The Woods

“This is my life we’re talking about.”

I flinched when she said that.

“Save us. Please.”

“By lying?”

“It was a loan. He just didn’t have time to tell you.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head. “He stole from a charity. He stole from your sister’s charity.”

“Not my sister’s,” she said. “Yours.”

I let that one go. “I wish I could help, Greta.”

“You’re turning your back on us?”

“I’m not turning my back. But I can’t lie for you.”

She just stared at me. The angel was gone. “I would do it for you. You know that.”

I said nothing.

“You’ve failed everyone in your life,” Greta said. “You didn’t look out for your sister at that camp. And in the end, when my sister was suffering the most…” She stopped.

The room temperature dialed down ten degrees. That sleeping snake in my belly woke up and started to slither.

I met her eye. “Say it. Go ahead, say it.”

“JaneCare wasn’t about Jane. It was about you. It was about your guilt. My sister was dying. She was in pain. I was there, at her deathbed. And you weren’t.”

The unending suffering. Days turned to weeks, weeks to months. I was there. I watched it all. Most of it anyway. I watched the woman I adored, my tower of strength, wither away. I watched the light dim from her eyes. I smelled death on her, on the woman who smelled of lilacs when I had made love to her outside on a rainy afternoon. And toward the end, I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t watch the final light go out. I cracked. The worst moment of my life. I cracked and ran and my Jane died without me. Greta was right. I had failed to stay on watch. Again. I will never get over it—and the guilt did indeed drive me to start up JaneCare.

Greta knew what I’d done, of course. As she just pointed out, she alone was there in the end. But we’d never talked about it. Not once had she thrown my greatest shame in my face. I always wanted to know if Jane asked for me in the end. If she knew that I wasn’t there. But I never have. I thought about asking now, but what difference would it make? What answer would satisfy me? What answer did I deserve to hear?

Greta stood. “You won’t help us?”

“I’ll help. I won’t lie.”

“If it could save Jane, would you lie?”

I said nothing.

“If lying would have saved Jane’s life—if lying would bring back your sister—would you do it?”

“That’s a hell of a hypothetical.”

“No, it’s not. Because this is my life we’re talking about. You won’t lie to save it. And that’s pretty typical of you, Cope. You’re willing to do anything for the dead. It’s the living you’re not so good with.”

CHAPTER 26

MUSE HAD FAXED ME A THREE-PAGE SUMMARY ON WAYNE Steubens.

Count on Muse. She didn’t send me the entire file. She had read it herself and given me the main points. Most of it I knew. I remember that when Wayne was arrested, many wondered why he decided to kill campers. Did he have a bad experience at a summer camp? One psychiatrist explained that while Steubens hadn’t talked, he believed that he had been sexually molested at a summer camp during his childhood. Another psychiatrist, however, surmised that it was just the ease of the kill: Steubens had slaughtered his first four victims at Camp PLUS and gotten away with it. He associated that rush, that thrill, with summer camps and thus continued the pattern.

Wayne hadn’t worked at the other camps. That would have been too obvious, of course. But circumstances had been his undoing. A top FBI profiler named Geoff Bedford had nailed him that way. Wayne had been under moderate suspicion for those first four murders. By the time the boy was slaughtered in Indiana, Bedford started to look at anyone who could have been in all those spots at the same time. The most obvious place to start was with the counselors at the camp.

Including, I knew, me.

Originally Bedford found nothing in Indiana, the site of the second murder, but there had been an ATM withdrawal in Wayne Steubens’s name two towns away from the murder of the boy in Virginia. That was the big break. So Bedford did more serious digging. Wayne Steubens hadn’t made any ATM withdrawals in Indiana, but there was one in Everett, Pennsylvania, and another in Columbus, Ohio, in a pattern that suggested that he had driven his car from his home in New York out that way. He had no alibi and eventually they found a small motel owner near Muncie who positively identified him. Bedford dug some more and got a warrant.

They found souvenirs buried in Steubens’s yard.

There were no souvenirs from that first group of murders. But those, the theory went, were probably his first killings and he either had no time for souvenirs or didn’t think to collect them.

Wayne refused to talk. He claimed innocence. He said that he’d been set up.

They convicted him of the Virginia and Indiana murders. That was where the most evidence was. They didn’t have enough for the camp. And there were problems with that case. He had only used a knife. How had he managed to kill four of them? How had he gotten them into the woods? How had he disposed of two of the bodies? They could all be explained—he only had time to get rid of two bodies, he chased them deep in the woods—but the case wasn’t neat. With the murders in Indiana and Virginia, it was open and shut.

Lucy called at near midnight.

“How did it go with Jorge Perez?” she asked.

“You’re right. They’re lying. But he wouldn’t talk either.”

“So what’s the next step?”

“I meet with Wayne Steubens.”

“For real?”

“Yep.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

Silence.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah.”

“When he was first arrested, what did you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“Wayne was, what, twenty years old that summer?”

“Yes.”

“I was a counselor in the red cabin,” I said. “He was two down at the yellow. I saw him every day. We worked that basketball court for a week straight, just the two of us. And, yeah, I thought he was off. But a killer?”

“It’s not like there’s a tattoo or something. You work with criminals. You know that.”

“I guess. You knew him too, right?”

“I did.”

“What did you think?”