Do you hear me, Sabrina Abbott? This is your summer to LIVE!
So that’s what I’m going to do.
29
“THAT’S THE LAST ENTRY,” STEVIE SAID, GENTLY CLOSING THE BOOK.
For almost an hour, she had read from the diary. Her throat was dry and her voice was starting to crack a bit. Janelle had seen this and come over with a can of sparkling water. Stevie didn’t like sparkling water, but she guzzled it and then had to turn her head and try to conceal the massive belch this caused. She was not successful.
Poirot never burped after he identified the murderer.
Patty Horne had turned the color of five-day-old turkey. She was utterly still, her head cocked slightly to the left, and something almost like a queasy smile spread across her mouth. The rest of the assembled were silent.
Stevie glanced over at Shawn Greenvale, who sat with his chin tucked to his chest. None of that could have been easy for him to hear, no matter how long ago it had happened. But he bore it, like he had stayed strong for Paul. They may have broken up, but clearly Sabrina had been with Shawn because he was a fundamentally good guy. It just hadn’t worked out.
“So,” Stevie said, feeling another froggy burp rising in her throat and pushing it down painfully, “let’s start with this question: Who is Wendel Rolf, and what happened to him after he arrived at your house that day? I needed some help getting the answer. . . .”
She reached over to the laptop and switched the windows. An image projected onto the screen—a person with large glasses and straight, long hair.
“Hi,” Stevie said. “Tell everyone what you found out.”
“Hey,” Germaine said. “I’m Germaine Batt from The Batt Report.”
Germaine was a classmate of Stevie’s from Ellingham who ran her own online news channel. She and Stevie had an unusual, somewhat mercenary relationship, and this favor was going to have to be repaid. It was worth it.
“Okay.” Germaine had no problem dispensing with all other formalities and diving in. “I started with Harvard, because that came up in the conversation you showed me. I got in touch with some people there this afternoon and they pulled some yearbooks for me. Wendel Rolf graduated in the class of 1940, along with Arnold Horne. I found enlistment records for both of them on a genealogy website. Wendel Rolf was honorably discharged in 1946, and Arnold Horne in 1947. So far, so normal. But then, everything about Wendel Rolf just—goes away. I had to go through local paper archives and Facebook all day, but I found a relative of his. I pretended I was part of a Harvard alumni research thing, so they talked to me. Wendel Rolf went away for a weekend fishing trip in 1978. He never came back. He was declared dead in 1983. No one knows if he had an accident or not—but it sounds like his family thought he may have taken his own life and wanted to spare them somehow and make sure they got the life insurance money. You can find out a lot if you say you’re from Harvard.”
“So,” Stevie said, “Wendel Rolf sees his old classmate and army buddy Arnold Horne’s picture in a magazine. It’s definitely him. His name is in the caption. He decides to pay his friend a visit. It seems pretty clear that he realizes right away that something is off—that this isn’t Arnold Horne. In the conversation Sabrina overheard, he mentions another man—a von Hessen.”
“He was a lot easier to find,” Germaine said. “Otto von Hessen was a high-ranking Nazi intelligence officer working out of Berlin. Lots of stuff out there about him. He was last seen in April of 1945, right before Berlin fell. Then he vanished. Want me to put up the pictures?”
Stevie nodded, and Germaine shared her screen, putting Arnold Horne’s Harvard photo next to an official photo of von Hessen.
The resemblance was unmistakable.
“Arnold Horne went to Harvard and was a spy in World War II,” Stevie said. “He was in Berlin. We know from the conversation that he had a connection to von Hessen. When Berlin was falling and the Nazis needed to make their escape, what better way than to take the identity of an American intelligence officer? They aren’t identical, but the resemblance was good enough if you didn’t look too closely. The real Arnold Horne went to Germany, but it was Otto von Hessen who came back and started a quiet new life in America and tried to keep himself under the radar. He moved to a small town where nothing ever happened, ran the local bank, and didn’t like getting his picture taken. And for years, it worked out. But then, Barlow Corners built a statue, a local photographer took a good picture, and that picture went into a national magazine. Wendel Rolf saw his old friend’s photo, paid him a visit, and realized something was wrong—that he wasn’t visiting Arnold Horne at all. Wendel Rolf was never seen again. He’s victim number one. This is where the story begins. It’s also probably where the story would have ended if Sabrina Abbott hadn’t been in the cabana with Greg, if she wasn’t so observant and determined. Now . . .”
Stevie nodded to Germaine and closed that window, then turned to Patty.
“. . . you enter the story. It’s graduation, summer 1978. You told me yourself that you were kind of aimless. You had no plan for what you were going to do when the summer was over. Greg, your friends, hanging out—that was your whole world. On the day that Greg and Sabrina were in the cabana and your father met Wendel Rolf, you had no idea what was going on. None of those three people wanted you to know what had happened at your house that afternoon. That night, Wendel Rolf comes back, and your father kills him. The next day, Sabrina returns to the house and sees things have been moved around. She was already curious about what she’d heard. You still have no clue, and neither does your dad. But then, Sabrina’s conscience gets to her and she tells you she was in the cabana with Greg. You leave camp and tell your dad, and your dad knows that it’s all coming apart. Your friends—the ones he despises—are going to destroy your lives. I’m guessing a lot of things went down in your house that night. I think your dad told you the truth, or some version of it, because you knew your friends had to die, and you had to help your dad kill them. Something had to be done, fast, and he couldn’t exactly sneak into the camp and take care of it. It had to happen somewhere else, where there were no people around. And you knew exactly the spot—the weekly drug delivery out in the woods. Sabrina would be there. Eric, Todd, and Diane—they were unlucky. And who knows what they’d been told? They all had to die.”
Stevie put the slide with the photos of the four victims back up on the screen, so that Patty would have to look at them.
“You had to be protected. So the next day you returned to camp, and suddenly everything was fine with Greg—so fine that you were busted getting busy with him and put on house arrest. This ensured you had an ironclad alibi. Some details of the Woodsman murders had been in the paper. This was perfect. There was no internet then—if Arnold wanted to get the details, he would have needed to get a copy of the newspaper articles. So it’s not that surprising that Sabrina ran into him on July 5, when she was on her way out of the library and he was going in. That encounter sealed her fate.”
Stevie waved a stray bug that had gotten inside the Bounce House away from her face. She had been talking for a long time and her body was starting to ache. She wanted to flop down in a beanbag and rest for a while, but the story was not finished. It was time to open the box in the woods, time to ruin the surprise.