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IN MANY OF THE MURDER MYSTERIES STEVIE LOVED, THE DETECTIVE would gather the suspects in a room, then explain who didn’t do it before getting to who did. She never really understood why suspects would want to go to something like that, except maybe because these books took place in the past, and there wasn’t that much to do then. Today, she got it. People would come because everyone wants to know the answer—especially in a place like a small town, where everyone knows everyone, and murder had cast a shadow for decades.
A murder reveal is worth skipping Netflix for.
In this case, it barely took any effort. All Stevie had to do was go on Nextdoor and put up a post in the Barlow Corners community page. It read: FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED IN 1978. TONIGHT, 8:30 p.m. She listed the address of Carson’s barn. For good measure, she had Carson go to town and let it be known in the right places that something was going down. The machinery of Barlow Corners did the rest. At eight thirty that night, the unreal orange walls of the Bounce House seemed to thrum as a small crowd of Barlow Corners
residents came in and took their places on the sea of beanbags. It was a good turnout, more than she needed. The key people had come: Paul Penhale, Susan Marks, Patty Horne, Shawn Greenvale, and Sergeant Graves. （The latter had gotten the courtesy of a phone call.）
Stevie had spent most of the day working on a borrowed laptop, revising Carson’s slideshow. It was loaded up and ready to go. There was only one more piece she needed, and she waited, pacing in the corner of the room. Finally, David came through the barn door and stepped up to her.
“It’s done,” he said. “They’re bringing it in through the back door.”
“Okay,” she said, mostly to herself. “It’s time.”
Carson and some of his crew had set up their cameras and equipment around the barn. Stevie nodded to him, and he dimmed the lights.
Stevie stepped up in front of the group. There were about thirty people. Plenty for her purposes, and not enough to be terrifying. Nerve-wracking, though, for sure.
Nate and Janelle came in quietly and slid along the wall to sit closer to the front. Stevie swallowed hard and began speaking.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “As you know, we came here to make a podcast about the Box in the Woods case, in the hopes of telling the story and trying to help with closure. But what I want to talk to you about tonight is the story a town tells about itself.”
She hit the clicker, and the picture of the Bicentennial
dedication of the John Barlow statue appeared on the screen, in all its seventies polyester glory.
“Here are two moments of Barlow Corners’ fame in one picture,” she said. “In 1976, the town built a statue to the town founder, a Revolutionary War hero named John Barlow. His big act of heroism, as it turns out, was stealing some British horses and delaying a battle for a few hours. And he owned enslaved persons. Not very heroic. But people build myths, right? Tell the story enough times and it becomes true. John Barlow must be a hero—he has a statue. And then, this picture is taken, because doesn’t this look like the perfect all-American town, building a statue of a Revolutionary War hero? Another story to put on top of the first story. But something was wrong in Barlow Corners.”
She scanned the room.
“People got away with things here,” she went on. “And then there was a new, terrible story to add, almost like an urban legend or a slasher movie. Four camp counselors went into the woods to do drugs . . . and none came out alive. At first the police thought it was about drugs, because why wouldn’t it be? But that makes no sense. It was a small amount of pot, and it was left at the scene. The scene looked like the killings of the Woodsman, but the scene was also wrong in critical ways, and the DNA found on Eric’s shirt didn’t match the Woodsman’s profile. Most people discount those theories now. But who could it be? There was suspicion in town, because there were people who might have had good reason to want Todd Cooper dead. Todd Cooper had run down