The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(36)

“Hey,” Patty said. “Hey.”


He stopped and turned.

“I’m not doing this,” he said. He had that tone he got when he wasn’t quite sober, a random loudness.

“My friends are dead,” she yelled, “and you’re being an asshole. . . .”

“Our friends,” he shot back. “God, you’re always like this.”

“Like what? You’re the one who hooked up with Sabrina. You cheated on me.”

He muttered something under his breath and got on his bike.

“Greg!” she screamed. She was losing it. It was all too much. Hot tears burned in her eyes. “Greg, don’t. You’re drunk. . . .”

He revved the engine to drown out her yelling and made to pull out. She stood in the way of the bike, so he walked it backward and turned out of the parking lot. She ran after the departing bike, yelling his name. She followed him all the way to where the parking lot met the road, crying and waving her flashlight. By now, everyone around was staring as she watched his bike disappear into the darkness.

Greg was barely a mile away when he left the road and went right into the trees and a wall of rock.





10



“WHAT THE HELL?” JANELLE SAID. “THE HELL?”

It was a good question.

Stevie turned first to the door, which was shut. She walked over and rattled it. It was still locked from the inside. She went over to the window, stepping onto a chair to examine it. The screen and the internal safety grate were intact. There was nowhere for someone to be, but they still looked under the beds. Janelle examined the screws of the window guards up close and found that they were tight, and that there would be no way to remove or replace them from outside. Since the cabin sat on a concrete base, there was no way to come from under the cabin. The only thing that was even slightly open was small hole in the screen, maybe an inch and a half in diameter, which was large enough to let in the mosquitoes, but certainly not large enough to allow a person through.

In short, someone had done the impossible.

They sat on the cold concrete floor and looked at each other.





“Well,” Stevie said, “someone’s been reading about me.”


Not long after Stevie had arrived at Ellingham Academy and announced that she would be working on the long-cold Ellingham murder case, someone projected an image onto the wall of her room in the middle of the night—a terrifying version of the Truly Devious letter but rewritten to reference Stevie. Stevie had long kept this to herself, with only Janelle and David knowing most of the details. But after the case was over and Stevie was getting press, she had talked about it with Germaine Batt, Ellingham’s resident student journalist. Germaine had helped Stevie solve the case, and Stevie owed her an exclusive.

So someone knew about messages appearing on Stevie’s bedroom wall at night.

“But that one was projected,” Janelle said. “That’s paint. Someone painted our wall, while we slept, when there was no way in.”

“So what does that mean?” Stevie asked. “It means it didn’t happen.”

“But it did happen.”

“No,” Stevie said. “It means that there’s a message on our wall now. But it had to have been there before we came in last night, because there’s no other way it could have gotten there.”

“It wasn’t there,” Janelle said. “We would have seen it.”

“How can you make something like that appear?”

Janelle fell silent in thought for a moment, then got up





and returned to the wall. She climbed up on Stevie’s bed and examined the word up close, scratching at it with her nail and testing the residue with the tip of a finger.

“That’s really dry,” she said. “No tackiness to it at all. There are paints that go on one color and dry another, but . . . say that someone came in when we were out at the picnic and painted that on the wall. One, we would have smelled it. Paint stinks. And two, we were still awake for a while and paint dries quickly, at least initially. I don’t think it would be that dry, though.”

Stevie stood up and faced the wall.

It wasn’t that Stevie had no fears. Stevie had a lot of fears and anxieties. There had been times when they had ruled her life. Someone was playing a game. Someone had presented her with a locked-room puzzle. And this wasn’t scary as much as it was perplexing. If she had a mental puzzle to work on, her fears took a back seat.

Face the problem. Look at it hard. What did she see?

The message was painted on the top third of the wall, not the eyeline. The word was painted in blocky, sloppy capitals. The paint had run a bit, like a spooky horror font. She climbed back up on the bed next to Janelle and looked at the brushstrokes closely. There was something weird about how the paint ran down the wall.

“Look at how the drips all cut off at the same point,” Stevie said, pointing. “Like a clean line.”

Janelle leaned in to look. “Someone wiped the paint,” she





said. “You can see the trace where they wiped it to keep it from dripping too much. How considerate.”

Stevie gave a long exhale and stepped down. “Let’s check under the bed,” she said.