Sergeant Graves chose this moment to get up and walk over to Patty Horne.
“I’d like to speak to you outside, please,” she said.
“I’m not going outside with you.”
“If you like,” the detective said calmly, “I’m happy to speak to you in here as well. Outside was for your privacy. Ms. Bell came and spoke to me earlier and told me what she knew. I was able to get a warrant this afternoon. You own a firearm.”
It was not a question.
“I have a warrant for that, and for your DNA to do a familial match against the sample recovered from Eric Wilde’s shirt. I have a swab with me. It will only take a minute of your time.”
She nodded toward the back of the room.
“I have two officers with me to assist,” she said. “If you could just go over and join them, we’ll continue this conversation somewhere private. I’ll be by once I speak to Ms. Bell for a moment.”
Sergeant Graves waved Stevie over to a door leading to a small back patio.
“You didn’t mention that you recovered the diary,” she said to Stevie.
“Surprise?”
Sergeant Graves pulled a glove from her pocket, slipped it on, and took the diary from Stevie.
“And the shirt,” she added.
Stevie handed over the remains of the shirt.
“We’re also going to talk about the shooting that you failed to mention. So you and your friends are going to stay in this building so we can get some statements and sort this out.”
They stepped back inside and Sergeant Graves dismissed most of the assembled. Stevie noted that many people had already recorded some of the events and were clearly posting them online. Carson was pinging around the room, trying to prevent this, but that bird had flown. He came over to Stevie and let out a long sigh.
“I’m going to sell so many of those bags,” Carson said, not nearly as quietly as he should have.
30
THE MOON WAS HIGH OVER THE LAKE. THERE WERE BUGS, OF COURSE, thousands of them, but the four people sitting side by side on the dock didn’t care. They swatted and slapped at them occasionally, but it made no real impact. The natural bug spray that Janelle had brought along only seemed to amuse them.
“I don’t know about you,” David said after the silence had grown too long, “but I’m bored now.”
He reached for the bottle and gave himself another spritz of the sticky, citronella-sweet bug spray.
It had been an hour since Stevie and her friends had been dismissed by Sergeant Graves. There would be days ahead of this, of statements, of forms and conversations. But for tonight, they were done, and they had offered themselves up to the bugs as food.
“Okay,” Nate finally said. “Why?”
“Why what?” Stevie said.
“Didn’t you tell us you had the diary?”
“I’m sorry,” Stevie said, sighing. “I had to do it that way. See, all the stuff with Allison—aside from the food dye—that’s all guesswork. The thing that tied Allison’s death to Patty was the diary. If Patty thought I didn’t have the diary, she had to be really, really curious about this big gathering that was happening. I had to be sure she would go, and I had to be sure she was going to be genuinely shocked. I needed to startle her so badly that she might freak out and start talking on camera in front of people. I had to make sure she really thought she was safe up until the last second before I got out the diary.”
“What do you think will happen to her?” Janelle said.
“A lot of it will be hard to prove,” Stevie said, “but there are some things out there. There are traffic cameras in town at the stoplights, so they’ll be able to see if she left the bakery early that morning. They can look for the shell casings in the woods and see if they match her gun. That may be the thing that really gets her—shooting at us.”
“The documentary won’t help,” Nate said. “She’s going to be the ugly kind of famous once they see her reaction to what you said.”
“Sometimes bad people get away with it,” David added. “But I feel like this one won’t. This town is mad.”
Something whooshed just over their heads. Stevie flinched.
“Bat,” Janelle said. “They’re here to feast on all these insects.”
“I’ll take that as a sign,” Nate said, standing and stretching. “I’m going to go write.”
The other three turned to look at him.
“What?” he said.
“You know what,” Stevie replied.
“I had some ideas, that’s all. Since that kid has been following me around, telling me I don’t know my own book. Anyway. Do your thing.”
He walked off back toward the camp.
“That kid was right,” Stevie said. “The kid told me he was going to make Nate get back to work on the book, and he did it. He . . . annoyed him into it.”
“And I . . .” Janelle also stood. “. . . am going to go talk to Vi. I’ll see you back at the cabin.”
This left David and Stevie.
“So,” David said after a long moment.
“So,” she replied, looking down at her legs.
It was time to talk, which she was bad at. This kind of talking, anyway. The feeling, apologizing, heartfelt kind of talking. Breaking-down-murder talking was one thing—this kind was actually scary.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She spat it out—flung the sentence away from her.
“I knew what I signed up for with you. We aren’t like the other children.”
Stevie scratched at the exposed skin at the top of the cast, near her elbow.
“Yeah, well . . .” Words had not failed her when she was talking about crime. Crime was easy—this was the hard stuff. “What are you going to do? About this England thing.”
“Well, you’ll be at Ellingham,” he said. “Busy. Too busy for me.”
“Stop it.”
“No,” he said. “I mean it. You just got famous again. You solved the Box in the Woods murders.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“I’m just saying. You’ll be at school anyway. And I’m not going to lie, the idea of someone my dad can’t stand sending me to college is pretty tempting. It would feel good . . .”
A but hung somewhere between the moon and the lake.
“. . . for a day or two. But that’s the part of me that’s like him. The part that thinks everything is a competition, everything is about winning, and having enemies. And in the end all I’d be doing is taking money from another person who wanted to buy me. The guy isn’t asking for anything—he’s nice—but he’s also sticking it to his enemy. I don’t want my life to be about that anymore. So . . . I’m not taking his offer or his money.”
Stevie’s head shot up and she looked at him eagerly.
“I have a little in savings,” he said, “and I can get a loan. I don’t have enough for a year, but I can do a semester. There’s a program I’ve already applied to. Not super long. Maybe you can come to England for the break. They have crimes there. Lots of them. Everybody’s getting murdered all the time. Jack the Ripper—did they solve that one?”