The Box in the Woods

CAMP SUNNY PINES WAS A FEW MINUTES’ DRIVE FROM THE CENTER OF town, on a road that ran alongside a low and slow-moving creek. The sign was made of brown wood, with the camp named burned in and painted white. The road wove through the trees for a moment, then opened up into a wide expanse of fields and low buildings. Carson parked and the trio got their things out of the back of the car. They followed Carson to the large dining pavilion, hauling their suitcases and bags over the gravel of the parking area. Stevie’s cheap suitcase had even cheaper wheels, which gave up once they got a stone stuck in them. She dragged the bag the rest of the way, scraping it along the concrete floor of the pavilion and leaving grass and skid marks as it went. Inside the pavilion, a woman was supervising a small crew that was assembling welcome packages while fielding phone calls.

“That’s Nicole,” Carson said in a low voice. “Agree to everything she says. We’ll work it out later.”

This was an ominous statement.

Nicole looked up and noted their arrival with a nod but no smile, and came over while she continued her conversation, which turned out to be about septic tanks. Nicole was a tall woman, probably about six feet, with her hair tied back in a brown ponytail. She wore long swim shorts, a fitted running top, and a whistle around her neck. Stevie could see many things in Nicole all at once. Whatever time you woke up, Nicole woke up earlier than you, when the day was young and the sun just born. She made a complete breakfast, which contained protein, fruit, and maybe even a vegetable. She accomplished things that she’d put on a list the night before. She stretched in the fresh air. She forged a trail. She punched into the future with a mighty fist. She knew who she was, where she was going, and why she was better than you. But go ahead, whine about how tired you are. She will listen. She will crush you with her eyes. You will emerge smaller from the encounter because she has compressed your spine.

Or something like that. She had a whistle, anyway.

After the first general round of introductions was made, Nicole took a long nasal inhale and gazed across the picnic table at the assembled.

“Just so we’re clear . . . ,” she began. “This is a camp. It’s for kids to have fun over the summer. It’s also part of a community. Sunny Pines is not about what happened in 1978. That’s in the past. Terrible things have happened at a lot of places. You move on. It’s not a murder mystery thing.”

She stared at Stevie for a long moment. Stevie wanted to politely reply that it was kind of a murder mystery thing, what with the murder, and the mystery. But Stevie did not say this, because she did not want to eat a whistle.

“So when you’re at this camp, you work for the camp,” Nicole said. “That means you do your job and take care of the campers. A few basic rules that you’ll hear again in the main orientation, but hear them now as you’ll be here for a few days. No swimming on this side without a lifeguard present. No night swimming. No jumping off the rocks, ever. No open fires that aren’t a part of authorized camp activities. No smoking or vaping. No alcohol, and no use of marijuana products. Violations of these policies will result in your dismissal, even if you are here with Carson.”

Carson was fingering a set of meditation beads and staring at the ripples on the lake.

After that, there were forms to sign, conduct policies to read. They were all given welcome packs, sets of information, maps, and a list of emergency numbers to put into their phones.

“I’ll give them the tour,” Carson said. “I know you’re busy.”

Nicole gave him a long look and returned to whatever she had been doing. They left their bags at the pavilion and followed Carson out into the grassy fields that surrounded it.

“She’s the head of the good times committee, huh?” Nate asked.

“I liked her,” Janelle said. “She’s a strong woman.”

“I’m afraid of everyone,” Nate reminded her, and Janelle nodded in acknowledgment.

“You have your tree,” she said.

A blissful smile crossed Nate’s face once again.

Camp Sunny Pines was a collection of brown-timbered buildings around a lake, interspersed with large pavilion structures. At the center of it all was Lake Wonder Falls, which seemed like a weird name now that she looked at it. There were no falls in sight, and very little wonder. It seemed like a nice and ordinary lake, the water a brownish color, and still enough to reflect the clouds and sky above. Little docks jutted out all around it, and there was a floating dock in the middle for swimmers and divers.

“The lake is sort of shaped like an hourglass,” Carson said. “This part down here is smaller, flatter, and shallower. Then it gets really skinny—the road goes over that part. The other side is open to the public. It’s higher, with the big rocks, and it’s a lot deeper. It’s really like two separate lakes with a little channel between them. This is the child-friendly side.”

On this side of the camp, the lake was about a hundred feet across, surrounded by a narrow edge of beach, with some swampy, reedy areas (snaketown) cutting into it. There was a swimming pool, tennis court, fields, and a large assembly area with a firepit in the middle. Carson showed them all around, pointing out the racks of canoes, the rows of communal bikes, and a yoga and dance pavilion. They worked their way around to the tidy wooden bunkhouses that butted up against the woods. They were built on raised concrete platforms, probably to protect them if the lake flooded its banks. Stevie noticed that while all the windows had screens in them, they also had metal latticework. She suspected this was installed in the wake of the murders, to ensure no one could get in from the outside.

“This”—Carson pointed at a cabin with the word PUMAS painted over the door—“is the cabin Brandy Clark was in the morning the bodies were discovered. As you can see, it’s close to the tree line. The first body was found this way.”

He led them down a wide grassy opening in the trees, which narrowed to a path about eight feet wide, surfaced in cedar wood chips.

“Eric Wilde was found right about here,” he said, taking his tablet out of his messenger bag and pulling up the black-and-white photo he had shown them the night before. “You can see that he was lined up more or less with that tree there with the double trunk.”

Stevie took the tablet and compared the spot. Eric had been found facedown, with his head pointed in the direction of the camp.

“It looks like he was heading back,” she said.

“It was a dirt path then, so they had a footprint trail for at least part of it. What seems to have happened is that he was attacked and injured probably at the primary site, and he ran through the woods to escape. He must have largely stayed off the path to keep away from his attacker. He was almost back to the camp when the killer caught up with him. He almost made it.”

The landscape and the path looked very much the same. Standing here, she could see that the path veered around the performance area, meaning there was no clear line of sight to the camp. Eric had been close, but not close enough.

“Now,” he said, “ready to go to where the main event took place? We’ll need the car for that one.”

Nate mouthed the words main event.

They got back into the car and drove over the short bridge that spanned the narrow of the lake. This route continued back past the camp buildings and into the woods. It was startling how quickly things went from manicured and inhabited to entirely forested and overgrown. The canopy of trees was so dense that the woods were dark in the bold light of day. The road bent gently to the left and merged with the dirt track they had seen earlier. It was a narrow, bumpy trail, more holes than solid ground. The Tesla handled it but was clearly used to more refined surfaces, and the group bounced up and down in their seats like popping corn. After a few minutes, Carson pulled over and stopped the car on the side of the road.

“This is it,” he said. “Blink and you’d miss it.”

They stepped out into the woods. The air here had a rich smell of leaves and plant life, and the sun occasionally poked through the cover in a thin finger of light, but mostly it was subdued and soft. Their footsteps fell silently on the dirt and soft pine needles underfoot.

“This is like being inside of a meditation app,” Nate said, looking around.

Carson pointed at a small stake in the ground by the path with a black ribbon tied to it.

“People come here and mark the spot where you should stop your car. The parks department takes the stake out all the time, and someone puts one back in.”

He cheerfully marched on, into the trees. Stevie was about to follow, but Janelle put out her hand, which held a bottle.

“Tick spray,” she said. “There are going to be so many ticks in here, and Lyme disease is no joke.”

Ticks. Snakes. This is why camping was bad. This and every other reason.

After spraying themselves, they followed Carson down an indistinguishable path, a random and winding walk through the trees, full of roots and snags and branches that reached out to grab hair and clothing. They shortly arrived at a small clearing. The only thing that indicated anything at all might have happened here was a small ring of stones where a fire had been, with a few melted-down candles in the grass.

“This is it,” he said. “People come here, as you can see. It’s a big murder tour and goth hangout.”

The first thing Stevie noticed was that the spot was so . . . unremarkable. When she’d read that this occurred in a clearing in the woods, she expected a wide-open space. This was a spot between some trees, maybe a little larger than most, but it wasn’t special.

“I’ve worked out all the spacing from studying the photos,” Carson said. “Many of the trees are still here. That fire pit is about right. People have been coming here long enough to mark the spot that they basically made the campfire area permanent.”

He stood on a spot to the left of the stone circle.

“There were log seats there, and there. Everything here at this site was left in an undisturbed state. No sign of a fight of any kind. There was a blanket that would have been about here, the tray of grass was on it. The box was this way. . . .”

He continued on, back into the woods.

“He’s creepier than you,” Nate whispered to Stevie. “How does that make you feel?”

“Honestly, pretty good,” she replied.

The path this time was much thicker, harder to walk down. Stevie had to press back branches with every step. This was where the wild things were, quite literally. When Carson stopped again, there was barely a clearing—just a narrow space between trees.

“It was right here,” he said, leaning on a thick oak tree. “The infamous box. In actuality, it was a hunting blind.”

“What exactly is a hunting blind?” Janelle asked.

“Basically a place to hide,” Carson replied. “It looks like a box. It has a slit open in the side, just big enough to see out of. Hunters sit in the blind and look out and wait for animals.”

“That seems fair,” Nate said.

“And literal,” Stevie added. “In this case. Do we know what happened to it?”

“The police took the lid,” Carson said. “Souvenir hunters took the rest, years ago.”

“So the crime scene walked away,” Stevie said.

They tramped back to the clearing. As she stood there on the spot of a notorious quadruple homicide, Stevie had a strange feeling—and not the strange feeling that you would expect to get on the site of a notorious quadruple homicide. The sun was bright overhead. A soft summer breeze came through the trees. Everything smelled soft and fresh. This spot was . . .

Nice. It was a nice, normal spot. A good spot for a picnic, or to hang out under the stars with your friends. Its remoteness almost added to the feeling of security. It was padded by woods—a nook. A little oasis. Sabrina, Eric, Todd, and Diane had come here, set up their blankets and music and snacks, set about their rolling and talking and having fun. Someone had waited, perhaps behind one of these very trees, for the right moment.

“What are you thinking?” Carson asked.

What was she thinking? What was the feeling? What was it, this little sensation, like a finger tracing its way up her spine?

“I knew it was out in the woods,” she said, “but I guess I thought it was closer to the camp. This is remote. And it’s so . . . it’s not a place you’d stumble upon. You’d have to know where to go. There were four of them. Four teenagers. One was a football captain, but it sounded like they were all physically fit. So a lone murderer, or even a pair, they’d be outnumbered. How do you subdue four young adults in a remote place like this, that they may know better than you do?”

“Gunpoint,” Carson said. “That’s one way.”

“But they were all stabbed. If you have them at gunpoint, you shoot them.”

“And there were drugs in their systems, but they weren’t sedated or anything like that,” Carson said.

“So they’re maybe high or drunk, but they’re conscious—conscious enough that Eric could run four miles in the dark. Probably not gunpoint. Maybe you separate them, or they’ve separated themselves. You go two by two. Lots of killers have taken on couples.”

“Like Zodiac,” Carson said a little too eagerly. “Make one tie up the other.”

“Creepy man, creepy man,” Nate sang under his breath. “This is a creepy, creepy man.”

“Another thing,” Stevie said. “There were no other tire marks, right?”

“Right.”

“So this person or these people probably came on foot. That’s a lot of night hiking in the woods. Whoever it was came with supplies. Someone went to a lot of trouble to kill four camp counselors. Who does that?”

“Besides Jason Voorhees,” Nate said.

“This is my question,” Carson said. “There’s something messed up in Barlow Corners, something no one’s ever gotten to the bottom of. Someone has to know something. The answer is here, if we look for it. I’m a disrupter. I like to make things happen. We’re going to disrupt this situation and crack it open.”

“Oh my god,” Nate said in a low voice. “I gotta get in my tree.”

July 11, 1978

6:00 p.m.

NOTHING HAPPENED IN BARLOW CORNERS. OR, NOTHING WAS SUPPOSED to happen in Barlow Corners. It was the kind of place where things were always okay—not great or terribly exciting, but okay. There was a gentle hum of boredom that teenagers hated and adults came to love.

You could get everything you required on the main strip along Beechnut Street and Maple Avenue. There was the Ben Franklin five-and-dime and Unity Hardware for all your basic household needs. The Dairy Duchess, the local diner owned by the McClure family, was good for a quick bite or a family meal. Anderson’s Grocery and Deli provided day-to-day food items. For your bigger weekly shop, there was the A&P grocery two miles down the road. There was even a nod to the younger crowd in the form of a boutique called Zork’s, where the teenagers bought their T-shirts, posters, and lava lamps.

On a fine summer night like this one, most of the town would stroll along with an ice cream or a Popsicle, the kids would ride their bikes, and there would be horseshoes on the green. But it was not a normal summer night. When faced with a tragedy of this proportion, the residents of Barlow Corners did the only thing they could think to do—they threw a town-wide potluck picnic.

Four days after the murders, every business in the town closed at three in the afternoon. Large folding tables came out from the fire department hall and the church basement and the high school events supply closet. These were set up on the town’s main green space—the square next to the library. The citizens of Barlow Corners came together under the blue twilight and the long green shadows of an early summer evening with their folding garden chairs, lawn blankets, and coolers.

Everyone brought something for the picnic tables. Indeed, people seemed to be trying to outdo themselves by bringing more than one dish. Tupperware of every size clustered on the tables, heaped with potato salads and coleslaws. Multiple families brought along their grills, and an assembly line was created to distribute hot dogs and hamburgers. There was much fussing over the arrangements of the condiments and the rolls and salads. Did someone have an extension cord to plug in this electric covered dish of baked beans? Was there a way of keeping the bees out of the relish? On the dessert tables things were stacked two deep: peach and blueberry and strawberry pies, lemon bars, Jell-O molds, banana pudding with Nilla Wafers, fruit salad, angel food and chocolate cakes. As everyone placed their food down, they had a look in their eye, a look that said that every item was an offering, thanks to have been spared. The angel of death had visited Barlow Corners again, and again gone past their door.

Nothing on this scale had been seen in the town since the massive festivities for the American Bicentennial, two years prior, when they had unveiled a statue of John Barlow, for whom Barlow Corners was named. John Barlow was a minor figure in the American Revolution who had stolen a British general’s horse and slowed him down on the way to a battle. The town was on the site of his farm and massive property, so when a town was established on the spot, it was named in his honor. On that night, two years ago, the mood had been jubilant. All of America exploded in fireworks, and everything was draped in red, white, and blue. Barlow Corners was the perfect American small town, unveiling the perfect American small-town statue of their own local Revolutionary War hero.

Tonight, there were no fireworks, no sparklers, no bunting or clusters of red, white, and blue balloons—just people quietly keeping busy, filling the Chinet paper plates, putting tape labels on the Tupperware containers to make sure they were returned to their owners. The smaller children, unaware or unaffected by the gravity of the moment, chased each other around the grass as the fireflies started their evening rounds. A few biked or Big Wheeled around the sidewalks that bordered the green.

Everyone watched everyone else.

Around the edges of the green, strangers lingered. There were several news vans from New York City parked just out of view. There were other strangers as well. Some of these were law enforcement—local, state, and probably a few FBI. And then there were simply the people who had come to gawk. Everyone watched everyone watching everyone while the Big Wheels and bikes went around and around.

An hour or so into the picnic, Mayor Cooper, father of Todd, parked his Coupe DeVille in front of the library and walked quietly across the green. People nodded in his direction and greeted him solemnly as he approached his friends, Arnold Horne and Dr. Ralph Clark. Both were pillars of the community—Arnold the president of the local bank and Dr. Clark the main physician. Both men had daughters who had been touched by the events and even seen one of the bodies. They would normally have been joined by Dr. James Abbott, the town dentist, but the Abbotts did not come out that evening—their grief over the loss of their daughter was too great. Mayor Cooper, Todd’s father, had only come because he was the mayor, and the mayor had to show up.

Mayor Cooper accepted a beer that Dr. Clark offered, and then the men exchanged the polite, subdued pleasantries that were expected.

“How’s Marjorie?” Arnold Horne asked.

“She’s . . . been in bed the last few days.”

A nod of understanding from the two men.

“I can prescribe her something,” Dr. Clark said. “To help her rest.”

“That might be useful.”

“I’ll have Jim open up the drugstore. I’ll go over with him and get it and drop it by your house later.”

“Very good of you,” Mayor Cooper said.

They communed silently for several minutes, sipping their beers and watching their neighbors pretending not to watch them. The children made repeated runs to the dessert table, snatching brownies and lemon bars.

Mayor Cooper cleared his throat softly.

“People are going to talk,” he said, keeping his focus on the dessert table. “About what happened in December.”

His companions were silent.

“It had nothing to do with this, of course,” Mayor Cooper went on. “Todd had nothing to do with that, anyway.”

“Of course not,” Arnold Horne said.

Perhaps without meaning to, all three men looked over at the Penhale family, who sat off to the side on their plaid blanket. Many people in town thought Todd Cooper had run down little Michael Penhale. It was certainly true that Todd had been a reckless driver. Teenage boys often were, especially when they’d had a few beers. And what teenage boy didn’t have a beer now and again? Things happen. Besides, no one knew for sure, and no one would ever know for sure.

“Of course,” Dr. Clark added.

On a different part of the green, Brandy Clark sat with her older sister, Megan. Brandy hadn’t slept a full night since she had found Eric’s body. She tossed, she turned, she paced. She put on her headphones and sat on the carpet by her record player and cycled through her albums. She brushed the cat and rearranged the figurines on her bureau and cried and paced some more. She could sit here at the picnic as well as anywhere else, and she didn’t want to be alone.

“You need to eat something,” Megan said.

“Not hungry.”

“How about a lemon bar?”

“I’m not hungry,” Brandy repeated.

Megan sighed and stared at the row of hydrangeas that bordered the library. In the falling daylight they took on an intensity that was hypnotic—violently saturated raspberry and indigo blue. Above them, the ever-horsebacked figure of John Barlow stood sentry over a town that was bleeding, and all the macaroni salad in the world was not going to heal the wound.

But she had to try.

Megan got up and walked over to the bank of coolers. She lifted the lids one by one, pawing through the contents, which bobbed around in the melting ice water. She plunged her hand into the water and grabbed a root beer and an orange soda. She might be able to convince Brandy to have a few sips of one of them. This was about all she could do for her sister now: get her soda. She returned to their chairs and held the cans out to her sister.

“Take one,” she said.

Brandy wordlessly reached for the orange soda and popped it open. They sat and drank for a few moments, before Brandy finally spoke.

“Who could do this?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Megan said quietly. “Someone evil.”

“Maybe they’ll come back.”

Her voice carried on the breeze, and a few people turned.

“No,” Megan said. “They’re long gone.”

“How do you know?”

“No one would stick around after doing something like that.”

“They would if they lived here. Or if they were planning on doing it again. I feel like they’re here, watching us.”

“Come on.” Megan stood and took her sister’s hand. “Soda’s not enough. You’re going to eat something.”

Reluctantly, Brandy stood and followed her sister to the folding tables that were groaning under the weight of all the food. She allowed her sister to make her a plate of seafoam green ambrosia salad, watermelon, and cake. She allowed herself to be reassured.

The thing was, Brandy was right.