What Lies in the Woods(61)

The “Cass” sections were interwoven with straight reporting. The index pointed me toward a few small excerpts from these. Alan Junior’s birth, mentions of him in the context of the marriage. Nothing much about him as a person, though you got the sense that the author was doing her best to conjure up a personality behind the name. The closest she got was in a passage about his bedroom, glimpsed only in one photo among many in the police files. That was the one I remembered:

Trophies and ribbons crowd one small shelf. Second-and third-place wins in soccer tournaments and track events, not one blue ribbon among them. The muddy soccer uniform draped over the side of a hamper suggests a boy still trying to earn that first-place ribbon, that trophy—still trying to impress a distant and indifferent father.



Or it suggested he was a decent but not great athlete who hadn’t done his laundry. The passage was illustrated with the photo I remembered—a nine-or ten-year-old AJ with his father. Lightly curling brown hair and a tentative smile. He was a wisp next to his broad-shouldered father. He looked like a normal kid—a nice kid. But Stahl looked nice, too. If I’d seen the photo without knowing who he was, I might have said he had kind eyes. The same eyes that seemed to radiate pure evil in the photos from the trial.

The answers I wanted weren’t here. There was no wicked version of the boy, no mini Psycho Stahl, to conjure from such scant details. If he was a monster like his father, the proof wasn’t in these pages. I flipped idly through the book, recognizing passages here and there. I’d read the book in a rage, searching for tiny factual details that weren’t quite right so that I could discount the rest. The parts that called my father a drunk, a man who couldn’t protect his daughter. That cast me as the helpless victim of life and circumstance and Stahl, reduced to what was done to me. As for the other “characters” Devereaux constructed …

Cody’s name caught my eye.

Cody Benham, the best friend of Cassidy’s brother, Oscar, is an unlikely figure to become the shining white knight of the story. Frequent run-ins made him a common subject among the local police, and Chief Miller described him as a hot temper in search of a brawl.



She’d somehow neglected to mention that all of Cody’s youthful indiscretions had occurred with Oscar’s willing participation—and instigation. And that the closest Cody had come to actually getting charged was … well. It was because of me, and it had ended their friendship. An act that I hadn’t honored, in the end. Cody had tried to save me from Oscar, and I’d thrown that away, like I threw everything away.

My eyes skipped over the page.

Oscar Green, Cassidy’s protective older brother, is a muscular young man, with long lashes and a slow way of speaking. He oozes that kind of backwoods charm, a lumberjack with a Shakespearean vocabulary.



“Oh, fuck off,” I said. I wondered if he’d gotten her into bed. Probably. He’d nail anything with a heartbeat, and as Cody had said, entirely too many women found his brand of I don’t give a fuck about anything, including you alluring. Not that I could exactly throw stones.

I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to think about Oscar, but his name kept coming up. That was the way with Oscar. I tried to stay away from him and it never worked.

You and me were meant to be. Memory stirred under my fingertips.

The bedroom door opened. I looked up blearily as Mitch entered, carrying two glasses of bourbon. “I thought you’d still be up,” he said. He held the drink out. I didn’t move. “It’s just booze, not betrothal,” he joked. I set the book aside and took the drink, and he used the motion of handing it to me to sidle closer and sit down on the bed beside me, not quite touching me.

The cold glass nestled against my palm, but I didn’t take a sip yet. I studied Mitch instead. Everyone I’d ever been with, I’d been trying to be a particular version of myself. With Mitch, I was an artist who could make some meaning out of her damage. She’d come from the forest, but she didn’t belong to it anymore. She was a daydream I’d had, that I’d lived in for a while.

I wondered who I was trying to be with Ethan. But the past few days, I hadn’t had the option of being anyone but myself. Everything that had happened had stripped me down to the bone.

“How was it? Going back home?” Mitch asked. He swirled his drink, ice cubes clinking against the glass. “How’s Olivia?”

He didn’t know. Of course he didn’t know—I hadn’t told him. But it seemed impossible. The world had changed. He should have noticed.

“Olivia is dead,” I said.

Mitch’s face contorted, passing through shock and confusion and anger and then settling into baffled horror. “I’m so sorry,” he said. The right words, the wrong expression. He reached out, put a hand on my knee. “My God. What happened?”

I couldn’t. I couldn’t go through it all over again. I shook my head, and he stroked his thumb across my kneecap.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “Not now. I’m just so sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I just…”

He leaned forward, closing the gap between us. I knew what he was doing, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t stop him, just froze as his lips met mine. His kiss was deep and tender and ardent. I knew the scent of him, his aftershave and expensive lotion, knew his touch, but like the apartment they had become alien.