Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(69)

She had lied to her friends. She was in the state of lying at this very second.

“Come on,” Sebastian said, standing up and breaking the mood. He led them back the way they’d come, out of the back gardens and off to the side of the house, where there was a garage and two parked cars.

“Over here,” he said, leading them through a few trees.

And there it was. The woodshed. It was bigger than it looked in the photos.

“I should tear the damn thing down, but it feels wrong,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

The door of the woodshed was new, and it locked with a normal door key, not a padlock. Sebastian opened this, revealing a plain box of a space, containing a rider mower and dozens of hay bales. The windows were coated with old cobwebs that had stuck together and formed gray strips, and the windowsills were lined with cans of WD-40 and other cans and bottles of oils and garden sprays. It smelled of sweet hay and gasoline. This was not the first time Stevie had stood at the site of a murder. What struck her here, as it had in the past, was how ordinary it was. No neon sign. No arrow. No statue or marker. It was a shed—a big shed, but a shed. She walked its perimeter to get the size of it. It looked to be about ten feet by fifteen feet or thereabouts, something about the size of two cars. It appeared to be in the same condition as it was in the photographs, not freshly painted, but in a similar state of faded gray and brown. She examined the door. The latch had been replaced, of course, but upon close inspection she could see minute scars in the wood where the old latch had been ripped away.

There was something else in what Sebastian had just said—the thing about the death cap mushroom. It looked so innocent. So dull. So ordinary.

“Just a nasty old outbuilding,” he said, looking around. “I don’t use it for firewood anymore. Built a new shed for that. Now it’s mowers and these hay bales, which we use for event seating outside. Sit around the fire on an autumn evening, have a hot chocolate or a nice glass of port.”

Stevie looked up and around. Something was confusing her. Something she’d just seen, or hadn’t seen, in those crime scene photos. The shed had a window, high up, near the peak of the roof. When she looked up now, there was no high window, no peak. The ceiling was flat, and now that she thought about it, it was lower than the overall height of the building. Which meant there was something above them. A quick scan of the ceiling revealed a rope pull and the faint outline of a pull-down opening.

“What’s up there?” she asked.

“Just a crawl space,” he said.

When you want someone to tell you something—don’t ask, tell it wrong.

“Oh,” Stevie said. “That’s where the robbers hid, right?”

“Oh no,” he said. “No. No, that wasn’t used. The floor was rotted away.”

“So no one could have hidden up there?”

“No.” Sebastian shook his head. “My parents sealed it up. It was a deathtrap.”

Perhaps sensing that this was the wrong choice of words, he rubbed his eyes.

“It’s since been replaced for safety reasons,” he added. “Considering what had happened in there, we didn’t want anyone else hurt.”

Maybe it was all the time she’d spent around tour guides in the last week, but Stevie could now feel in her bones when the tour was coming to an end.

“Would you mind,” she said as Sebastian went to the door. “I have this school thing I have to do. I need to take some pictures, and it would be great if I could pose on the hay bales? Would it be okay to use one or two? I’ll put them back.”

Sebastian accepted this and left them, perhaps thinking that American schools gave out vague, hay-adjacent assignments and hoped for the best. It wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Hay?” David said as soon as Sebastian was gone. “What are you doing?”

Stevie closed the woodshed door, leaving them in darkness. She pulled her phone out and turned on the flashlight, pointing it toward the ceiling. She reached for the rope pull, but it was just an inch or two out of her grasp.

“Grab that,” she said to David. “Pull it.”

“Buy me dinner first.”

She elbowed him in the ribs, maybe a touch too hard, because he started coughing. He reached up and pulled on the rope, opening the hatch. There was a folding ladder, which Stevie indicated he should pull down.

“It’s a nice change,” he said. “Usually, we go into creepy holes in the ground. I’ve enjoyed going up into creepy holes instead.”

Once the ladder was down, Stevie wasted no time climbing up. She expected that she might be about to stick her head into the home of a million billion spiders, that would immediately swarm her. Instead, she got a strong smell of old leaves and dirt. There was nothing up there, really. Just a bit of dead space, about four feet high, containing nothing but dirt and a few broken-down cardboard boxes. She banged on the floorboards a few times with her fist, both to test their sturdiness and to shake out any mice or other creatures that might be around. No visible movement.

Stevie got as high on the ladder as she could, while resting her body on the crawl space floor and sliding along. She elbow-crawled forward. She pushed herself up to a crouch and went over to the window. It was even smaller than it looked from below. She tried to raise it up, but the wood had warped, and she was barely able to move it more than a few inches.