The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(70)

It rained all that afternoon and night, more persistently than it had at any other point during their time at the camp. Things shifted entirely to indoor mode, which was clammy and close. Aside from dinner, all the other activities were off, and the campers retreated to any covered space to stare into their tablets and phones until they went cross-eyed.

Then, sometime in the evening, there was an almighty crack as a bolt of lightning fell close by. The kids screamed as one, at first out of fear, and then because screaming was awesome. In the next minute, the power was out, and it stayed that way all night. There were some generators, but not in the cabins. Stevie had not thought to charge her devices, and so everything she owned ran out of juice within the first hour, cutting off any communication with David on the other side of the lake.

That night, it rained with a kind of biblical ferocity,





pounding the cabin roof and flicking in through the screened windows, misting Stevie’s face and sheets. She occasionally woke to mighty flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder that definitely landed somewhere not too far away. Janelle slept through it, her earbuds snugly in place. Many people might have enjoyed the sound and found it peaceful, maybe even Stevie under the right conditions.

These were not the right conditions.

She stood at the window a long time, then she went out onto the little porch of the cabin and watched the rain fall in the dark. She considered walking over to the campsite, but she had enough self-preservation to know that a walk through the dark murder woods in this kind of storm was not a good idea. So she paced the few feet of the porch so as not to wake Janelle. Sometime before dawn, her body wearied and she went inside and lay on top of the sheets. The next thing she knew, the awful, familiar crackle blasted her away.

“Good morning, Sunny Pines! Happy Fourth of July!”

From the bed, Stevie could see the sky through the screen window. It was big and blue, as if to say, “What? I didn’t do anything last night. What are you even talking about?” Janelle’s bed was empty—she had already greeted the day and gone off for a shower. Stevie had had the forethought to plug everything in before she finally went to sleep, and her phone and tablet had taken long, refreshing drinks of electricity during the night and were prepared for duty. She immediately checked for texts from David. There were none.

She wasted no time. The white T-shirt from yesterday





had a long, angry black slash on the front, but she pulled it on anyway. There was no time to wait for Janelle to tell her where she was going, or even to text. She had to move, now, toward David. She half ran through the camp, across the path, and over to the public side of the lake.

Stevie had heard of this thing called forest bathing, where you went out into the woods or the wild and simply breathed it all in, made contact with nature. It was supposed to be good for you. This was the kind of thing she would have doubted before, but this morning, the woods did have a calming effect. That deep smell of leaves and soil after a rain, the cooling effect of morning shade—it soothed her and made her think more clearly. So they fought. They’d fought before. Arguments had punctuated their entire relationship. It would be okay. They would talk it out. They would kiss it out. It would be one of those makeup scenes she always heard about. It would be fine, except for one small problem:

When she reached the place his tent had been, she found that he was gone.





23



SPIDERS HAD IT MADE. THIS ONE, FOR INSTANCE. ALL DAY NOW, SHE (Stevie was sure she was a she even though she was a daddy longlegs) had been chilling in this corner under the window bench, watching over a loose weave of webbing, waiting for a snack to show up. It looked like a good life under there, shooting your own house out of your butt, food flying over to you, everybody basically leaving you alone.

“You have to stop that,” Nate said.

“Stop what?”

Stevie’s voice was flattened by her position on the floor, her face tilted toward the wall.

“Whatever it is you’re doing. You look like a Blair Witch remake.”

She had been here for almost an hour. Maybe more. Maybe even a lot more. Who even knew? She was on Spider Time now.

When she’d left David’s campsite, she walked around the lake for a while, her thoughts unmoored. She must have arrived back at camp sometime after lunch, then come right





up here to the treehouse, where Nate had been on his laptop, alone and content. Then she got down on the floor and started thinking about the spiders. That had been her day so far.

Nate poked her with the toe of his sneaker.

“This is a David thing,” he said. “Obviously.”

She did not reply.

“Romance seems fun,” he added.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not. I don’t know what happened. I don’t even want to know. But I know you can’t do whatever the hell this is. Don’t you have things to do?”

“Janelle’s got it. She doesn’t need me.”

“I don’t mean Janelle.” He crossed around and sat on the bare window seat and looked down at her.

“I screwed everything up. I ruined everything.”

Nate banged his head against the screen behind him, then jerked forward when it proved to be looser than he imagined.

“Stevie.” He sounded annoyed enough that she pulled her chin off the floor, then gradually pulled herself up. She was dizzy from the extended period of time she’d spent staring at nothing. She looked down at herself, at the white T-shirt that had been so pristine the day before. The shirt was still as rectangular, but it was no longer clean or stiff; it had melted into a bag of damp wrinkles, slashed all over with grime. The marks from Arrowhead Point were really pronounced, almost black. She tried to rub them away, but they didn’t budge. Whatever