Stevie looked up at the trapeze hanging from the ceiling. Time to swing for the sky—or at least, swing for the windows.

“. . . except, that’s wrong. There weren’t four victims. And when you understand that, the whole story starts to make sense.”

A long silence followed.

“What?” Susan finally said.

She seemed to express the feeling of the assembled. Stevie had been hoping someone might say something like that, otherwise her pause was just weird.

“It wasn’t four victims,” Stevie reiterated. “It was six. One before the box in the woods, and one after. Those four counselors weren’t killed by some serial killer or because of a little pot. They were killed because one of them had seen something they weren’t supposed to see. This person knew something terrible had happened in Barlow Corners and tried to do something about it.”

“Sabrina,” Shawn said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but that person has to be Sabrina.”

“Sabrina,” Stevie repeated, nodding. “She was smart, she was persistent. And . . . she wrote it all down in her diary.”

“Wait,” Shawn said. “Are you saying . . . you have Sabrina’s diary? The one Allison was always looking for?”

The inside of Stevie’s cast began to itch furiously.

“I’m saying that I . . . we . . . found the diary,” Stevie said. “Someone didn’t want us to. Someone went after us, shot at us, and chased us right off the edge of Point 23 to try to get it from us. Because they knew Sabrina was the only witness.”

Stevie looked over at her friends. Nate begged her with his eyes to stop.

Stevie was not going to stop.

She turned her focus on one person in the room—someone she needed to maintain eye contact with.

“This person was right to worry about Sabrina,” Stevie continued. “And Allison. And me. They tried to shut us all up. But it didn’t work.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Stevie saw Nate sag. Janelle kept looking at Stevie, her eyes worried but curious. David, agent of chaos that he was, looked ready to ride with whatever lie was about to come out of Stevie’s mouth.

It was now or never.

Stevie slid her uninjured hand into her cast sling and withdrew the diary.

“Who wants to hear what Sabrina Abbott has to say?” she asked.

28

OVER THE COURSE OF THE AFTERNOON, STEVIE HAD GOTTEN VERY familiar with the contents of this little book. She had marked pages with sticky notes—dozens of them. Now it was time to read:

JANUARY 3, 1978

Welcome, 1978. Nice to meet you. Time to crack open this fresh new diary I got for Christmas. I like that this one has a plain red cover this time. I liked the Snoopy one from last year because I will always love Snoopy and nothing can stop that, but this one is more of what I’ve got in mind for the future.