2. Tuesday
CHAPTER 2
TUESDAY
M aggie was trapped on a porch swing in what had to be 99% humidity feeling very much like she had somehow been transported to the summer of 2005.
Daniel Becker, the director of Camp Oak Ridge, was late. Arguably late. He didn’t technically know that she was waiting specifically for him. He’d just sent an unhelpfully cryptic note to her brand new @blueharbor email saying that he had something for her and planned to stop by “Miss Peggy’s cottage” in the late afternoon if she’d be around. In an effort to dust off a little of her Southern Hospitality, she’d responded, “Sounds great!” Exclamation point and everything.
She wasn’t even sure that he’d received the message. Her cell reception this far up in the mountains was crap, and the password to the wifi at her aunt’s cottage had not been, as she had dared hope, left on a post-it helpfully stuck to the refrigerator. Neither had Aunt Peg gotten around to retrofitting the cottage with central air, so Maggie had retreated to the porch where there was at least a working fan and the faint memory of a breeze.
And now she was stuck there, her curls reaching a level of frizz not achieved since she’d been a Blue Harbor camper herself. She would have abandoned ship for a coffee shop with some wifi, mystery delivery be damned, but Director Becker had been friendly with her aunt. And, more importantly, as the on-site head of the neighboring boys’ camp, he was a direct report of Peter Davies, CEO of C. P. Davies, Inc., one of the largest privately-owned residential real estate development firms in the world. Legend had it that Oak Ridge had been founded and endowed by Charles Peter Davies himself after his youngest son generated the Depression-era version of the Kardashian’s covid-lockdown-birthday-party-on-a-private-island PR debacle. (“Sorry about the abject poverty! HAGS!”) The company still owned the camp, and charming photos of happy tweens spending seven free weeks in the Blue Ridge Mountains somehow appeared in the papers whenever anyone objected to C. P. Davies driving longtime residents out of newly-gentrified neighborhoods.
Maggie was hoping the Davies family would see their way to expanding their Youth Summer Experience Portfolio by buying Blue Harbor. Step one was making a good impression on Director Becker, demonstrating that, despite the turmoil, everything at Blue Harbor was running smoothly. Which it definitely would be. As soon as she figured out how to get cell reception, connect to the wifi, and locate, at a minimum, the list of campers scheduled to arrive the following week.
Maggie sighed, and pushed off the porch with her feet, greedy for whatever airflow a little swinging would generate. Every few minutes she unlocked her phone and tapped the icon for her work email. Muscle memory. She was, technically, on vacation. More of a sabbatical, really, but all covered by the nearly three months of PTO she had saved up over the past nine years.
She worked as a consultant at one of the elite international firms that recruits by advertising its generous benefit packages and then clearly communicates to new employees that they are expected to take minimal advantage of them. Maggie had never minded. She liked her job. It was intellectually rigorous. She traveled, met interesting people, and if she rarely made it back home, well, she had taken a job across an ocean for a reason.
And yet here she was, a few hours drive from the Research Triangle where she’d grown up, the newly minted Interim Director of Programs at Camp Blue Harbor. It wasn’t a job that anyone particularly wanted Maggie to have. It certainly wasn’t a job that Maggie wanted to have. And yet.
Maggie tried to appreciate that the morning had gone relatively well. Having slept like the dead on her hotel mattress until about 4 a.m. (thank you, jet lag) she’d checked out early and made it up the mountain to Blue Harbor in time for a 10 a.m. meeting with the core team that her aunt had hired to help run things. Because parents somehow entrust their children for months at a time to the care of seasonally-employed college students who are not yet old enough to legally drink (a.k.a. counselors), the core staff was made up of, somewhat alarmingly, only two other people.
The first was the nurse, April Harris, a white woman about Maggie’s age with eerily impeccable blonde barrel curls. She had the slightly too cheerful energy of someone who had probably been both head cheerleader and valedictorian and now owns at least three tumblers bedazzled with wine puns. She had also apparently spent years working in a local Emergency Department, which Maggie found hard to square with the sweet-tea-extra-sugar demeanor, but she’d had her own heart blessed enough times to know that appearances could be deceiving.
The second was the head cook, Mikhail Kozlovskiy. When she’d walked in to him seated alone at a long table in the Dining Hall, the shaved head and white tank gave the impression of a young Russian mobster in a 1980s B-movie. As soon as he’d opened his mouth to greet her, though, she’d understood why her aunt had hired him. He spoke exclusively in an outside voice, and his boisterous enthusiasm and dimpled smile were so infectious they could probably be weaponized and distributed through a city’s water system. His main gig was running a food truck in town called The Chuck Wagon and he apparently went exclusively by Chef Chuck both on and off the clock. Maggie could respect that kind of commitment to branding.
It was hardly a robust “core team” for someone parachuting into the director role the day before counselor training was set to begin. Maggie’s Aunt Peg had apparently been running Blue Harbor mostly by herself. Maggie wasn’t one to knock going it alone. She hated group projects as much as the next recovering straight-A student. But the fact that running an entire summer camp had been more or less a one woman operation was not ideal under the circumstances. Those circumstances being that the one woman whose operation it had been was now dead as the result of an unlucky encounter with an unusually aggressive copperhead snake. (If you habitually take long solo hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the least you could do is keep your files organized, a thought Maggie had thus far managed to keep to herself.)
Quite suddenly, Maggie’s sweaty porch vigil was interrupted by loud barking.
“Parton. Don’t be rude.”
The barker, however, an enormous black and white blur of a dog, was undeterred. It continued up the slope, barking intermittently in either greeting or warning. Maggie could never tell.
The dog was accompanied by a leanly muscled white man with an impressively even tan, something Maggie felt competent to judge because the man was not wearing a shirt. As he approached, she saw that he was sopping wet all the way down to his Tevas. His dark, messy hair was glistening in the sun, rust-colored nylon shorts clung to his strong thighs, and he had thrown a wrung-out t-shirt over one shoulder.
If this was Director Becker, arriving drenched and topless to a meeting he himself had called was, to say the least, unprofessional. But this couldn’t be Director Becker because Director Becker had been quite good friends with her aunt. The man flashing her an apologetic smile was closer to thirty-five than Aunt Peg’s sixty-five. (And, it was neither here nor there, but, acknowledging objective fact, he was extremely hot.)
The man spoke as the dog reached the steps a few feet ahead of him. “Sorry to keep you wait—” Before he could finish, the dog, which was apparently also sopping wet, began to shake itself vigorously, and they both found themselves caught in an extremely localized downpour. Maggie closed her eyes and cursed the series of events in her life that had led to this precise microclimate.
“Maggie McArthur?”
The dog appeared to have ceased fire, so Maggie wiped the water from her eyes and opened them in acknowledgment. “Daniel Becker,” the man said, holding out a hand. “Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a bit of an incident with some geese. We were trying to get them out of the free swim section, and Parton here thought he would be helpful—” The dog cut him off with another bark, and Maggie had the impossible impression that it was chiming in to agree that it had been very helpful indeed.
Maggie took advantage of the pause to introduce herself before she got more details on the incident with the geese. “Good to meet you, Director Becker.” She took his hand, defaulting to her carefully calibrated Business Grip. His palm was slightly damp in hers. She glanced down out of habit, to make her standard assessment of what impression a new colleague was attempting to project via expensive wristwatch. Director Becker wore a knotted string bracelet in green and brown.
“Oh, uh, just Daniel. Or Becker. I’d say Mr. Becker is my father, but I, uh?—”
“Becker.” Maggie smiled her boardroom smile. “McArthur.”
* * *
This woman wasn’t quite what he had expected. Things had been chaotic in the days since Miss Peggy’s passing, and keeping Oak Ridge in the loop had been no one’s priority. At some point the information that Blue Harbor wouldn’t be canceling its summer session had trickled down to him. Apparently, with ownership likely falling to Miss Peggy’s only living relative, the family had sent some sort of management consultant to take over on an emergency basis.
Obviously, obviously , he’d known that even a management consultant wouldn’t show up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in June literally wearing a grey pants-suit, but he was surprised nonetheless to find the woman stretched out on the porch swing wearing khaki shorts, an olive tank, and Chaco sandals, her wild copper curls framing her freckled face like some sort of model out of an REI catalog. Once she’d spoken, though, his assumptions slotted comfortably back into place. She wasn’t wearing a grey pants-suit. She embodied one.
“McArthur,” he repeated, feeling like he’d stepped into an old noir.
Parton had made his way past the porch swing and was standing by the threshold to the cottage staring at the door. Having apparently run out of his limited patience, he barked once and scratched gently on the wood.
“Hold on, bud.” He glanced back to Maggie McArthur, who was looking at him like he had been talking to an imaginary friend. “So, yeah, this is Parton.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” she said over her shoulder in the tone of someone humoring a small child.
Parton scratched at the door again.
The woman seemed to be waiting for Daniel to say something more. It hadn’t occurred to him until right then that she might not know about Parton at all, but now that he thought about it, why would she? And why would she care?
Daniel had wanted to do something, anything, to carry a tiny piece of the burden, when Miss Peggy had died. Taking Parton in was the only something he could think of. He’d assumed the dog’s stay with him was generally understood to be temporary. Parton belonged to Blue Harbor as much as he belonged to Miss Peggy. But the blank look on Maggie McArthur’s face implied that she, at least, had not been informed that her new position came with a complimentary canine.
“Parton is—was—Miss Peggy’s dog. He, uh, he lives here. I’ve been taking care of him since she…I assumed you knew, or that someone had mentioned…” He could feel himself floundering under Maggie McArthur’s dubious stare. Even Parton was giving him a sort of pitying look, head tilted to the side. Where was all that barking when you needed it to helpfully interrupt your babbling? “Look you, uh, you don’t seem like much of a dog person, so if you’d prefer, I can just?—”
“No. If the Blue Harbor Director is responsible for this dog, then I will handle it. It’s not a problem,” she said, sounding like a spokeswoman briefing the press about something that was, in fact, a problem. “Does it have any…accessories?”
Daniel was beginning to suspect that Maggie McArthur had never met a dog. Parton pawed at the door again. Ms. McArthur ignored him.
“He’s just got about half a bag of food that I, uh, forgot back at Oak Ridge. There should still be some in the cottage, though. Bottom part of the cupboard, I think.”
“Great,” she said, in a tone that made it sound anything but. “Does it have a leash?”
“No, he, uh, Miss Peggy kind of gave him free reign. If you want me to help get him set up?—”
“No. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
As if in agreement, Parton scratched again at the front door. Ms. McArthur turned to open it for him, standing somewhat farther away than seemed strictly necessary. She stretched her already long arm as far as she could to reach the handle. Parton, who didn’t appear to mind that this strange woman was clearly avoiding him, slipped happily through the opening at the earliest possible opportunity. Ms. McArthur paused for a moment before closing the door behind him.
“So,” Daniel began. “Where’d you fly in from?”
“Brussels.”
“Oh cool. I’ve never been.” She did not immediately pick up the conversational baton, so his mouth kept going. “I have had the sprouts though. Excellent source of iron.” He grinned, and didn’t get so much as a pity smile back. Daniel was honestly thrown. Dad jokes killed at Oak Ridge. Plus, he was exceedingly personable. Not suave, not polished, but he put people at ease. Anxious campers. More anxious parents. It was his whole deal. Or, it was at least half his deal. He had other skills, but this really was the one he hung his hat on.
Maggie McArthur was having none of it.
“If that’s all, I’d better get back to work.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. Actually, wait, sorry, no. I did want to talk about the summer socials. On Saturdays, and sometimes on bonus weeknights, we—Oak Ridge—we do a sort of…joint thing…with Blue Harbor. You know, because, historically, it was a boys camp/girls camp thing. And now it’s just kind of…I don’t know…neighborly. But yeah. It’s a tradition. We usually trade off hosting. More or less.”
“Not a problem. Blue Harbor will be upholding all of its contractual obligations. If you could forward me the agreement.”
“Oh, it’s, uh, pretty informal.”
Maggie arched a perfect eyebrow. “Define ‘pretty informal.’”
“I mean it’s not a free-for-all. There’s a Google Calendar.”
“There’s a Google Calendar.”
“With some event details,” he offered half-heartedly. “I’ll share that with your Blue Harbor email.”
“Great.” There was that word again. “Please do.”
“Great.” My god, was it contagious? “I mean, yes. Let me give you my number. I keep my business cards in my good pants, but I can just put it in your phone if you don’t mind.”
She held out her phone, with an expression that said she couldn’t tell whether he was joking about the good pants. (He was not. He only ever needed the cards when he was doing off-season marketing, which was also the only time he ever wore those pants.)
Daniel keyed his number into the phone and went to text himself so that he’d have her number as well, but it failed to send. “No one warned you about the cell reception either, huh? A couple of the bigger carriers don’t work up here. You’ll probably want to head up to Hendersonville to switch as soon as you can. T-mobile’s pretty good.”
She took her phone back silently.
“I’ll, uh, I’ll send you that Google Calendar,” Daniel said by way of goodbye.
“Great.”