Page 55 of What Lies in the Woods

“Do you know anyone who might have?”

He paused. “Oscar,” he said.

“Yeah, I was kind of afraid that was what you were going to say,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “What was their relationship like?”

“In one word? Messy,” he said. “Oscar was always magnetic to womenin a way I didn’t understand. He had this way of making you work hard to impress him, so that when he did throw a scrap of approval your way it was addictive. The more he ignored girls, the more they seemed to fling themselves at him.”

“And Jessi was like that?”

He grunted. “The opposite. She was the one who wasn’t impressed. And he was the one who got obsessed. I never saw Oscar fall for someone until Jessi. Or after, either.”

“Were they ever actually together?” I asked, trying to imagine Oscar in love. But then, I’d never known the side of him that he showed everyone else. From the beginning, he’d taken one look at me and realized there was no need to charm me. I was no one. I was alone. He didn’t need to bother with masks.

“I wouldn’t say together, exactly. Sex, yes; relationship, not so much. But something was going on there,” Cody told me. “Things changed between them all of a sudden a little while before she left, but Oscar didn’t talk about it. And we weren’t exactly the kind of guys who had a lot of heart-to-hearts about our love lives.”

“Right,” I said. I scratched at an itch on my jaw. I’d been hoping Cody would tell me that Oscar barely knew Jessi. That there was no reason to talk to him. But it sounded like he was right in the middle of everything. “Do you remember when she actually left town?” I asked Cody.

“I don’t remember exactly. Late August, I think? Definitely the end of the summer. She was only in town three months or so.”

“Thank you. That helps,” I said. It was a start, at least.

“You really think Stahl might have killed her?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But it looks like a possibility.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you all right, Naomi?”

I started to answer automatically. But in this tiny slice of shared reality, I didn’t want to lie to him. “I keep feeling like I’m going to wake up and realize you never found me,” I said.

“I have that nightmare, too,” he said. “But I did find you. You’realive, and you’re safe, and you don’t need to go chasing Stahl’s ghost. Focus on living.”

“Thanks, Cody,” I said.

“Take care of yourself, Naomi.”

We said our goodbyes. I hung up and sat with the phone cradled in my lap, letting my awareness seep slowly outward again.

A few minutes later, I walked to Ethan’s door. He opened it before I even knocked and beckoned me in.

“Get anything?” he asked. He had files pulled up on his computer—notes on Stahl, it looked like, and a map of the peninsula with dates and names scrawled on it—possible missing victims, maybe.

“A bit,” I said. “He didn’t know she was missing. He said she took off suddenly, but it wasn’t surprising.”

“And when was that?”

“Late August,” I said.

He frowned. “You’re sure?”

“He was pretty sure. Why?”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Because if Jessi Walker was alive and well in August, there’s no way Stahl killed her. His mother had a stroke in late July. He spent two months on the East Coast to help her while she recovered.”

“That can’t be right,” I said. “Maybe Cody got the dates wrong.”

“Or Stahl had nothing to do with Jessi’s death,” Ethan said.

I sat heavily on the bed, cupping my head in my hands. If Stahl hadn’t killed Jessi, he wouldn’t have gone out to the woods to visit the body. He would have had no reason at all to be in Chester, to be off the trail and happen to stumble into me. And no reason to kill a random little girl eating a peanut butter sandwich who hadn’t even seen him.

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