The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(60)

“You want this?” he said, offering her the can.





Stevie took it. He dragged over another folding chair and sat close to her.


“You okay?” he asked. He was asking that a lot now.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Neither do I, but I have no idea what’s going on.”

She had explained some of the case to him, but not every detail of what she had done here. The cool parts, of course, like busting Carson and things like that, but not what it felt like to be in Allison’s house, surrounded by Sabrina’s things. Not the feeling of being able to give Allison something her sister had made, however minor.

David studied her face for a moment.

“Someone’s died,” he said. “Someone connected to a murder that happened here. We’ve been here before.”

He meant back at Ellingham, when someone had died at a place that was so famous for murder. She took a sip of the coffee, which was bitter and strong. She didn’t love the taste, but it had a clarifying effect, so she gulped it down. “Your kayak,” she said. “Can it fit two people?”

“Just one. They have canoes, though. They can fit up to three.”

“Then we need to get one.”

David didn’t bother changing out of his sleeping clothes. He found a pair of shoes, and they walked to the little boat rental place a bit farther in, closer to Sunny Pines, and took possession of a canoe. When they helped lift it down and push it along the sand, it seemed much larger than Stevie thought it would be. And as they got it into the water, it was far wobblier





than she’d hoped. But she was focused and got herself into the bench seat and worked out how to paddle. After a few minutes of confused splashing and going in circles, they were drifting out onto the placid waters of Lake Wonder Falls and headed toward Arrowhead Point. The police were moving people away from the shoreline under the peak, and they had hung a tarp over the area where Allison had landed so that nobody could view the body. But nothing stopped them from drifting closer on the water. A few people were doing the same—watching from canoes or rafts or floating tubes. Not that there was much to see. The tarp screened off most of the action. A few police officers were on the edge of the point, examining it. Stevie watched this activity for some time in silence, as David paddled a bit to keep them as stationary as possible. One of the police officers crawled along the point, then got up and walked back to the path. Presumably they would look for any sign of what had caused Allison to fall.

“I don’t get it,” Stevie finally said.

“I’m not sure what there is to get.”

“You don’t understand what I saw at her house,” Stevie replied. “Allison was precise. She made Janelle look disorganized. Everything exactly in the right place. Schedules followed to the minute. It was part of her coping mechanism to deal with her sister’s death. She ran that path at the exact same time every day. I went with her. She knew every bump on the ground. I stood on the point with her. She warned me about how it tapered.”

“It’s still a steep edge. People can fall off steep edges.”





“No,” she said firmly. “It wasn’t an accident.”


“You never think it’s an accident.”

It was true that there had been several “accidents” at Ellingham Academy that Stevie didn’t think were accidents. The thing was—she’d been right about those.

She was right now.

Stevie watched a blue dragonfly buzz the surface of the pond. The water was still, and though covered in a thin green algae haze, it managed to reflect the sky in patches and was somehow more beautiful for what marred it. If she didn’t see the police working on the rocks, she would never have believed that anything could happen here.

Carson called several times, and Stevie pushed them all to voicemail. She leaned back in the canoe and tried to understand how, somewhere between the puffy clouds above and their reflections below, Allison Abbott had ceased to exist.





20



THE REST OF THE DAY THAT ALLISON DIED SLIPPED PAST IN A STRANGE haze. Stevie went through the motions at the art pavilion, her brain churning. By dinner, she was tired from her circular thinking. She sat, her untouched food in front of her, repeating the story to Nate and Janelle for what had to have been the fifteenth time.

“From everything you’re saying, it really sounds like she fell,” Janelle said. “You know, most car accidents happen on roads people know the best. People go into autopilot and feel like they don’t have to pay as much attention. She could have been preoccupied.”

“No,” Stevie said again. “Something’s not right.”

“Did anything seem off about her when you gave her the list?” Janelle asked.

“No. She was happy to get it.”

She could tell from their expressions that, like David, they knew Stevie was quick to say that something was not an accident. They also knew better than to voice this in the





state Stevie was in. She walked back to their cabin, feeling lightheaded and sleepy. She called David.

“Hey,” she said.

“You sound weird.”

“Just tired,” she said.