by Riley Sager
Not even former campers are immune from the rumors, which I learn when I open Facebook on my phone and finally unmute the posts from Camp Nightingale alumni. The first thing I see is a photo posted an hour ago by Casey Anderson, a short, red-haired counselor I had met on my first morning at camp. She was also, incidentally, the first Camp Nightingale veteran to seek me out on Facebook. Although I genuinely liked her, that friend request went ignored with all the others. Now I stare at a photo she took of the cabins with Lake Midnight glistening in the background.
Back again, she wrote. Feels like old times.
The picture had already received fifty likes and several responses.
Erica Hammond: Have a great summer!
Lena Gallagher: Awwww. Brings back memories.
Felecia Wellington: I can’t believe you went back there. Franny could offer me a million dollars and I still wouldn’t go.
Casey Anderson: Which is probably why Franny didn’t ask you. I’m happy to be here.
Maggie Collins: Agreed! That place always freaked me out.
Hope Levin Smith: I’m with Felecia. This is a bad, bad idea.
Casey Anderson: Why?
Hope Levin Smith: Because that place and its lake are messed up! We’ve all heard the legend. We all know there’s a ring of truth to it.
Lena Gallagher: OMG, that legend! Scared me so much back then.
Hope Levin Smith: You had every right to be scared.
Casey Anderson: You’re all being ridiculous.
Hope Levin Smith: Casey, you’re the one who talked about it the most! You can’t call it bullshit now that you’re back there.
Felecia Wellington: Don’t forget we all know what happened to Viv, Ally, and Natalie wasn’t an accident. You said so yourself.
Brooke Tiffany Sample: Who else is going to be there this summer?
Casey Anderson: Of people you know, me, Becca Schoenfeld, and Emma Davis.
Brooke Tiffany Sample: Emma?!? Holy fuck!
Maggie Collins: After all that shit she said about Theo?
Hope Levin Smith: Wow.
Lena Gallagher: That’s, um, interesting.
Felecia Wellington: I’d love to know how that happened. Watch your back, Casey. LOL
Casey Anderson: Be nice. I’m excited to see her.
Erica Hammond: Who’s Emma Davis?
I close Facebook and turn off my phone, unable to stomach reading another word of gossip and crackpot theories. Other than Casey, I can’t recall meeting any of those women while at camp. Nor have I heard the stories that the lake is cursed or haunted. It’s bullshit. All of it.
Only one of the responses is the absolute truth. What happened to Vivian, Natalie, and Allison wasn’t an accident.
I know because I’m the one who caused it.
Although their eventual fate remains a mystery, I’m certain that what happened to those girls is all my fault.
5
I bolt from my slumped position in the back seat when the rounded peaks of the Adirondacks push over the horizon. The sight of them sets my heart racing ever-so-slightly—a soft hum in my chest that I try to ignore. It gets worse once the driver turns off the highway and announces, “Almost there, Miss Davis.”
Immediately, the car starts to bump down a gravel road. Both sides of the road are lined with forest that seems to get thicker and darker the deeper we go. Gnarled limbs stretch overhead, reaching for one another, branches intertwined. Towering pines diffuse the sun. The underbrush is a tangle of leaves, stems, thorns. It is, I realize, like one of my paintings come to life.
Soon we’re at the wrought-iron gate that serves as the only way into Camp Nightingale. It’s wide-open—an invitation to enter. But the gate and its surroundings are anything but inviting. Flanking the road are four-foot-high stone walls that stretch into the woods. An ornate archway, also wrought iron, curves over the road, giving the impression that we’re about to enter a cemetery.
The camp reveals itself in increments. Structures slide into view as if pushed there by stagehands. All of them are remnants from when the land was a private retreat for the Harris family, now repurposed for camp use. The arts and crafts building, low-slung and quaint, used to be a horse stable. All white paint and gingerbread trim. A flower bed sits in front of it, bright with crocuses and tiger lilies. Next is the mess hall. Less pretty. More utilitarian. A former hay barn turned into a cafeteria. A side door gapes open as workers haul in cases of food from an idling delivery truck.
In the distance to my right are the cabins, barely visible through the trees. Nothing but edges of moss-stippled roof and slivers of pine siding. I catch glimpses of girls settling in. Bare legs. Slender arms. Glistening hair.
At first glance, the camp looks the same as it did when I left it all those years ago. It’s a weird sensation, like I’ve been shuttled back in time. One foot in the present, another planted in the past. Yet something about the place feels slightly off. An air of neglect hangs over everything like cobwebs. And the longer I’m here, the more I become aware of what has changed in the past fifteen years. The tennis court and archery range both now sit in a startling state of disuse. Spiky weeds burst through the court’s surface in jagged lines. The grass in the archery range is knee-high, dotted on the far end with rotting hay bales that had once held targets.
Atop the otherwise immaculate arts and crafts building, a handyman nails shingles to the roof. He stills his hammer as the town car passes, peering down at me, his face round and reddened. I stare back, suddenly recognizing him from my first visit. I remember seeing him quite a bit around camp, constantly tinkering and fixing. He was younger then, of course. Better looking. Possessed a brooding intensity that intimidated some, intrigued others.
I’d grab his tool any day, Vivian once said at lunch, prompting eye rolls from the rest of us.
I wave to him, wondering if he also recognizes the older me. He returns his gaze to a shingle, raises his hammer, pounds it into place.
By then the town car is whipping around the circular drive in front of the Lodge. Franny’s home away from home, as she calls it, although it’s more home than most people will ever lay claim to. But that’s been its purpose ever since it was built by her grandfather on the shore of the lake he also created. A summer house for a family that chose nature over Newport. Like most old structures, there’s a heaviness to the Lodge, a somberness. I think of all the years it’s witnessed. All those seasons and storms and secrets.
“We’ve arrived,” the driver says as he stops the car in front of the Lodge’s red front door. “I’ll get your bags from the trunk.”
I exit the car, legs stiff and back aching, and I’m immediately engulfed by fresh air. It’s a smell I’d forgotten. Clean and pine-scented. So different from the city’s fumes. It sparks a hundred memories I’d also forgotten. Simple ones of walking through the woods behind Vivian or sitting alone with my toes in the lake, contemplating everything and nothing all at once. The scent beckons me, pulling me forward. I start walking, unsure of where I’m headed.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell the driver, who’s busily unloading my suitcase and box of painting supplies. “I need to stretch my legs.”
I keep walking, around the Lodge to the grassy slope behind it. There I see what the fresh air has led me to.
Lake Midnight.
It’s larger than I remember. In my memory, it had become similar to the Central Park Reservoir. Something contained. Something that could be controlled. In reality, it’s a vast, sparkling presence that dominates the landscape. The trees lining its bank lean slightly toward it, branches bending over the water.
I start down the sloping lawn, continuing until I reach the tidy dock that juts over the water. Two motorboats are moored to it. On the shore nearby are two racks upon which upside-down canoes have been stacked like firewood.
I walk
the length of the dock, my footfalls slipping through cracks in the planks and echoing off the water. At its edge, I stop to look across the lake to the far shore a half mile away. The forest there is thicker—a dense wall of foliage shimmering in the sunlight, at once inviting and forbidding.
I’m still staring at the far shore when someone approaches. I hear the swish of sneakers in grass, followed by their thunk against the planks of the dock. Before I can turn around, a voice rises behind me like a bird chirp catching the breeze.
“There you are!”
The voice belongs to a twentysomething woman who rushes down the dock. Behind her, still on land, is a man roughly the same age. Both are young and tan and fit. If it wasn’t for their official Camp Nightingale polos, they could easily be mistaken for J.Crew models. They have that same outdoorsy, sun-kissed glow.
“Emma, right?” the woman says. “Hooray! You’re here!”
I reach out to shake her hand but wind up getting pulled into an enthusiastically tight embrace. No Franny-like half hugs with this girl.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” she says, breaking the embrace, slightly out of breath from the exertion of it all. “I’m Mindy. Chet’s fiancée.”
She gestures to the man on shore, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s referring to Chester, Franny’s younger son. He’s grown into a handsome man, lean and lithe and tall. So tall that he towers over both Mindy and me, stooping in a slightly self-conscious way. It’s a far cry from the short, skinny kid I had seen flitting around camp. Yet hints of that boyishness remain. In the sandy hair that flops over his face, covering one eye. In the shy smile that flickers across his lips as he calls out, “Hey there.”
“I was just getting reacquainted with the lake,” I say, when I’m not really sure that’s the case. I can’t shake the sense it was the other way around and Lake Midnight was getting reacquainted with me.
“Of course you were,” Mindy says, politely ignoring how unusual it was for me to immediately roam to the water’s edge. “It’s nice, right? Although the weather isn’t doing it any favors. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and the lake is looking a little ragged, if you ask me.”
It’s only after she’s pointed it out that I notice the telltale signs of drought around the lake. The plants on its bank bear several inches of browned stem—areas that had once been submerged. There was a drought happening the first time I was here, too. It didn’t rain once in two weeks. I remember climbing into a canoe, leaving sneaker prints in a strip of sunbaked earth between the bank of the lake and the water itself.
I’m eyeing a similar thirsty patch of land when Mindy grabs my hand and leads me off the dock.
“We’re thrilled to have you back, Emma,” she says. “Franny especially. This summer is going to be awesome. I just know it.”
Back on shore, I go to Chet and shake his hand.
“Emma Davis,” I say. “You probably don’t remember me.”
It’s wishful thinking. A hope that he remembers nothing about me. But the brow over Chet’s only visible eye lifts slightly. “Oh, I remember you well,” he says, not elaborating.
“Before you get settled in, Franny needs to see you,” Mindy says.
“About what?”
“There’s a slight problem with the rooming situation. But don’t worry. Franny’s going to sort it all out.”
Leaving Chet behind, she loops an arm through mine, guiding me up the slope and into the Lodge. It’s the first time I’ve ever been inside, and I’m surprised to see it’s not at all what I was expecting. As a girl on the outside looking in, I had pictured something from Architectural Digest. The kind of tastefully rustic retreat where movie stars spend Christmas in Aspen.
The Lodge isn’t like that. It’s musty and dim, the air inside tinged with a century’s worth of wood-fed blazes in the fireplace. The entrance hall we stand in leads to a general living area stuffed with worn furniture. Covering the walls are antlers, animal skins, and, oddly, an assortment of antique weapons. Rifles. Bowie knives with thick blades. A spear.
“Everything’s so old, right?” Mindy says. “I’m all for antiques, but some of this stuff is ancient. The first time Chet brought me here, it felt like sleeping in a museum. I’m still not used to it. But if it takes spending a summer working at a camp to impress my future mother-in-law, then so be it.”
She’s clearly a talker. Exhausting but also potentially useful. When we pass a small office on the left, I pause and ask, “What’s in there?”
“The study.”
I crane my neck to peek into the room. One wall is filled with framed photos. Another contains a bookshelf. As we pass, I glimpse the corner of a desk, a rotary telephone, a Tiffany lampshade.
“I use the electrical outlet in there to charge my phone,” Mindy says. “You’re welcome to do the same. Just don’t let Franny catch you. She wants all of us to disconnect and commune with nature or whatever.”
“How’s service up here?”
Mindy makes a dramatic gagging sound. “Horrible. Like, one bar most of the time. I honestly don’t know how these girls are going to cope.”
“The campers can’t use their phones?”
“They can until their batteries run out. No electricity in the cabins, remember? Franny’s orders.”
To my right, a staircase rises to the second floor, the steps tiny and impossibly narrow. Under the stairs sits a door intended to blend into the wall. The only things giving it away are a brass doorknob and an old-fashioned keyhole.
“And what’s that?” I ask.
“The basement,” Mindy says. “I’ve never been down there. It’s probably nothing but old furniture and cobwebs.”
We move on, Mindy playing tour guide, giving a running commentary about various family heirlooms. A portrait of Buchanan Harris that, I swear, might have been painted by John Singer Sargent, elicits a solemn “That’s worth a fortune.”
Soon we’re at the back deck, which spans the entire width of the Lodge. Wooden boxes crammed with flowers line the twig-work railing. Scattered around the deck are several small tables and the obligatory Adirondack chairs, all painted as red as the front door. Two of the chairs are occupied by Franny and Lottie.
Both are dressed in the same khaki shorts and camp polo ensemble as Chet and Mindy. Franny surveys Lake Midnight from the heightened view provided by the deck. Lottie, meanwhile, taps the screen of an iPad, looking up when Mindy and I step outside.
“Emma,” she says, her face brightening as she pulls me into what feels like my fifth hug of the day. “You have no idea how nice it is to see you back here.”
“It is,” Franny agrees. “It’s wonderful.”
Unlike Lottie, she doesn’t get up from her chair to greet me. I’m surprised, until I notice her wan and tired appearance. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since our lunch meeting months ago, and the change is startling. I had assumed being back at her beloved Lake Midnight would make her robust and hearty. Instead, it’s the opposite. She looks, for lack of a better word, old.
Franny catches me staring and says, “There’s worry in your eyes, my dear. Don’t think I can’t see it. But fear not. I’m just tired from all this activity. I’d forgotten how exhausting the first day of camp can be. Not a moment to spare, it seems. I’ll be right as rain tomorrow.”
“You need to rest,” Lottie says.
“And that’s what I’m doing,” Franny replies, somewhat testily.
I clear my throat. “You needed to see me about something?”
“Yes. I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem.”
Franny frowns slightly. It’s an echo of the half frown she gave me upon my first arrival at camp, when the family Volvo finally pulled up to the Lodge at the cusp of eleven. Franny greeted us with the same expression I see now. I wasn’t expecting you, she said. When you didn’t arrive with the others, I
thought you had canceled.
“A problem?” I say, trepidation thickening my voice.
“That sounds so dramatic, doesn’t it?” Franny says. “I suppose it’s more of a complication.”
“About what?”
“Where to put you.”
“Oh,” I say, which I’m sure is what I said when Franny told me something similar fifteen years ago.
Back then, my lateness was to blame. They had already gotten all the girls settled into their cabins, grouped together that morning by age. Since there was no more room available with girls my own age, I was forced to bunk with ones who were several years older. That’s how I ended up with Vivian, Natalie, and Allison, intimidated by their additional years of life experience, their acne-free complexions, their fully formed bodies.
Now Franny tells me it’s the opposite problem.
“My intention was to give the instructors some privacy. Let you have a nice cabin all to yourselves. But there was a bit of a mix-up with planning, and we find ourselves with more girls than we initially expected.”
“Fifteen more,” Lottie says, unprompted.
“Which means all our instructors will have to share lodgings with some of the campers.”
“Why can’t the instructors bunk together?”
“I asked her the same thing, Emma,” Lottie says.
“That’s a fine idea in theory,” Franny tells us. “But there are five of you and only four bunks in each cabin. One person would have to bunk with the campers anyway. Which wouldn’t be remotely fair to that single person.”
“Couldn’t we stay in the Lodge instead?”
“The Lodge is for family only,” Mindy pipes up from the corner of railing where she’s been watching our conversation. She gives her ring finger a wiggle, drawing attention to the fat engagement ring circling it. The message isn’t subtle, but it’s clear. She’s one of them. I’m not.