"In the Woods" Alternate Ending
My personal fan theory for the murder mystery novel In The Woods (2007) by Tana French.
IMAGINE A SUMMER STOLEN, not from a color-graded coming-of-age, but from the black-and-white double truck of a small-circulation newspaper. Imagine two children with fawn legs, tendoned and cross-hatched by tall grass. Imagine a third, dragging along his darker body, dragging along his darker soul. Imagine Faust correct and the devil is a dog come to earth.
When I introduced myself, I warned you that I lie. I said it the way one might wear a jacket, just to add a layer, to obscure the t-shirt underneath so that for others the peaks of color might amount to something cool. How embarrassing to have known that Damien and I, all this time, had been matching under our clothes. If I press myself, I’d say maybe that’s part of the reason I despised the guy.
Of all people, of all things: It was Heather who eventually showed me.
I had been home on a random Tuesday, one of those lonely nights after I’d been kicked off the murder squad and twisting my thumbs to try and feel any sort of motivation for my new cases of mailbox vandalism and stolen handbags. I was only six weeks away from the end of my lease with Heather. I planned to move back to London, lend a hand to the local detective force, wear knitted vests over soft buttoned shirts, maybe change my name again. (I hadn’t yet used Robert.) I didn’t want to go to Cassie’s wedding, and I certainly didn’t want to live here when the invitations went out and my mailbox stayed empty.
I was two Tom Collins into my evening, tapping away at old emails the way only mild drunkenness can inspire, when the bell rang. My room is closer to the door and so I answered. It took me almost a full minute to realize who he was, without the pudge and acne.
“Little,” I said eventually. “My god.”
“Adam?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have known it was you without your voice.”
I didn’t know how to tell him, but I had surprised myself by knowing. I had forgotten about him all this time. Watching the way his eyes folded at the crease, it returned: the way he’d jam the toe of his runners into the brick while he waited for me to finish drinking from the water fountain; the two-handed muddle when I passed him the basketball, the pink creases of his small fingers pulling on the lattice schoolyard fence. We had been friends. Not as close as me Peter and Jamie, but Little and I were kind to each other at school. I think I saw us as comrades in the invisible war, the children who looked like children versus the ones who looked like fools. It had been his idea to get a private investigator involved in Jamie’s situation. His dad was one, he told me, and they got kids out of bad families all the time. I found this setup quite surprising. It must have been a childish prejudice of mine, assuming that the bullied kids’ parents might have been custodial workers or gas station attendants or something of the like. He said he’d talk to his dad on our behalf, if we wanted him to, but we’d have to coordinate with our parents as well. No no no, Jamie said. We couldn’t tell them we were doing this. But still, everyone was nicer to him after that. He was only trying to help. And now here he was, on my doorstep, old enough to have a job himself, old enough that it no longer mattered what he looked like, though really he wasn’t so bad anymore.
“I’m sorry,” Heather said, appearing behind me. “I forgot to tell you that Will was coming over to see the place. He is thinking of renting your room.”
Will. Of course he didn’t go by Willy Little anymore.
“What luck,” I said. “We’re old friends, if you can believe it.”
Heather clasped her hands. “Oh Rob, how lovely! Come in, come in! Did I hear you call him Adam?”
“I used to go by a different name, as a child,” I said. I had hoped she wouldn’t notice, but I had given up on hiding it these days.
Will, Heather, and I made it through only about ten minutes of small-talk and pleasantries — here’s the room, it’s a decent size, doesn’t get too cold, I’m sorry I never told you I keep whiskey in here — before I felt a sharp pain bloom behind my ears. “You’ll have to excuse me,” I told them. “I think I feel a migraine. But feel free to poke around while I step out.”
I didn’t wait for their sympathy. White light was already bleeding at the corners of my sight, blurring the apartment around its edge. I felt the floor tilt on my way to the bathroom, swung the door shut with unnecessary force, and braced the sink with both hands. There were red streaks underneath my fingers until I blinked and cleared them. There was a ringing noise in my skull, almost like a clipped edge of a scream, but then I took an Advil and it was gone. And then, exactly a second later: the flood. It was back, it was all back.
August: blustery, feverish. The way it was, not the way I remember it. If you look at the weather report for the month in 1984 you’ll see that it was unseasonably gray in Dublin, forgettable until it wasn’t. The only one who was ever bold enough to fact-check me on that was O’Kelly, in the third hour of questioning that would delete from my life an entire Wednesday. It was the least of the incongruences that lawyers would later use to prove I’d suffered lasting trauma, not that it helped the sentence at all.
Picture a white sheet of paper, A5, perfectly flat and neat and pinned to the fence outside of school. WE FIGHT ON BEHALF OF CHILDREN, it said in thick capitals. And above this, in noticeably smaller print, Are you experiencing unfair treatment from your parental guardian? There was contact info along the bottom of the poster, a phone number for Jefferson Inc. Private Investigators.
I remember waiting for the school day to end, walking to the phone booth down by the cobbler. I played with the chipped red paint while I waited for the dial tone. And finally, someone picked up. When they would later play back the recording in court, my voice would sound so small and high that I would not recognize it as my own. But in my memory, it’s the same voice I have now that says it: My friends and I need your help. But you can’t tell our parents.
I made a plan with the man on the other end. The following week, we would meet in the woods, near the edge. He had grown up in town, he said, and was familiar with the area. We would explain Jamie’s situation and he would help us craft a case, using legal doctrine, that made it impossible for Jamie’s parents to send her away. He assured me, over and over again, that this was exactly what his business was for.
There is nothing more precious than your friends, he tells me, in the recording. His voice is so soft that even now I believe him.
It was overcast the day we met the man. He was waiting for us by the road, but to avoid being seen, we led him deeper into the trees and toward the castle. He looked like he could be any of our fathers: plain, dark pants and a loose shirt, a workman-type jacket with heavy-seeming pockets. He carried a briefcase, which my juvenile mind took to mean he was a real lawyer. In the beginning, he really did talk to us. He wanted to make sure we felt seen and understood. When Jamie began to extrapolate about how awful boarding school might be, he set his hand on her arm. When Peter described how much Jamie meant to us, he reached out and cupped the side of Peter’s face like he was something precious. I remember being jealous that the man hadn’t touched me, and then disgusted with myself for thinking that at all.
These cases were easier to win, he told us, if we exhibited signs of parental abuse. It would make a world of difference if he did a couple things to us in order to establish this evidence. It would hurt in the moment, he explained, but then Jamie wouldn’t have to go. We all agreed to this. At the time, I thought it was sort of brilliant.
Peter was the boldest of us. He went first. The man ran his hands over Peter’s whole body, searching for weak spots where he might be easiest to bruise. He settled on the neck, explaining that it wouldn’t hurt if he did it with his mouth. We watched as the man cupped his lips around Peter, sucking in for a long time. He repeated it over and over until there was a small ring of indentations consistent with strangulation. Peter stood tall and still through it all, but his smile shook near the end. The man wiped his mouth on his wrist. He told Peter he might have to do it again, depending on how long we waited to take things to court.
Then it was Jamie’s turn. For girls, he said, you had a guaranteed removal from your parents if you could prove sexual abuse. He asked her to take off her clothes. Jamie thought about it for a moment, then shrugged and removed them. She stood with her back against the castle. I didn’t like to see her like that. I remember keeping my eyes on the ground, near her pile of clothes, staring at one of her strawberry hair clips against the dead leaves. I could hear the man unzipping his pants, the crush of a twig underneath his knees. It was only once he started, once he began to grunt, low and long, that I felt something sick about it. I knew what those boys had done to Sandra. I watched the tendons of Jamie’s hands, tight against the white rock and moss of the castle. My blood turned sour. When I looked at Peter, his neck still gleamed with saliva. And then suddenly I was on top of the man, pressing my own hands to his neck in exactly the places he had indicated on Peter. I prayed for the air to leave him.
I didn’t expect it to work. But the man released Jamie, reaching for me, and in that time, she was able to slide out and dart to Peter’s side. The man rolled, pinning me beneath him. I heard the buckles of the briefcase. There hadn’t been a gun — at least, I hadn’t seen one — but then he was holding a pistol. I thought for certain that he would kill me. I thought maybe, if he did, Peter and Jamie might be able to make a run for it. They had been so noble, so trusting, allowing their bodies to be molded for a better future. I could be like that too. I could be good. I laid still and prepared myself for the sacrifice.
It never came. The man whirled around and shot them — Peter and Jamie — my best friends — the loves of my life — grass-stained and muddled, sun-burned and blistered — one and two, straight in the chest, one naked one clothed — clinging to each other.
I knew it was true. I knew it was true because even conjuring the images in my brain gave a name to the very taste of my tongue, as if the events of this had infected the very dust and oil of my body. I couldn’t have imagined something so awful had I tried, and this was the truest part: I was jealous. I was jealous that he had wanted Peter and Jamie. I was jealous he had thought them delicate enough to kill. He was everything I despised and I wasn’t worth anything to him. He had known they would run and he had known that I would stay. I wanted so badly to be important.
I wrestled him to the ground until the gun was in my hands. The rustle the weight the grunt the metal the gleam the slick the crush of Jamie’s white t-shirt and the flash and flash and flash of gray sky, rolling. He tore at my clothes, ripping at my shirt. I kicked him so many times that my toes came through the netting of my trainers. It took almost ten shots for him to stop moving. By the end of it, I was alone in the woods.
Peter and I — we were different shapes almost everywhere, but we wore the same size shoes. The sun had set and I didn’t have daylight to help me; I had to navigate the dense woods from memory, dragging body after body after body. I put all of them in the river. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Actually, I did. I knew it would be my fault if anyone found out what had happened, if anyone listened to that phone call. And there was something, too, to the idea of erasing all of the evidence, of leaving a clean nothing behind, so that maybe people could believe that they’d really done it, that Peter and Jamie had really run away. It was so dark that I couldn’t tell if the river had taken their bodies or not. When the last one had been pushed off the bank — I’d ended with Peter because I had been dreading the act of wrestling my broken shoes onto his lifeless feet — I stood at the edge for a long time, staring out at the river and the forest and the night. And that is where the memory stops and everything turns black, not because I forgot the rest, but because that’s all there was.