Chapter Nine
Now
I knew that it was just a ghost story. There was no monster.
But there were a hundred people here this weekend. And as Margo had proved, it wasn’t hard to break into this place.
That thought alone made me stand up straighter.
The walls were paper-thin. I could hear the creak of the guest room bathroom door, the sound of Margo turning on the sink and loudly completing her skin care routine that was surely eighteen steps long.
If there were someone here, I would be able to hear them.
And anyway, who breaks into your house, lights a single match, and hides under your bed to… what? Kill you?
As ridiculous as the thought sounded in my head, it still made my chest tighten. I thought again of being out in those woods, fumbling with the flashlight. Leaves crunching and branches snapping. That deep-seated feeling that someone was just out of sight, watching.
I strained my brain, trying to remember what I’d done last night when I’d gotten in. It was all such a blur—being back in my childhood home for the first time in five years, waiting for my mom to appear at any moment. Having to remind myself that she wouldn’t.
Had I lit a candle last night? I didn’t think so, but I must have. There was nothing else that made sense. Besides, the cabin smelled faintly of warm cookies, my mom’s favorite scent that she always kept stockpiled.
I checked, rechecked, and triple-checked my bathroom and closet, just to be sure, and locked the door to my room.
I knew I could have walkied Rig, but it felt so childish.
What would I even say? I found a used match on the counter?
No, I was being paranoid. Everything was fine, and I was completely safe here.
But I couldn’t get it out of my head, as I lay in bed and waited for sleep.
I couldn’t help but feel like it meant something. That it meant fire.
—
I woke up early on the day of my mother’s funeral, around sunrise, jittery and wired. Light was just barely peeking through the curtains, spilling onto my pillow.
As the coffee brewed, I eyed the staircase, and a strange sort of boldness took hold of me. I wanted to go upstairs, finally. I wanted to see my mother’s room. I needed to.
But when I finally stepped inside, I almost turned around.
Our cabin wasn’t tiny, exactly, but it was cozy.
That’s what my mom had always said, at least. It had been a gift from Grandpa Dread, when my mom and dad had moved to camp after they graduated college.
They were young and in love, freshly engaged, and my grandpa had built this place for them as a wedding present.
Their marriage hadn’t lasted long, but my mother and I had lived here my entire life.
It had always been a safe space for me. It had always been my home.
And I’d spent a thousand hours in this room—sneaking up here to sleep with my mom when a thunderstorm shook the ground, begging her to read me one more story even as my eyes drooped with sleep.
Rig and Val had been kind, hiring cleaners to come in and pack up the place. They knew I couldn’t bear it, and neither could they. The window was open, the curtains billowing in the soft breeze, and I took a deep, shuddering breath.
The furniture was the same as it had always been, of course: the old four-poster bed she’d inherited from her grandparents, and the twin side tables beside them.
There was a gnawing pain in my chest as I saw how sterile the room was now, without all her color and light.
I didn’t see the little pocket Bible that she always kept on her bedside table, and the lack of it made the room feel completely wrong.
I made a mental note to ask Rig if he knew where it was.
I opened every dresser drawer, a wave of anxiety creeping up my back. They were all empty. The room looked blank, unlived in, and it made me feel strangely detached. Like I wasn’t really here. Like she’d never really been here at all.
But in the left bedside table, the bottom drawer caught on something; I heard a screech, like something was stuck in the mechanism. I reached my hand in as far as it could go, groping around in the dark. Finally, I found it.
In my hand was a dainty gold necklace that had been damaged somewhere along the way. It had three small, glittering charms—an N, an I, and an E. My breath caught.
My mother was Anita professionally, but to her closest friends, she’d always been Annie.
The chain looked old, and slightly rusted at the clasp. I wondered just how long she’d been missing it.
I’d never seen it before, though that wasn’t exactly surprising.
My mom had loved jewelry—the good stuff, the cheap stuff, and everything in between.
Most of it was locked away in a safe-deposit box that Val had set up for me, on the other side of the pass in Lavender.
I couldn’t handle going through all of it myself, so I’d let her deal with it.
Now, though, in her sterile room, I regretted that choice.
Not only were a couple of the gold letters missing, but the chain was tangled, and I took my time unraveling it, not wanting to make it worse.
After a few minutes, it was all straightened out.
In a moment of crippling sadness that almost knocked the wind out of me, I stood in front of the small mirror and clasped it around my neck.
I put my hand to the remaining charms, feeling the small grooves in the metal, comforted by the sharp edges.
This was real. My mom was real. I was real. She was with me, even in some small way. Looking after me.
I’m safe here, I told myself over and over, forcing myself to stop thinking about that damn match on the counter.
—
When Margo and I got to the mess hall for breakfast a few hours later, it was crawling with strangers. It set my teeth on edge.
Logically, I understood why we’d invited reporters here.
It was all part of Chelsea’s master plan, to make Welcome Back Weekend the hottest ticket of the summer, to get the whole state talking, and to get every kid in the Southeast foaming at the mouth to spend their summer at the remote paradise that was Dread’s Cove.
While I wondered how many of them were planning to make fun of me in their articles—a washed-up bartender, nepo baby with no experience, the sole heir to an infamous, possibly haunted summer camp—I did hope that, for my mother’s sake, they would see whatever beauty was left here.
Even if they had to squeeze it to its breaking point.
Before the summer of the fire, Dread’s Cove had never experienced such a swift fall from grace. My mother was called every name in the book; our family was dragged through hell and back, accused of gross negligence at best, black magic and cult rituals at worst.
Everything we did was questioned in the aftermath—all our safety protocols and emergency evacuation plans.
Our vetting process for staff members. Our training procedures for counselors.
No one was satisfied with the simplest answer: that the fire had been an act of God.
A brutal, yet entirely natural and non-preventable tragedy.
No, for many people, that was too easy. They wanted a witch hunt. They wanted a culprit.
It wasn’t just because of the fire itself, or Steph’s death.
It was everything that led up to it, too, the treasure map that landed with a big black X on that awful, awful night.
The break-ins and vandalism. The boys who went missing in the woods.
That final message, left in bloodred paint on the mess hall, laced with rage and warning.
It didn’t matter that my mom did damage control in the months after, agreeing to interview after interview.
It was a wildfire, she said—and it had absolutely nothing to do with the faceless criminal who’d been terrorizing Dread’s Cove for two months.
There had been lightning that night on the other side of Lady’s Lake.
It had been a dry summer, one of the driest on record.
But there were still rumors, of course. People came out of the woodwork to claim that there hadn’t been lightning near the lake that night; that she was lying to save face. That it hadn’t been an accident.
My family owned hundreds of acres, and technically speaking, the fire had burned across private property.
Which meant that police findings had never been made public.
And though no one could prove my mother wrong, that it was simply a terrible, natural accident, it was never clear if she was right, either.
If the fire had been the final act of the Dread’s Cove Phantom, after a summer of little horrors.
Or if she was hiding something. If we all were.
And now those very same reporters who’d called my mother a liar, who’d printed stories accusing her of gross negligence, of being a dumb heiress who had no business being responsible for children, were all here this weekend, pretending to mourn her.
I was scanning the room for a somewhat private table (of which there were none) when Chelsea grabbed my wrist, spinning me around so that our faces were inches apart.
“Are you trying to sabotage me?” she hissed through bared teeth.
I could see the wild expanse of new freckles across her nose, a testament to her hours spent in the sun over the past few months as she oversaw the final days of construction.
I also saw the exhaustion, up close like this. The bags under her eyes were poorly disguised by the wrong shade of concealer.
“No, of course not.” I kept my voice quiet, intimately aware of the strangers and friends watching us closely. Margo had made a beeline for the espresso station, stating that the coffee I’d made had tasted like dirt water.