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“Then why did you bother putting your own blood on the sheets and thewindowsill?”
She looks down and away, as if the shame of it all is suddenly coming to the forefront. “I slipped when I was putting the fake blood around the cabin. I hit my head on the side of the bed and it started bleeding a lot. Far more than I would expect something like that to bleed. Then when I climbed out of the window, I actually did scrape my back and cut myself. I guess it wasn’t a very well-planned prank,” shemurmurs.
“I… I don’t understand,” Holden says. “You did that and then you just stayed in the woods for days? You didn’t come back to find out what happened with theprank?”
“No. I climbed out of the cabin and went into the woods. I was going to hide there and watch how everybody reacted, then jump out and surprise everybody. It was supposed to be funny. Like the story at the campfire. But then I was attacked. That man really was in the woods. I tried to get away from him and he must have cut me a couple of times, then he got his hands on me and I ended up in that house. I don’t know what happened in between. I just know that I woke up in that house,” Mirandasays.
“Why didn’t you tell us this from the beginning?” I ask.
“Because I was scared. I knew how that was going to sound. Ridiculous. I understand that. I know it sounds completely outlandish that we would plan tricks like that only for something that horrible to actually happen. No one was going to believe me,” shesays.
“So you lied,” Garrison says. “You allowed everybody to believe a masked killer broke into your cabin and attacked you, but you managed to escape and then he went after the others in the camp. Do you understand how much that changes the investigation? What you’vedone?”
“I’m sorry,” she says so low it’s nearly a whisper. “I didn’t mean to cause any problems. I have no idea there was any way to find that out. And I didn’t think it was going to make a difference. I got attacked. I am Jacob Merriweather’s victim like everybody else. Look.”
She shows the cuts on her arms and the still-bandaged wound on her head.
“The difference is they are dead,” I tell her.
“What are you thinking?” Detective Garrison askslater.
“I don’t know. Something about all this just isn’t sitting right with me. I know the kids were playing tricks on each other at camp. All of the other survivors talked about it. But what Miranda did took it an extra step. I don’t understand what the end game of that was supposed to be. She was just going to stay in the woods and watch her boyfriend, friends, and the campers come and find her cabin bloodied? How long was she going to watch them completely panic and fall apart before she jumped out and yelled ‘gotcha?’”
“People that age don’t think clearly,” Garrison offers. “They think things are much funnier than they actually are. They don’t think about the consequences of what they aredoing.”
“When I was her age, I was getting ready to start training to get into the FBI. The blood I had seen was real,” Ireply.
“So, what do you think it means?” heasks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “What do you know about her? Her family, anything? I know she isn’t from the area. Only two of the counselors were from Cherry Hill: Anthony and Emily. The other ones came in from other towns. She told me she and Holden were in college together and it was his idea to come be counselors. But whatelse?”
“There really isn’t much else to know,” he says. “As far as I can tell, she doesn’t have a family. It’s just her. She’s an adult, so she doesn’t have to list her parents on anything, but when she was in the hospital, I tried to find a next of kin for her, thinking she might like having her family with her, but I wasn’t able to findanybody.”
“She talked about being out in the woods, using her survival skills to stay alive. But she told me she never even went to summer camp when she was younger. Where did she get survival skills?” I ask. “I can’t imagine there was a tremendously extensive training program that went into being a counselor for the week at CampHollow.”
I stand up and go to the notes written on the large pads of paper around the edge of the room. My eyes scan over them, taking in every detail, waiting for something I missed to jump out at me, or a connection to be made that wasn’t before. I stop at the list of victims. I’d written their names in large print on one piece of paper so I could see them easily. They’re there as a reminder, to make sure that as we investigate, we don’t lose sight of who we are doing this for. Of what really matters.
“Do you have a copy of the map of where the bodies were found at the camp?” Iask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Just asecond.”
He hands me a sheet of paper with X-marks showing where each of the bodies was found throughout the camp. I go to the other side of the room to where we put together a timeline based on the testimony of each of the survivors, the phone records from the camp and the Barrett house, and the discovery of the crashed truck along with the timing of the campfire and when the storm started and stopped. Right before us are all little details that came together to help us figure out when the massacre happened.
“It’s too close together,” I say, looking at it.
“I thought they seemed pretty spread out,” he says. “Look at these, they are clear across the camp from each other.”
“No, but that’s what I mean,” I tell him. “All of the victims at the camp are spread out. There are a couple of places where more than one person was killed in the same location, like the art cabin that Lisa escaped from. But they are found in so many different places. Not to mention Anthony all the way up near the road and the Barretts two miles away. They are so spread out in location, which means they’re far too close together in time. Nobody could have committed all of these murders within this timeline that wecreated.”
“You think the timeline is off?” heasks.
“No. I think our theory is. Remember at the very beginning when he said maybe there were twokillers?”
“We dismissed it pretty much immediately,” hesays.
“Exactly. And maybe we shouldn’t have. We were thinking about Lisa saying she thought it was Mike and how that would have worked into everything, but that isn’t the only possibility. It had to have been the work of at least two people in order for all of these victims to be killed within this amount oftime.”
“You think Miranda did this? With who? Merriweather?”
