“Sure,” Stevie said. “Definitely.”
“I live on the far side of the lake. You can walk the path around, which takes awhile, or if you take a bike, it’s about fifteen minutes. Here . . .”
She wrote her address on a napkin from one of the dispensers.
“Come at six thirty,” she said. “We’ll have breakfast. I leave for my run at seven thirty. You’re welcome to run with me as well.”
Stevie had not been expecting a six thirty in the morning meeting time, but she nodded confidently as if that was how she always started her mornings. Allison gave Stevie the address and left. Nicole watched this from the other end of the dining pavilion.
“Everything all right?” she asked as Stevie passed. Her tone suggested that there was no way she thought that was the case.
“Fine, actually,” Stevie said, herself surprised.
Nicole seemed a touch disappointed.
When Stevie returned to the art pavilion, she saw that Janelle had made a display of paint jars on the shelves. She had been joined by a sweaty and defeated Nate, grass stains on his shorts, his hair sticking up on top and slicked around his face with perspiration. He was resting on the smooth concrete floor and staring up at the ceiling.
“What was that about?” Janelle said.
“Allison Abbott came to apologize. She wants me to come to her house in the morning to see some things. Are you alive?”
“No,” Nate said. “And I heard your creepy message situation is now a creepy doll situation. Have you worked it out yet?”
“Not yet,” she replied. “I will. It’ll come to me.”
It did not come to her. It didn’t come to her that afternoon, or over hamburgers around the campfire. Instead of socializing, she watched the feed from the cameras and picked at the problem in her head, finally going back to the cabin early. She approached with care, finding that she was unnerved by the shadows. She opened the door quickly, to surprise anyone who may have been inside, but there was no one, as the cameras told her. She sat in the middle of the floor and looked up at the message, three-quarters of the way up the wall, with its neatly wiped paint. She stared at it until her eyes went blurry, then she groaned out a loud sigh and called David.
He picked up immediately.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” he said. “Everything okay?”
“Basically,” she replied, rolling onto her stomach. “Still no idea who left the message, but whoever it was also left a box of creepy murder dolls outside of Carson’s house, so I have that going for me.”
David was quiet for a moment.
“You there?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know this is what happens to you, but I really don’t like this. Are you okay?”
“I’m annoyed,” she said. “I can’t figure out how it was done. It’s not possible.”
“I was going to wait to take my time off,” he said, “but how about I do it now? I’ll ask for the week and then I’ll go there. I could be there in a few days. There’s a public camping side. I’m going to stay over there and camp. Do some swimming. Get in touch with nature.”
Stevie felt a light, floating feeling rising up from her heels, shooting through her spine and out the top of her head. David was coming. David was going to be here.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously.”
“When will you be here?”
“Couple days,” he said. “A friend of mine is going to lend me her car.”
“A friend? Who will lend you her car?”
“Jealous? You should be. She’s hot. She’s also sixty-three and has two grandkids. Does yoga every day. She’d put my back out.”
A feeling like warm, spreading sunshine crept over Stevie’s body.
She had a cold case, she had a locked-room mystery, she had her friends, and now, she would have David.
In that moment, it was possible that Stevie had never been happier.
12
STEVIE HAD AN INDIFFERENT RELATIONSHIP WITH BIKES. SHE KNEW how to ride one. At one point in her childhood she had owned one, but she never really rode it and the tires deflated, so her parents sold it at a yard sale. Bikes, however, were now her main mode of transportation.
Allison Abbott may have been able to do the ride in fifteen minutes, but for Stevie it was a sweaty forty-five-minute ride around the dirt trails that said they were excellent for biking but were actually uneven and pitted and unexpectedly narrow at times with surprise rocks. Also, where Allison lived at the far end was almost entirely uphill. By the time Stevie arrived, it was almost seven in the morning, which felt to her like a win. Judging from Allison’s face when she opened the door, she did not feel the same way.
“I thought you would be here a bit earlier,” she said, holding the door open for Stevie to come inside.
“Took . . . a while.”
“Would you like a drink?”
Stevie nodded heavily, sweat running down her face. Allison got her a large glass of water. As she gulped it back, Stevie took in her surroundings. This was a clean kitchen. It was more than that—this was a precise kitchen. The handles of the mugs on the shelf all faced the same way. The stainless steel fridge had no marks on the outside, and the inside, which Stevie saw momentarily, looked factory-pristine. There was nothing extra on the counter, no weird piles of stuff, no random pieces of paper or notes. The dish sponge sat up straight like a soldier, drying in the optimal manner. There were clear containers of things like cereals and grains in an open pantry. This place had shades of Hercule Poirot, who always needed things to be of perfect size and in the right place.
“I wanted you to come here because I have something to show you,” Allison said. “This way.”
Stevie followed Allison into the hallway, which had dozens of carefully framed photographs of family and friends. At least a dozen were of Sabrina. Not one was crooked or unevenly spaced. Stevie followed on, up the carpeted stairs, past more framed photos. The house was like a gallery. There were Allison and Sabrina sitting side by side on a step, a black-and-white dog between them. Sabrina and Allison, the latter with a gap-toothed smile, opening Christmas gifts by a tree. Sabrina and Allison squinting into the sun at the beach. Sabrina and Allison by the lake. A whole wall of Sabrina Abbott, with her raven hair and big brown eyes, her wide, open smile. Sabrina was beautiful, there was no question about it. There was a brightness to her, a determination that shone through the decades and the poor seventies photo quality that tinged the world in sepia.
They passed by the open door of an immaculate if slightly impersonal master bedroom and went to a closed door near the end of the hall. Allison opened this, and Stevie followed her into a darkened, smaller room that seemed to be a guest bedroom, except there was no bed. The walls were lined with packed bookshelves, and there were dressers and a rocking chair, but nowhere to sleep.
Allison opened the curtains, and the room was suddenly airy and bright.
“Light can damage things,” Allison said. “That’s why I keep it so dark.”
With the sun pouring in, Stevie had a better look at where she was. While this room was neat as a pin, nothing here was curated or impersonal. Every surface was absolutely full of old paperbacks and textbooks, yearbooks, notebooks, photo albums. One entire set of shelves was filled with vinyl record albums, and a small portable turntable sat next to them. There were white archival boxes, and colored and clear bins, and wicker bins—everything precisely labeled: MAKEUP, HAIR SUPPLIES, JEWELRY, SCHOOL SUPPLIES, MISCELLANEOUS DRESSER CONTENTS. . . dozens of these. Sitting around and among these things were knickknacks: a stuffed Snoopy doll, a pink rotary telephone, a small figure of a monkey, a lumpy pottery bud vase. And all over, there were turtles—a large stuffed one; a pillow; a print; an oversize ceramic figurine of one, as big as a stuffed animal.