The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(46)

She took several pictures, getting the bunk from every angle.


The floor was slightly more interesting. This cabin had a wooden floor. It felt to Stevie like there was nothing between the planks and the solid concrete the cabin rested on, but she got down on the floor and knocked, making sure all was solid. She crawled around, knocking and checking, picking at the boards with her fingers. Nothing gave.

“What are you doing?” said a voice.

Stevie jerked her head up and saw a redheaded girl standing in the doorway of the partition wall, a phone clasped to her head and a horrified look on her face.

Stevie could hear the person on the other end of the phone saying, “What? What?”

“There’s someone crawling on the floor of my bunk,” the girl said into the phone. “Hang on.”

“Oh hey,” Stevie said. “Sorry, I’m . . . looking for something.”

It was true, and she had no other excuse ready at hand.

“In my bunk? On the floor? Who are you?”

“I’m Stevie, I . . . I got here yesterday and I . . . came in here by accident and I dropped my . . . um, a key?”

“Hang on,” the girl said into the phone. “Hang on. So you were in here and you lost a key?”

Stevie nodded lamely.

The girl clearly didn’t believe her, but at the same time couldn’t seem to figure out why Stevie might be lying. She looked at her things, which had not been disturbed.





“It’s not here,” Stevie said, getting up and brushing off her knees. “Sorry, I . . . got the cabins mixed up before and . . . I must have dropped it somewhere else. Sorry to bother you. I’ll see you later.”


Stevie left as casually as possible, which was really not casual at all. She felt the girl’s eyes on her back. Her lie had been okay at best. What was she supposed to say? Don’t mind me. I’m just a weirdo who creeps into your bunk while you’re gone and crawls around on the floor by your bed. Why am I doing this? Oh, because of the murders.

She decided to skip lunch, even though she was hungry. She didn’t want to immediately face the redheaded girl again. She texted Janelle and asked her to bring a hot dog and soda to the cabin, where she was going to hide for a while with the door closed.

The red hair made Stevie think of Diane McClure, who in many ways was the least-documented victim. She wasn’t as bad as Todd, as good as Sabrina, or the well-meaning drug dealer who almost made it to safety. She was simply there, the girlfriend, the fourth victim. Stevie flopped onto her bed and picked up her tablet, paging through the files until she got to the very short one allocated to Diane. There was an excerpt from a book on the case about her:

Very few people had much to say about Diane McClure. Her school records show that she was a middling student, barely passing many of her classes but not quite failing out. She belonged to no





clubs. Her yearbook photo shows a black-and-white image of a heavily freckled girl with a strange smile that looks neither happy nor sincere. Her thick red hair is long and straight, but the photo cannot capture how vibrant it was in life.

Diane was the daughter of lifetime Barlow Corners residents Douglas and Ellen McClure. Her parents met at Liberty High in the 1950s, marrying in 1956. Her brother, Daniel, was born in 1958, and Diane was born in 1960. In 1965, they purchased the Dairy Duchess, a local diner, from its owners. They would run the diner well into the 1990s. Diane worked there in the evenings and on weekends.

“Diane liked to have fun,” said friend Patty Horne. “She loved Led Zeppelin and Kiss. She loved going to concerts. She pretty much always wore a shirt from some band or other. That’s so much of what I remember about her—her red hair and her Tshirts from concerts. She had really strong feelings about which albums were acceptable listening. She was passionate. God, she loved Led Zeppelin so much.”

This was a time when high schools had smoking lounges, and Diane spent a lot of time in the one at Liberty High. Some of the only photos of her in the 1978 yearbook show her leaning out the window, cigarette in hand.

Diane began dating Todd Cooper early in their





junior year, and by the end of senior year, they were considered one of the leading couples of Liberty High. But they were not king-and-queen-of-the-prom material.

“Diane was too much of a badass for that,” said another friend. “When I think of what happened that night, one thing that I always think is . . . Diane must have put up one hell of a fight. Whatever happened, she went down swinging.”

Stevie stared at the ceiling for a moment. Had Diane gone down swinging? Had any of them? She paged through the file that detailed the injuries. (Carson might have had some unfortunate quirks, but he put together a solid set of case files.) She got to the diagrams of the bodies, with the detailed notes. Todd, Diane, and Eric had head wounds. Todd was stabbed sixteen times. Diane nine. Only Sabrina had no head wound, and Sabrina was the only one noted for having defensive marks on her hands.

What this seemed to mean to Stevie was that Diane, Todd, and Eric were all struck, possibly to incapacitate them. In Eric’s case, he wasn’t struck hard enough, and he managed to run. Sabrina, again, was the odd one out. Maybe this was because she was the least threatening and didn’t need to be hit on the head.

Whatever the case, one of these things was always not like the other. Sabrina Abbott, again, the perfect girl, the special one—reaching up, fighting back the knife. . . .