by BETH KERY
During the last activity before dinner, she and Dave Epstein were leading an archery activity. The numbers of interested campers had increased to twice the size of what they’d had earlier in the week, and many of the new attendees were novices. As a result, Alice wasn’t too surprised that arrows were being released haphazardly and going far afield.
“I’ll make this run, you did the last,” Alice told Dave resignedly when yet another camper’s arrow zinged into the woods. She and Dave allowed a half a dozen or so to go before they’d make a retrieval run.
“I’ll switch them off this target,” Dave called, meaning he’d stop the kids from shooting in Alice’s direction as she scurried toward the edge of the woods. She cautiously moved past the tree line, avoiding the high grass and peering around the dim woods. She recovered five of the arrows, but had to hunt for the sixth. After several seconds, she spotted the orange arrow in the dirt between two oaks. Picking through the brush, she recovered it and turned to leave.
“… why you can’t just tell me what’s going on.”
Alice paused upon hearing the female voice in the near distance. The tone had been a little irritated and tense. Cautiously, she looked around the trunk of an oak tree. She saw Thad and Brooke standing in a secluded clearing around twenty feet away.
“Do you think I should have refused?” Thad asked.
“No, of course not. But why all the interest in her? It doesn’t make any sense,” Brooke said, and Alice heard desperation in her tone.
“I’m not going to defend myself on that score again. I haven’t lied to you about anything.”
Brooke stepped into him. Thad’s face hovered over her upturned one.
“What do you think it’s like for me?” Brooke asked him in a choked voice. “Knowing that practically everyone in this damn camp thinks you’re crazy for her?”
“I can’t help what they think. She doesn’t feel the same way, so what difference does it make?”
“It makes all the difference in the world,” Brooke said miserably.
“Then why are you here with me?” Thad asked quietly, his hand bracketing her jaw. His golden head dipped. Their mouths fused.
Alice slowly, carefully fled the scene.
WHILE she and Kuvi partnered to get the bonfire on the beach ready, Alice had time to think about what she’d seen in the woods. In many ways, it was comforting for her, to have something so concrete and thought provoking to distract her. True, it worried and confused her, what she’d seen and heard, but at least it was better than focusing on everything she’d learned yesterday in Dylan’s den.
She was pretty certain that she—Alice—was the person to whom Brooke referred. Alice couldn’t think of anyone else that other people at the camp might suspect Thad was interested in romantically. He certainly never gave the impression he was partial to Brooke. Alice had thought Brooke’s interest in him entirely one-sided. Clearly, she’d been wrong. It disturbed her, to think of Thad purposefully misleading her.
“Do you ever see Thad and Brooke together?” Alice asked Kuvi as they laid some thick logs in a ring on the beach to serve as an outer limit for the beach bonfire.
“Sure,” Kuvi said, frowning and straightening from a kneeling position. She dusted off her hands. “She follows him around like she’s an addict and he’s her favorite drug.”
“Well I know that,” Alice said. “I just mean … do you ever see him reciprocate the interest?”
Kuvi’s eyes went wide. She suddenly looked very uneasy. “Do you have some reason to think he’s cheating on you?” she hissed.
“Cheating on me? No, Kuvi, you’re all wrong about Thad and me—”
“Really?” she squeaked. She seemed surprised, and then relieved. “Good, because I’ve been on hot coals trying to figure out whether or not I should tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Alice asked, dropping a log on the beach.
“You said you were going to be busy this weekend, so I thought—you know—you and Thad were going to go away together or something for your night off. But then I saw him on Sunday night with Brooke past dark out on the dock. They looked a little chummy from what I could see. In fact, I made a fool of myself and called out your name. I thought that’s who Thad was with.”
Alice shook her head. “It wasn’t me. Thad and I aren’t together.”
Kuvi’s eyebrows knitted together. “Hey—then where have you been going all these nights?”
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that,” she began, knowing it was time to at least come clean about her affair with Dylan Fall to her roommate, if not the other bewildering stuff she’d learned yesterday. Alice couldn’t begin to imagine trying to explain that story to another person.
Someone called out. Three other counselors approached, carrying armfuls of wood.
“I’ll explain it to you the first chance we get,” Alice promised hurriedly. “But Kuvi? You’ve got to promise not to tell a soul when I do.”
Kuvi nodded earnestly, her gaze concerned. The other counselors approached, halting their conversation.
THAT night, they got the bonfire going at dusk, and the campers and staff all gathered together on the beach, lounging, sipping sodas, talking, and roasting marshmallows for s’mores. The night staff was already there. They’d go later tonight, because of the bonfire. At the end, the night staff would take over immediate supervision of the kids. She’d already explained to Dylan that she’d be later tonight than usual.
As the colorful, gorgeous sunset faded, Alice saw heat lightning flickering in the western sky. It only added to the excited ambience of the night. The crowd was anxious to hear about the team point totals. Everyone was directed to take a seat on the beach. Alice and Judith organized the Red Team around them. Sebastian Kehoe himself was going to be announcing the team point count after a week of camp. There was a lot of anticipation in the air.
As Kehoe talked in a booming voice from where he stood near the roaring bonfire, darkness fell around them. Alice and her kids were seated near the outer edge of the ring, facing the lake and the bonfire, their backs to the woods. The reach of the bonfire light was weaker where they sat huddled together. Lightning lit up the southwestern sky again, illuminating the outline of huge thunder-heads. Electricity seemed to charge the air, making her forearms prickle.
Kehoe began to announce the point counts for each team, but Alice was distracted. The back of her neck prickled. She glanced around, peering at the dark tree line in the distance. A shiver tore through her. Those were the woods. They weren’t far from the spot where Addie Durand had been taken.
Where Dylan had been stabbed.
She shuddered.
“You okay?”
She blinked, focusing on Judith’s face cast in dim firelight.
“Yeah. Just caught a chill,” Alice replied softly. “What do you think? Do we stand a chance?” she asked, nodding toward Kehoe.
“It’s going to be rough,” Judith said. “Thad’s team is miles ahead of everyone else’s so far.”
“I don’t know. It might be close,” Alice whispered.
“You’re right. The Red Team’s got a good chance,” Judith muttered intently, sitting up taller and craning to hear Kehoe. Alice repressed a smile. It was the first peaceful conversation she’d ever had with the girl. It was nice, hearing Judith take ownership of the Red Team.
Despite her thoughts, she again was distracted by the woods behind her. She stared over her shoulder, trying to tease the shadows apart. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“God, he saved us for last,” Judith said miserably a moment later, biting at a thumbnail.
“The Red Team,” Kehoe called out. “Team counselor Alice Reed and team leader Judith Arnold: a grand total for week one of six hundred and forty-seven points.”
Alice startled at the explosion of shrieks and shouts of triumph coming from all of her kids. They’d beat Thad’s Orange Team by two points!
Maybe I got here under suspicious cir
cumstances, but I’m not doing half bad.
She couldn’t believe it. Laughing, she shared an impulsive hug with Darcy and then Judith.
“Not losers now, huh?” she said quietly near Judith’s ear. Judith gave her a sharp glance when they parted, but her happiness was clearly too big for cattiness at that moment. She grinned full-out instead.
“Who ever said we were?” she asked with fake innocence.
“No one, of course,” Alice replied, clapping and whooping for her kids.
AFTER everyone had settled down, one of the Kehoe managers stood and said it was a tradition at the bonfires to tell ghost stories. She announced that the kids could earn public speaking points for their team if they volunteered.
“And we’ve got a good night for it,” the manager said, waving significantly at the southwestern sky where lightning smoldered among the clouds. “Any volunteers?”
Matt Dinorio, who sat next to Judith, raised his hand and waved it strenuously. The manager called his name. A prickle of trepidation went through Alice. Suddenly, the little details of Matt’s ghost story leaped out at her, taking on new life and meaning.
I can tell you one ghost story about Camp Durand that’s real … that one about the mother who haunts the woods and the castle because her baby was killed in there, and she wanders around looking for her … I’m telling you, it’s true! … I told one of my teachers about it after I heard the story last year, and Mr. Glyer said he did remember something about that happening years ago, right here at Camp Durand. It was all over the news.
Oh no.
She’d been so preoccupied with what she’d learned yesterday, she hadn’t put together the pieces in her mind. Matt’s tale had been a bastardized version of Addie Durand’s story, some lingering ghost of the event that must have rocked Morgantown and the surrounding area twenty years ago. Crystal must have known. That’s why the night supervisor had been so adamant about denying the truth of the story. And in fact, Crystal hadn’t lied. It hadn’t been a camper who had been kidnapped. Crystal just hadn’t wanted to frighten the kids, and so had quashed the story. Alice wondered if Camp Durand employees hadn’t been doing something similar for years, even if they couldn’t entirely erase the Durand kidnapping from the public’s consciousness.
“Matt,” Alice said tensely as the boy started to stand. “Not the story about the kid being snatched at Camp Durand.”
“I’ve got it all figured out,” Matt told her excitedly in a hushed tone, wiping the sand off his cargo shorts. “Crystal was mad the other night because I said it happened here. She thought that’s what scared the little kids the most. I’m going to make it generic, and say it happened near some woods around here, not at Camp Durand,” he hissed before he lunged through the crowd.
He was gone like a shot arrow, beyond the reach of Alice’s voice unless she wanted to yell at him and make a scene. She listened uneasily as Matt began his story, adding more details and drama here at the bonfire than he had in the Red Team common room a few nights ago.
“… this man and woman—the parents,” Matt was saying, “loved their little girl so much. She was their whole world, and everything was so great for them and they were all so happy. But that all changed one dark, stormy summer night … a night a lot like this one,” Matt said, his eyes moving theatrically over his audience, pulling them into the story. “On that night, the mom had taken a walk and visited some friends. She stayed later than she’d intended. A storm had moved in fast, and it made the night darker earlier than it normally would have been. She had her little girl with her, and the little girl had fallen asleep during the visit. So the mom had to carry the girl into a path in the dark woods in order to get to their house. She was really nervous, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched.
“And she was being watched from the cover of the trees. There were these kidnappers in the woods, waiting, and they snatched the little girl right from her mother’s arms. One second, her daughter was there, and the next, the mother was alone and screaming for her baby … screams you can still hear echoing in those woods today.”
Shivers rippled across Alice’s skin. She rubbed her arms, trying to diminish the goose bumps that had popped up on her flesh. She glanced behind her to the woods uneasily. Had the bonfire started to dim, because the shadows seemed closer now …
“Well, these men killed the little girl; murdered her in cold blood,” Matt said solemnly, and he had the campers’ full attention now. Even Alice, who was highly unsettled by the story, was listening while her lungs burned as she held her breath. “And when the mother heard about her little girl being murdered, she went crazy. She didn’t want to live, with her daughter being taken right out of her arms like that and murdered. She was out of her head with grief. So one night, the mother—”
“Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt,” a man said loudly.
Alice gasped and jumped when someone touched her arm. She stared up at Dylan’s face, shocked. His fingertips brushed lightly across the back of her shoulder, as if in a furtive gesture of reassurance, before he straightened.
“Excuse me,” he said again, his gaze meeting hers ever so briefly. “Can I get through? I have an announcement to make to everyone.”
Alice moved, as did the other kids in front of her, parting the way so Dylan could walk through the crowd. His commanding, dark figure seemed to blaze along the outline with the light from the bonfire. Sebastian Kehoe stood to meet him when he reached the center of the ring of people. Alice watched anxiously as the two men conferred in subdued voices. Everyone started chattering in the interim, curious and interested as to the reason for the interruption.
Dylan turned and held up a hand. Everyone’s chattering silenced.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask everyone to return to their cabins,” he called out loudly. “There’s a bad storm on the way. If the night staff can quickly organize their teams, please? Everyone should get inside as fast as possible.”
Alice stood with everyone else, bemused and unsettled by the interruption.
EVEN though her assigned meeting with Dylan wasn’t for another fifteen minutes, Alice left her cabin and entered the woods. The storm had come closer, and she somehow knew he’d be waiting for her now, before the storm broke. The air seemed to crackle with electricity and thunder rumbled ominously overhead.
Suddenly, she felt his hand brush her forearm and she turned to him in the darkness. She opened her mouth to say something—she wasn’t sure what, because she was too anxious to ask him if he’d interrupted Matt’s “story” at that particular point on purpose—but then his mouth was covering hers, hot and possessive, and her thoughts scattered beneath his heat.
Thunder rolled through the sky, louder this time.
“Come on,” Dylan said urgently next to her lips. “The storm is about to break.”
She followed him in the pitch black, no longer as hesitant as she had been on the first night, trusting him to guide her unerringly. When they reached the edge of the woods past the stables, she moved behind him, her arms around his waist. He led her into the woods, and she shivered despite the warm, humid air. The trees thrashed and groaned around them. A shocking flash of lightning made the woods go iridescent for a moment, leaving the impression of Dylan’s head and broad shoulders burned behind her eyelids. The hair on her forearms stood on end, and it felt like every inch of her skin tingled with electricity.
Rain started to spatter her skin as they reached the castle grounds.
“Come on. It’s going to unload on us,” Dylan said, urging her to run up the grass slope. Wind and rain buffeted her as they made their way to the back terrace. Thunder boomed, and Dylan was herding her up the back steps for cover beneath the eave. He unlocked the door, prodding her with his touch to go before him into the unlit media room. She waited, panting, while he locked the door and keyed in the code to the alarm system. By the time he turned to her, the air conditioning had caused her wet skin to roughen.
Outside in the yard, the wind bent the trees and whipped the branches like they were made of rubber instead of bark.
“It really is a bad storm,” she said quietly when he faced her.
“Did you think I made the whole thing up?” he asked, stalking toward her. Without breaking her stare, he dropped his keys onto a nearby table, causing a loud jangle of metal against wood. Despite the reference he’d made last night to going into the office in Morgantown, she wondered if he hadn’t worked at home today instead. He wore jeans and a blue and white plaid button down. He hadn’t shaved yet again. With that thickening scruff shadowing his lower face and upper lip, he really had his pirate-look going on. He looked a little dangerous.
Sexy as hell.
“No, it’s not that. It’s just when you chose to interrupt the campfire. Dylan, that story Matt was telling, was that a”—she swallowed thickly, rubbing her chilled arms—“a sort of urban legend about Addie? It was, wasn’t it?” she whispered when he didn’t immediately reply, and his expression remained masklike. He took her into his arms, his hands opening at the back of her hips.
“I told you how it really happened. I was there. Who knows better? That was just a campfire story that’s been embroidered over the years.”
“About a ghost of a woman who haunts these woods?” Alice said, studying his hovering, handsome face intently while her heart beat a tattoo in her ears. “The mother of the little girl—”
“Now’s not the time,” Dylan cut her off. He stepped closer, and she could feel his body heat penetrate her T-shirt and the fullness behind his fly. She pressed against him, stifling a whimper as need roared into her awareness.
“What’s it time for?” she asked. He dipped his head and she lifted her chin. Her provocative question was a cover for the sudden stab of fear that went though her. Dylan was right. She didn’t want to talk about Lynn Durand right now.