The Last Time I Lied_A Novel

by Riley Sager

  Theo opens his mouth, reconsiders what he’s about to say, closes it again. When he finally does speak, sincerity tinges his voice. “I’m glad you’re here. I know it isn’t easy. But it means a lot to my mother. It means a lot to me, too.”

  Then he’s gone, leaving me alone to wonder what, exactly, he meant by that. Does it mean a lot to him because it pleases Franny? Or does it mean my presence reminds him of happier times before the camp shuttered in disgrace?

  Ultimately, I decide it’s neither of those things.

  In truth, I think it means he forgives me.

  Now all I need is to somehow find a way to forgive myself.

  9

  Apparently to Mindy, whenever meant tonight, because after the campfire I find myself on cabin-check duty. While not thrilled, I’m at least pleased to have Casey as my co-checker. Together we go from cabin to cabin, peeking inside to do a head count and ask if any of the campers need anything.

  It’s strange being on the other side of things. Especially with Casey in tow. When I was a camper here, she’d give a single rap on the door before throwing it open, trying to catch us in the act of some imagined misbehavior. We greeted her with wide-eyed innocence, lashes fluttering. Now I’m the one getting those looks—a surreal turn of events that makes me feel partly jealous of their mischievous youth, partly annoyed by it.

  In two of the cabins, I find girls balled up in their bunks, crying from homesickness. While Vivian was wrong about all newbies crying their first night, a small few truly do. I spend a few minutes with each one, telling them that while camp may seem scary now, they’ll soon grow to love it and will never want to go back home.

  I hope it’s the truth.

  I never got the chance to find out.

  After the cabins have all been checked, Casey and I walk to the patch of grass behind the latrine. It’s dark back here, made even more oppressive by the forest that begins a yard or so away. Shadows crowd the trees, broken only by fireflies dancing among the leaves. The utility light affixed to the latrine’s corner swarms with bugs.

  Casey pulls a cigarette from a battered pack hidden in her cargo shorts and lights up. “I can’t believe I’m sneaking cigarettes. I feel like I’m fourteen again.”

  “Better this than face the wrath of Mindy.”

  “Want to know a secret?” Casey says. “Her real name is Melinda. She goes by Mindy to be more like Franny.”

  “I get the feeling Franny doesn’t like her very much.”

  “I can see why. She’s the kind of girl I went out of my way to avoid in high school.” Casey blows out a stream of smoke and watches it languidly float in the night air. “Honestly, though, it’s probably for the best that she’s here. Without her, it would be open season on poor Chet. These girls would eat him alive.”

  “But they’re all so young.”

  “I’m a teacher,” Casey says. “Trust me, girls that age are just as full of raging hormones as boys. Remember how you were back then. I saw the way you fawned over Theo. Not that I blamed you. He was a fine-looking young man.”

  “Have you seen him now?”

  Casey gives a slow, knowing nod. “Why is it that men only look better with age? It’s completely unfair.”

  “But he’s still just as friendly,” I say. “I didn’t expect that.”

  “Because of what you said last time you were here?”

  “And because of what people are saying now. I saw some of the responses to your Facebook post. They were pretty brutal.”

  “Ignore them.” Casey gives her hand a casual flip, as if brushing away the smoke still spouting from her cigarette. “Most of those women are just adult versions of the bitchy teenagers they were when they went here.”

  “A few of them mentioned that this place gave them the creeps,” I say. “Something about a legend.”

  “It’s just a silly campfire tale.”

  “So you’ve heard it?”

  “I’ve told it,” Casey says. “That doesn’t mean I think the story is true. I can’t believe you never heard it.”

  “I guess I wasn’t here long enough.”

  Casey looks at me, the cigarette held between her lips, its trail of smoke making her squint.

  “The story is that there was a village here,” she says. “Before the lake was made. Some will say it was full of deaf people. I heard it was a leper colony.”

  “A leper colony? Was an ancient Indian burial ground too much of a cliché?”

  “I didn’t make up the story,” Casey snaps. “Now, do you want to hear it or not?”

  I do, no matter how ridiculous it seems. So I nod for her to continue.

  “Deaf village and leper colony aside, the rest of the story is the same,” Casey says. “It’s that Franny’s grandfather saw this valley and decided on the spot it was where he was going to create his lake. But there was one problem. The village sat right in the middle of it. When Buchanan Harris approached the villagers and offered to buy their land, they refused. They were a small, tight-knit community, ostracized by the rest of the world. This was their home, and they weren’t going to sell it. This made Mr. Harris angry. He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. So when he increased his offer and the villagers again refused, he bought all the land surrounding them instead. Then he built his dam and flooded the valley at the stroke of midnight, knowing the water would wash away the village and that everyone who lived there would drown.”

  She lowers her voice, speaking slowly. Full storyteller mode.

  “The village is still there, deep below Lake Midnight. And the people who drowned now haunt the woods and the lake. They appear at midnight, rising from the water and roaming the forest. Anyone unlucky enough to encounter them gets dragged into the lake and pulled to the bottom, where they quickly drown. Then they become one of the ghosts, cursed to search the woods for all eternity looking for more victims.”

  I give her an incredulous look. “And that’s what people think happened to Vivian, Natalie, and Allison?”

  “No one truly believes that,” Casey says. “But bad things have happened here, with no explanation. Franny’s husband, for example. He was a champion swimmer. Almost made it to the Olympics. Yet he drowned. I heard that Franny’s grandmother—the first wife of Buchanan Harris—also drowned here. So when Vivian and the others disappeared, some people said it was the ghosts of Lake Midnight. Or else the survivors.”

  “Survivors?”

  “It’s been said that a handful of villagers escaped the rising waters and fled into the hills. There they stayed, living off the land, rebuilding the village in a remote section of the woods where no one could find them. The whole time, they held a grudge against the Harris family, passing it on to their descendants. Those descendants are still there, hidden somewhere in the woods. And on nights when the moon is full, they sneak down to the land that used to belong to them and exact their revenge. Vivian, Natalie, and Allison were just three of their victims.”

  It turns out that Casey’s an expert tale-spinner, for as she finishes, I feel a chill in the air. A light frisson that makes me look to the woods behind her, half expecting to see either a ghostly figure or mutant forest-dweller emerging from the tree line.

  “What do you really think happened to them?” I say.

  “I think they got lost in the woods. Vivian was always wandering off.” Casey drops her cigarette and grinds it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Which is why I’ve always felt partly responsible for what happened. I was a camp counselor. It was my job to make sure all of you were safe. And I regret not paying more attention to you and what was going on in that cabin.”

  I stare at her, surprised. “Were there things going on I didn’t know about?”

  “I don’t know,” Casey says as she fumbles in her pocket for another cigarette. “Maybe.”

  “Like what? You were fr
iends with Vivian. Surely you noticed something.”

  “I wouldn’t say the two of us were friends. I was a senior camper her first summer and then came back to work as a counselor the two years after that. She was always a troublemaker, but charming enough to get away with it.”

  Oh, I know that all too well. Vivian excelled at charm. That and lying were her two greatest skills.

  “But something about her seemed off that last summer,” Casey continues. “Not majorly different. Nothing that someone who only knew her casually would notice. But she wasn’t the same. She seemed distracted.”

  I think of the strange map Vivian had drawn and the even stranger photo of the woman with long hair.

  “By what?”

  Casey shrugs and looks away again as she irritably puffs out more smoke. “I don’t know, Emma. Like I said, we weren’t that close.”

  “But you noticed things.”

  “Little things,” Casey says. “I noticed her walking alone around camp a few times. Which never happened the previous summers. Vivian was always surrounded by people. And maybe she just wanted to be left alone. Or maybe . . .”

  Her voice trails off as she takes one last draw of her cigarette.

  “Maybe what?”

  “She was up to no good,” Casey says. “On the second day of camp, I caught her trying to sneak into the Lodge. She was hanging around the steps on the back deck, ready to run inside. She said she was looking for Franny, but I didn’t buy it.”

  “Why would she want to break into the Lodge?”

  Casey shrugs again. The gesture contains a note of annoyance, almost as if she wishes she’d never brought up the topic of Vivian. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  My final stop on cabin check is Dogwood, where I find all three girls on their beds, phones in hand, faces awash in the ice-blue light of their screens. Sasha is already under the covers, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose as she plays Candy Crush or some similarly frustrating time-waste of a game. A cacophony of chirps and beeps erupts from her phone.

  In the bunk below her, Krystal has changed into baggy sweats. The matted teddy bear sits in the crook of her arm as she watches a Marvel movie on her phone, the soundtrack leaking out of her earbuds, tinny and shrill. I can hear blips of gunfire and the telltale crunch of fist hitting skull.

  On the other side of the cabin, Miranda reclines on the top bunk, now dressed in a tight tank top and black shorts so small they barely qualify to be called that. She holds her phone close to her face, doing a faux pout as she takes several pictures.

  “You shouldn’t be using your phones,” I say, even though I was guilty of doing the same thing earlier. “Save your batteries.”

  Krystal tugs off her earbuds. “What else are we going to do?”

  “We could, you know, talk,” I suggest. “You may find it hard to believe, but people actually did that before everyone spent all their time squinting at screens.”

  “I saw you talking to Theo after dinner,” Miranda says, her voice wavering between innocence and accusation. “Is he, like, your boyfriend?”

  “No. He’s a—”

  I truly don’t know what to call Theo. Several different labels apply.

  My friend? Not necessarily.

  One of my first crushes? Probably.

  The person I accused of doing something horrible to Vivian, Natalie, and Allison?

  Definitely.

  “He’s an acquaintance,” I say.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Sasha asks.

  “Not at the moment.”

  I have plenty of friends who are boys, most of them gay or too socially awkward to consider a romantic relationship. When I do date someone, it’s not for very long. A lot of men like the idea of being in a relationship with an artist, but few actually get used to the reality of the situation. The odd hours, the self-doubt and stained hands that stink of oil paint more often than not. The last guy I dated—a dorky-cute accountant at a rival ad agency—managed to put up with it for four months before breaking things off.

  Lately, my romantic life has consisted of occasional dalliances with a French sculptor when he happens to be in the city on business. We meet for drinks, conversation, sex made more passionate by how infrequent it is.

  “Then how do you know Theo?” Krystal says.

  “From when I was a camper here.”

  Miranda latches on to this news like a shark biting into a baby seal. A wicked grin widens across her face, and her eyes light up. It reminds me so much of Vivian that it causes a strange ache in my heart.

  “So you were at Camp Nightingale before?” she says. “Must have been a long time ago.”

  Rather than be offended, I smile, impressed by the stealthiness of her insult. She’s a sly one. Vivian would have loved her.

  “It was,” I say.

  “Did you like it here?” Sasha says as bombastic music rises from her phone and exploding candy pieces reflect off the lenses of her glasses.

  “At first. Then not so much.”

  “Why did you come back?” Krystal asks.

  “To make sure you girls have a better time than I did.”

  “What happened?” Miranda says. “Something horrible?”

  She leans forward, her phone temporarily discarded as she waits for my answer. It gives me an idea.

  “Phones off,” I say. “I mean it.”

  All three of them groan. Miranda’s is the most dramatic as she, like the others, switches off her phone. I sit cross-legged on the floor, my back pressed against the edge of my bunk. I pat the spaces on either side of me until the girls do the same.

  “What are we doing?” Sasha asks.

  “Playing a game. It’s called Two Truths and a Lie. You say three things about yourself. Two of them must be true. One is false. The rest of us have to guess the lie.”

  We played it a lot during my brief time in Dogwood, including the night of my arrival. The four of us were laying on our bunks in the darkness of the cabin, listening to nature’s chorus of crickets and bullfrogs outside the window, when Vivian suddenly said, Two Truths and a Lie, ladies. I’ll start.

  She began to utter three statements, either assuming we already knew how the game was played or just not caring if we didn’t.

  One: I once met the president. His palm was sweaty. Two: My parents were going to get a divorce but then decided not to when my dad got elected. Three: Once, on vacation in Australia, I got pooped on by a koala.

  Three, Natalie said. You used it last year.

  No, I didn’t.

  You totally did, Allison said. You told us the koala peed on you.

  That’s how it went every night. The four of us in the dark, sharing things we’d never reveal in the light of day. Constructing our lies so they’d sound real. It’s how I learned that Natalie once kissed a field hockey teammate and that Allison tried to sabotage a matinee of Les Misérables by spilling grape juice on her mother’s costume five minutes before curtain.

  The game was Vivian’s favorite. She said you could learn more about a person from their lies than their truths. At the time, I didn’t believe her. I do now.

  “I’ll start,” Miranda says. “Number one: I once made out with an altar boy in the confessional during Christmas mass. Number two: I read a hundred books a year, mostly mysteries. Number three: I once threw up after riding the Cyclone at Coney Island.”

  “The second one,” Krystal says.

  “Definitely,” Sasha adds.

  Miranda pretends to be annoyed, even though I can tell she’s secretly pleased with herself. “Just because I’m smoking hot doesn’t make me illiterate. Hot girls read.”

  “Then what’s the lie?” Sasha says.

  “I’m not telling.” Miranda gives us an impish grin. �
�Let’s just say I’ve never been to Coney Island, but I go to mass all the time.”

  Krystal goes next, telling us that her favorite superhero is Spider-Man; that her middle name is also Crystal, although spelled with a C; and that she, too, threw up after riding the Cyclone.

  “Second one,” we all say in unison.

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “I’m sorry,” Miranda says, “but Krystal Crystal? No parent would be that cruel.”

  When it’s time for her turn, Sasha nervously pushes her glasses higher onto her nose and wrinkles her brow in concentration. Clearly, she’s not used to lying.

  “Um, my favorite food is pizza,” she says. “That’s number one. Number two: My favorite animal is the pygmy hippopotamus. Three: I don’t think I can do this. Lying’s wrong, you guys.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “Your honesty is noble.”

  “She’s lying,” Miranda says. “Right, Sasha? The third one is the lie?”

  Sasha shrugs broadly, feigning innocence. “I don’t know. You’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Your turn, Emma,” Krystal says. “Two truths and one lie.”

  I take a deep breath, stalling. Even though I knew this was coming, I can’t think of suitable things to say. There’s so much I could reveal about myself. So little I actually want to have exposed.

  “One: My favorite color is periwinkle blue,” I announce. “Two: I have been to the Louvre. Twice.”

  “You still need to give us a third one,” Miranda says.

  I stall some more, mulling the possibilities in my head, ultimately settling on something perched between fiction and fact.

  “During the summer of my thirteenth year, I did something terrible.”

  “Totally the last one,” Miranda says to nods of agreement from the others. “I mean, if you truly had done something terrible, you’re not going to admit it during a game.”