“What’s that?” He leaned in to look at her book. “Is that guy hanging?”
Stevie tried to close the book, but Lucas had his hand on the page.
“Why is that guy hanging? What is this?”
“Research,” she said.
“For what?”
Stevie looked around for Janelle to help her, but Janelle was busy demonstrating proper sand-in-bottle technique to some kids. Some would have called this “doing her job,” but to Stevie, this was abandonment.
“Have you read The Moonbright Cycles?” Lucas asked.
Stevie had read Nate’s book right before they started Ellingham. Her tastes ran toward true crime, and fictional crime, and fictional crime based on true crime, so an eight-hundred-page book about monsters that lived in caves and dragons and swords was not really in her wheelhouse. She’d thought it was fine. But mostly she cared because she loved Nate, and it seemed like a lot of work to write a book. She wouldn’t have been able to do it.
“Uh . . . uh-huh?”
“Don’t you think Moonbright should have stayed in Solarium? It was stupid to leave. He could have fought Marlak there.”
Nothing this child was saying corresponded to real words or ideas in her head.
“He doesn’t like suggestions,” Lucas said.
“That’s okay. He doesn’t like writing either.”
A strange look passed over Lucas’s face.
“He will,” he said, before drifting off to the opposite
corner of the pavilion to fill his sand bottle. When he was gone, Nate approached Stevie and sat down.
“I think Lucas is going to Misery your ass,” Stevie said. “Sorry about your ankles.”
“I swear to god that kid has been watching me in my sleep,” Nate said, wrapping his arms around himself. He noted the book that Stevie had in front of her. “That’s terrifying,” he said, pulling it toward him and opening it up. He flipped through it, asking no questions about why Stevie was examining miniature scenes of horrible deaths.
“I’ve got to figure out something to do,” she said. “About Allison.”
“What’s there to do, though?”
“This case, this place—it’s too much, and at the same time, it feels like it all fits together. Like when you do a puzzle and you first open the box and it’s just a pile of random pieces, then as you go, they get easier to snap together. I feel it, but I’m not there yet. I feel how Allison’s death fits in. I feel that it wasn’t an accident. I feel like I’ve even seen how it happened, like I already know, but it’s in some part of my brain I can’t get to? Do you know what I mean?”
Nate nodded.
“Like when I write. I kind of know what it is I want to do, and I can’t write for so long because it feels out of reach and it drives me crazy, but when I see it I can . . .”
She tuned out for a moment, focusing on something happening over his shoulder. He turned to see what she was looking at. Nicole was striding toward them.
“Shit,” Stevie said. “I didn’t even do anything wrong this time.”
She put the Nutshell Studies book on her lap under the table. Nicole came over, but she wasn’t looking at Stevie.
“Fisher,” she said. “Josh Whitley, the other counselor, has arrived. You can move your things over to the treehouse now.”
Nate’s eyes grew wide.
“I can help you,” Stevie said. “Janelle’s got this.”