“Someone . . .”
“Shot at us,” she said.
“Who?”
Stevie’s mind was going too fast to explain. All the threads, the wires, the tangled mess of stuff—it was connecting in her head in a way that she could not articulate.
“I’ll know soon,” she said.
When they reached the camping area, Stevie staggered out of the car and immediately walked to the wooded path that looped the lake. “We have to walk around,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“Over there,” she said, indicating Point 23.
They began the long tramp around the lake, Stevie’s body aching the entire way. The force at which she had hit the water had strained all her muscles, and her lungs and throat still burned. Her sneakers were still waterlogged and squelched with every step. Every once in a while, Stevie would dip off the path to get a clear view of the water.
“I’m looking for my backpack,” she said. “I had to take it off in the water. Either it sank or someone recovered it.”
“Does it matter? It’s just a backpack.”
“I had Sabrina Abbott’s diary,” she said. “I found it. I didn’t have a chance to read it, but I found it.”
“You found it? Where?”
“Inside a turtle at Allison’s house. I would have read it already, but someone tried to kill us.”
“So you were right about Allison.”
“Looks that way,” she replied.
The backpack was nowhere to be seen.
They had reached the space where the woods peeled back and the point jutted out in front of them, in all its terrible glory. Stevie’s head began to swim as she approached it. She backed up several paces and got on her hands and knees, picking through the undergrowth and tree roots with her good hand.
“You think you can find a bullet?” he asked.
“Maybe . . .”
David got down on the ground as well, examining the earth. Stevie paused in her efforts for a moment to turn and have a look at him combing the dirt with his fingers. He was a good one. A weird one. A difficult one. But he always came through.
“Someone at the camp may have a metal detector,” he said. “I could go back and ask.”
Stevie returned to her examination of the forest floor. She felt the ground, digging in with her fingers.
“You sounded mad when I found you guys last night,” David said.
“I think I was.”
“We both have problems. Serious ones.”
Stevie suddenly flattened herself on the ground on her back. She stretched out, looking at the blue sky above.
“Did you find one?” David asked.
“Nope.”
“You okay?”
“Yep.”
“Tired?”
“Yep. But there are a few things I have to do today.”
“Like tell the police someone shot at you? Don’t worry, I already know the answer to that one. I say these things for my own amusement.”
“I need to have a Think Jam,” she replied. “And I need Janelle to make a craft. Ask me why.”
“Are you a hundred percent sure you didn’t crack your head?”
“Thank you for asking,” she said, looking over at him and smiling. “I’ll tell you why—because it’s what Frances Glessner Lee would do. It’s time to show Barlow Corners a nutshell.”
27
IN MANY OF THE MURDER MYSTERIES STEVIE LOVED, THE DETECTIVE would gather the suspects in a room, then explain who didn’t do it before getting to who did. She never really understood why suspects would want to go to something like that, except maybe because these books took place in the past, and there wasn’t that much to do then. Today, she got it. People would come because everyone wants to know the answer—especially in a place like a small town, where everyone knows everyone, and murder had cast a shadow for decades.
A murder reveal is worth skipping Netflix for.
In this case, it barely took any effort. All Stevie had to do was go on Nextdoor and put up a post in the Barlow Corners community page. It read: FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED IN 1978. TONIGHT, 8:30 p.m. She listed the address of Carson’s barn. For good measure, she had Carson go to town and let it be known in the right places that something was going down. The machinery of Barlow Corners did the rest. At eight thirty that night, the unreal orange walls of the Bounce House seemed to thrum as a small crowd of Barlow Corners residents came in and took their places on the sea of beanbags. It was a good turnout, more than she needed. The key people had come: Paul Penhale, Susan Marks, Patty Horne, Shawn Greenvale, and Sergeant Graves. (The latter had gotten the courtesy of a phone call.)
Stevie had spent most of the day working on a borrowed laptop, revising Carson’s slideshow. It was loaded up and ready to go. There was only one more piece she needed, and she waited, pacing in the corner of the room. Finally, David came through the barn door and stepped up to her.
“It’s done,” he said. “They’re bringing it in through the back door.”
“Okay,” she said, mostly to herself. “It’s time.”
Carson and some of his crew had set up their cameras and equipment around the barn. Stevie nodded to him, and he dimmed the lights.
Stevie stepped up in front of the group. There were about thirty people. Plenty for her purposes, and not enough to be terrifying. Nerve-wracking, though, for sure.
Nate and Janelle came in quietly and slid along the wall to sit closer to the front. Stevie swallowed hard and began speaking.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “As you know, we came here to make a podcast about the Box in the Woods case, in the hopes of telling the story and trying to help with closure. But what I want to talk to you about tonight is the story a town tells about itself.”
She hit the clicker, and the picture of the Bicentennial dedication of the John Barlow statue appeared on the screen, in all its seventies polyester glory.
“Here are two moments of Barlow Corners’ fame in one picture,” she said. “In 1976, the town built a statue to the town founder, a Revolutionary War hero named John Barlow. His big act of heroism, as it turns out, was stealing some British horses and delaying a battle for a few hours. And he owned enslaved persons. Not very heroic. But people build myths, right? Tell the story enough times and it becomes true. John Barlow must be a hero—he has a statue. And then, this picture is taken, because doesn’t this look like the perfect all-American town, building a statue of a Revolutionary War hero? Another story to put on top of the first story. But something was wrong in Barlow Corners.”
She scanned the room.
“People got away with things here,” she went on. “And then there was a new, terrible story to add, almost like an urban legend or a slasher movie. Four camp counselors went into the woods to do drugs . . . and none came out alive. At first the police thought it was about drugs, because why wouldn’t it be? But that makes no sense. It was a small amount of pot, and it was left at the scene. The scene looked like the killings of the Woodsman, but the scene was also wrong in critical ways, and the DNA found on Eric’s shirt didn’t match the Woodsman’s profile. Most people discount those theories now. But who could it be? There was suspicion in town, because there were people who might have had good reason to want Todd Cooper dead. Todd Cooper had run down an innocent boy with this car—Michael Penhale—and no one did anything about it. He got away with it because he was the son of the mayor. But he was guilty, and pretty much everyone knew it. No one would blame the Penhale family for wanting revenge. . . .”