The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(50)

“No, I’ve got it, I—”

She held up a hand.

“I’m doing this on my own,” she went on. “I’ll talk to people.”

“And then we’ll—”

He just would not stop.

“I’ll,” she said, “tell you if I find anything. But these are real people. Janelle and I are real people. I know you have the money and you own this place, but you don’t own this town or their pain. We’re supposed to be helping. You’re not helping.”

If Carson was embarrassed by being dressed down by





a seventeen-year-old girl at his camp, he certainly didn’t show it.

“I hear what you’re saying,” he said.

Nate shook his head in warning.

“Now you’re going to answer some questions,” Stevie went on. “Were the floors of the bunks always concrete?”

This clearly threw Carson for a loop.

“Always,” he said. “In case of flooding. Sometimes the lake spills over the banks.”

“Were they redone, or are these the originals?”

“They were redone . . . I think in the sixties?”

“But they were like this in 1978?”

“Yep,” he said. “Why? You think there’s something encased in the concrete or something?”

“No,” she said.

“Then why—”

“No,” she said again.

Carson shut up. He unfolded himself from the floor.

“I made the right decision with you,” he said. “I was trying to disrupt the narrative, but I promise you, I won’t do anything like that again.”

“Wow,” Nate said when he was gone. “Wow. If you don’t want to be a detective, I think you have a future in domination. He’s shorter now.”

Truth be told, Stevie had enjoyed it. She glowed with warm pleasure.

“What was the concrete thing about?”





“Sabrina’s diary,” Stevie said. “I wanted to know if there was any chance it could have been concealed in the floor. I guess not.”


“You know there’s basically no chance that thing is still around, right? If they haven’t seen it since 1978 and have already looked?”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “If she was going out into the woods to buy pot, she wouldn’t bring her diary with her. It’s not like she was going to be sitting out there in the dark writing, ‘Dear diary, here I am, buying weed for the first time.’”

“No,” he said. “I guess not. What about in a tree? People do that a lot in books—stash something in a hollow tree.”

“Possible,” Stevie replied. “Seems risky, though. It could be destroyed by weather, or someone might find it. You’d want it to be in a safe, dry place that only you knew about.”

“Okay, what about someone obsessed with the case? Souvenir collectors. If someone found that diary, it would be huge.”

“True-crime people aren’t serial killers—they don’t want secret trophies. If someone had that diary, they’d want to tell everyone. That’s the whole point.”

Nate nodded in acceptance of this fact.

“So it seems like the diary is your main thing now. Is this because you feel like the case itself can’t be solved?”

“I don’t know if the case can be solved,” Stevie replied. “I don’t know if I’m the one who would be able to do it if it could be. It’s probably going to come down to DNA or something.





But looking for the diary is something I can do to help someone who’s still around.”

“You didn’t tell Carson that.”

“Carson doesn’t need to know,” Stevie replied. “Screw Carson.”

“Agreed. Also, I think it’s a good plan. I don’t mean to sound like it’s not. It just seems like it also might be hard, but less hard than tracking down a serial killer from 1978.”

They fell into silence, listening to the chirp of the crickets or the cicadas or whatever it was that chirped all night in the summer. Some kind of chirping thing.

“People had so little to do back then,” Nate said meditatively. “Before the internet, I guess you had to keep a diary or something. How else would you remember what happened?”

Stevie hmmmmed.

“There will be children here tomorrow,” Nate said. “Children. With their little child fingers.”

“Child fingers?”

“I’m saying we won’t be safe anymore. This other counselor better stop being sick really quick.”

As Stevie walked into her cabin later, Janelle was wrapping up a call with Vi. Stevie could see their short silver hair on the screen, and their pink-tinted round glasses. Whatever lovey-dovey talk they were engaged in cut off quickly. Stevie said hello, then went over and flopped on her bed. It was not a particularly forgiving sort of bed, and the springs squeaked in protest. There was a pungent chemical smell in the air, and





the message on the wall was gone.

“You got it off the wall,” she said as Janelle finished the call.

“Yeah, I used some denatured alcohol to soften it, then I scraped it off.”