The Little Woods (29 page)

I didn’t breathe easily until I’d closed the door behind me. I changed my clothes and tossed Helen’s dress in the general direction of her closet. I had to get out of this place. There was no way I could live with Helen anymore. Blood beat inside my head with metronomic certainty.

Getting on my knees, I opened my bottom drawer, shoving aside Iris’s crumpled papers. My hand lingered on the puzzle box. I took it out and, setting it in front of me, tried to stare it down. I knew there had to be something more to it, and I had an idea it had something to do with the logo—those two circles separated by a
T
, but I didn’t know what it could mean. The letters certainly didn’t signify anything. I’d tried to make some sense of them and had come up with nothing.

“Oh, fuck it,” I said, sick of waiting around for something that would never happen. I flung open Helen’s closet and reached inside for her tool kit. I extracted her hammer and returned to the box.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s nothing personal.” And then I slammed the head of the hammer full force into the back of the box, cracking it down the middle, the resulting trauma causing a cascade effect of screeching wood and a single pop as one of
the circles on the bottom of the box popped out. I picked up the box and examined the circles, finally seeing them for what they were: two tiny grooved dials.

I dug my fingers in and turned them, thinking if I could move them to the right position, something might happen. And then I saw it: the letters hadn’t seemed to signify anything because they weren’t Roman letters. They were ancient Greek. And suddenly I knew what to do.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, my fingers shaking. I turned each dial clockwise one half turn, until the letters spelled a word:
OYTIΣ. Nobody
. Ms. Harlow’s favorite word had certainly made an impression on Iris.
Nice, Iris. Very nihilistic
. I shifted the second dial until it was perfectly in place and then something clicked. A lever gave way, and a tiny compartment sprang from the side of the box. Inside was a tiny slip of paper and on it was written:

I looked again at the top of the puzzle box. The Fagles translation of
The Odyssey
, book four, lines 304 to 308. I pulled Helen’s copy down and turned to the passage.

The Trojan horse. How fitting.
Nice work all around, Iris
. Pulling out my notebook, I set about deciphering the text. It was going to take me a while, but I finally had the key. I felt suddenly giddy, knowing that the answer was at my fingertips. Now all I needed to do was plug in the letters and I’d have the last piece to the puzzle.

My pen flew across the page as I worked, the message slowly revealing its secrets. When I had finished, my head starting to pound, I read the deciphered note in its entirety.

Richard? Magda? Iris had been having a secret affair with Helen’s dad? I sighed and leaned back against the base of my bed. I was disgusted, but if I’d learned anything lately, it was that you never knew what people were capable of. So this was what Iris had been doing at the Slaters’ lake house the past spring. She must have been out there seeing Richard when Chelsea thought she was visiting Helen. The scenario I’d created with Reilly and Iris could also apply to Iris and Richard Slater. Had he broken it off with her and then started messing around with someone else? Chelsea, maybe? Had she threatened him with blackmail and he’d killed her?

I sat there, trying to get my mind around it. I was sick with the possibility, but I didn’t have much time to think about it, because I saw Helen descending the lawn, Noel a few paces behind her. Quickly, I shoved the deciphered note under my pillow, but not before it registered in Helen’s eyes. She flung open the door, her face lovely, sparkling, her starlet smile lighting up the room, and then her gaze settled on the demolished dress I’d tossed in the general direction of her closet.

“Wow,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” I said, staring at her.

She picked up the dress and examined it from a distance. Noel entered quietly, refusing to meet my eyes.

“Brunch was amazing.” Helen laid the dress over the back of her desk chair, her eyes drifting to the box that lay in pieces on the floor.

“Ah,” she said when she saw it, and then her eyes shifted to my pillow.

I slowly inched back toward the pillow, but she pushed me out of the way, and before I knew what happened, she had the note crumpled in her fist. I jumped up to face her, but she stepped back, holding the note against her chest.

“Helen!” Noel gasped. “What are you doing?”

Helen’s eyes moved over the paper quickly, a slight color rising in her cheeks.

“What is that?” Noel whispered.

When she’d finished reading, Helen smoothed out the paper, folded it up, and held it between two fingers like a stylish cigarette.

I just stared at her, not knowing whether to be angry or afraid.

“You think I didn’t know about this?” She laughed.

I was shocked. “You knew?”

“Of course we knew.”

“Iris?” Noel gasped.

“Who else?” Helen laughed, throwing her arms into the air in a theatrical display of exasperation. “Even from beyond the grave she torments us.”

“How did you know?”

“She told us. It’s a lie, you know. He never touched her. She was delusional. She was crazy and obsessive.”

“Helen, what are you doing?” Noel cried.

“So juvenile,” she sighed, a hand on her hip. “Codes and secret liaisons. It’s so, like, wannabe James Bond or something. So sad.”

Noel was staring at her feet, barely breathing, it seemed, and Helen smiled at me, triumphant.

“Very romantic, don’t you think? You should have seen the
Romeo and Juliet
one she made him after we read it in class. So embarrassing. My dad keeps it locked up in his desk at home. He pities her. God, she was such an idiot.”

“How can you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make fun of her like that. She’s dead. Your father killed her.”

“My father didn’t kill her,” she said, laughing.

“How do you know that?”

She stood there, smoothing her hands like a cat preening, and then replaced one on her hip and stared at me with
cold precision. “Look, I know for a fact that he didn’t kill her, okay?”

Suddenly I felt very cold.

“Oh my God, Helen. You didn’t. You didn’t … kill Iris, did you?”

She just smiled at me.

“No.” I shook my head. “You wouldn’t do something like that. Please tell me you didn’t do … that. Please tell me, Helen.”

“Let’s just say I’m glad she’s dead and leave it at that.”

“No. You can’t leave it at that. This is a life we’re talking about. It wasn’t yours to take.”

I noticed Noel was shaking. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

A moment later Noel was gone, the curtain slapping gently against the frame as the wind picked up.

“Cally.” Helen laughed. “Please don’t be a total fuckwit. How could I have killed Iris? I have an alibi, remember? I was at my party all night with like thirty other people. Noel was there too. She went to bed early, remember?”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked to the window. Why did I feel like I was drowning?

“Noel?” I heard myself say.

Helen raised her eyebrows and tilted her head to the side like she did when she was bored. Then she smiled to herself, clearly pleased at the chance to reveal a secret.

“No. Noel wouldn’t do that,” I said.

Helen shrugged. “Accidents happen, Cally. I’m telling you this so you don’t push things any further. I know you care about Noel too, and you’d never do anything to hurt her, so
let’s just drop it, shall we? Only, I do need to know one thing. Where did you get the box, Cally?”

“No, Helen,” I said. “Tell me what happened that night. You said it was an accident. What kind of an accident?”

Helen sighed, feigning exhaustion. “God, all right, Cally. I’m telling you this because I know you’ll make a big stink about it if I don’t, but I need your word that you won’t go tell anyone. This is really serious.”

She raised her eyebrows at me, and I nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. Iris was psychotic. She was obsessed with our dad. She even pulled some strings to make sure we were roommates, because she thought it would put her one step closer to him. By October I kind of thought she was over it, and then the day of the party she told us she’d been sleeping with him, and that they were in love, but that they broke up last spring because of my mother. It was obviously a lie,” she said, shifting her eyes to the side. “But she made a big deal about how we needed to talk to her about it or she was going to tell everybody. She wanted us to invite her to our place for fall break so she could try to win him back. Can you believe it, the audacity? She kept calling us, wanting to come to the party so we could discuss. Obviously she couldn’t come to our house. What was she thinking? And I couldn’t leave the party and go deal with her, so I sent Noel. She pretended to feel sick and go to bed early, but really she went back to deal with Iris.”

“And Noel took her up to the cave?”

“No,” she smirked. “That was Iris’s idea. She was like that.
Cally, you didn’t know her, but the girl was a serious nutcase. She took Noel up to the cave and gave her mushrooms. She was trying to bond with her, to get Noel on her side.”

“And Noel ate them?”

“Noel will take whatever someone gives her. I don’t think you realize how malleable my sister is. She just goes along with whatever anyone tells her. Fortunately, that person is usually me. In this case, though, she wasn’t so lucky.”

“So they just went up to the cave in the dark and took mushrooms the night before the math competition? What the hell?”

“My sentiments, though to be honest, I doubt Iris gave a flying leap about that math competition. She gave up caring about school a long time ago. So they go up to the cave, chill out, Iris draws her crazy dragon, and Noel does God knows what, and then at some point Iris gets really weird and delusional. She tells Noel that she wants her on her side. She wants Noel to get our dad to divorce our mom. Can you imagine? What a pathetic psycho. She showed Noel that stupid box she’d made him like she was that woman from
Fatal Attraction
—like the box was proof that it was true. Noel tried to take it from her, and Iris, like, attacked. Noel had to push her off. That’s when it happened. Iris fell back and hit her head on a rock. And Noel booked it out of there. Obviously, she had no idea that Iris could die. She was alive when she left. Her head was bleeding, but she was fine. She ignored Noel and went back to her drawing. Honestly, we thought she ran away after that. We had no idea she was dead. We really didn’t until … well, until we all found her that day. God, I felt like such an idiot taking
us to that cave. I had no idea that was where they’d been, and obviously I didn’t know she was dead. But that box, it was in the cave when Noel left.”

“Wait,” I said, something sinking in. “Iris didn’t die of a head wound.”

“Not at the time, but it can happen slowly over the course of a few hours. We didn’t know.”

“No, Helen. You’re not listening to me. Noel didn’t kill Iris, because Iris didn’t die of a head wound. Iris was strangled.”

“What?” Helen’s face lit up, luminous with relief. “Are you sure? How do you know that?”

“Just trust me. I’m sure.”

She put her hand on her hip, her joy quickly turning to calculation. “So sometime after Noel left the cave, Iris was strangled? How is that possible?”

“I think someone was following them that night. He waited outside the cave, and when Noel left, he saw his chance to be alone with Iris. He went inside. They argued, things got out of hand, and he strangled her. Then he took the puzzle box.”

“Who?” Helen asked, her eyes wide. “Who did that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, my mind moving quickly, dancing over pieces of information, trying to put it all together.

“Okay,” she said, her eyes moving over me. “Here’s what I want to know. Why the hell are you involved in any of this? What gives, Wood?”

And that was when it all snapped together.

“Oh God,” I gasped.

“What?”

“Oh my God,” I said, starting to pace. “The box was never meant for me. It was meant for Noel. I had an idea it might have been. I even asked her about it, but I couldn’t see why someone would have left it for her.”

“What are you talking about? How did you get it?”

“Someone left it for me to pick up at sports sign-in, only it wasn’t for me. Ms. Sjursen said there was a Post-it note with my name on it, but she couldn’t find it, and it was never my name. It was Noel’s.”

Helen cocked her head to the side. “Okay, but why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We need to back up a bit. We need to consider this from the killer’s point of view. What if the box doesn’t mean anything to the killer? What if the box was just the link between Noel and Iris? What if the killer knows that Noel injured Iris? What if the killer’s trying to lay the blame for the murder on Noel?”

“But Noel would know she didn’t kill Iris once she found out Iris was strangled.”

“It might not matter. If the police find out that Noel and Iris fought up in that cave, high on drugs, on the night of Iris’s death, it’s not going to look good for Noel.”

“So where does the puzzle box come in?”

“I think it was something to freak Noel out and get her to go to the police. It came with a note that said
there is only one way out
. For months I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle box and see what was inside it, but that was never the point. The box itself was the point, the very existence of it. Sending it to Noel with that note was like saying, ‘I know what you did up in that cave, and you’re going to pay if you don’t confess.’ I think
the killer was trying to manipulate her into confessing and taking the blame.”