“She broke up with her boyfriend right around then, right?” Stevie asked.
“She did,” Allison said. “Shawn.”
“Why did they break up? Do you know?”
“It was a normal teenage breakup,” Allison replied. “Shawn was the kind of person who might go somewhere for college, but then he’d come home, get married, do exactly what his parents did. Sabrina was moving to New York City to go to Columbia in the fall. She was so excited about her new life. Looking back on it, I can see what happened. He was always around. Always really nice, but around . . . a lot. He was like an older brother to me. I was really upset when they broke up.”
“Did you ever think that—”
“It wasn’t Shawn,” Allison cut in. “It’s true that Shawn never gave up. I think he was convinced that Sabrina was going through some phase and that she would come back. He wasn’t supposed to be working at the camp that summer. His family had an outdoor sports business—they rented canoes and kayaks, things like that. He was supposed to be working there, but when Sabrina broke up with him, he got a job at the camp. That really wasn’t weird. Everyone worked at the camp. If he wanted to be with his friends, that was the place to be. It was an unwelcome surprise for Sabrina, but he never bothered her. Shawn was a lovesick kid, but a nice one. He wouldn’t have touched a hair on her head. And he was in all night with Paul Penhale, anyway.”
“Do you think Todd Cooper hit Michael Penhale?”
“Absolutely,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.
“Why would your sister hang out with someone who did that?”
Allison sighed deeply.
“I think she must have thought he didn’t do it. Sabrina was really principled, and really smart. Maybe it was too horrible to believe that someone you knew could have done something like that. Sabrina was smart, but . . . she was also young, and she thought the best of people.”
“Do you think what happened to Michael Penhale had anything to do with the murders, though?”
“That,” she said, “I don’t know.”
Allison stretched out one last time to reach for her toes and stood.
“I’m going to finish my run,” she said. “I don’t know if you . . .”
“I may walk back to your house,” Stevie said as casually as she could. “Get my bike. To get back to camp.”
Allison smiled and nodded, then continued on her way, picking up her pace. Stevie was unsure what to make of her morning with Allison, but at the very least, she now had an idea about how to focus her time here.
She had a plan.
13
AFTER ANOTHER HOT AND EXCEEDINGLY SWEATY BIKE RIDE, MUCH OF which was down the edge of the road while cars whipped past her, Stevie turned down the drive to Sunny Pines. She dropped the bike in the bike rack, wiped her face on the edge of her T-shirt (possibly flashing some other counselors in the process), and hurried over to the dining pavilion for breakfast. It was good that most of her T-shirts were black—they hid the heavy sweat marks all over her torso. Unlike Ellingham, which was up in the mountains of Vermont and in session during the cooler months, everything about camp was moist in the heat. Her body—moist. Her clothes—moist. Her shoes practically stuck to the ground. Her towels were always damp. Her hair was never really dry. The constant tackiness gave the bugs something to stick to.
The first thing she noticed was that the camp as a whole seemed to have vanished. There was a man on a riding mower preparing the fields, and a few people were in the dining area cooking, but otherwise, no one. This was good for her current purposes, which were getting to her cabin and getting a shower before anyone saw her, or more important, smelled her. The cabin was still secure. The camera app alerted her that she was approaching, so that was working. The big SURPRISE was there to greet her in the morning sunshine.
“Surprise,” she said back to it.
She pulled off her disgusting clothes and tossed them into her empty suitcase that she decided would serve as a hamper. (Janelle had brought a pop-up laundry basket for this purpose, because she was Janelle, and Janelle planned her moves in advance.) No shower had ever felt as good as the fresh-air shower she had that morning, despite the fact that something was definitely moving around under the stall. When she emerged, clean and fresh, the camp was still silent but for the birds and the mower in the distance. She walked over to the art pavilion, where Janelle was up on a chair, hanging a mobile from a beam.
“Where is everyone?” Stevie asked.
“They went on a hike around the lake. I thought about going, but I need to get this done.”
Stevie looked around the art pavilion. It was a concrete shell structure, with three walls and a peaked roof, full of tables and chairs and cubbies and shelving for art supplies. The only private area was a room in the back to secure things when they were out of use. Janelle had already transformed it from the blank, rough space it had been to a cheerful, Insta-ready fantasia of crafting glory. She had made sample crafts of many types—jars full of colored sand, pot holders, woven bracelets, hanging ornaments made of colored beads—and had set up all the necessary supplies around them like a fancy store display.
“There was chalkboard paint,” Janelle said, hopping down from the chair. “I got permission to spray the back door and use that as a bulletin board. I’m doing that this afternoon. This morning I was organizing the back office. There was a ton of crap in there.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Stevie said. “You know you have a problem, right?”
“I can quit anytime I want. How was it?”
“Weird,” Stevie said, sitting down in one of the child-size chairs. “But informative. But weird. Allison has a kind of museum of her sister’s things. She kept everything of Sabrina’s. Everything. Brushes. Little slips of paper. But I get now why she wants the diary so much. So I’ve decided to focus on getting the diary for her. I’m not sure it gets the case anywhere, and it’s a long shot. But I guess finding diaries is kind of my thing.”
This was true. At Ellingham, Stevie had located the diary of a student from the 1930s, which was hidden in a space in the wall.
Something that Stevie said made Janelle lift her chin in interest. She turned on her heel and walked into the room in the back. Stevie could hear her shifting boxes along the concrete floor. She emerged a minute later holding one, which she set on one of the tables.
“This one has loads of old paperwork in it,” she said, removing the lid and pulling out handfuls of loose, dog-eared paper in a variety of colors and conditions. “Just order forms and things like that, but I feel like I saw . . .”
Janelle shuffled through the box until she found what she was looking for and passed it to Stevie. It was an old pink piece of paper.
“It caught my eye because of the name,” she said. “But I put it back because it’s nothing.”
Stevie took the paper and examined it.
EXTRA SUPPLY ORDER FORM
REQUESTSED BY SABRINA ABBOTT
JUNE 20, 1978
Paints: waterculors, acycilcs ($60)
Pencils and brshes: ($50)
Ceramics: ring boxes, earring stands, cats, dogs, cookie jars; trash cann, turtle, teddy bear, roller skate ($ 28)