Chapter Ten
Then
Forty-Three Days Before the Fire
Even after what happened with Kendall, it had been a near-perfect first week. No serious injuries, no teenagers caught making out in the Barn. After our annual camp-wide capture the flag game this afternoon, everyone was tired from the heat and had crashed early.
I was tired, too, but I’d stopped by my mother’s cabin around ten o’clock for a celebratory cup of chamomile tea, as was our tradition. We were sitting out on her back patio, looking out over the water, watching the fireflies wink in the dim moonlight.
My mom took a long sip from her favorite mug, the one with a rainbow trout jumping in a stream. “So, how are Steph and Margo adjusting? I feel like I’ve barely spent any time with them.”
“Well, the girls love them. Which makes sense, because Steph is hilarious. And so much fun. One of the Smallmouth girls, Celia, told me that every night, Steph has them vote on three Taylor Swift songs, and they have a mini dance party before bed. And then Margo is—well, it’s hard to describe Margo. She’s sort of mean, but in a cool way?”
My mom’s mouth quirked up. “Does she join in on these dance parties?”
“She must. Steph doesn’t really take no for an answer.”
After I talked about both of them for five minutes straight without stopping or taking a breath, my mom leaned back in her chair, looking smug and satisfied. “Who would have thought that mono would actually be a blessing in disguise? You seem pretty smitten.”
We both laughed, the sound echoing through the trees. She was right—I was smitten. Especially with Steph.
We had the bottom bunks and were usually the last two awake.
We’d done the same thing every night for the past week.
After Margo and Chelsea had started snoring, I’d sneak over to her bed, like we had that first night.
We’d share headphones and watch something on her laptop—we’d finished Fleabag last night, and had already decided our next project would be all the Twilight movies.
I loved being a counselor, but I’d never been so excited for curfew. This summer, it meant I had uninterrupted hours with Steph Bennett.
It had only been a few days, but—as ridiculous as it sounded—I couldn’t believe I’d spent my whole life not being friends with her.
Because it wasn’t only that she was interesting. She made me feel interesting, too. She made me feel like someone worth staying up late for.
“This summer just feels special,” I said in closing, as I fiddled with my tea bag.
I glanced back at my mom, expecting to see her smirking still, but a wistful kind of cloud had passed in front of her face. “I’m glad to hear it. This place is magic like that, I think—always bringing us the people we need the most.”
I was about to ask my mom what she was talking about—if she was okay—when one of the counselors came around back. It was clear from the way he was wringing his hands that he hadn’t come by for a simple social call.
“Logan,” my mom said, jumping into her role seamlessly. “What’s the matter?”
He scratched at the patchy stubble on his chin. “I was finishing up my rounds and passed the office. The front window is completely busted out, ma’am. Someone, well—someone broke in, I think.”
I gasped, before I could stop myself. “Are you serious?”
He rolled back on his heels and looked out at the water as if our rapt attention was making him uncomfortable. “Or maybe it was an animal. I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” My mom’s tone wasn’t unkind, but it lacked her usual warmth. She set her mug down on the table with a soft clank, then flexed her hand before tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Please head back to your cabin. We’ll take it from here.”
After Logan was out of earshot, she let out a single, whispered “Shit.”
“Should we…,” I began, and we locked eyes. Hers were round and bright, but there was a tension between her eyebrows that I rarely saw. She usually reserved that sort of frustration for the annual budget meeting, or the few times per summer when she had to seriously reprimand a camper.
My mom called for Rig on her walkie-talkie—said we had a Code Yellow, which was our shorthand for potentially dangerous situations—and we waited in stilted silence for a long few minutes before he met us at the head of the path.
“Someone broke into the office,” she told him before he had a chance to ask, and Rig frowned, his mustache drooping.
“Who?” A look that I couldn’t decipher passed between them. After a moment, Rig gave us both a stiff nod and patted the revolver in his holster. “Let’s go check it out.”
I opened my mouth to protest—a gun? I didn’t argue, though, worried that they’d tell me to head back to Black Bass.
Silently, we made the short trek to the office. All I could think about was what Kendall had said the other night. That she had seen someone—a monster—stalking through the woods. My mom and I had been so quick to dismiss it as the result of telling stories, a figment of her imagination.
But now…I didn’t know what to think.
The office was the first building you saw when you entered camp property, just in front of the rec center. Right now, it was shrouded in heavy darkness. My mother shone her flashlight, and just as Logan had described, the front window was smashed through.
“Some kind of prank,” my mother suggested with forced lightness, breaking the tense silence that had been building between the three of us.
She took out her master key and let us inside, and thankfully, Rig didn’t take out his gun.
It was immediately clear that there was no one inside.
The office was a small space, with only three cramped rooms and a locked closet where we kept all the camp archives.
There was a large rock and shards of glass in front of the window, and my mother held her arm out in front of me to keep me from walking through the mess.
I heard nothing but the soft hum of the cicadas, and the dull sound of my heart thumping in my rib cage.
Crime wasn’t exactly a common occurrence around here.
Yes, we kept a lot of the buildings locked, but that was more for safety reasons than the actual fear of someone trying to steal or vandalize.
I could tell by the way my mom was fiddling with the pendant around her neck that she was more uncomfortable than she wanted to let on.
I didn’t ask, but I wondered if she was thinking about what Kendall had said, too.
The door to her office had been forced open, the papers and frames on her desk thrown around haphazardly. Eeriest of all, the screen of her computer was awake—someone had been here, only a few minutes ago, trying to log in.
To do…what?
I was hit by a wave of nausea. Though it was my mother’s office that had been broken into, I felt strangely violated.
I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why I was so afraid, but I was.
Maybe it was because of how isolated we were out here.
That had always made Dread’s Cove feel like a refuge from the rest of the world.
I’d never thought much about how dangerous that remoteness could be—what might happen if someone took advantage of it.
We were three miles from Lavender, the small town where many of the staff lived during the off-season.
Even so, you could count the number of stoplights on one hand; it wasn’t exactly a mecca of civilization.
Sheriff Ramon had jurisdiction over the whole county, which meant his office was at least an hour’s drive on a good day.
It would be even harder to rouse him in the middle of the night.
If something terrible really did happen—if we were in danger—how long would it take for someone to get here?
What would happen while we waited?
“You don’t think this was whatever Kendall saw, do you?” I asked, my voice high-pitched and strained. “Was he…real?”
“There’s no monster in the woods, ladybug,” Rig said, with an easy kindness that bordered on condescending.
“Then who did this?”
They were both quiet for a moment.
“Rig, will you walk Greer back to Black Bass?” my mom asked, leaning down to examine the broken glass on the floor.
I didn’t like being excused and ordered around like a child, but I didn’t argue; I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.
I kept close to Rig’s side as we walked, feeling a strange sense of relief that he had that gun, after all. I’d never once felt nervous walking through Dread’s Cove before—how many times had I wandered these paths alone, even as a child, popping between my mom’s place and Chelsea’s, or Wes’s?
I thought of the girls in our own cabin. I thought of the younger campers, heading to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I thought of someone following them through the darkness.
Everything suddenly felt a little more dangerous. Even the moonlight felt ominous, rather than welcoming.
“Who do you think did it?” I asked Rig when we got to Black Bass, my hand hovering over the doorknob.
A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Like your mom said, probably just some kids playing a joke.” He glanced at the door, the tightness in his eyes betraying his worry. “Tell the girls to be careful, all right? Don’t walk around by yourselves, especially at night. Just until we nip this in the bud.”
I gave him a wooden nod. “I’ll tell them.”
He squeezed my shoulder. I didn’t miss the way he patted the gun on his hip, once, then twice, before disappearing into the woods, back in the direction we’d come.
My roommates were all asleep, but I was so rattled that I woke them. We sat in a circle on the floor while I told them the whole story. Chelsea’s face was white when I finished. “But you’re sure they didn’t take anything?”
“Not that we can tell. It was weird, though. There’s nothing worth stealing in there.”
“Does your mom have any idea who it was?” Steph was quieter, more somber than usual. She sat with her head resting on Margo’s shoulder, legs crisscrossed so that she appeared folded into herself. “The same guy Kendall saw?”
“Kendall didn’t see anything.” I said the words as confidently as I could muster, but I didn’t know if I believed it.
“We’re just supposed to be careful. It was probably some kids being stupid. We’ll tighten up the curfew requirements. I doubt it will happen again.”
I was wrong.