“My parents kept all of Sabrina’s things in boxes,” she said. “They tucked them away in the attic. When I got them, I brought them out and gave them a space of their own. I know it may be odd to keep these things, but it comforts me. I come in here sometimes to sit and read. I feel close to her in here.”
This room was Sabrina Abbott, right down to her hairbrush and her erasers. She looked at the spines of the books. Sabrina was certainly a serious reader—there were two shelves of paperback classics, textbooks on psychology and history, with a few romance novels sprinkled in for good measure.
“Part of me has always wanted to organize them by color and size,” Allison said. “But I’m a librarian. I can’t do that. Here . . .”
She indicated the top shelf of one of the bookshelves, which had about half a dozen small notebooks. She took one of these down carefully. There was a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock on the cover, along with 1977 in large cartoon print.
“Her last diary,” Allison said, opening it with care. “The last one I have, anyway. Look at this.”
She laid a hand over the actual entry, leaving a list exposed at the bottom of the page:
Piano: 1 hour 15 minutes
Calc: 50 minutes
German: 45 minutes
Physics: 30 minutes
History: 45 minutes
“She wrote it down every night,” Allison said. “How much homework she did that day. I’ve read these diaries so many times I have them memorized.”
She withdrew the book and set it back in its place on the shelf.
“You were asking the police about the last diary,” Stevie said.
“It’s my holy grail. I’d do anything to get it back. It would be a picture of her during those last months. It would feel like talking to her again.”
“And it wasn’t with her things?”
“We got everything from her bunk, and it wasn’t there. If the police don’t have it—I mean, I still think they may have had it at some point and lost it. The investigation, if you can even call it that, was a mess. But if they don’t have it, my guess is that she hid it somewhere and it was lost. She told me that the kids in her bunk were nice, but they went through her things, played with her makeup, things like that. She may have stashed it somewhere that the kids couldn’t get to it.”
A small but bright light illuminated Stevie’s mind. She would have to return to it later. There was still much to take in in this room.
“Here’s something else,” Allison said, removing a small blue plastic box from one of the shelves. She seemed to appreciate the fact that Stevie had a genuine interest in Sabrina’s belongings.
“These are interlibrary loan slips. I found these at the library at the bottom of an old file cabinet. Look at these books she requested. You can tell a lot about a person from what they read. Even after she graduated, she was still requesting books, getting ready for the fall semester. The last two she requested were in June: A Woman in Berlin and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This was my sister’s summer reading when she worked at a camp. She studied German and she was pretty good at it, and she always wanted to know why people behave the way they do. She was deciding between majoring in psychology or history. She wanted to work for justice.
“I keep anything at all I can find of Sabrina’s. Sometimes her friends from high school turn up something—a note from class, a picture, anything at all. They know I collect them. It’s like I’m putting together a puzzle, but there are an infinite number of pieces.”
She put the slips back in the box.
“I’m also an archivist,” she added. “I come by it honestly. But you see what I mean. Sabrina worked. She studied. She volunteered. I became a librarian because she loved the library. She took me there, and it always felt like home to me.”
She consulted her smartwatch.
“Almost seven thirty,” she said. “If you want to keep talking, you have to come running with me.”
Stevie absolutely did not run, but she had a lot more to ask, so it seemed that this morning was the day she took it up. She was dressed in black shorts and a black T-shirt, which seemed fine enough. It wasn’t the moisture-wicking, professional-grade outfit Allison had on, but it would do.
“Great,” Stevie said. “Would you mind if I took some pictures? Just for me? Not for Carson. I promise.”
Allison considered for a moment, then nodded. Stevie photographed the room from several angles, getting various shots of the shelves. When she was done, Allison closed the curtains before leaving, shrouding Sabrina’s things back in protective darkness.
“Partially I cope by running,” she explained as she stretched against her outside steps. “I started running when I was a teenager, and I’ve never stopped. It makes me feel clear, like I have some control. I run the lake every morning. It’s a beautiful view.”
Allison set off, her gait even, and Stevie followed. It took her all of two minutes to become winded and so sweaty that she thought her body would lose every drop of moisture it contained, but she attempted to keep up.
“Is . . . there anything . . . you remember . . . about that night?” she asked.
Allison puffed out easy, even breaths.
“I remember everything,” she said. “But nothing relevant. I was at home. I was twelve years old. We got a phone call. After that, it was like a nightmare that never stopped.”
“But . . . you never . . . left town?”
“When something horrific happens, you sort of feel like you have to stay? Until justice is done. Which it never was.”
Stevie found it hard to ask any more questions for a moment, as they started circling the lake. She tried to keep up with Allison, who was very obviously slowing her pace for her benefit. They continued on for another ten minutes or so, Stevie staggering alongside Allison, until she finally slowed to a stop in a break in the trees. She stepped forward, onto a lip of black rock that jutted out into the air.
“This is Arrowhead Point,” Allison said. “It’s the best view of the lake. I stop here every morning to take it all in—well, when the weather allows for it. You have to be careful in the winter.”
She stepped out onto the point. Stevie hesitated behind her. While the point certainly seemed stable and it stretched out about ten feet, it wasn’t very wide, and it had a gentle downward slope as it narrowed to its tip. Stevie took a few careful steps out onto the rock. Once she did, she could see why Allison stopped there. It was a stunning spot, the lake spread out below, winking in the morning sun. The trees wrapped around, like a hug. All of Barlow Corners and the camp stretched out below, partially visible through the trees. Allison rolled her shoulders, and Stevie managed to catch her breath enough to continue her questions.
“From everything I’ve heard,” Stevie said, “it seemed like Sabrina was kind of the odd one out that night.”
“That’s what everyone says,” Allison replied, sitting down on the rock to stretch her legs. “That’s the standard line. ‘What was good girl Sabrina Abbott doing out there?’ But that part never confused me. She was having fun, that’s all. She’d earned it. She was an incredibly hard worker, but she was also an eighteen-year-old kid in the 1970s, which were a really loose time.”