“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.”