The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(5)

“Yes,” Stevie said, staring at the woman on the other side of the deli counter.

“Which one is that?”

“It’s the one marked ‘low-sodium ham.’”

“Where?”

Stevie pointed at a round-edged rectangle of ham, the one with the card that read “Low-Sodium Ham.”

“Oh. Okay. I’ll have a . . . I guess . . . make it a half pound of that, and a pound of . . . do you have low-fat Swiss cheese?”

“Yes.”





“Where’s that?”


Stevie pointed at the cheese that was similarly marked.

“Oh.” The low-fat Swiss cheese somehow disappointed. The woman bit her upper lip and consulted her phone. “The recipe says low-fat Swiss, but . . . do you have low-fat provolone?”

“No,” Stevie said.

“Oh. Um. Hmmmm.”

What were the murder statutes in Pennsylvania? Surely there had to be something in there about people who came to the deli counter and stood there asking questions about things that were clearly written on signs, making ten other people wait behind them. It was the Friday-evening shift, which meant people wanted their weekend lunch meat and deli stuff and they wanted to go home. And here was this woman, lost in the cabinet of wonders that was the deli counter.

“Do you have . . . ,” the woman began.

Lots of murder weapons at the deli counter. So many knives. The most dangerous thing was the meat slicer, but it would be hard to turn that into a murder weapon. Too heavy, and it had a safety guard. It could probably be done, though. . . .

“I guess . . .” The woman peered into the glass. “I mean, I guess I’ll take the Swiss. The low-fat Swiss. A quarter, no . . . wait. I’m probably going to double it, so . . . well . . . a quarter would probably be fine. Or . . .”

You’d have to get someone into the feeding side of the





slicer. Really hold them in there. You could take off their fingers. . . .

“Miss?”

Stevie snapped back. She had been staring at the slicer, shoving imaginary fingers into the opening.

“A quarter pound of the low-fat Swiss,” the woman said again.

This was said with a bit of an edge to it, indicating that it was outrageous how Stevie had made this woman wait entire seconds. There was no recognition of all the time the woman had spent pondering her lunch-meatorial thoughts. She saw the woman give a side-eye to someone else in the line that said, Can you believe the kind of person they hire here? Stevie clenched her jaw and took the heavy brick of cheese from the refrigerated counter.

“Thin!” the woman yelled. “Thin!”

Stevie considered the slicer again. Not the most elegant weapon, but it could get the job done.

Fame is a fleeting thing. One minute, she was the student sleuth, celebrated on the internet for catching a killer at her exclusive boarding school. People wrote articles about her. She saw her face at the top of some news pages, her short blond hair that she cut herself sticking up at weird angles, her face too round for the camera but normal in life, and her vintage red vinyl coat looking good. She’d finished out the school year a celebrity. She’d kept her school open and safe. And, though the world at large didn’t know it, she’d solved





one of the greatest cases of the last century.

And then . . . the world moved on to the next shiny thing. Her name still popped up from time to time, but not as much, and then not really at all. Then she was home from school, back in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Her Ellingham friends returned to their homes as well, all over the country. Her old job at the mall was filled, and she was super lucky to get this job at the grocery store, four days a week, from four to eleven.

Stevie didn’t mind the job so much, really. The first part of the evening was the most annoying—the four-to-eight shift behind the deli counter. She liked putting things in order, filling containers, slicing, packing. Where the whole thing fell apart was when she had to deal with people. She learned a lot working with customers. She knew the person who would chat to her nonstop, the person who felt that they were entitled to her entire soul as she got them ham. She saw people stressing and straining, working out budgets in their heads. She learned that people really like American cheese, and that she wasn’t sure what American cheese even was.

The second half of the shift was spent breaking down the salad bar. That was definitely the best part of the night. From that point onward, she usually didn’t have to talk to customers anymore. While she technically wasn’t supposed to wear earbuds while people were in the store, no one cared that much, especially if you were doing a job like this one, where you didn’t have to deal with people. She had a full hour and a half of a true-crime podcast to listen to while she removed the steam trays, filled carts with the leftover vegetables and





fruits, and cleaned up the weird gunk that was on the side of the industrial-size salad dressing bottles. She was in the middle of dumping out the bloody remains of a tray of pickled beets when her phone rang.

“Hey,” she said quietly.

“How’s my princess?” David said.

“Still working. You talk.”

“Well, I’m here in . . . I don’t remember the name of the town. We had dinner at Cracker Barrel. And now I’m at the local firehouse helping run a raffle for a group of candidates in this area. If you play your cards right there might be a basket full of lavender bath salts in your future. What do you have for me?”