What Lies in the Woods(53)

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Because if Jessi Walker was alive and well in August, there’s no way Stahl killed her. His mother had a stroke in late July. He spent two months on the East Coast to help her while she recovered.”

“That can’t be right,” I said. “Maybe Cody got the dates wrong.”

“Or Stahl had nothing to do with Jessi’s death,” Ethan said.

I sat heavily on the bed, cupping my head in my hands. If Stahl hadn’t killed Jessi, he wouldn’t have gone out to the woods to visit the body. He would have had no reason at all to be in Chester, to be off the trail and happen to stumble into me. And no reason to kill a random little girl eating a peanut butter sandwich who hadn’t even seen him.

“They saw him,” I whispered. “Liv and Cass.”

“They saw someone,” Ethan said gently. “Eyewitness testimony is unreliable even with adults.”

“Then Stahl didn’t attack me,” I said leadenly. They’d been wrong and I’d lied, and the wrong man had gone to prison because of us. Because of me.

“We don’t know that. It doesn’t prove anything either way,” Ethan said, but I could see in his eyes that he was certain now.

I stared at him. “That’s what you thought all along, isn’t it? You never really thought it was Stahl.”

“I thought it was a possibility,” he hedged. “But it didn’t seem likely. The way you described the cave, you had trouble getting into it. Stahl was a big guy. He could have shoved the body in there, but he’d have trouble accessing it later. He’d want someplace he could get into and out of easily.”

“Then why go along with the whole theory? Why even tell me about the quiet summer?”

“Because you wanted it to be true. I thought it would help you open up and talk to me. And then it let you accept my help. And like I said—I didn’t think it was impossible that it was true. I was hoping it would be. You’d have your answers.”

“Fuck.” I lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I should have been angry. I just felt wrung out—and oddly relieved. I hadn’t really understood why Ethan was helping me. Now I was starting to. “Are you going to turn this into a podcast?”

He sat down next to me, his weight making the bed sink. “This is all a bit beyond the scope of the project I pitched,” he admitted. I snorted. “I told you. I won’t use anything without your permission.”

“But you’d like to.”

“I’d be an idiot not to,” he said.

“You are kind of an idiot, though,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you expect something more than what my daddy says I am,” I told him. I wrapped the edge of Ethan’s shirt around my fist, the shape of my knuckles distinct under the thin fabric. I pulled him toward me and he leaned forward, bracing himself with a hand beside my head as he looked down at me.

“What your dad said—” he began.

“It’s true. More or less. I’m a disaster. And a liar. And apparently, I sent the wrong man to prison.”

He didn’t tell me it wasn’t true. He didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. “Someone killed Jessi. Someone killed Liv.”

“Or Jessi fell and hit her head, and Liv killed herself,” I said. And I was the only villain in the story after all. The girl who lied.

He splayed his hand over my chest, as if to feel my heartbeat, and his fingertip grazed the edge of the ridged scar beside my sternum. The one that had come the closest to killing me.

“Someone did this to you,” he said. “Maybe we were wrong about it being Stahl, but right about the reason. The man who killed Jessi saw you. He tried to kill you. Silence you. And when Liv put the pieces together, he silenced her, too. You caught the wrong monster twenty years ago. That means there’s another one still out there. And you’re going to find him.”

“I like the girl you think I am,” I said. I rubbed the cuff of his T-shirt sleeve idly between my fingers. “If you were smart, you’d get far, far away from me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. He kissed me, softly, and I shut my eyes and told myself that my father was right and none of it meant anything at all.





Ethan passed out sometime around two p.m. I got dressed quietly so I wouldn’t wake him up. There was no chance of me getting any sleep. My thoughts were caught in an endless loop, cycling between Jessi and Liv and that summer twenty-two years ago. I was ready to accept that Stahl hadn’t been the one who attacked me. He wasn’t the thread connecting the three of us.

Except that Liv and Cass had seen him.

Unless they hadn’t.

There was only one person left who could tell me exactly what they’d seen.

At two o’clock on a Friday, Cass would be at the lodge. The sensible thing would be to call or to go by her house later, but instead I drove out of town, along the winding road that led farther into the moss-draped trees. You came upon the lodge suddenly—rounding a thickly wooded turn to discover it right in front of you, nestled against a backdrop of a hundred shades of green and brown. When we were kids it was a single building, sagging and waterlogged, with scratchy sheets and stained carpeting. It had closed completely the year before Cass bought it.