“Then don’t,” Shawn said shortly. “Could you move back, please?”
Stevie stepped away. He closed the truck door and drove off. Stevie rubbed at her face, annoyed with herself. She should have waited, taken her time, gotten a proper introduction—not just run down the street yelling his name.
“I think he likes you,” David said. “It’s because you play coy.”
She groaned and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
“Was he important?” David asked.
She nodded. He reached over and took her wrists, gently peeling her hands from her face.
“Live and learn,” he said. “It’s fine.”
It wasn’t, but there was nothing she could do about it now. Whatever she had been thinking about Susan was long gone, and Shawn was now up the road. She was back in the moment, with David.
“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 . . .