The Box in the Woods (Truly Devious #4)(88)

I need to get out of Barlow Corners. This place is too small.

JULY 5, 1978

My library books came in today. Mrs. Wilde called over to the camp to let me know. I feel embarrassed now that I had books about Nazis sent to our library, but since I ordered them, I rode my bike over to town while the kids were in group free time and Katie was watching them. I was on my way out holding them and I ran into Mr. Horne. He was on his way into the library. I didn’t have them in a bag—I was going to put them in my bike basket. He could see the titles.

He said, “That’s some serious summer reading.”

I said, “It’s for Columbia. They make us do some reading over the summer before we come. Some literature, some history.”





He said wow or something like that, and he was being really normal, but my heart was going fast. And there was . . . I don’t know? Something in his expression?

I don’t know why I did this. I said, “Did you have to do that for Harvard too?”

He said he couldn’t remember. Maybe. It was too long ago.

Then he said, “How did you know I went to Harvard?”

I said, “Patty told me.”

The trouble was, I hesitated because it took me a second to think of it, because my brain froze. He looked at me for a long second and smiled. Then he said goodbye and good to see you, have fun at camp, and went on doing what he was doing.

This whole thing is making me so paranoid, and the books weren’t going to help with that. So I went back to the library and told Mrs. Wilde that they weren’t what I needed after all and returned them. I rode back to camp really fast.

Mr. Horne is not a Nazi.

I should try to relax a bit, take a week or so and try to really enjoy myself. Really enjoy myself. I’ve done all this hard work. Why can’t I have fun like everyone else?





I’m going out to the woods with them tomorrow to hang out. I know what that means. He picks up the grass out there. But they also have fun.


I’m doing it. I need to break some rules for once, or I feel like I’m going to pop. This is my summer to live.

Do you hear me, Sabrina Abbott? This is your summer to LIVE!

So that’s what I’m going to do.





29



“THAT’S THE LAST ENTRY,” STEVIE SAID, GENTLY CLOSING THE BOOK.

For almost an hour, she had read from the diary. Her throat was dry and her voice was starting to crack a bit. Janelle had seen this and come over with a can of sparkling water. Stevie didn’t like sparkling water, but she guzzled it and then had to turn her head and try to conceal the massive belch this caused. She was not successful.

Poirot never burped after he identified the murderer.

Patty Horne had turned the color of five-day-old turkey. She was utterly still, her head cocked slightly to the left, and something almost like a queasy smile spread across her mouth. The rest of the assembled were silent.

Stevie glanced over at Shawn Greenvale, who sat with his chin tucked to his chest. None of that could have been easy for him to hear, no matter how long ago it had happened. But he bore it, like he had stayed strong for Paul. They may have broken up, but clearly Sabrina had been with Shawn because he was a fundamentally good guy. It just hadn’t worked out.

“So,” Stevie said, feeling another froggy burp rising in her





throat and pushing it down painfully, “let’s start with this question: Who is Wendel Rolf, and what happened to him after he arrived at your house that day? I needed some help getting the answer. . . .”

She reached over to the laptop and switched the windows. An image projected onto the screen—a person with large glasses and straight, long hair.

“Hi,” Stevie said. “Tell everyone what you found out.”

“Hey,” Germaine said. “I’m Germaine Batt from The Batt Report.”

Germaine was a classmate of Stevie’s from Ellingham who ran her own online news channel. She and Stevie had an unusual, somewhat mercenary relationship, and this favor was going to have to be repaid. It was worth it.

“Okay.” Germaine had no problem dispensing with all other formalities and diving in. “I started with Harvard, because that came up in the conversation you showed me. I got in touch with some people there this afternoon and they pulled some yearbooks for me. Wendel Rolf graduated in the class of 1940, along with Arnold Horne. I found enlistment records for both of them on a genealogy website. Wendel Rolf was honorably discharged in 1946, and Arnold Horne in 1947. So far, so normal. But then, everything about Wendel Rolf just—goes away. I had to go through local paper archives and Facebook all day, but I found a relative of his. I pretended I was part of a Harvard alumni research thing, so they talked to me. Wendel Rolf went away for a weekend fishing trip in 1978. He never came back. He was declared dead in 1983. No





one knows if he had an accident or not—but it sounds like his family thought he may have taken his own life and wanted to spare them somehow and make sure they got the life insurance money. You can find out a lot if you say you’re from Harvard.”

“So,” Stevie said, “Wendel Rolf sees his old classmate and army buddy Arnold Horne’s picture in a magazine. It’s definitely him. His name is in the caption. He decides to pay his friend a visit. It seems pretty clear that he realizes right away that something is off—that this isn’t Arnold Horne. In the conversation Sabrina overheard, he mentions another man—a von Hessen.”