Chapter Seven
Now
Eventually, the bottle of allegedly shitty whiskey was nearly empty, and Margo stood and stretched her arms over her head. It was hard to tell exactly how drunk she was—but if my own swimming head was any indication, she was well past tipsy.
I stifled a yawn, already imagining how good it would feel to turn on the fan, open the windows, and fall into a deep, hopefully dreamless sleep. “The bed in there should be made, but—”
“Is it still there?” Margo’s hair was matted from where she’d been leaning back on the couch, her earrings askew, and she looked like some kind of mad scientist who’d just had an experiment go wrong.
I blinked at her, trying to make sense of the question. “Is what?”
“Black Bass,” she snapped, like I was being stupid on purpose. She took a small step back, her ankle rolling, then caught herself on the side of the couch. “Is it still there?”
“Yeah.” I said the word slowly, stretching it out into two syllables. “It’s one of the only buildings that didn’t burn down.”
“Have you gone yet?” She no longer seemed drunk at all.
I was quiet.
“I just need to see it,” she said, clearly sensing my hesitancy.
“Please,” she added like an afterthought. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since I decided to come back. I can’t stop imagining her in that bunk bed, laughing and reading a fucking magazine, and—”
Her voice broke and, for the second time tonight, I found my resolve wavering.
The truth was that I needed to see it, too. That bone-deep desire both made sense and didn’t. It’s not like Black Bass was the last place either of us had seen her alive. She’d been at the beach that last night, we’d both spoken to her, just minutes before—
I clenched my jaw hard enough to hurt and forced the thought away.
I needed to see the cabin because, in my darkest moments, I’d found myself questioning everything.
If any of it had been real. If the Steph who’d whispered with me in the dark that summer had ever really been the friend I thought she’d been.
The friend who I had been so desperately needing her to be, even when things started to fall apart.
“Let’s go,” I said, pausing before grabbing the near-empty bottle of whiskey on the table. Liquid courage, and all that.
“Brave little heiress, aren’t you?” she said, but her smirk was playful now that I’d agreed.
I unscrewed the top and took a sip that was much too big.
Shoving my feet into a pair of sneakers, I tilted my chin at the front door, encouraging her to go first. “Come on, before I change my mind.”
Camp was still and silent as we weaved our way through the edge of the woods, toward Counselor Row.
At Dread’s Cove, all the twelve-and-up campers slept in cabins without a counselor—we all bunked together in our own cluster of cabins.
Ours were nicer than those for campers, but not by much.
Nothing like the gorgeous homes in Staff Village.
But while the campers slept basically outside, just with a roof over them, we at least had walls and our own plumbing.
Those last few sips of whiskey seemed to hit me all at once, and I stumbled over a root, almost eating shit on the trail. Margo helped me up with one hand and clapped the other over her mouth to suppress her snort of laughter. It didn’t work very well.
“Be quiet,” I chastised, holding a finger to my lips like she was a petulant child. She mirrored my movement, giving an obnoxious “Shhhhh” that was so loud I cringed and staggered back a step.
“You’re going to wake up the whole camp.”
“Oh, boo, you’re no fun at all. Glad to know some things never change.”
“Really?” I said, barely quieter than she was. “That was your biggest problem with me, back then? That I wasn’t fun—”
I stopped talking abruptly at the sound of twigs snapping behind us. We both froze.
“Who the fuck is there?” she said, her pitch a little too high.
Another twig snapped, closer this time, and I fumbled with my flashlight.
I’d kept it off so far on purpose; the light of the moon and my own muscle memory were typically enough to guide me, and I hadn’t wanted anyone to see us prowling around.
The last thing I needed was a photo of me roaming the woods, Bigfoot-style, holding a bottle of whiskey by the neck. The headlines wrote themselves.
But if there was someone following us, I needed to know. Right now. It took me an agonizing few seconds, but finally, I turned on the ancient flashlight my mom always kept by the front door.
I shone it on the path behind us, and into the surrounding trees, but there was nothing and no one. “An animal,” I said, not sure if I believed my own assessment. I had that strange, intuitive sense that someone had just been there, watching us from the darkness.
“Didn’t sound like an animal,” Margo breathed before grabbing my arm and pulling me along. “Guess the Phantom’s back to his old tricks, huh?”
I sucked in a breath, forced my legs to keep moving. Her arm was still locked with mine, tight enough that it might cut off my circulation. “Don’t say that. It’s not funny.”
Margo snorted, unimpressed, then took a long sip. She smacked her lips before speaking, her eyes still darting between me and the trees on either side of us. “Cool it with the pearl-clutching, please. You and your mom were always the first to say the Phantom was just a story.”
“It was. It is. I just don’t think this weekend feels like the right time to bring it up. It feels…wrong.”
We both fell silent as we continued walking, and I wondered what Margo was thinking. Before I got up the courage to ask, the trail spit us out in front of Black Bass. My pulse quickened at the memories it triggered—by the sound of Margo’s quiet gasp, I was sure she was remembering it all, too.
There was no one staying in it this weekend; a pipe had burst in the bathroom a few days ago, Rig had told me, and he didn’t have time to get it fixed before the weekend began.
It was at the far end of Counselor Row, cut off from the rest by a large oak tree—that was why Chelsea and I always preferred it.
It gave us more privacy than any of the others.
Tonight, though, all that privacy felt ominous. Like we were the only people at camp, the only people for a hundred miles.
I was suddenly very glad that Margo was with me. That she, of all people, had her arm tangled around mine. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
“Shall we?” I said, going for levity, even as I eyed the carved sign above the door with a gnawing sense of unease.
We both hesitated at the threshold, not wanting to be the one to break the seal. When it was clear that she was waiting on me, I squeezed my eyes shut and grabbed the handle, flinging it open without looking.
The smell hit me first. That same pine smell of my childhood, concentrated. It looked different but wholly the same, like so much of Dread’s Cove.
I was struck with the type of nostalgia that almost bowls you over. For the first time since I’d been back, I realized that I had missed this place, more than I was willing to say.
Cautiously, Margo and I stepped inside. I could tell she was holding her breath. Waiting for a ghost. I was, too.
“God damn,” she whispered behind me. “I can’t believe we actually slept here.”
Both of our eyes were immediately drawn to the back left corner. Steph’s bed. My legs moved of their own accord, and then I was sitting down on the thin mattress.
I knew Margo had to be reliving it, same as me—the lifetime of moments we’d spent here.
Though it wasn’t really a lifetime at all, I had to tell myself repeatedly. It was less than two months.
Beneath my feet, a floorboard creaked. I looked down and noticed a small gap between two boards, just slightly bigger than the space between the others. Barely noticeable. I pushed on it with the tip of my foot, trying to see if it was a fluke, or something intentional.
It shifted again.
“Margo,” I said, and she was by me in an instant, crossing the room as though she hadn’t been scared of it a moment ago.
“What?” She followed the glow of the flashlight to the board on the floor, watched the way my foot made it move. She bent down, put her manicured hand in the seam where the two boards met, and lifted. It came up easily.
In all the years that Black Bass had sat empty, no one had noticed a loose floorboard. No one had noticed a hollow space, beside Steph’s bed. Which meant that no one had found the single old photo hidden there.
Margo snapped it up. I stood, tried to grab it from her, but she was too quick. She held a finger up to me in warning, like a librarian.
I studied it over her shoulder. It was a picture of a young family, clearly taken at Dread’s Cove, maybe sometime in the nineties.
There were three of them: mom, dad, and baby.
The parents both had big, toothy smiles, and the little girl couldn’t have been more than a few months old.
She had dark, thick hair that stuck out at all angles and bright blue eyes.
They were lovely, though they were strangers to me.
I did recognize the cabin they stood in front of—it was in the Staff Village, right next to Rig and Val’s. Or it used to be, before the fire. They’d all been rebuilt now. I felt a weird sort of dissonance, recognizing the place, but not knowing any of their faces.
“Some family that used to work here, I guess.” I snatched it from her and turned away before she could take it back. “I don’t recognize them. Do you think Steph put this here?”
Margo had gone strangely still. “Does it say their names?”
“Nope,” I said. I squinted my eyes, wondering if that would give me more of a sense of recognition, but there was nothing.
I turned it over, but there was just a drawing of some weird symbol that I’d never seen.
A few odd lines and a circle. The longer I looked at it, the more confusing it was. “What do you—”
“I think that’s a picture of Steph.” She swallowed. “And her parents.”