Treasure in the Woods

by E. A. House

  “Somebody like who?” Carrie asked, but she sounded worried rather than skeptical.

  “I really don’t know,” Maddison admitted.

  “Do you have a theory?” Carrie asked her. Chris finally got all the way into his sleeping bag and then realized that he was standing mostly upright. “Chris, there’s a zipper in the side,” Carrie pointed out.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before I got all the way in this way?” Chris demanded. He looked like a giant caterpillar with a human face, and Maddison thought about telling him he looked like an extra from a horror movie about human-bug hybrids. But he was also a bright, artificial-purple color and that just wasn’t scary enough. Plus, she didn’t know how strongly Carrie hated bug-based horror films. It was better not to risk it.

  “Uh,” Chris said, and Maddison abruptly realized she’d been staring at him and his bright purple sleeping bag thoughtfully. “What? Do I have something . . . on my face?”

  He was possibly blushing, although the tent was lit only by Maddison’s headlamp and Carrie’s flashlight so it was hard to tell. Maddison was blushing, but it was because of a tangled collection of feelings about Chris that probably didn’t even involve having a crush and so she was going to ignore them until they went away or became less tangled. There were more important things to worry about, anyway.

  “We still haven’t decided if we’re going to go all the way to the old mission,” Maddison said, fiddling with the drawstring of her sleeping bag.

  Carrie groaned.

  “No, really,” Maddison said. “We keep getting sidetracked and I know it isn’t anyone’s fault but if we don’t make a plan and stick to it we’re just going to go in circles.”

  “Very scary circles,” Chris agreed. He sat down with absolutely no grace at all, now halfway stuck in his sleeping bag, and finally unzipped the bag enough that he could get out and then crawl back in like a normal human being. “Especially since direction has never been my strong suit and I’m kind of hopelessly turned around . . . ”

  “We were almost at the campground,” Maddison said. “You couldn’t see it because we were going to have to hit the equestrian trail first and then double back a little bit, but we were probably . . . fifteen minutes from the campground when we fell?”

  “The trail you two fell off would still work,” Carrie suggested. “It’s not like it peters out or anything, you guys just took a corner too fast and fell into—I think we’re in a creek bed, to be honest. Or we could double back and find the regular trail.” She pulled a trail map out of the pocket on her sleeping bag. “Or, I think we aren’t even that far from the equestrian trail so we could take that.”

  “And let the headless horseman run us down?” Chris suggested.

  “Chris, there isn’t even a headless ghost in these woods, let alone a headless horseman,” Carrie growled.

  “Annie might be headless,” Maddison suggested, and got to see Carrie throw her arms up in frustration from inside a sleeping bag. It made the whole sleeping bag wriggle like a caterpillar and did nothing to take Maddison’s mind off bug-based horror movies.

  “Fine!” Carrie said, after she untangled the drawstring of her own sleeping bag from her mouth and rubbed the elbow she had bruised for a full minute. “There aren’t any equestrian ghosts in this park!”

  “That’s fair,” Chris allowed.

  “Shut up, Chris.”

  “I just said—”

  “Christopher Kennedy Kingsolver!” Carrie exploded.

  “O-kay,” Maddison said, before they both started using middle names and she was forced to reveal that her own middle name was Olive. “I think maybe we all need a little sleep. Do you want to continue this argument in the morning?”

  “No,” Carrie sighed, deflating. “I want it to be done with so I can sleep without worrying. Equestrian trail, regular trail, or the one we were on?”

  “Umm,” Chris said.

  “Just pick one,” Carrie groaned.

  “The one we were on,” Chris said after a long pause during which they were all either weighing their options or falling into a light doze despite their best efforts not to fall asleep. “So we keep being as unpredictable as possible.”

  “For once I agree with you,” Carrie said, even though in Maddison’s experience, Chris and Carrie tended to agree a lot more than they disagreed, arriving at the exact same conclusion at about the same time but from different directions. It must be something only an outsider would pick up on. “I’ll go with the trail we were on.”

  “That’s fine by me,” Maddison finished. “We didn’t seem to be followed when we were on that trail, did you notice?”

  “Hm,” was the only response she got from Carrie, who had already fallen mostly asleep. Maddison looked across the sleeping-bag lump to Chris and raised an eyebrow.

  “She doesn’t like staying up past eleven thirty,” Chris whispered, nodding at the digital clock he had hooked over the tent flap, which read twelve thirty in glowing green letters.

  “Well then, good night,” Maddison told him, and carefully snuggled far enough into her sleeping bag that the outside world went away.

  MADDISON WOKE TO FAINT SUNLIGHT, GENTLE BIRD chirps, and hysterical screaming. “What the hey?” she said, fighting her way out of the sleeping bag and wondering if the stick she’d had under her hip all night would make a decent weapon. It had been a weapon against sleep for at least two hundred sheep, by Maddison’s count, but painful lumps on the ground when you were sleeping outdoors sometimes turned out to be the size of peas when you moved your sleeping bag the next morning. She would have to move the sleeping bag to see.

  In the meantime, Maddison opened her eyes and sat up in the morning sunlight, wondering what the yelling was about. Carrie was still a sleeping-bag lump, and was to all appearances actually still asleep, but Chris was pressed up against the zippered tent flap, listening intently with a frown on his face, and sporting the most magnificent bedhead Maddison had ever seen in her life. Uh oh, Maddison thought, one hand going to her head automatically, how bad is mine?

  “How bad is it?” she asked Chris in a whisper, finding the hairbrush in her bag and starting on her hair. A second later she realized she could have been asking about the yelling or about her hair, but Chris was a polite person who didn’t tease you for having birds’ nests on your head when you woke up.

  “Mm,” Chris said. “You don’t sleepwalk, do you? Or cook whole meals or clean the house while you’re asleep?”

  “No . . . ” Maddison said. She’d never sleepwalked; sometimes she talked in her sleep but only when very stressed or sick.

  “Because I don’t and Carrie doesn’t. And um, we might be in trouble.”

  “Oh no, what now?”

  “Well,” Chris said, as the shouting got louder and closer. “Apparently sometime last night somebody drenched three of the cameras in soda and broke all but one of the tripods and did a bunch of damage to a handful of other things. Harry did a lot of screaming about them too,” he said. “But I didn’t follow everything the camera operators told me yesterday so I don’t understand what they did to the rest of the stuff. And as the only unknown variables . . . ”

  “Oh great,” Maddison said, just as Harry started to rip their tent flap open and Bethy basically tackled him and finally—finally!—Carrie sighed and blinked awake.

  “Wha’ matter?” she mumbled, squinting. Chris gestured helplessly. Harry roared something about “destruction of property” and then yelped like Bethy had smacked him, and the booming voice of Robin Redd suddenly joined in the fray, offering Harry a coffee.

  “Everything will be better if you have a nice cup or two and commune with nature for a bit!” Maddison heard Redd say. Then there was a scuffling sound and Redd said, “My coffee!”

  Maddison and Chris exchanged worried looks. Harry was, it seemed, not in the mood to let coffee and nature calm him.

  “Maybe you should just go back to sleep,” Maddison told Carrie.

&
nbsp; But Carrie turned out to be one of those people who went from fast asleep to wide awake and horrifyingly competent in no time at all, so by the time Maddison had put her hair up in a tight braid and laced her hiking boots back on, Carrie was neat and put together and entirely awake, and actually able to smile at Bethy and open the tent flap to her when she knocked.

  “Hey guys,” Bethy said. She looked tired and sounded stressed and had a very new coffee stain on her jeans. “I hope I didn’t wake you up, but we’ve got a bit of a situation we need to ask you about.”

  “Yeah, we heard,” Chris said. “Carrie, where is my other shoe?”

  “Right behind you!” Carrie said, French-braiding her hair with her eyes closed.

  Maddison fished an only-slightly-frayed purple ribbon out of her bag and tied it to the end of her braid, because she needed a little extra something today. Then she took a deep breath, set her shoulders, and followed Chris out of the tent.

  It was a very sorry group that was clustered around the one aluminum picnic table, heaped with busted camera equipment and cups of coffee in the early morning light, but they were thankfully not a group inclined to blame anyone. Harry very clearly wanted to jump right to the point where he accused everyone of stealing and sabotage and just as clearly had been sat on by Redd, but he was the exception, not the norm. Much of the camera crew looked as though this was nothing more than what they expected, and Bethy just looked like she had a never-ending headache. Even Flo seemed subdued, but that was because she had obviously been dragged out of a sound sleep by people commandeering her coffee pot. She was still wrapped in a flannel housecoat, looking disapproving and somehow not nearly as silly as she ought to. She was also standing guard over the coffee pot, which might have been why half the film crew looked so mournful.

  “Right,” Bethy said, once everyone was awkwardly sitting around the picnic table either clutching a cup of coffee or staring mournfully at the ruined camera equipment or doing both or, in a few cases, staring mournfully at an empty cup of coffee. “So. Obviously we have a situation, and obviously Harry is in no fit state to deal with this.” She paused to tell Harry—who had opened his mouth to protest or just start yelling again—to hush. “I know you’re the producer, but you were yelling gibberish this morning—so I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.” She sighed and dumped a long stream of sugar into her cup of coffee. “We really can’t afford any more legal drama, after Harry tried to shoot and then sue Susan last month.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s five forty-five in the morning, what were you even doing up this early?”

  Harry mumbled something that Maddison didn’t catch and Bethy didn’t seem to think worth catching.

  “So we are going to accurately assess the damages, call the insurance company, and see what our policy says about this sort of thing, and get what we can set up for today’s shoot, and then—then!—we will reconvene at seven and have something to eat before we address the elephant in the room. Okay?”

  There was a lot of sheepish muttering and then everyone scattered, but Bethy grabbed Chris before he could book it and Maddison and Carrie hung behind for moral support. And because Bethy would clearly have grabbed one of them if they’d been within range.

  “I really don’t think you kids had anything to do with this,” Bethy said, “but I’d still like you to hang around until seven. I still have to get you to sign waivers since you’ve technically been on set and Redd has no short-term memory,” she said. “I’m hoping to have an idea of who did this before seven anyway.”

  “Okay, we can do that,” Carrie agreed. Chris nodded frantically. Maddison shrugged, because she thought that waiting until seven was the least they could do.

  When Bethy had gone off in the direction of her phone, Maddison turned to Chris and Carrie and opened her mouth to ask if the timing of this mess seemed a little suspicious but Chris beat her to it.

  “You don’t think this was because of us, do you?” he asked. “That whoever is following us decided to teach us a lesson about hiding from them?”

  “Maybe?” Carrie said. “It seems like a strange way to go about it. Honestly, this seems like someone is trying to keep the ghost story alive.”

  “But we decided that wasn’t real,” Chris said. “And this film crew also decided that it wasn’t real, remember the argument about fake bloody handprints last night?”

  Maddison did in fact remember the argument, as it had been a huge relief when Todd finally admitted, in the face of a furious Bethy, that he had planted the bloody handprint at the picnic area to scare Liam and see how long it took Redd to realize that the print wasn’t real.

  “Yeah,” Carrie said. “But if we hadn’t known that, what would ‘a film crew goes out into the woods to shoot a documentary about a ghost, but all their equipment gets smashed’ sound like to you?”

  “The start of a movie that you don’t like very much,” Maddison said. “Ohhh, I see. Though I really wish I didn’t. Chris, what do you—Chris?”

  Chris was staring into space again. He had his “I’ve just had a thought, and nobody is going to like it” face on.

  “Smashed equipment,” Chris said thoughtfully. “Except not all of it was smashed, was it?” They were still next to the picnic table that had been piled with ruined camera equipment—which had been spirited away by the camera operators in an effort to see what could be fixed. Chris turned to stare at the place where the camera equipment had been, expression thoughtful.

  “No,” Carrie said slowly, “not all of it was smashed, but then I guess the ghost got distracted or heard someone coming and had to book it before she was finished.”

  “Yeah, and that’s another point,” Chris agreed, now looking both thoughtful and excited. It was the face he had when he’d just caught a clue, and Maddison, who was starting to suspect where he was going with this, felt a swoop of dread mixed with excitement. And she wasn’t at all surprised when the next words out of Chris’s mouth were, “I need to go talk to the camera operators!”

  “This is not going to end well,” Carrie said as her cousin skipped across the clearing to the tent with the second-loudest swearing coming from it. The camera operators weren’t watching their language but Harry and Bethy were even louder. They were hopefully talking to one another, because swearing that badly at an insurance claims investigator would surely guarantee a denial. “And are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I know nothing about cameras,” Maddison offered. “But does the fact that at least one was untouched and only specific pieces of the equipment were damaged suggest that this was an inside job?”

  “I was actually thinking we should go gather up all our stuff and check it for any extras,” Carrie said. “I wouldn’t put it past the ‘ghost’ to try framing us. But as far as the sabotage goes I think you’re probably right, and I hope Chris doesn’t find us another conspiracy that won’t go away.”

  “Well, how bad could it be in comparison to what we’re already dealing with?” Maddison asked.

  The answer, it turned out, was not very. It was a completely ordinary, run-of-the-mill sort of conspiracy, and nothing at all like a lost treasure ship and a murdered aunt. Honestly, it was almost cute. Maddison was so shocked that she dropped her backpack on Chris’s foot so that his explanation of what he meant was delayed while he hopped around in pain for a while.

  “What did you put in here? Rocks?” Chris gasped.

  “No,” Maddison said. “Just clothes. And maps. And some snacks, and a really nice stick I think I could do some damage with.” It was the stick that had been digging into her hip for half the night, actually. Maddison had found it when she and Carrie had taken down the tent so the film crew didn’t have to, which they’d done after checking all their things for any object that didn’t belong to them before packing everything up.

  They’d gotten the sleeping bags together and it had occurred to Carrie that polite guests left no sign that they were there and she’d insisted on taking the tent dow
n. It had almost come down on top of Maddison’s head—the thing was unwieldy once you started unpegging it. She was pretty sure Carrie had polite guest rules mixed up with polite camping rules. Also they were just a little bored and full of nervous energy. They’d even gone ahead and packed up all Chris’s things since he’d still been asking the camera operators nosey questions.

  “Did you grab me a stick?” Chris asked. When he had finally turned up, Carrie and Maddison had been sitting on the ground playing a clapping game in the spot where the tent used to stand and feeling a little too discreetly tucked away. The tiny clearing was in the shape of a figure eight, with one loop far smaller than the other, and in the smaller loop there was just enough room for one extra tent and a picnic table, covered in bits of old brick for reasons Redd had not known when he’d given them the tour.

  It was separate without being out of hearing distance of the rest of the camp, and Maddison was pretty sure they’d been put up there because of a combination of politeness and them being much younger than most of the crew. Unfortunately, there was a pine tree half-blocking sightlines to the rest of the camp and it was going to be hard to prove that they’d been in their tent the whole time doing nothing but sleeping. And the cameras were just through the bushes at the other end of the bottleneck, so they were still close enough to fall under suspicion.

  “No, but I’m sure you can find one of your own,” Maddison said.

  “After you tell us that you didn’t traumatize the camera operators too badly,” Carrie added.

  Chris agreeably sat down across from her, on a tree stump marking the boundary between the woods and the clearing, and started poking through the available sticks. “The funny thing is,” he said, “if we did destroy the cameras we’d have been doing them a favor. They’ve still got the newest one, and the night-vision one. Those were the cameras with insurance policy issues. Everything else is insured, so according to Todd if they get an insurance payout they might actually be able to buy better cameras. And they can still finish this shoot, even, although it’s going to be a huge hassle because of the tripods.”