The color drained from Paul’s face, and his husband, Joe, looked like he was about to leap out of his seat. Stevie crossed the front of the room quickly, to stand by Susan Marks.
“Something bothered me about the conversation I had with you,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out what it was until now.”
Susan looked at Stevie, with a glint of interest in her eye.
“There’s a thing that people sometimes do when they make up a lie,” Stevie said. “They make up details, specific ones. Paul told me that he and Shawn were in the lake house that night learning ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on guitar. That made sense. But then you told me the same thing. You were really vague about everything else. You said you did some random checks and went to bed. But you made sure to tell me about the guitar and the song. When I left your house, I ran into Shawn on the street.”
Stevie looked to Shawn, who folded his arms across his chest.
“He didn’t want to talk to me,” Stevie said. “But then he really didn’t want to talk to me when I said I’d spoken to you. All three of you really seemed to want everyone to know that Paul and Shawn were in the lake house playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’—like it was the most important thing that happened that night. There’s really only one reason you’d all be so specific and all tell that same story over and over in the same way. It’s because it wasn’t true.”
Shawn put his head down and glowered a bit. Paul put his hands to his eyes and wiped away a tear, as his husband patted his arm. Susan continued to look at Stevie with a growing wariness.
“Paul,” Stevie said, “you weren’t in the lake house.”
Everyone in the barn fell utterly silent, so Paul’s reply seemed to boom out.
“No,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t. It’s not their fault. They were helping me.”
“I know,” Stevie said. “Only Shawn was in there that night, watching over the lake. He probably was playing the guitar and learning ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Susan, you did check in there to make sure there was a lifeguard on duty, but I doubt you noticed what song it was. I don’t think you were a big Led Zeppelin fan.”
Susan gave a soft snort.
“Paul,” Stevie continued, “you were somewhere else, but you weren’t murdering anyone.”
“No,” he said, folding his hands on his lap. “No, I wasn’t. It’s been so long. It’s so ridiculous we’ve had to keep this up. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“No,” Stevie said, “you were meeting a boy.”
Paul nodded. “He was from another town. He drove over to meet me in the woods. Then the murders happened and I had to prove where I was. I couldn’t be gay. I would have been run out of town. I wouldn’t have been allowed to work at a camp, for sure, because they would have believed that a gay guy couldn’t work with kids, because . . .”
“Because it was 1978,” Stevie said. “The same reason you had to keep quiet, even though you’d met your wife and were falling in love.” This was to Susan, whose lip wobbled a little. She gave Stevie a nod.
“So what happened?” Stevie asked gently.
Susan looked at Shawn, who sighed and nodded.
“The morning after,” Susan said, “I spoke to each counselor, one-on-one, to find out exactly what was going on that night. When I got to Paul—he couldn’t really answer. He said something vague about taking a walk. I knew right away what that meant. I knew he was gay. I knew who most of my gay kids were, and I always tried to look out for them. I was gay and closeted too, but I was an adult. He was just a kid, and he’d already been through so much that year. I knew what would happen to him if he had to tell the police he was meeting a boy. He could have lied, made up a girl, but then they might have asked who she was. Then I remembered that Shawn had been all alone in the lake house. Paul and Shawn were friends, and they were both good kids. I realized that both Shawn and Paul might have trouble with this situation—Shawn because of Sabrina, and Paul because of Todd. So I got the idea for them to say they were together. To protect them, you understand. So I brought Shawn in . . .”
“He was amazing,” Paul said. “I had to come out, right there, and he was incredible about it. You were incredible.”
“It was no big deal,” Shawn said. “You know that.”
“So I had Shawn go over in detail what he had been doing,” Susan went on, “and then I made them work out the story right then and practice it. They were in the lake house, playing guitar. I made them specify the song, so that all the details would match. And I would tell the same story too. You have to understand, this wasn’t a story we thought we’d have to keep up. I figured the police would speak to everyone, and then they’d find out who did it, and that would be that. I knew those two boys had nothing to do with it and they needed protection.”
“But then it was never solved,” Paul said. “I wanted to tell the truth, but that would have caused problems for Shawn and Susan. The more famous the case got, the more we had to stick to it, because changing the story would have been a huge deal. So we had to keep telling the same story over and over.”
He let out a long sigh.
“I’m glad,” he said. “God, I’m so glad. Thank you. Thank you both.”
The crowd in the Bounce House began to stir, sensing that things had come to a close.
“That’s not the big reveal,” Stevie said, holding up her good arm. “It’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. See, this is still about the story that the town tells about what happened that week in 1978, the four murder victims . . .”
Stevie looked up at the trapeze hanging from the ceiling. Time to swing for the sky—or at least, swing for the windows.
“. . . except, that’s wrong. There weren’t four victims. And when you understand that, the whole story starts to make sense.”
A long silence followed.
“What?” Susan finally said.
She seemed to express the feeling of the assembled. Stevie had been hoping someone might say something like that, otherwise her pause was just weird.
“It wasn’t four victims,” Stevie reiterated. “It was six. One before the box in the woods, and one after. Those four counselors weren’t killed by some serial killer or because of a little pot. They were killed because one of them had seen something they weren’t supposed to see. This person knew something terrible had happened in Barlow Corners and tried to do something about it.”
“Sabrina,” Shawn said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but that person has to be Sabrina.”
“Sabrina,” Stevie repeated, nodding. “She was smart, she was persistent. And . . . she wrote it all down in her diary.”
“Wait,” Shawn said. “Are you saying . . . you have Sabrina’s diary? The one Allison was always looking for?”
The inside of Stevie’s cast began to itch furiously.
“I’m saying that I . . . we . . . found the diary,” Stevie said. “Someone didn’t want us to. Someone went after us, shot at us, and chased us right off the edge of Point 23 to try to get it from us. Because they knew Sabrina was the only witness.”