The Box in the Woods

IN MANY OF THE MURDER MYSTERIES STEVIE LOVED, THE DETECTIVE would gather the suspects in a room, then explain who didn’t do it before getting to who did. She never really understood why suspects would want to go to something like that, except maybe because these books took place in the past, and there wasn’t that much to do then. Today, she got it. People would come because everyone wants to know the answer—especially in a place like a small town, where everyone knows everyone, and murder had cast a shadow for decades.

A murder reveal is worth skipping Netflix for.

In this case, it barely took any effort. All Stevie had to do was go on Nextdoor and put up a post in the Barlow Corners community page. It read: FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED IN 1978. TONIGHT, 8:30 p.m. She listed the address of Carson’s barn. For good measure, she had Carson go to town and let it be known in the right places that something was going down. The machinery of Barlow Corners did the rest. At eight thirty that night, the unreal orange walls of the Bounce House seemed to thrum as a small crowd of Barlow Corners residents came in and took their places on the sea of beanbags. It was a good turnout, more than she needed. The key people had come: Paul Penhale, Susan Marks, Patty Horne, Shawn Greenvale, and Sergeant Graves. (The latter had gotten the courtesy of a phone call.)

Stevie had spent most of the day working on a borrowed laptop, revising Carson’s slideshow. It was loaded up and ready to go. There was only one more piece she needed, and she waited, pacing in the corner of the room. Finally, David came through the barn door and stepped up to her.

“It’s done,” he said. “They’re bringing it in through the back door.”

“Okay,” she said, mostly to herself. “It’s time.”

Carson and some of his crew had set up their cameras and equipment around the barn. Stevie nodded to him, and he dimmed the lights.

Stevie stepped up in front of the group. There were about thirty people. Plenty for her purposes, and not enough to be terrifying. Nerve-wracking, though, for sure.

Nate and Janelle came in quietly and slid along the wall to sit closer to the front. Stevie swallowed hard and began speaking.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “As you know, we came here to make a podcast about the Box in the Woods case, in the hopes of telling the story and trying to help with closure. But what I want to talk to you about tonight is the story a town tells about itself.”

She hit the clicker, and the picture of the Bicentennial dedication of the John Barlow statue appeared on the screen, in all its seventies polyester glory.

“Here are two moments of Barlow Corners’ fame in one picture,” she said. “In 1976, the town built a statue to the town founder, a Revolutionary War hero named John Barlow. His big act of heroism, as it turns out, was stealing some British horses and delaying a battle for a few hours. And he owned enslaved persons. Not very heroic. But people build myths, right? Tell the story enough times and it becomes true. John Barlow must be a hero—he has a statue. And then, this picture is taken, because doesn’t this look like the perfect all-American town, building a statue of a Revolutionary War hero? Another story to put on top of the first story. But something was wrong in Barlow Corners.”

She scanned the room.

“People got away with things here,” she went on. “And then there was a new, terrible story to add, almost like an urban legend or a slasher movie. Four camp counselors went into the woods to do drugs . . . and none came out alive. At first the police thought it was about drugs, because why wouldn’t it be? But that makes no sense. It was a small amount of pot, and it was left at the scene. The scene looked like the killings of the Woodsman, but the scene was also wrong in critical ways, and the DNA found on Eric’s shirt didn’t match the Woodsman’s profile. Most people discount those theories now. But who could it be? There was suspicion in town, because there were people who might have had good reason to want Todd Cooper dead. Todd Cooper had run down an innocent boy with this car—Michael Penhale—and no one did anything about it. He got away with it because he was the son of the mayor. But he was guilty, and pretty much everyone knew it. No one would blame the Penhale family for wanting revenge. . . .”

The color drained from Paul’s face, and his husband, Joe, looked like he was about to leap out of his seat. Stevie crossed the front of the room quickly, to stand by Susan Marks.

“Something bothered me about the conversation I had with you,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out what it was until now.”

Susan looked at Stevie, with a glint of interest in her eye.

“There’s a thing that people sometimes do when they make up a lie,” Stevie said. “They make up details, specific ones. Paul told me that he and Shawn were in the lake house that night learning ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on guitar. That made sense. But then you told me the same thing. You were really vague about everything else. You said you did some random checks and went to bed. But you made sure to tell me about the guitar and the song. When I left your house, I ran into Shawn on the street.”

Stevie looked to Shawn, who folded his arms across his chest.

“He didn’t want to talk to me,” Stevie said. “But then he really didn’t want to talk to me when I said I’d spoken to you. All three of you really seemed to want everyone to know that Paul and Shawn were in the lake house playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’—like it was the most important thing that happened that night. There’s really only one reason you’d all be so specific and all tell that same story over and over in the same way. It’s because it wasn’t true.”

Shawn put his head down and glowered a bit. Paul put his hands to his eyes and wiped away a tear, as his husband patted his arm. Susan continued to look at Stevie with a growing wariness.

“Paul,” Stevie said, “you weren’t in the lake house.”

Everyone in the barn fell utterly silent, so Paul’s reply seemed to boom out.

“No,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t. It’s not their fault. They were helping me.”

“I know,” Stevie said. “Only Shawn was in there that night, watching over the lake. He probably was playing the guitar and learning ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Susan, you did check in there to make sure there was a lifeguard on duty, but I doubt you noticed what song it was. I don’t think you were a big Led Zeppelin fan.”

Susan gave a soft snort.

“Paul,” Stevie continued, “you were somewhere else, but you weren’t murdering anyone.”

“No,” he said, folding his hands on his lap. “No, I wasn’t. It’s been so long. It’s so ridiculous we’ve had to keep this up. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

“No,” Stevie said, “you were meeting a boy.”

Paul nodded. “He was from another town. He drove over to meet me in the woods. Then the murders happened and I had to prove where I was. I couldn’t be gay. I would have been run out of town. I wouldn’t have been allowed to work at a camp, for sure, because they would have believed that a gay guy couldn’t work with kids, because . . .”

“Because it was 1978,” Stevie said. “The same reason you had to keep quiet, even though you’d met your wife and were falling in love.” This was to Susan, whose lip wobbled a little. She gave Stevie a nod.

“So what happened?” Stevie asked gently.

Susan looked at Shawn, who sighed and nodded.

“The morning after,” Susan said, “I spoke to each counselor, one-on-one, to find out exactly what was going on that night. When I got to Paul—he couldn’t really answer. He said something vague about taking a walk. I knew right away what that meant. I knew he was gay. I knew who most of my gay kids were, and I always tried to look out for them. I was gay and closeted too, but I was an adult. He was just a kid, and he’d already been through so much that year. I knew what would happen to him if he had to tell the police he was meeting a boy. He could have lied, made up a girl, but then they might have asked who she was. Then I remembered that Shawn had been all alone in the lake house. Paul and Shawn were friends, and they were both good kids. I realized that both Shawn and Paul might have trouble with this situation—Shawn because of Sabrina, and Paul because of Todd. So I got the idea for them to say they were together. To protect them, you understand. So I brought Shawn in . . .”

“He was amazing,” Paul said. “I had to come out, right there, and he was incredible about it. You were incredible.”

“It was no big deal,” Shawn said. “You know that.”

“So I had Shawn go over in detail what he had been doing,” Susan went on, “and then I made them work out the story right then and practice it. They were in the lake house, playing guitar. I made them specify the song, so that all the details would match. And I would tell the same story too. You have to understand, this wasn’t a story we thought we’d have to keep up. I figured the police would speak to everyone, and then they’d find out who did it, and that would be that. I knew those two boys had nothing to do with it and they needed protection.”

“But then it was never solved,” Paul said. “I wanted to tell the truth, but that would have caused problems for Shawn and Susan. The more famous the case got, the more we had to stick to it, because changing the story would have been a huge deal. So we had to keep telling the same story over and over.”

He let out a long sigh.

“I’m glad,” he said. “God, I’m so glad. Thank you. Thank you both.”

The crowd in the Bounce House began to stir, sensing that things had come to a close.

“That’s not the big reveal,” Stevie said, holding up her good arm. “It’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. See, this is still about the story that the town tells about what happened that week in 1978, the four murder victims . . .”

Stevie looked up at the trapeze hanging from the ceiling. Time to swing for the sky—or at least, swing for the windows.

“. . . except, that’s wrong. There weren’t four victims. And when you understand that, the whole story starts to make sense.”

A long silence followed.

“What?” Susan finally said.

She seemed to express the feeling of the assembled. Stevie had been hoping someone might say something like that, otherwise her pause was just weird.

“It wasn’t four victims,” Stevie reiterated. “It was six. One before the box in the woods, and one after. Those four counselors weren’t killed by some serial killer or because of a little pot. They were killed because one of them had seen something they weren’t supposed to see. This person knew something terrible had happened in Barlow Corners and tried to do something about it.”

“Sabrina,” Shawn said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but that person has to be Sabrina.”

“Sabrina,” Stevie repeated, nodding. “She was smart, she was persistent. And . . . she wrote it all down in her diary.”

“Wait,” Shawn said. “Are you saying . . . you have Sabrina’s diary? The one Allison was always looking for?”

The inside of Stevie’s cast began to itch furiously.

“I’m saying that I . . . we . . . found the diary,” Stevie said. “Someone didn’t want us to. Someone went after us, shot at us, and chased us right off the edge of Point 23 to try to get it from us. Because they knew Sabrina was the only witness.”

Stevie looked over at her friends. Nate begged her with his eyes to stop.

Stevie was not going to stop.

She turned her focus on one person in the room—someone she needed to maintain eye contact with.

“This person was right to worry about Sabrina,” Stevie continued. “And Allison. And me. They tried to shut us all up. But it didn’t work.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Stevie saw Nate sag. Janelle kept looking at Stevie, her eyes worried but curious. David, agent of chaos that he was, looked ready to ride with whatever lie was about to come out of Stevie’s mouth.

It was now or never.

Stevie slid her uninjured hand into her cast sling and withdrew the diary.

“Who wants to hear what Sabrina Abbott has to say?” she asked.