Carson called several times, and Stevie pushed them all to voicemail. She leaned back in the canoe and tried to understand how, somewhere between the puffy clouds above and their reflections below, Allison Abbott had ceased to exist.
20
THE REST OF THE DAY THAT ALLISON DIED SLIPPED PAST IN A STRANGE haze. Stevie went through the motions at the art pavilion, her brain churning. By dinner, she was tired from her circular thinking. She sat, her untouched food in front of her, repeating the story to Nate and Janelle for what had to have been the fifteenth time.
“From everything you’re saying, it really sounds like she fell,” Janelle said. “You know, most car accidents happen on roads people know the best. People go into autopilot and feel like they don’t have to pay as much attention. She could have been preoccupied.”
“No,” Stevie said again. “Something’s not right.”
“Did anything seem off about her when you gave her the list?” Janelle asked.
“No. She was happy to get it.”
She could tell from their expressions that, like David, they knew Stevie was quick to say that something was not an accident. They also knew better than to voice this in the state Stevie was in. She walked back to their cabin, feeling lightheaded and sleepy. She called David.
“Hey,” she said.
“You sound weird.”
“Just tired,” she said.
“The kayak thing didn’t work out so well. Do you want to walk over and I’ll meet you by the path?”
Stevie rubbed her face with her hand. She had so little time with David—every day counted—but she was leaden with exhaustion. Something about Allison’s death had knocked her sideways.
“I think I need to sleep,” she said.
She heard him sigh.
“Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, going up the steps to her cabin.
Once she got inside, she flopped onto her bed, not even bothering to take off her shoes. It was only seven in the evening—still light out—but Stevie was shutting down. She closed her eyes, letting the cabin and the camp and the confusion of the day slip away. Just as she was nodding off, her phone rang. It was an unknown local number.
“Is this Stephanie Bell?” said a woman’s voice.
“Yes?”
“My name is Susan Marks,” she said. “I used to run the camp when it was Wonder Falls.”
Stevie knew the name and sat up.
“Allison . . .” The woman sounded pained. “Allison Abbott gave me your name and said I should contact you. As you knew her, I thought I should let you know . . .”
“I know,” Stevie said softly.
Susan was silent in acknowledgment.
“She asked me to talk to you about what happened here, before. . . . I was hesitant, but I want to honor her wishes. If you’d like to speak to me.”
“Definitely,” Stevie said. “Yes. Could I . . . come to town? In the morning?”
“Fine. Come by any time after eight.”
After giving Stevie her address, Susan Marks hung up. Stevie texted this update to David, then slipped into a deep, unbroken sleep.
“So who is it we’re going to see?” David asked as they pulled out of the camp the next morning.
David had come in the old gray Nissan to take Stevie into town, thus sparing her from the treacherous and sweaty bike ride. Stevie had made a show of going over to the art pavilion, but left as soon as Nicole had done the morning rounds. The day was almost unbearably humid. The air-conditioning in the car didn’t work, so they had the windows open. The morning was bright, but the sun shone through a haze of cloud. Some kind of wild summer weather was afoot.
The twelve hours of sleep Stevie had gotten seemed to have revived her. Her body had decided to shut down completely and reboot, and now she was alert, maybe even a little hyper. Sometimes anxiety did that—it could slow you down or speed you up.
“Susan Marks,” she said. “She was the head of the camp in 1978.”
“What am I supposed to be doing during this interrogation? When do I get to pound my fist on the desk? Or am I the one who offers the coffee? You tell me who I’m supposed to be.”
“I’m not interrogating anyone,” she said.
It was kind of weird being in a car with David. No one had a car at Ellingham. They had been in all kinds of places and spaces together there. They’d lived in a small dorm house together, cozy little Minerva, with its fireplace and old sofas. They’d been in each other’s rooms, eaten meals together, seen each other from dawn to dusk. They’d occupied closets together, slept in a ballroom, and crept side by side through tunnels and hidden spaces underground.
So a car should not have been a big deal. And yet, she found herself staring at his profile as he drove, one hand on the wheel, the other casually dangling partway out the window. The air knocked his wavy hair back from his forehead. He’d gotten a bit of a tan on the road, an uneven one.
Here was the thing about romantic feelings—the sensation was incredible, like a warm flood through every highway and byway of her body. Every good chemical she could produce turned up, like some kind of bountiful harvest. But the feelings and the chemicals blocked out everything else. They dulled logic and sense and focus. They made everything else seem kind of irrelevant and time started to move jerkily—too fast, then too slow. And they came on with no advance warning, like now, watching him drive. Everything went loose, and all the orderly thoughts in her brain were now just a bag of parts. She wanted to lean over, to kiss him on the soft hollow of his cheek, to pull over and forget going to see Susan. Susan could wait. They could go into the woods. . . .
“You’re staring at me,” he said, not turning his gaze. “Are you about to bite my face or something?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Thought so.”
She took a long gulp of thick air and told herself to get it together. David was smiling a knowing smile, like he knew precisely what was going on in her head.
They drove past Liberty High, with its giant blue billboard.
“They should get a bigger sign,” David said. “That one is too subtle.”
“I can barely see it,” Stevie said.
“Small towns really love their high schools. They seem to scream about them. Why do you think that is?”
“People love to scream.”
“That’s probably it,” he said, turning to her with a wolfish grin. “I know I do.”
Focus, she told herself. They were almost there.
Susan Marks lived in the center of town, on one of the side streets off the main road. They parked by the library and the green. Barlow Corners was quiet but not completely still. There were a few people going in and out of the shops. There were people in the Sunshine Bakery with coffee. Stevie followed the map on her phone, which guided them through the painfully quaint lanes that trailed back behind the main drag. The roads here were one lane only, with tidy little Victorian houses groaning under the weight of flower baskets, decorative flags, and wicker porch furniture. Susan’s was the last one on this particular lane. She had fewer flags, but many more flowers and shrubs.
A woman with sharply cut gray hair was on her knees in a flower bed in front of the house. As Stevie and David turned down her path, she rose and dusted off her knees. Susan Marks was in her midseventies, and despite a little stiffness as she stood, she had the look of someone who did an hour of yoga a day to warm up for the second hour of yoga she did each day.