What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

Author:Kate Alice Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Back at the motel, I stood under the anemic shower, heat turned hot enough to blister. The last shreds of hope I’d had that Stahl was my monster after all had been torn away with Cass’s story. My lie had haunted me all this time, but I’d had Liv and Cass as witnesses to the truth. I’d always been able to hold on to that, and believe that no matter what I’d done, the outcome had been … if not just, then correct.

But now that was gone. It wasn’t just Cass’s testimony that had been contaminated—her memories couldn’t be trusted, either, any more than mine could. We’d ruled out any reason for Stahl to be there. And then there was the fact that his son seemed to have proof he hadn’t been. Or if not proof, something that made him certain.

His son. God. I’d been doing my best not to think about him. I could believe Stahl was a wicked man, whether he was in those woods or not. But his son had done nothing to me, and I’d torn his life to tatters.

I shut off the water and toweled myself off, and didn’t feel clean at all.

I’d kept the letter. Maybe I should have gotten rid of it. Burned it, shredded it. But I’d left it in the bottom of my bag instead, and after I’d pulled on fresh clothes I pulled it out. It was covered in muddy shoe prints, the text nearly illegible, but I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. The words had seared themselves in my mind.

I am trying to understand.

If Ethan was right, Stahl was a murderer. He’d died where he belonged, and whatever my sins, I hadn’t caged an innocent man.

But was he right?

I’d worked hard to avoid learning too much about Stahl’s crimes, my stubborn way of retaining control—some sense of identity beyond what he’d done to me. Now I pulled up article after article, waded through forum threads and blogs with black backgrounds and neon text. I stared at photographs of dead and mutilated women, their swollen faces, the wounds that, unlike mine, had never closed. I examined time lines and transcripts, and piece by piece I mapped the holes that had been there all along, that people before me had found and argued over. Holes that hadn’t mattered, because Stahl wasn’t in prison because of these dead, discarded women. He was there because of me.

I found myself staring at a photograph of a single-story home. The photo was black-and-white, pulled from a newspaper. Uniformed police officers trooped in and out of the front door, carrying boxes, while a woman and a boy—twelve, maybe thirteen—stood off to the side, watching. Her hand was on his shoulder; he stared at the camera. The low quality made his face indistinct, but those eyes seemed to bore through me.

“Police raid Stahl’s home while his wife and son look on,” the caption read. So that was AJ Stahl, watching his world fall apart.

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