“I had to go back to school with the guy I knew had run my brother down and gotten away with it,” he said. “I had to see him every day. I avoided him, and he avoided me. I was also dealing with the fact that I was a gay, closeted jock in the late 1970s, so I was trying to compensate and seem really . . . whatever straight and manly looked like then. It wasn’t an easy time, but we got through it. My parents were amazing people. My dad wanted justice. Fairness. He didn’t want revenge. He wasn’t that kind of person. He wanted people to do the right thing. He never stopped trying to get someone to look into it. When the local police let him down, he tried the state police. When the state police couldn’t help, he went to the local press. He talked to everyone who would listen. He would have kept going, but seven months later, Todd was dead.”

He lifted his hands gently as if to say, And that was that.

“You were at the camp that night,” Stevie said. “The night of the murders.”

“I was, like every other teenager in town. Everyone knew that group was going out that night. It was an open secret when Eric was going to get the weed. Back then, it was both illegal and everywhere. I bought off him. Everyone did. Every week he would come around and ask you what you wanted, and you’d give him a few bucks, and he went somewhere and picked up the stash.”

“Who would have known where that was?” Stevie asked.

“Everyone knew it was in the woods somewhere—the whole thing was kind of an open secret. The only part Eric really kept quiet was the exact spot it was hidden, to make sure it wasn’t stolen. I mean, he took Sabrina out there, and she wasn’t really in that group of people for very long. It was in all other respects a totally normal night. There were three lifeguards—Todd, Greg Dempsey, and Shawn Greenvale. Todd was out in the woods, Greg was on house arrest in one of the camp admin offices, so I went over to the lake house to hang out with Shawn. I would never have gone in with Todd there, or Greg, really. Shawn was learning guitar, and he was trying to learn how to play Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ just like every other kid in the seventies. Susan checked on us. Then I went back to my bunk. I think I read a book or something for a while, then I went to sleep. I remember waking up to someone screaming the next morning. That’s really all I know. Obviously, people looked at my family because of what happened to Michael, but we got lucky in one respect—our neighbors were over at our house all the time after Michael died, bringing us food, generally taking care of us and keeping us company. On the night of the murders, our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Atkins, were over for dinner and stayed to watch television. My mom took medication every night to help her sleep, and she went to bed around nine thirty. Mrs. Atkins went home, but Mr. Atkins stayed until two in the morning having beers with my dad on the porch and playing cards. At least that left my parents out of it. And I was with Shawn up until the time I went to bed. The other counselor saw me come in. So we were spared that mostly. People still looked at us funny sometimes, but everyone knew we had nothing to do with it.”