What were the seventies even about? Was it all smoking and listening to this kind of stuff and riding around in huge cars without wearing seat belts? This was the song everyone liked?
The song ground on:
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
But there was something, something, something in what Susan had said. The music summoned it out of hiding and Stevie saw its shadow flit across her thoughts. What the hell was it? Stevie ran down her list of notes again, reading them under her breath, letting them sink into her subconscious. Paul, Shawn, Magda, Patty, Patty . . .
Only one person’s name came up twice: Patty Horne. But Patty had the most ironclad of all alibis—someone literally had seen her all night long. Plus, she had absolutely no reason to kill her friends. Todd, Eric, and Diane were her people, like Nate and Vi and Janelle were Stevie’s people. But what about Greg Dempsey, who died later that week in a bright flash of light and a wall of rock and trees?
Another dead bike rider in Barlow Corners.
An idea took shape.
As Patty had said, if they hadn’t been busted in a makeup nookie session, they most likely would have been victims as well. Or perhaps the killer (or killers) wouldn’t have been able to attack a group of that size. Four people—that would have been hard enough. But six? What if you had wanted to kill someone in that group? And you knew that instead of six people, there would only have been four out there that night because Patty and Greg were under lock and key. Maybe you saw an opportunity.
But again, why? Why Sabrina, Diane, Todd, and Eric?
She flicked through the photos again, landing on Todd’s. She put her earbuds in and listened to the part of the recording where Susan talked about Todd:
“I never like to say kids are rotten, but . . . Todd Cooper, he was a rotten kid. Charming. Polite to your face, always. . . . He was guilty as sin, and everyone knew it. That was the shame of our town. . . .”
Todd Cooper had killed Michael Penhale, and everyone in town knew it. Out of the four of them, he was the only one who really made any sense as a target. The Penhale family was in the clear, and Paul Penhale had been seen in the lake house with Shawn. Susan had confirmed it. Even if Shawn and Paul wanted to team up to murder people they thought had wronged them, there seemed little chance that the woman she’d just met would have had any part in that.
But that didn’t mean that the Penhales were the only people in town who might want Todd Cooper to get what he had coming to him and wouldn’t be heartbroken to take out a few others along the way. Almost everyone noted that Todd was a dangerous driver.
Maybe Michael Penhale hadn’t been the first? Maybe someone else, someone walking along the side of the road—a hitchhiker? A drifter? Someone from the public camp? And maybe the others had all been there when it happened. Maybe that’s why they all had to die. . . .
She didn’t know. It all went around and around in her head. She saw, but she did not observe.
She looked around the art pavilion. No one needed her. She pulled out the Nutshell Studies book and flipped through until something spoke to her. The scenes all had simple names: Dark Bathroom, Attic, Striped Bedroom. . . . That was part of the genius of Frances: she did not glamorize. She did not go to the most high-profile crimes or scenes. She tended to show ordinary places, often inhabited by people without much money. These were people whose deaths might be overlooked or dismissed. She demanded that the investigator look and care. Look at the neatly folded towels with the single, tiny paring knife on top. Observe the worn clothing. (In fact, she often wore clothing over and over herself to wear it out enough, then cut it down to make the outfits for her studies, such was her dedication.) Examine the meat left out of the icebox, the position of the pillow, the contents of the garbage pail. Feel the textures, note the positions.
If Stevie could observe, she could make sense of it all. The word written on the inside of the hunting blind. The red cord that wasn’t the right type. The wounds on Sabrina’s hands. Eric Wilde’s position on the path. A missing diary. A boy knocked off his bicycle and killed. A brown Jeep that everyone in town knew. A seasoned runner falling from a spot she visited every day. Not all these things mattered—the point of the studies was to see that some of them did. She just had to figure out which ones. . . .
“Hey.”
Stevie looked up and pulled out her earbuds. Standing in front of her, inches away from her face, was Lucas. A new group of kids had come in and she hadn’t even noticed. Nate came in with the group, but hung back, far away from Lucas.
“What’s that?” He leaned in to look at her book. “Is that guy hanging?”
Stevie tried to close the book, but Lucas had his hand on the page.
“Why is that guy hanging? What is this?”
“Research,” she said.
“For what?”
Stevie looked around for Janelle to help her, but Janelle was busy demonstrating proper sand-in-bottle technique to some kids. Some would have called this “doing her job,” but to Stevie, this was abandonment.
“Have you read The Moonbright Cycles?” Lucas asked.
Stevie had read Nate’s book right before they started Ellingham. Her tastes ran toward true crime, and fictional crime, and fictional crime based on true crime, so an eight-hundred-page book about monsters that lived in caves and dragons and swords was not really in her wheelhouse. She’d thought it was fine. But mostly she cared because she loved Nate, and it seemed like a lot of work to write a book. She wouldn’t have been able to do it.
“Uh . . . uh-huh?”
“Don’t you think Moonbright should have stayed in Solarium? It was stupid to leave. He could have fought Marlak there.”
Nothing this child was saying corresponded to real words or ideas in her head.
“He doesn’t like suggestions,” Lucas said.
“That’s okay. He doesn’t like writing either.”
A strange look passed over Lucas’s face.
“He will,” he said, before drifting off to the opposite corner of the pavilion to fill his sand bottle. When he was gone, Nate approached Stevie and sat down.
“I think Lucas is going to Misery your ass,” Stevie said. “Sorry about your ankles.”
“I swear to god that kid has been watching me in my sleep,” Nate said, wrapping his arms around himself. He noted the book that Stevie had in front of her. “That’s terrifying,” he said, pulling it toward him and opening it up. He flipped through it, asking no questions about why Stevie was examining miniature scenes of horrible deaths.
“I’ve got to figure out something to do,” she said. “About Allison.”
“What’s there to do, though?”
“This case, this place—it’s too much, and at the same time, it feels like it all fits together. Like when you do a puzzle and you first open the box and it’s just a pile of random pieces, then as you go, they get easier to snap together. I feel it, but I’m not there yet. I feel how Allison’s death fits in. I feel that it wasn’t an accident. I feel like I’ve even seen how it happened, like I already know, but it’s in some part of my brain I can’t get to? Do you know what I mean?”
Nate nodded.
“Like when I write. I kind of know what it is I want to do, and I can’t write for so long because it feels out of reach and it drives me crazy, but when I see it I can . . .”