by Riley Sager
It was closed the entire time.
15
It takes me ten minutes to gather all the feathers the crows have left behind. More than a dozen littered the floor, with more scattered along Miranda’s and Sasha’s bunks. At least there were no bird droppings to go along with the feathers. I consider that a win.
While cleaning, I try to think of ways the birds could have gotten inside even though the window was closed. Two possibilities come to mind. The first is that they came in through a hole in the roof, one tucked in a corner where it’s hard to spot. The second, more logical reason is that one of the girls left the door open and the birds flew in. Someone else came along and shut the door, not realizing they were trapping birds inside Dogwood.
But as I carry the handful of feathers behind the cabin, a third possibility enters my head—that someone caught the birds and released them inside on purpose. There were three of them, after all, echoing the number of charms on my bracelet, which are themselves symbols.
I shake my head while scattering the feathers. No, that can’t be the reason. Like the idea of being spied on in the shower, it’s too sinister to think about. Besides, who would do such a thing? And why? Just like that shadow in the shower stall, I tell myself the most innocent explanation is also the most logical.
Yet once I’m back inside the cabin, I can’t shake the idea that something’s not quite right here. Between the camera, the shadow at the shower stall, and the birds, I’ve been on edge all day. So much so that I feel the need to get out of the cabin for a little bit. Maybe go for a hike. A little exercise might be just the thing to sweep away the weird thoughts I’m having.
I throw open my hickory trunk, looking for my hiking boots. The first thing I see is the folded piece of paper Vivian had hidden in her own trunk. My hands tremble when I pick it up. I tell myself it’s residual stress from everything else that’s happened today. But I know the truth.
That page makes me nervous. As does the photograph that once again slides from its fold.
I stare at the woman in the picture, getting another shudder of familiarity when I look into her eyes. It makes me wonder what the woman—this Eleanor Auburn—was thinking when the photograph was taken. Did she fear that she was going insane? Was she seeing something that wasn’t really there?
Setting the picture aside, I make another examination of the map Vivian had drawn. I scan the entire page. The camp. The lake. The crudely drawn forest on the far shore. Yet my gaze lingers on the small X that’s left two deep grooves in the paper. Vivian did that for a reason. It means something is located there.
There’s no way to know for certain until I go there myself.
Which is exactly what I intend to do. Heading across the lake will both get me out of the cabin and let me start the search for more information in earnest. Like killing two birds with one stone, which I realize is a bad metaphor when I spot a stray feather peeking out from behind my trunk.
I begin to gather supplies and stuff them into my backpack. Sunblock and hand sanitizer. My phone. A water bottle. The map also goes into the backpack, which I zip shut as I leave the cabin. On my way out, I give the camera a defiant stare, hoping both Theo and Franny will see it later.
Before departing camp, I stop by the mess hall to fill up my water bottle and grab a banana and granola bar in case I get hungry. Two women and a man are outside. Kitchen workers spending the lull between lunch and dinner smoking in the shade of the overhanging roof. One of the women gives a disinterested wave. The man beside her is the same guy with the goatee who briefly checked me out this morning. The tag affixed to his apron strap says his name is Marvin.
Now Marvin stares past me to the lake in the distance. Afternoon swimming lessons are taking place, the shore and water dotted with young women in bathing suits of varying degrees of modesty. He catches me watching him and displays a grin so slimy it makes me want to reach for the hand sanitizer in my backpack.
“It’s not illegal to look,” he says.
With that, Marvin jumps to the top of my list of suspected Peeping Toms. In truth, he’s the only suspect. A weak one at that. Marvin was working in the mess hall before I left for my shower. While there’s a chance he followed me there, I doubt he could have done it without anyone else noticing.
Besides, it’s possible no one was watching me.
Maybe.
“It might not be illegal, Marvin.” I put extra emphasis on his name, making sure he understands that I know it. “But those girls are young enough to be your daughters.”
Marvin drops his cigarette, stubs it out, goes back inside. The women begin to chuckle. One of them nods my way. A silent thank-you.
I continue toward the lake, my backpack slung over my shoulder. I spot Miranda lingering by the lifeguard station in a bikini designed to expose the maximum amount of skin while still being legal.
The lifeguard for the afternoon is Chet, which explains Miranda’s presence there. He’s undeniably handsome up there on his perch, with his Ray-Bans and whistle. Miranda stares up at him, laughing too loudly at something he’s just said, a finger twirling in her hair while she uses her big toe to trace a circle in the sand. Apparently she’s already gotten over the texter who broke her heart. She just better hope Mindy doesn’t see her. I suspect flirting with Chet is definitely not a display of Camp Nightingale spirit.
Nearby, Sasha and Krystal share a large beach blanket. They sprawl across it, still in shorts and camp polos, listlessly flipping through a stack of comic books. I walk over to them, my shadow falling across the blanket.
“Did one of you leave the cabin door open?”
“No,” Sasha says. “It lets in bugs, which cause disease.”
“Not even for a little bit?”
“We didn’t,” Krystal replies. “Why?”
Now that the cabin’s been cleared of feathers, I see no reason to tell them about the birds. It would only make Sasha more worried. I opt for a change of subject. “Why aren’t you swimming?”
“Don’t want to,” Krystal says.
“Don’t know how,” Sasha says.
“I can teach you sometime, if you want.”
Sasha wrinkles her nose, her glasses rising and falling. “In that dirty water? No thank you.”
“Where are you going?” Krystal asks, eyeing my backpack.
“Canoe trip.”
“Alone?” Sasha says.
“That’s the plan.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Each year, an average of eighty-seven people die in canoe and kayak accidents. I looked it up.”
“I’m a good swimmer. I think I’ll be okay.”
“It’s probably safer if someone is with you.”
Next to her, Krystal slaps her comic book shut and sighs. “What Miss Wikipedia here is trying to say is that we want to come along. We’re bored, and we’ve never been canoeing.”
“Yeah,” Sasha says. “That’s what I meant.”
“That’s not a good idea. It’s a long trip. And there’ll be hiking involved.”
“I’ve never hiked, either,” Krystal says. “Please, can we come?”
Sasha bats her eyes at me, the lashes fluttering behind her glasses. “Pretty please?”
My plan was to cross the lake, find the spot marked on Vivian’s map, and proceed from there. Sasha and Krystal will only slow me down. Nevertheless, a sense of duty tugs at me. Franny told me the purpose of reopening Camp Nightingale was to give the campers new experiences. That remains true, even if I’m currently pissed at Franny.
“Fine,” I tell them. “Put on life vests and help me with the canoe.”
The girls do as they’re told, grabbing dirty life vests that hang from the sides of the canoe racks. They slip them on and help me lift a canoe off one of the racks. It’s heavier than it looks and so unwieldy that we come close to dropping i
t. We remain a sorry sight as we awkwardly carry the canoe to the lake’s edge, Krystal holding up the front and me taking the rear. Sasha is in the middle, hidden beneath the overturned boat, just a pair of knobby legs shuffling toward the water.
Our struggle is enough to tear Miranda’s attention away from Chet. She trots over to us and says, “Where are you going?”
“Canoeing,” Sasha says.
“And hiking,” I add, hoping they’ll be dissuaded by the fact that there’s more to this trip than just paddling across the lake.
Instead, Miranda frowns. “Without me?”
“Do you want to come along?”
“Not really, but . . .”
Her voice trails off, the sentence unfinished but its meaning perfectly clear. She doesn’t want to be the only one left behind. I know the feeling.
“Go get changed,” I tell her. “We’ll wait for you.”
Another person means another canoe. So while Miranda runs back to the cabin to fetch shorts and a pair of sneakers, Krystal, Sasha, and I wrangle a second canoe to the water’s edge. When Miranda returns, we climb in, she and Krystal in one canoe, Sasha and me in the other. Using oars, we push off and start to drift out onto the lake.
The bulk of the rowing in my boat falls to me. I sit in the back, paddling on alternating sides of the canoe. Sasha sits up front, her own paddle across her lap, dipping it into the water whenever I need to straighten things out.
“How deep do you think it is here?” she says.
“Pretty deep in parts.”
“A hundred feet?”
“Maybe.”
Sasha’s eyes widen behind her glasses as her free hand unconsciously clasps her life vest. “You’re a good swimmer, though, right?”
“I am,” I say. “Although not as good as some people I know.”
It takes us a half hour to cross the lake. We slow when the water’s surface is darkened by tall pines along the shoreline, their reflections jagged and unwelcoming. Just beneath the surface are the remnants of trees submerged when the valley was flooded. Stripped of leaves and whitewashed by time, their branches seem to be grasping for fresh air that’s just beyond their reach. It’s a discomfiting sight. All those blanched limbs tangled together as mud-brown fish slip between them. Because the lake’s been lowered by drought, the farthest-reaching branches scrape the bottoms of the canoes, sounding like fingernails trying to scratch their way out of a coffin.
More trees jut out of the lake in front of us. Although to call them trees isn’t entirely accurate. They’re more like ghosts of trees. Bare and sun-bleached. Trapped in a limbo between water and land. Gone are their bark, their leaves, their limbs. They’ve been reduced to sad, brittle sticks.
After passing through the graveyard of trees, we come to the shore itself. Instead of the welcoming flatness Camp Nightingale was built upon, the landscape rises sharply—an ascent that eventually leads to the rounded peaks in the distance. The trees here tower over the water. Pines, mostly, their limbs connecting to form a pale green wall that undulates in the slight breeze coming off the lake.
To our right, a heap of boulders sits partway out of the water. They look out of place, like they had rolled down the mountain one by one, eventually accumulating there. Beyond them is a cliff where the land has been chipped away by the elements. Small, tenacious vines cling to the cliff wall, and mineral deposits stripe the exposed rock. Trees line the ridge atop the cliff, some leaning forward, as if they’re about to jump.
“I see something,” Miranda says, pointing to a ragged-looking structure sitting farther down the shore.
I see it, too. It’s a gazebo. Rather, it used to be. Now it’s a leaning structure of splintered wood slowly being overtaken by weeds. Its floorboards sag. Its roof sits slightly askew. While I’m not certain, I think it might be the cabin-like structure marked on Vivian’s map.
I start to row toward it. Miranda follows suit. On shore, we step out of the canoes, paddles clattering, life vests discarded. Then we drag the boats farther onto land to reduce the potential of them drifting away without us. I grab my backpack and pull out the map.
“What’s that?” Sasha asks.
“A map.”
“What does it lead to?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I frown at the woods before us. It’s dense, dark, all silence and shadows. Now that we’re on the other side of the lake, I have no idea how to proceed. Vivian’s map is short on details, and the accuracy of what she did draw is questionable at best.
I run my finger from the spot that probably-is-but-might-not-be the gazebo to the ragged triangles nearby. I assume those are rocks. Which means we need to make our way northeast until we reach them. After that, it looks to be a short walk north until I find the X.
Our route now set, I open the compass app downloaded to my phone the morning I left for camp, rotating until it points northeast. Then I snag a handful of wildflowers and, with Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal in tow, march into the forest.
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
“Let’s go,” Vivian said.
“Go where?”
I was curled up in my bunk, reading the dog-eared copy of The Lovely Bones I had brought with me to camp. Looking up from the book, I saw Vivian standing by the cabin door. She had tied a red handkerchief around her neck. Allison’s floppy straw hat sat atop her head.
“On an adventure,” she said. “To search for buried treasure.”
I closed my book and crawled out of bed. As if there was any doubt I wouldn’t. In the short time that I’d been there, it was already clear that what Vivian wanted, she got.
“Allison’s going to need her hat, though,” I told her. “You know how she is about UV rays.”
“Allison’s not coming. Neither is Natalie. It’s just you and me, kid.”
She didn’t bother to tell me where, exactly, we were going. I simply let her lead the way. First to the canoes near the dock, then across Lake Midnight itself, me struggling with my oar the entire way.
“I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’ve never been in a canoe before,” Vivian said.
“I’ve been in a rowboat,” I told her. “Does that count?”
“Depends. Was it on a lake?”
“The pond in Central Park. I went there once with Heather and Marissa.”
I almost told her how we jostled the boat so much that Heather fell in, but then I remembered about Vivian’s sister and how she had drowned. Vivian never told me where it happened. Or how. Or even when. But I didn’t want to bring it up, even in an innocent, roundabout way. I stayed quiet until we came ashore alongside a grassy area aflame with tiger lilies.
Vivian picked enough lilies to make a bouquet. When we entered the woods, she began to pluck their petals and drop them to the ground.
“Always leave a trail of bread crumbs,” she said. “So you know how to find your way back. Franny taught me that my first summer here. I think she was afraid I’d get lost.”
“Why?”
“Because I wandered off too much.”
That didn’t surprise me. Vivian’s personality was too big to fit inside the tidy confines of camp life. All those tennis lessons and crafting sessions. I’d started to notice how she greeted each one with a bored sigh.
She dropped another petal, and I turned around to look at the long line of them stretching away from us, marking our progress. It was a comforting sight. Like tiny, tangerine-colored footprints we had left behind that would eventually guide us home.
“Two Truths and a Lie,” Vivian said as she plucked off another petal and let it flutter to the ground. “I’ll go first. One: A guy once flashed me in the subway. Two: I have a flask of whiskey hidden under my mattress. Three: I don’t know how to swim.”
“The second one,” I said. “I’d have noticed if you were secretly drinking
.”
I thought of my mother and how she smelled when she greeted me after school. The spearmint gum she chewed did little to hide her wine breath. Even if it had, I was already an expert at noticing the slight dimness in her eyes whenever she drank too much.
“Aren’t you the observant one,” Vivian said. “That’s why I thought you’d like to see this.”
We had come to a large oak tree, its sturdy branches spread wide to create a canopy over the surrounding ground. An X had been carved into the bark, as big and bold as the way Vivian marked the lid of her trunk back in Dogwood. At the base of the tree sat a pile of leaves that camouflaged something beneath it.
Vivian pushed the leaves out of the way, exposing an old and rotting wooden box. Time had stripped the veneer from the lid, which allowed water and sunlight to do their damage, staining the wood in some spots, bleaching it in others. As a result, the box had become a patchwork of colors.
“It’s cool, right?” Vivian said. “It’s, like, ancient.”
I ran a finger over the lid, feeling a series of groves in the wood. At first I thought it was just another product of age and the elements. But when I looked closer, I noticed two faint letters etched into the wood. They were so worn by exposure that it was hard to make them out. Only when I leaned in close, the odor of mold and wood rot filling my nostrils, could I read them.
CC
“Where did you find it?”
“Washed up on the shore last summer.”
“While you were wandering off?”
Vivian smirked, pleased with herself. “Of course. God knows how long it was there. I brought it here for safekeeping. Go ahead and open it.”
I lifted the lid, the wood so soft and waterlogged I feared it might disintegrate in my hands. The inside of the box was lined with a fabric that might have once been green velvet. I couldn’t quite tell because the fabric was in tatters—nothing but dark, leathery strips.
Inside the box lay several pairs of scissors. Antique ones with ornate circles for finger holes and thin blades tapered like stork legs. I suspected the scissors were made of silver, although they’d been tarnished the same color as motor oil. The screws that held them together were swirled with rust. When I picked up a pair and tried to pry them open, they wouldn’t budge. Age and disrepair had rendered them useless.