Chapter Eighteen
Then
Thirty-Seven Days Before the Fire
The next twelve hours were the worst of that summer. Maybe of any summer I’d ever had at Dread’s Cove.
Wes filled us in as we sprinted to my mother’s cabin.
Apparently, a camper in Bluegill had woken up in the middle of the night, needing to pee.
The two beds next to him were empty; he figured his friends must have gone to the bathroom, too.
But when he got there, it was empty. He rushed to wake up his counselor, and everything had spiraled from there.
“Who is it?” I asked, though I had a sinking feeling I already knew.
“Jeremy Wallis and Carter Banks.”
My vision blurred at the edges. These were Kendall’s new friends. That boy she had a crush on.
The boys who told her they’d seen the Phantom, too.
To investigate, of course, we had to wake up the rest of the campers—and those fourteen-year-old boys were so loud and indignant that the entire camp was awake within minutes.
We searched every building on the property, including the other cabins. We checked under beds, in all the nooks and crannies and hidden spaces of Dread’s Cove. Between me and Chelsea, my mother and Rig and Val, I was sure we knew every last hiding place.
But they were nowhere.
Not in the rec center, not in the mess hall. Not in the dock house or on the beach. Not in the Barn.
It was like they’d vanished.
Every place we looked that we couldn’t find them, Kendall’s haunting words flashed through my brain: There’s someone out there, Miss Greer.
My mother called Sheriff Ramon. But it was storming tonight, and a bit of flash flooding on the winding roads posed a problem.
It might be a couple of hours before he got here.
So, the group of us—me, my mother, Rig, and Chelsea—took off into the woods with flashlights to search for Jeremy and Carter.
It took all night. Every moment felt tense and uncertain. There were animals out here. Black bears, coyotes, and bobcats. Silently, I prayed that nothing had attacked them. That they were safe, whole, alive.
We walked every trail on the west side of the lake. We called their names, not that it did much help; it had started to rain in earnest, and the wind was loud and demanding. We could hardly hear each other, much less two boys lost in the woods.
That was what I told myself, to keep from shaking: They’re just lost. They haven’t been taken.
As the wind whipped up, I could feel my mom growing scared. I saw it in how she was walking, spine stiff and jaw tight. It was hard not to be. I was, too.
I realized how easy it had always been for me to take for granted that Dread’s Cove was safe. But out here in the woods, as the summer storm took hold, it all felt so precarious.
It all felt like such a show.
I thought about how in the eighties, there’d been another pair of boys who’d snuck out in the middle of the night, to hike up to the bluffs on the west side of the lake.
One of them had fallen, broken his leg, and almost died.
That was the wake-up call my grandfather needed to get strict about boundaries and curfews.
When my mom took over, she buckled down even harder.
The northwest corner of the lake—where the shore got rocky and too high—was deemed off-limits.
All campers got the same spiel their first night: If you go out of bounds, you’re on the first bus home.
But when we couldn’t find them anywhere else, the bluffs were the only place left to look.
The rain got heavier as we walked. The first real downpour of the summer—we’d been desperate for any precipitation—and it had to be tonight, of all nights.
Our feet squished in the mud, and we hardly spoke.
Occasionally, my mom would lean toward Rig and seem to say something, but I could never make out the words.
At the base of the bluffs, Rig turned to face us. He and my mom shared a long, somber look before he gave her a single nod.
“I’ll head up there and look around,” he said. “We’ll find them.”
We waited for what felt like hours, though it was more like fifteen minutes.
Finally, as the first rays of sun peeked over the horizon, a faint glow of light spilling into the sky, Rig came around a tree followed by two fourteen-year-old boys, perfectly fine, hanging their heads.
I bit back a sob, and Chelsea grasped my clammy hand in her own.
“Oh my God, Jeremy,” my mother said, enveloping him in a crushing hug. He was a longtime Dread’s Cove kid—this was his fourth summer here, and his two older sisters had come through, as well as both of his parents.
“Mom,” I said, pulling her shoulder back gently.
She complied but kept her arms tight on Jeremy’s forearms. His sleep shirt was entirely soaked through, and I could see the goose bumps on his pale skin.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
Jeremy’s eyes went round, and mine likely did, too. I’d never heard my mother curse at a camper before; I wondered if this was the most angry, and relieved, she’d ever been.
“We were looking for the Phantom,” the second boy said. Carter. He was a head or so taller than Jeremy, standing just behind him with his arms crossed. Trying to look casual in that way middle school boys often do, though I could see just how badly his chin was quivering.
Chelsea turned her flashlight on him, and he staggered back, put a hand to his face like she was the paparazzi. He had a shock of red hair peeking out from beneath a camo baseball hat.
“There is no Phantom,” I said.
“We saw him,” he said, holding my gaze. He uncrossed his arms, and his rain-soaked T-shirt looked like it was chilling him fully to the bone.
“He walked by Bluegill. It wasn’t the first time, either.
” He glanced at his friend, as if hoping for backup, but Jeremy was too busy using my mom as a giant Kleenex.
“We followed him into the woods. But he was fast, and we got turned around and didn’t know how to get back to our cabin.
So we wandered around for a while, and then it started to rain, and—yeah. ”
He shrugged, like it was over now and that was that, like we hadn’t been run ragged all night searching for them. Like we hadn’t all been silently thinking through worst-case scenarios.
“All right, let’s head back and get out of the rain,” my mom said, fully Anita Olsen again. Fully in her element, as the matriarch of this camp. She tilted her head left, then right, like she was working out a kink, before clapping her hands together twice in a way that meant now.
The rest of the day seemed to pass quickly and impossibly slowly at the same time.
My mother wasted no time calling both of their parents, who lived in suburbs of Atlanta.
They’d be here to pick them up in a few hours’ time.
The rules were clear, and they’d broken them.
My mother hated nothing more than sending kids home early as a punishment, but they’d left her no choice.
The last time I saw them, both boys were openly crying in the office lobby, Carter especially. All pretense of being cool and unaffected had flown out the window. My heart cracked, for them and for Kendall, and I looked away. I was needed elsewhere.
Because in our absence, camp had descended into a state of utter chaos.
We spent all morning making the rounds to every cabin to check in, give hugs, and reassure the campers that the boys were safe and there was no monster in the woods stealing kids from their beds.
This was not the work of the Phantom because the Phantom wasn’t real.
But that explanation wasn’t satisfactory, especially to children who were already scared. Especially with the break-ins, and the sightings in the woods that had continued to escalate.
Even though the boys were recovered safe and sound, there was no stopping the hysteria that seemed to morph into a living, breathing thing.
I would pass kids with their heads bent together in the mess hall and hear them whisper things like, “What do you think the Phantom will do next?”
—
“Sorry I’m late,” I said through a yawn, sliding in next to Steph and grabbing a banana. Chelsea was picking at her daily oatmeal, so much brown sugar mashed in that just looking at it gave me a toothache, and Margo was trying to get Jane Eyre to stay upright and balanced against her coffee mug.
“Finally, you’re here,” Steph said dramatically, letting her head fall against my shoulder. Her smile faltered a bit as she studied my face. “Are you okay? It’s been a rough week.”
I sighed as I peeled my banana. “I’ll be fine. I’m just exhausted still.” It had been six days since that awful night, and everything and everyone felt strangely subdued.
“Must be so terribly draining to be an heiress,” Margo said, and my jaw dropped open. She didn’t even take her eyes off her book.
“I’m not an heiress,” I sputtered. “I just have a lot of responsibility.”
“A lot of responsibility and a few million dollars with your name written on it.” Her voice had a bite to it now. “I’m sure it’s more than worth it. Work now, play later, right?”
I opened my mouth to respond, though I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say. She was right, of course, though it made me wildly uncomfortable to talk about it in such stark terms; it was no secret that Dread’s Cove belonged to my mother, that it would be passed down solely to me one day.
But it was as if I was taking a test that I’d already failed, though I didn’t know where I’d gone wrong. And there was no way to check my answers, go back, and change anything. She raised her eyebrows, as if daring me to try.
I took my hair out of my ponytail and retied it, just for something to do with my hands. “I’m obviously very lucky,” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.”
“No, I get it.” Her lip curled into something dark. “Getting everything you want has got to be so exhausting. I’m not sure how you do it.”
“Everything I want?” I repeated.
Steph was clenching her mug in both hands beside me, and Chelsea had a spoonful of oatmeal hovering in front of her mouth.