The Hollows(4)

‘No.’

‘This is the coolest,’ David said, shoving a veggie burger into a bun and handing it to me. I got a good look at his Zodiac Killer tattoo as he passed it over.

‘We get to tell you about the Hollows Horror,’ said Connie, and she put down her wine and leaned forward, eager to tell me.





Chapter 2


As Connie and David took it in turns to tell me the story of what had happened here almost exactly twenty years before, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, as if someone were standing behind me, blowing cool air on to me through pursed lips.

‘So, it was July 1999,’ Connie said. ‘The anniversary is this month, in fact. The twenty-sixth.’

‘This used to be a much more basic campground,’ said David. ‘A place to pitch tents or park your RV. None of these fancy cabins. It wasn’t a resort.’

‘It was popular with schools. Like the one that was staying here the week in question. Wendt Middle School, out of Portland.’

‘And it was closed down immediately after what happened.’

‘What did happen?’ I asked. I tried to keep my tone light. ‘Don’t tell me – it was a dark and stormy night.’

‘Ha! Actually, it was a warm, still night, like this. A couple of kids, names of Jake Robineaux and Mary-Ellen Pearce, arranged to meet up after everyone else went to sleep. They were both fourteen, weren’t they, honey?’

Connie nodded. ‘That’s right.’ The same age as Frankie. ‘Jake wrote a book about it around five years ago. Self-published it.’

‘A Night in the Woods,’ said David. ‘That’s the title.’ He was sitting down, barbecue sauce smeared around his lips. He had already finished one bottle of beer and had moved on to the next. ‘Jake said that he found Mary-Ellen in this clearing in the woods, frozen to the spot, pointing her flashlight.’

‘What had she seen?’ I asked.

Neither David nor Connie replied straight away. They were like a veteran rock band who had played their set so many times they knew exactly how to work their audience.

‘Two of their teachers,’ said Connie.

‘Eric Daniels and Sally Fredericks,’ added David.

‘Murdered.’

‘Slaughtered.’

‘Both completely naked.’

Over the next thirty minutes, the Butlers told me, in unnerving detail, what had happened.

Eric Daniels was a thirty-eight-year-old English teacher, married with two children. He was described by those who knew him as ‘a great guy’: bookish but a big baseball fan; a man who was as comfortable doing home improvement as he was debating the finer points of To Kill a Mockingbird. He seemed a little too good to be true to me.

And, of course, he wasn’t perfect. Because he had apparently been having an affair with his co-worker, Sally Fredericks.

She was a geography teacher who had organised the camping trip, just as she had every year since starting at Wendt Middle School. She was two years older than Daniels, a fitness fanatic who had, the year before her death, run the New York City Marathon. She was typically skinny for a long-distance runner. In the photos that accompanied the news stories I found later, Sally wasn’t classically beautiful or conventionally attractive, but there was something about her. The trace of a wry smile on her lips; an ironic twinkle in her eye. Everyone described her as clever and cool and kind. And the students and colleagues she’d left behind had seemed genuinely devastated by their loss – as had her husband, Neal.

‘So what, they snuck off into the woods together to have sex?’ I asked, glancing up at the trees that rose behind the Butlers’ cabin.

‘Yep,’ David said. ‘I guess it was too good an opportunity to pass up. A warm night. All the kids asleep, or so they thought. It must have seemed exciting. Romantic.’

‘It happened a little way from here,’ Connie added, pointing up the path with her stick. ‘There used to be a nature trail there, with a clearing further along the trail. The perfect place for a midnight hook-up.’

‘Nothing like a bit of al fresco fun,’ said David, winking at his wife.

She grimaced. ‘Don’t get any ideas, buster. I don’t want any bugs biting me on the butt.’

‘But I wouldn’t blame them if they did,’ he said, kissing her. ‘It’s so biteable.’

She slapped his chest and rolled her eyes, but she was pleased.

‘How were they killed?’ I asked, marvelling at how the Butlers had paused halfway through their gruesome tale for some flirtation, as if they were teenagers enjoying a scary movie rather than a married couple recounting a real-life crime.

When I looked it up afterwards, I found that the Butlers had remembered the details as if they themselves were the pathologists who had examined the bodies and written the reports. Actually, it wasn’t hard to picture David and Connie at the morgue, in scrubs and surgical masks, scalpels and saws slicing and grinding beneath artificial light.

Eric had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy object, probably a rock. He had died of blunt force trauma. The pathologist noted that he had been struck three times on the back of his head, which had shattered his skull. They speculated that the murderer had first struck Eric while he and Sally were having sex, with him on top. It would have been dark and they were busy; they wouldn’t have heard their assailant creeping up on them, weapon raised.