Page 21 of The Staircase in the Woods

He hadn’t even realized he was doing it.Shit shit shit.He tucked them back under his armpits. “No.”

“Okay.” Doore kept looking over her files. “So. You all…had a powwow, then realized Matty had not come home like you thought, and then you—”

“We called the police. Right then and there. We called you. We did what we were s’posed to do. We, we—we did the right thing.”

He heard the defensiveness in his voice. It made him cringe inside.She’s going to smell your weakness, like a wolf sniffing out sickness in the herd. Owen knew that if any of them were weak, it was him. He was scared out of his mind. Even Nick had said it—If any one of us is going to break, it’s Owen.

A real vote of confidence there.

But Nick wasn’t wrong, was he?

Owen told himself,I won’t break, I won’t break, I won’t break.

He just had to hold the line.

He just had to tell their story. The story they’d rehearsed again and again and again. The one they’d agreed was the best one to tell.

Matty left the campsite Friday night after we went to bed.

Matty took his stuff.

Matty was gone when we woke up.

The end.

“We found his stuff,” Doore said matter-of-factly.

Owen’s heart did a small lift in his chest. The cops weresupposedto find his stuff. It was a part of it—part of the whole plan. Owen had to concentrate real hard not to say anything here that would spoil the fact he knew where they’d found it.

“Oh?” he asked, doing his very best acting. He was never on stage during any of his school’s theatrical productions, but rather on the tech crew with all the other geeks and goths and all-purpose weirdos. But he put on his very best cocky and confident Matty Shiffman impression—Matty, who was in every production, usually in a big role. “Where was it? His, uh, his stuff, I mean.”

Doore sucked air between her teeth. “Bottom of one of the biggest cliffs up at Highchair Rocks—north side, far end of the Oswald Lambert Loop trail, toward the Vista Point there. His backpack andtent were down there, amongst some pretty sharp rocks, let me tell you.”

“Oh, god,” Owen said, feigning horror. Not sure if he was underselling it or overselling it or just sounding super fakey. “He—he must’ve wandered out at night, and I guess he—I guess he fell.”

“You’d think. But there was no body to be found, Owen.”

“Maybe—maybe he was able to crawl somewhere, or even walk—”

“Odd, though, that there’d be no blood, no hair, no torn clothing, nothing. Certainly no footprints, either.”

“I don’t understand—so he just threw his bag and tent over a cliff?”

Doore shrugged. “Itissomething that someone on drugs might do.”

Owen flinched at that.

She continued her line of thinking:

“You’re teens. Just kids in a boring-ass nowhere town, nowhere state, nowhere part of the country. And I know, I know, you all said there was no drug use up there, but—come on, Owen. We asked around, it’s what we do, you know, as police officers, and it seems your group had at least a bit of a reputation for being drug users—and it didn’t take much to pressure a local dealer, Eddie Vidich—the one who lives in the trailer park off Stump Road?—into giving up the fact you bunch seem to have procured a variety of illicit substances from him before going into the woods that Friday night.” She pulled up the piece of paper and gave it a long look. “Marijuana and LSD.”

“I—I don’t do drugs, just drink sometimes—”

Shit. His middle cinched up. He just did it. He just broke. Not completely, not utterly, no, but—

“So youweredrinking up there.”

“I—”

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