and started thinking about the spiders. That had been her day so far.

Nate poked her with the toe of his sneaker.

“This is a David thing,” he said. “Obviously.”

She did not reply.

“Romance seems fun,” he added.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not. I don’t know what happened. I don’t even want to know. But I know you can’t do whatever the hell this is. Don’t you have things to do?”

“Janelle’s got it. She doesn’t need me.”

“I don’t mean Janelle.” He crossed around and sat on the bare window seat and looked down at her.

“I screwed everything up. I ruined everything.”

Nate banged his head against the screen behind him, then jerked forward when it proved to be looser than he imagined.

“Stevie.” He sounded annoyed enough that she pulled her chin off the floor, then gradually pulled herself up. She was dizzy from the extended period of time she’d spent staring at nothing. She looked down at herself, at the white T-shirt that had been so pristine the day before. The shirt was still as rectangular, but it was no longer clean or stiff; it had melted into a bag of damp wrinkles, slashed all over with grime. The marks from Arrowhead Point were really pronounced, almost black. She tried to rub them away, but they didn’t budge. Whatever was on it wasn’t dirt—it was something more inky and permanent. The shirt was ruined.

This seemed like a bad omen, a dark mark. A message. Her focus was shot. David was gone. The summer split apart like a wet paper bag.

“Stevie.”

Stevie blinked and looked up.

“I got some weird shit on my shirt,” she explained.

“Why don’t we get out of here?” he said. “I have nothing to do up here now, which is great. You’ve abandoned your post. Let’s get out of here and go to town.”

“For what?”

“For something to do. There’s a diner, right? Let’s go there.”

She was about to refuse, but when Nate looked annoyed, it truly startled her. His pale brows furrowed into a point.

“Fine,” she said.

She pushed off the floor. As she did so, she snuck a glance at her texts.

Nothing. Not that that surprised her. Her phone had been sitting by her head the whole time and had never made a peep.

She and Nate got bikes out of the rack, took their locks and keys, and headed down the path, out of Sunny Pines and back onto the now-familiar stretch of tree-lined road. This activity shook off the top layer of her malaise, which was unfortunate, because that layer had been keeping the other, more painful layers in soft focus. David had probably just driven off down this road. Or maybe he would drive by now. She should stop and call him. Or not. Maybe when she got to town. Call him before he got too far away, onto the highway, out of Massachusetts, out of her life, forever.

England. He was going to England?

Why was her life over when she was only seventeen? She’d peaked. It was done.

Also, screw him. Screw him for sneaking up on her with this information when she was trying to figure out what had happened to Allison Abbott. He could have told her about this on any one of their phone calls. He’d had so many chances.

Also, also? Free college? Poor little rich boy. She had no idea how her family was going to afford college. She would have to get so many loans that she would be in debt until she died. Oh, so you’re sad about your dad? Here’s free everything.

She pumped the bike harder, working all her feelings out on the road, riding more on the driving lane than the side. Go ahead and hit her from behind. She dared them. Nate was struggling to keep up with her, occasionally yelling something about the fact that she was “riding in the middle of the fucking road” or whatever. The pedaling stopped the thinking, and the road belonged to her now. Let them try to take it.

They arrived in Barlow Corners in record time, Nate red-faced and looking regretful that he had ever had this idea in the first place. Stevie, though, was mildly renewed. At least, she was hungry. It was a start. They locked their bikes by the library, near Sabrina’s reading room.

“Jesus,” Nate said as they crossed the street to the Dairy Duchess. “Never again. Next time I leave you there.”

It was only when they crossed the street and Stevie saw the red, white, and blue bunting that was on some of the storefronts that she remembered that it was the Fourth of July. There would be fireworks tonight. She checked her phone and found, to her surprise, that it was almost six o’clock. If she had guessed before, she would have thought it was maybe two, three at the latest. Somehow, she had lost almost an entire day in misery. No wonder Nate had finally peeled her off the floor.

The Dairy Duchess was an old-fashioned diner, the kind you saw on TV, that never seemed to exist in real life. There was a long counter with red stools, and Formica tables. It was also air-conditioned, which was a sweet, freezing relief. The place was basically empty when Nate and Stevie came in, so they took the prime booth by the window, looking out on the street and the town green across the way. The top of John Barlow’s hat peered above the menu that was tucked behind the ketchup bottles.

They both decided on some milk shakes and burgers, because Nate and Stevie had similar views on nutrition. To Stevie’s surprise, Nate got out his laptop and immediately starting typing.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Are you writing?”

“I’m just . . . I’m doing something.”

“You’re writing, aren’t you?”

“Solve,” he said. “Solve.”

“I can’t solve.”

“Okay, then sit there. At least you’re not on the floor anymore. I’ve done my job.”

This was a bit of a betrayal.

She opened her backpack and put her things on the table. Her tablet. Her phone. A notebook. Everything she knew about this case—aside from whatever was floating around in her head—was here. All the tools she needed. Now there was time and space to think.

She looked at the items.

She looked at the ketchup.

She looked at the menu and John Barlow’s hat.

She looked at the library.

She felt herself beginning to see.

Allison Abbot was dead. Allison Abbott had been murdered, and almost certainly because of something to do with this case. She hadn’t just fallen off that cliff. It didn’t matter how she, Stevie, felt. Allison Abbott was not alive anymore, and someone had to do something. She had promised Allison she would get the diary—and then Allison died.

Which meant, logically, that someone thought that Allison was close to getting that diary.

It followed that there was something in that diary that was worth killing for. Which meant it was Sabrina Abbott—perfect, wonderful, hardworking Sabrina—who was somehow at the center of this.

The burgers and milk shakes came, and Stevie started in on them while letting her focus rest on the reading room across the street. She softened her gaze, letting the contours of the building blur. Sabrina. Reading. Writing. Checking out books right up until the time she died.

Her brain began to settle. Stevie reached for the tablet, trying to maintain the mental state, and flicked back to the pictures of the room of mementos in Allison’s house—all those tidily arranged things. Books, clothes, knickknacks, photographs, record albums. A teenage life, frozen in time in 1978. She looked at the picture of the interlibrary loan slips for the books Sabrina had requested right before she died: A Woman in Berlin and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Serious reading for a serious person, someone preparing for her future at Columbia University. She thought about Sabrina’s 1977 diary, with the list of subjects and amount of time studied. Sabrina was a detailed reporter of events.

The shadow of an idea danced through the halls of her mind again. And another, and another. Dancing shadows on the wall. Ghosts. Answers—intangible answers, taunting her.

“Shit,” she said.

“What?”

She tapped her palms on the table in disgust.

“I’ve seen it,” she said. “Bits of it. Little flashes. Like that time I saw a moose behind some trees. I’ve seen something. Or heard it. And I can’t work out what it is.”

“Sounds like writing,” he said. “It’s the worst.”

He took a long sip of his milk shake as Stevie set her forehead down on the table. Perhaps sensing that she wasn’t coming back up anytime soon, he kept talking.

“People ask stuff like ‘What’s your process?’ I don’t know what my process is. I sit down and type stuff about monsters. Or I think about it. Or I type-think.”

The shadows flashed back up on the wall, the edges clearer. More of a shape.

She lifted her head.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“What? When? Which thing?”

“Writing. Typing. Thinking. What?”

“What?”

“Stop saying what,” she said. “What do you mean? You type and think?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I kind of think with my fingers? That sounds bad. You know what I mean.”

“You type stuff,” she said. “You type. Shit, shit, shit. . . . Give me your computer.”

“Are you going to finish my book?” he said, pushing it over to her. “Because this is good news for me.”

Instead of typing, or even looking at the screen, Stevie instead stared at the keyboard, lightly running her finger from the L key all the way over to the return, then back again. Then she grabbed her tablet and frantically swiped back and back until she found what she wanted.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I have to go.”

“What?”

“Stop saying what! I have to go.”

“Stop saying you have to go,” Nate shot back, grabbing the bike lock key. “Go where?”

“Allison’s house,” she replied, waving her hand for the check.

“No. You can’t do that. Allison is dead.”

“So she won’t care,” she said. “Give me back the bike key. I know where Sabrina hid her diary. It’s not lost.”

“Stevie, explain.”

Stevie wriggled in frustration, but pulled up a photo.

“Here,” she said, passing him her tablet. “That’s a pic of the list of supplies ordered for the camp art pavilion in 1978 and how much it cost.”

Ceramics: ring boxes, earring stands, cats, dogs, cookie jars; trash cann, turtle, teddy bear, roller skate ($ 28)

“Typewriters sucked,” she said. “They didn’t have backspace keys. Look at this weird semicolon after ‘cookie jars.’ Stupid typo, right? And this was the seventies, so if you hit the wrong key, you couldn’t fix it easily. Now look at your keyboard. The semicolon and colon key are the same. You get a semicolon if you forget to hit the shift. If you hit the shift, it’s a colon, which makes more sense. A colon would mean . . .”

“It was a list.”

“Exactly. That means they ordered cookie jars in the following shapes—trash can, turtle, teddy bear, roller skates. Who typed this list? Sabrina. Who has to make projects as part of her job? Sabrina. Who loves turtles? Sabrina. Remember the big turtle in the reading room at the library?” She tapped on the glass of the window in the direction of the reading room. “Sabrina said the kids went through her things, so she made something to hide things in. She made a turtle cookie jar. And she wouldn’t have had that with her on the night she died. It was back in the bunk. And now . . .”

She flipped back through the photos again, finding the images of the room in Allison’s house. She turned the tablet back toward Nate triumphantly.

“Right there,” she said, pointing at the large turtle figure on one of the shelves. “What does that look like to you?”

“A turtle,” he said. “Possibly a turtle cookie jar.”

“Give me the bike key.”

“I’m coming with you,” he said.

“You hate coming with me on stuff like this.”

“I know,” he said. “And I know you. This is what you do. It’s your move.”

“I have to do it. It’s part of the job.”

“You love that shit, though.”

Stevie did not reply to this because she did, in fact, love that shit.

“You know I love you too, right?” she said.

“Tell it to my grieving family when you get me killed,” he replied, reaching for his wallet. “Let’s pay and go before I change my mind.”