What Lies in the Woods(6)

One of the stab wounds had nicked the side of my heart, not quite puncturing the atrial wall. If it had been a millimeter deeper or farther to the right, I would have escaped the pain after all.

The door opened. Mitch crept in with a hangdog shuffle. “I’m sorry,” he said, sinking down cross-legged beside me on the carpet. “You’re right. I’m an asshole. Completely useless. Can you forgive me?”

“Okay,” I said, and then I flashed him a quick smile. If I sounded half-hearted, he’d keep up the Please forgive me groveling as long as it took. “You’re not useless, and you’re not an asshole.”

“Yes, I am. I’m a horrible boyfriend.” He leaned his head against my shoulder. I sagged. I didn’t have the energy to make him feel better right now, but if I didn’t he would keep this up all night, berating himself for his supposed failures.

“It’s okay,” I soothed. “You’re so stressed out, and I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. His fingertips trailed down my arm and played across my palm, and I shut my eyes. What was wrong with me? Mitch loved me. He wanted the best for me. Why couldn’t I love him like I used to? “Who’s Persephone?” Mitch asked.

I jerked, startled, and realized that Mitch was looking at my hand—at the bracelet wrapped around my fingers. It had been in the bottom of the box. I hadn’t even known that I’d picked it up. It was simple: a discolored nylon string, knotted into a loop and strung with plastic alphabet beads that had faded and chipped until the letters were almost unreadable. But not quite.

“No one,” I said. I tossed the bracelet back in the box, disturbed that I’d picked it up without noticing. I can’t tell you more. Not over the phone, Liv had said.

“Then why do you have her bracelet?” he asked with a little laugh. “Let me guess. Elementary school crush. Your BFF. Your babysitter.”

“I don’t even know why that thing is in there,” I said. I should have gotten rid of it a long time ago. I crammed the binder and the cards and the quilt back in the box. The things in that box were the very last possessions I’d taken with me when I left Chester. “Maybe I should throw it all out. Move on.”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve told you how fucking amazing you are,” Mitch said. “You were eleven years old and you put a serial killer away. They had jack shit on Stahl without your testimony. You were a pint-sized badass, and I think holding on to things that celebrate that isn’t a bad thing at all.”

I shook my head. I hadn’t been brave, just obedient—and terrified. Not of Stahl, but of failing. The police and the prosecutors and everyone else told me over and over again that I had to do it, that it was all on me.

We’d all identified Stahl, but there were questions about witness contamination with Liv and Cass. They’d given general descriptions right away, but they’d seen Stahl on the news before the official ID. I’d been unconscious during the televised arrest, untainted. So while all three of us testified, my words counted the most. I had to do it. Otherwise none of his victims would have justice, and he was an evil, evil man, and did I want him going free?

“I’m going to go home for a while,” I said. I hadn’t been certain until I spoke the words out loud.

“Home? You mean Chester? Why?”

“You know. See my dad. See Liv and Cassidy.”

“That makes sense,” he said, nodding. “Go back to the beginning. Full circle and all of that. Get some closure.”

What does that even mean, you found her?

I’ll tell you, but only in person.

I’m not going back.

We owe it to her.

“Closure. Yeah. Something like that.”





We met on the first day of kindergarten. This was, of course, completely inevitable; Chester Elementary only had one class per grade. I was well aware when I sat down in the front row between Olivia Barnes and Cassidy Green that I was the moat between two opposing armies.

Cassidy’s dad, Big Jim, was the mayor of Chester and owned the last operating mill in town. One of the last in the whole county, in fact. Chester was a town that still sported signs reading THIS HOME SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS, but increasingly those signs were a lie. The blame for this fell, fairly or not, on people like Marcus Barnes and his wife, Kimiko.

Kimiko was a biologist, Marcus an environmental lawyer, and between the two of them they represented everything Chester hated. After they moved to town, they woke up one morning to find a spotted owl, neck broken, dumped on their doorstep. They’d had their tires slashed while they were eating at the family restaurant in town, and Kimiko had fielded more than one racist and obscene call.

The truth was that by the time they arrived the era of plenty was over for the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest. The Olympic National Forest belonged to the owls, whether Chester liked it or not, and it wasn’t Marcus and Kimiko Barnes who’d made that happen. But the grief and fear of a dying town didn’t care about logic. Liv started that first day already an outcast.

Nobody hated me or my family the way they hated hers, but I was almost as much of an outsider as she was. I was the girl with divorced parents. The girl with holes in her clothes and a stale smell. Mom was a floozy who’d walked out and Dad was a lazy drunk who could barely hold down a part-time job at the bar, and no one expected me to turn out any better.