What Lies in the Woods(54)

Two years after that, she’d transformed it. Huge, rough wooden beams supported the roof, artfully primitive, while the all-glass front entrance added an elegant modern touch. Inside, works by local Native artists decorated the lobby, and the front desk sold tiny packets of salted caramel popcorn for four bucks a pop.

“Can I help you?” chirped a tiny brunette from behind the counter, her cheeks rounding with her perfect customer-service smile.

“I’m looking for—” I started, but I didn’t get any further.

“Naomi! What are you doing here? Is something wrong?” Cass asked, striding across the lobby. Belatedly, I realized that I hadn’t changed or brushed my hair, and I probably looked terrible.

“I just need to talk to you,” I said. Cass’s eyes darted past me. Her expression was tight with discomfort. This was her space, and I was intruding on it. Causing chaos. But she only waved a beckoning hand and marched down the hall. I trailed behind as she made her way to one of the conference rooms on the ground floor and opened it with a keycard. As soon as we were both inside, she shut it and turned to me, spots of pink high on her cheeks.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.

I winced. I couldn’t say anything in my defense, because she was right. “I’m sorry.” It was utterly inadequate. One of her friends had died, and the other disappeared on her.

Her lips thinned. “It’s fine. What do you need?” she asked, her voice strained.

I tensed. Maybe coming here had been a bad idea. But it was too late now. “I need to know exactly what you saw the day I was attacked,” I said.

She let out a groan, covering her face with one hand. “Naomi. You have to let this go.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I told her pleadingly. “I just need to hear it—from you, I mean. I don’t remember. I need you to do it for me.” Tell me I didn’t do anything wrong.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached out and took my hand, drawing me gently over to one of the long tables and ushering me into a chair. We sat across the corner of the table from one another, and Cass kept her hand over mine.

“I’m going to tell you this once,” she said. “And then you are going to stop torturing yourself, okay?” At my nod, she took a deep breath. “Liv and I were down in the Grotto. We heard you scream, and we started to climb out to see what was wrong. That was when I saw the man. He was standing over you. He had a knife in his hand. You were on your stomach, and you were kind of … flopping around.”

She swallowed, looking queasy. My heart beat fast in my chest. I hadn’t actually heard Cass testify; my testimony had been last, and I hadn’t been allowed to listen to the others. Hearing it now, my heart ached for the little girls we’d been.

“You managed to roll over. He dropped down on one knee and the knife came down again, and it—I think that was the one that got your face.”

I touched a finger to the scar automatically. That blow had been one of the hardest, but it was at an angle, laying open the flesh from the hinge of my jaw almost to the corner of my mouth.

“Liv tried to climb out. She shouted for you, but I grabbed her and put my hand over her mouth. He was so focused he didn’t hear—and you were screaming, too. I had to wrap my whole body around her to keep her there. His hand kept coming up and going down again. Over and over.” She looked to the side, taking short, sharp breaths. “Then he just … stopped. He said something, I think, but I couldn’t tell what. He walked away.”

I pictured the scene. The spot where I’d sat. The Grotto. I frowned. “I was pretty far from the boulder,” I said.

Cass’s head tilted. “I guess.”

“And he had his back to you.”

Her brow furrowed. “Not completely. I could see the side of his face.”

The side of his face, from what, fifty feet away? Sixty? More? “Do you remember exactly what you told the cops? The description you gave?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “I would have told them he was big. Short, brown hair. White. No beard—I remember they asked about the beard, and I was sure he didn’t have one. But when Dougherty showed me the photo of Stahl, it looked just like him.”

“Wait. Dougherty showed you a picture of Stahl? When, at the hospital?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, it was before the ambulance even got there.”

On the side of the road. Before they even knew I was still alive. “Cass, I thought you gave the description to Chief Miller.”

“I did,” Cass said slowly, a line appearing between her eyebrows in faint confusion. “He’s the one who asked me about the beard, so yeah, he’s the one I gave the description to.”

“But Miller got there after the ambulance,” I said. You couldn’t live in Chester without knowing every step of that story. From Leo Cortland on down, everyone wanted you to know exactly where they’d been that day. And Miller always talked about rolling up to a scene already swarming with sirens and two little girls shivering in the back of an ambulance. “So Dougherty showed you the photo before you gave your description.”

She wetted her lips. “Maybe. No. I told him—I told him there was a man, a big man. I told him about the brown hair.”