Page 63 of The Woods

His mom shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Who did she think they were?”

“She said that they looked like her family and mostly acted like her family, but she was certain that they were imposters. She said, how could she be guilty of killing her family when they weren’t really her family?”

His mom shivers and scrunches up her face in disgust. “She sounds certifiably crazy.”

“Well, yeah,” Quinn answers. “She ended up in a place for the criminally insane. They found her mentally unfit to stand trial.”

His mom pulls the car up to the curb in front of the school and puts it in park, turning to face him. “Sounds to me like you listened to the entire show.”

“Not the whole thing,” he says. “But it seems like stuff we should know.” She shakes her head, but he can tell from her expression that she agrees and isn’t that mad. “Especially when family members start acting like different people.”

Her eyes go wide. “Oh my God, Quinn. It is not the same thing at all. I’m sorry I even brought it up. Please just forget it. And seriously, no more investigating the murders.”

Quinn lifts his backpack from the floor of the car and opens the door. “Does seem like a strange coincidence though.”

“Don’t be silly,” she says, swatting the air. “It’s not a coincidence at all. Now, go on before you’re late.”

He thanks her for the ride and gets out of the car. Before he enters the school, he glances back to see her still sitting there, with the car in park, staring out the window. He’ll find out later that his mom searched for the podcast. It wasn’t hard to find, all you had to do was type in the words mother kills entire family in Merrymont.

Alice

She broke her own rule, and binge-listened to the first four Justine Gordon episodes of Killing Their Own while driving between appointments, on her earbuds eating lunch in a restaurant, and in a parking lot when she should have been answering emails on her phone. She saved the fifth episode for her drive home.

Cleo: I have a question for you listeners. After what we’ve learned about the Justine Gordon case, do any of you out there believe that there’s something strange in those woods, or is Justine just batshit crazy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Today we’re talking to someone close to the case who believes Justine Gordon. Who believes there’s something else going on. At the time of the horrific murders, our guest had only been on the police force for two years. He arrived on the scene after the 911 call made by Justine Gordon’s older son. He was one of the officers appointed with the task of searching the woods. Our guest is still a police officer and therefore we will not be using his real name. His voice has been disguised.

Cleo: Hi, Tom. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here with us today.

Tom: You’re welcome.

Cleo: Let’s dive right in, shall we? Tom, tell us about your experience in the woods surrounding the Gordon house. Explain to us what makes you believe that Justine Gordon may not in fact be criminally insane and that something truly evil lives in those woods, as she continues to claim.

Tom: [clears throat] We were called in to search for the older Gordon boy after his 911 call. We divided the woods into a grid, and I was assigned one area to search. It wasn’t long before another officer found the bodies of the father and the younger son. They’d been buried not far from the main house, where Justine Gordon was explaining that the bodies belonged to imposters. As soon as we found those bodies, our search for the missing eighteen-year-old boy kicked into high gear. The clock was ticking to find him before he succumbed to the poison.

Cleo: Tom, that sounds absolutely horrific. Can you tell us what you found that day in the woods?

Tom: Another officer found the boy’s phone first. It was on a path about a hundred yards into the woods. I was assigned a section of the grid deeper in the woods, where I came across a large rock face. I noticed there was an opening in it, and I thought maybe it led to a cave. I thought maybe the boy could have gone in there for shelter, trying to escape his mom. I radioed to my team that I was heading inside, you know, just in case anything happened. They told me to wait for backup, but time was ticking, you know? So I went in. It was a pretty good size. Big enough to stand up in. Conducted a quick search by the light of my flashlight, and that’s when I saw the pile of clothes. A pair of jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, the kind of clothes an eighteen-year-old boy would wear. They were covered in dried blood and were torn up pretty bad. I radioed to my team lead that I thought I’d found evidence of the boy. He told me he was sending two more officers and a forensics team, and to wait outside the cave. I couldn’t wait. I unholstered my gun, just in case, and continued my search. That’s when I noticed another opening in the rock. I crouched down and shone my flashlight inside and saw that it led to another cave. It was a narrow opening, so I had to turn sideways, but I got myself through. [clears throat] That’s when things got real strange.

Cleo: Tell us about that, Tom.

Tom: [clears throat] Yeah, well, I squeezed my way into the second cave and found that it was even bigger than the first one. More of a cavern, I guess. As soon as I got in there my radio started broadcasting static, one long stream of it. I tried calling my team lead, but I couldn’t transmit or receive, so I turned it off. Walking farther into the cave, I heard a crunching sound underfoot. I shone the flashlight down and saw what looked like bones and bone fragments all over the floor. I swept the flashlight across the cave walls and that’s when I noticed the symbols.

Cleo: Symbols?

Tom: Painted on the walls.

Cleo: What kind of symbols, Tom?

Tom: [clears throat] Witchy-type stuff. Pentagrams. The walls were just covered in them. All kinds of weird symbols.

Cleo: When you say “witchy,” do you mean occult? Would that be the word to use?

Tom: Yeah, sure, occult, that sounds right. Anyway, when I saw those symbols, and the bones on the floor, I wanted to get the hell out of there. I got a real bad feeling. I was pretty freaked out.

Cleo: Well, yeah, of course you were, Tom. That sounds like a very unsettling place to stumble upon.

Tom: Yeah, well, I couldn’t leave, could I? We were looking for the older boy. I had to examine every corner of that cave, and the cavern beyond.

Cleo: And?