Page 18 of What Lies in the Woods

He scrubbed a hand over his chin. “Look. I know you don’t do interviews, and I understand why. When I saw you here I was hoping that face-to-face, I could charm you. Obviously, I was wrong. But I really need this. You and your friends are the heart of this story. You’re the part of it that isn’t about reveling in evil. If none of you speak up, the story is all about Stahl. The victims get lost. And I don’t want that.”

“He had other victims,” I pointed out. “No one talks about them, you know. Six young women. Six. And few people can even name them—even the people who know every detail of his MO and can recite my entire biography. If you want to do Stahl’s victims justice, you should be focusing on the girls who didn’t get away.”

“Lia Kemp, Tori Martin, Maria Luiselli, Hannah Faber, Ashlynn Raybourn, and Rosario Rivera,” Schreiber said, leaning forward intently. “Lia was the youngest. She was sixteen, a runaway. She was asex worker; Stahl apparently picked her up at a truck stop. No one ever reported her missing, and she wasn’t identified for three years after her body was found by hikers. Maria was the oldest—thirty-five. She had three kids. She’d struggled with drug addiction but was clean when it’s believed that she met Stahl while hitching home from work. Her shift ended after the buses stopped. She’d walk the four miles or she’d hitch a ride when she was lucky. She knew it was dangerous. She carried a knife in her purse, but it didn’t save her. I can keep going.”

I sat back in my seat, mouth dry. I hadn’t even known all of that. I had never been able to bring myself to read about Stahl. I couldn’t even have recited their names like he did. And I’d never heard anyone talk about them like that—like he wasn’t just cataloging facts. Like they mattered to him.

“Stahl never faced justice for what he did to those women,” Schreiber went on. His voice was rough, and he looked into my eyes as if searching for something. “There wasn’t enough evidence to link him to a single one of those murders. Without you, he isn’t arrested. He doesn’t go to trial. He doesn’t spend the rest of his life behind bars. Without you, more girls die. I’ve done the work, Ms. Cunningham, but without you, there’s no ending to this story.”

“It doesn’t feel like an ending,” I said. I stared at the blinking light on the digital recorder, imagining my voice played back. Imagining the people who would hear it, hungry for narrative, the sense of story to make random violence make sense. “You want to know what I feel, hearing he’s dead? I feel numb. I feel relieved, because he won’t ever get the chance to kill me, like he promised to if he ever got out. And I feel guilty.”

“Guilty?” he repeated, surprised.

I shouldn’t have told him that. Too late now. “A man died in prison because of my testimony. It’s a lot to put on a child. I know he was a horrible person. If anyone deserved it, he did. But it happened because of me, and that’s more power than I ever wanted to have. It shouldn’t have been up to me.”

“Not just you. Cassidy was the one who first identified Stahl, while you were unconscious,” he said.

“You really have done your homework.” I folded my hands on top of my laptop. I was talking too much. I needed to get my answers and shut him down. “What did Olivia say to you?”

He considered. “Not a lot. She said that she was interested in talking to me, but there were some things that she needed to deal with first. It’s funny—she told me something similar, about the victims. That what I was doing was good, because the dead shouldn’t be forgotten.”

We owe it to her.“That’s all?”

“Pretty much,” he confirmed. “But she wanted to check in with you and Cassidy first—she preferred to have your blessing.”

Preferred. Not needed. She was going to tell, with or without us.

This is a good thing,I thought. Weshouldcome clean. With Stahl dead, the only thing keeping us silent was shame and selfishness. Liv was the only one brave enough to admit that.

“Well, then,” I said. “We’re done. Cheers.” I lifted my bottle to him.

“I’ve got more questions.”

“But I don’t,” I replied with a shrug. “Sorry.”

“One more,” he pressed. “And then I promise I’ll leave you alone.”

I sighed and swigged my beer. The hops made my nose itch. “Fine. One more.”

Schreiber gave me a considering look, his finger tapping on the table. “Stahl’s youngest known victim was sixteen. He targeted women who were alone and lured his victims into his truck under false pretenses. He transported them in his truck to the location where he assaulted and killed them.”

“I know all this. I don’t want to hear it,” I said, my skin crawling, but he didn’t stop.

“He sexually assaulted them before stabbing them to death. On four of the bodies there was evidence of restraints being used; decomposition made it impossible to tell in the other two cases.”

“What is your point?” I asked, feeling sick. I couldn’t hear about thedetails. I didn’t want to imagine what it had been like for those women. There was enough horror in my head already.

“You were eleven years old. You were with friends. You weren’t near the road; you were in the forest. You were stabbed, but you weren’t assaulted, and you weren’t restrained,” he said. “There was no physical evidence linking Stahl to the attack. Your testimony, and your friends’, was all that the prosecution had to go on.”

“Is there a question in all of this?” I asked, keeping my voice steely as fear flashed through me. The questions had been asked a hundred times before, of course, but they were always questions aboutStahl. Why had he changed his pattern? What had he been doing in Chester?

“Here’s my question: Are you sure it was Stahl who attacked you?” he said. His voice was gentle, understanding.

“He was convicted, wasn’t he?” I shot back. He was convicted. Liv and Cass had seen him. The police weresure.

“That’s not an answer.”

I sat back, my palms braced against the table. “We’re done here.”

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