The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(66)

“What were you saying about school?” she said.

A strange half smile spread across David’s lips.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just making conversation.”





When David dropped Stevie back at camp, the day was well underway, and it was punishingly hot. By the time she walked from the parking lot to the art pavilion, she was drenched in sweat. Janelle was holding court over a group of nine-year-olds who were filling bottles with colored sand under her watchful gaze. Stevie made her way around the room, trying to figure out how to assist, but there wasn’t much to explain about putting sand in bottles. So she planted herself at an empty table and pulled out her phone to listen to the recording she had made of the conversation with Susan. She began to jot the important points down.


- nothing special about night before

- Paul and Shawn in lake house playing Stairway to Heaven

- a scream

- ran, met Magda McMurphy (Magda and Susan married)

- gathered everyone in dining pavilion

- found three more missing

- Patty Horne knew location

- campers sent home

- went to football field on the night of the vigil, saw Patty Horne crying, saw light of the crash up the road

- doesn’t feel that it was a drug deal or the Woodsman but can’t explain why





Once she had gone over the recording, she stared at the list, unsure what to do next. She picked at a torn cuticle. “Stairway to Heaven.” She’d heard of the song, but she had no idea how it went. She sometimes tried to listen to things that would evoke the time or place of the thing she wanted to understand. Sometimes, at Ellingham, she listened to thirties music to try to get into the mindset of what it was like back when Albert and Iris had first moved to the mountain. Maybe the music would help her now. She found Led Zeppelin online, then found the song and hit play.


It started off as a plinky-plonky guitar song with a flute, gradually morphing into something more hard rocking. It had cryptic lyrics about magic staircases and laughing forests. This seemed like music for people who thought they might be wizards.

What were the seventies even about? Was it all smoking and listening to this kind of stuff and riding around in huge cars without wearing seat belts? This was the song everyone liked?

The song ground on:

And as we wind on down the road



Our shadows taller than our soul



There walks a lady we all know



But there was something, something, something in what Susan had said. The music summoned it out of hiding and





Stevie saw its shadow flit across her thoughts. What the hell was it? Stevie ran down her list of notes again, reading them under her breath, letting them sink into her subconscious. Paul, Shawn, Magda, Patty, Patty . . .

Only one person’s name came up twice: Patty Horne. But Patty had the most ironclad of all alibis—someone literally had seen her all night long. Plus, she had absolutely no reason to kill her friends. Todd, Eric, and Diane were her people, like Nate and Vi and Janelle were Stevie’s people. But what about Greg Dempsey, who died later that week in a bright flash of light and a wall of rock and trees?

Another dead bike rider in Barlow Corners.

An idea took shape.

As Patty had said, if they hadn’t been busted in a makeup nookie session, they most likely would have been victims as well. Or perhaps the killer (or killers) wouldn’t have been able to attack a group of that size. Four people—that would have been hard enough. But six? What if you had wanted to kill someone in that group? And you knew that instead of six people, there would only have been four out there that night because Patty and Greg were under lock and key. Maybe you saw an opportunity.

But again, why? Why Sabrina, Diane, Todd, and Eric?

She flicked through the photos again, landing on Todd’s. She put her earbuds in and listened to the part of the recording where Susan talked about Todd:

“I never like to say kids are rotten, but . . . Todd Cooper, he was a rotten kid. Charming. Polite to your face, always. . . . He was guilty as sin, and everyone knew it. That was the shame of our town. . . .”





Todd Cooper had killed Michael Penhale, and everyone in town knew it. Out of the four of them, he was the only one who really made any sense as a target. The Penhale family was in the clear, and Paul Penhale had been seen in the lake house with Shawn. Susan had confirmed it. Even if Shawn and Paul wanted to team up to murder people they thought had wronged them, there seemed little chance that the woman she’d just met would have had any part in that.

But that didn’t mean that the Penhales were the only people in town who might want Todd Cooper to get what he had coming to him and wouldn’t be heartbroken to take out a few others along the way. Almost everyone noted that Todd was a dangerous driver.

Maybe Michael Penhale hadn’t been the first? Maybe someone else, someone walking along the side of the road—a hitchhiker? A drifter? Someone from the public camp? And maybe the others had all been there when it happened. Maybe that’s why they all had to die. . . .

She didn’t know. It all went around and around in her head. She saw, but she did not observe.

She looked around the art pavilion. No one needed her. She pulled out the Nutshell Studies book and flipped through until something spoke to her. The scenes all had simple names: Dark Bathroom, Attic, Striped Bedroom. . . . That was part of the genius of Frances: she did not glamorize.