Born Under a Blond Sign

by V. J. Chambers

  “Good,” he said. “As well as can be expected, I suppose. It was business as usual. How was your day?”

  “Fucking frustrating as hell,” I said. “Frat boys are Satan’s minions, I swear. And Duke Campbell is the worst of the bunch.”

  “Won’t talk to you, huh?” said Brigit.

  “No,” I said. “And honestly, I didn’t much suspect him before this, but now I’m starting to like him more and more for this.”

  “For what?” said Miles. “For Gilbert?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I know I’m not supposed to tell you stuff until I’ve got more evidence. I really just want to talk to this guy, that’s all.”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s the same Duke Campbell, but Gilbert used to have a little friend with that name. They went to camp together or something, and then Duke came by the house a few times. Stayed overnight and stuff.”

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “Seriously,” said Pike.

  “You think you’d still recognize him even if it’s been years?” I said.

  “Maybe.” He shrugged.

  “Brigit, pull up the Teke website. There’s a picture of him on there.”

  “On it,” she said.

  Miles and I walked around behind her desk to look at her computer.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Miles. “That’s him, all right. He’s a older, but definitely the same kid. Near as I know, they were friends.”

  “Well,” I said. “Apparently later in their lives, Duke hated Gilbert.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “So, nobody at your house cared you took this stuff?” I asked, looking through the big cardboard box that Miles had brought into the office.

  “First of all,” he said, “it’s not my house, it’s my parents’ house. Second of all, there was no one there except servants, and their opinion on my taking stuff doesn’t matter.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get back to the office, so I’ll see you later on this evening, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, lifting out a trophy which said First Place in Canoe Race on its base. “Thanks!”

  “No problem,” he said, and he was gone.

  I continued to remove things from the box. A big picture of a bunch of kids in matching blue t-shirts, a baseball glove, a stack of letters, a boonie hat.

  “You’re here early again,” interrupted Brigit’s voice.

  I looked up to see her coming into the office, clutching a thermos of coffee.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Are you going to change the hours or something?” she said. “Because one of the things I liked about this job was the fact that I never had to show up until late.”

  “I’m only here because I had to meet Miles,” I said. “He was dropping this stuff off that he got from his parents’ place.”

  “Oh.” Brigit put down her thermos and came into the inner office. She peered at the array of items I’d set on my desk. “What is this?”

  “It’s all Gilbert’s,” I said. “Apparently, from when he was a kid at camp. He attended with Duke Campbell, which is where they met each other.”

  “Huh.” She picked up the baseball glove and tried it on. “Man, my hand barely fits.”

  “It’s a kids’ glove,” I said, snatching it back from her.

  Undeterred, she picked up the picture next. She turned it over. “Oh, look, they all signed it, like a yearbook.”

  “Did Duke sign it?” I tried to get the picture back.

  She held it just out of my grasp. “Hold on, I’m looking.”

  “Brigit, for God’s sake—”

  “There.” She pointed, showing it to me. “‘Friends to the bitter end, Duke Campbell.’”

  “Well, Miles is right. They were friends. Why would he hate him now?”

  “Who knows. But one thing is for sure,” said Brigit. “He sure doesn’t want to talk about Gilbert now.”

  “Yeah, I’d probably have moved on from the guy by now if he’d just given us an interview. But seeing as he’s being so difficult, well, I’m intrigued.”

  “Definitely,” said Brigit, picking up the stack of letters next.

  “Let me see that.” I held out my hand.

  “You were here before me. I can’t believe you didn’t start digging through these first. Instead, you were taking everything out of the box.”

  “I wanted to see what I was dealing with,” I said. “Once I looked at everything, I could determine what was the most important thing to inspect.”

  “Obviously, it’s the letters.” She was riffling through them. “These are all from Duke.”

  “Seriously?”

  Brigit opened one up and began to read. “‘Dear Gilbert, How are you? I am doing okay. I miss camp, but it’s nice to be back at school. It’s too bad we don’t go to the same school. That would be neat. My teacher this year is Mrs. Teemley. She has very fat ankles but seems pretty nice. Well, write me back, okay? Your friend, Duke.’” She looked up at me. “The spelling is pretty bad. I don’t know how old he was when he wrote this, but—”

  I grabbed the stack of letters out of her hands.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Get over it,” I said, opening up the next one.

  While my hands were busy, Brigit grabbed the rest of the stack.

  “Brigit—”

  “It makes better sense for us to divide and conquer,” she said.

  I sighed. I guessed she was right.

  I read through a few of the letters. Duke wasn’t much of a writer, really. His letters were usually short. Somehow, they also managed to be meandering, jumping from subject to subject. I read about three of them, and they were nothing special.

  “Listen to this,” said Brigit.

  “What?”

  “‘I know we can never say anything about what happened. Believe me, I will keep this secret until the bitter end. Just like how long we will be friends. Oh, and don’t worry about Bryn Peterson, I will always have your back with her, no matter what crazy stuff she tries.’”

  “What secret?” I said. “And who’s Bryn Peterson?”

  “Don’t know,” said Brigit.

  I dove into the next letter with renewed interest.

  But none of the other ones mentioned anything else like that.

  * * *

  With that end thoroughly dead, Brigit and I decided to take another tack. We made a list of all the names of people in the picture. I gave her half and she gave me the other, and then we set about looking for contact information on each of them. That yawn-worthy task took up the better part of the day, but we were largely successful. Some of the people were nowhere to be found, of course, but in this day of social media, most of them were easy to track down.

  Then we had to start contacting them.

  When we could, we called. If we didn’t have a number, we contacted them digitally and asked them to call us. I knew, however, from experience that most people wouldn’t call back unless we really badgered them, so I just hoped we’d run into someone with the answers whose phone number we had.

  Most people didn’t know anything. Hell, half of the people I called barely remembered going to this camp. Several of them drew a complete blank when I mentioned Duke Campbell.

  I caught up with Brigit later and compared notes. She wasn’t having much better luck with her list either. She said that most people remembered Gilbert, but she figured that was because he’d been in the news lately. They all wanted to get sidetracked and talk about the shooting instead of any “secret” Duke and Gilbert might have had or any reason why they didn’t like each other.

  I was down to about three names by that point, and I was beginning to think that we weren’t going to have any luck at all. But I had to admit that I was happy to be getting done with this mindlessly annoying task, which was one of the things I really did not enjoy about being a detective.

  I called the third to the last
name on the list. It was a guy named Pete Sacks.

  He answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  I introduced myself, told him who I was and that I was calling to ask about his camp experiences for a case.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “My parents sent me to that damned camp every year. I must have gone eight years in a row. I was fifteen before I got out of that.”

  “Do you remember being there with Duke Campbell and Gilbert Pike?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Man, they were lifers just like me. I’d see them year after year after year. Guess our parents just wanted to get rid of us, you know?”

  “Were you friends?”

  “With them? Sure, we were friendly. I wasn’t as tight with them as they were with each other, of course.”

  “They were close?”

  “Man, they were attached at the hip. Real close friends. Kind of friends who finish each other’s sentences, that kind of thing. They always managed to be in the same cabin, and they were bunkmates. Gilbert took the top bunk and Duke took the bottom. You asking about this because of those school shootings?”

  “That’s right. I’m looking into it for the family.”

  “Whose family?”

  “Gilbert’s,” I said. “So, the two of them never fought? There was never a rift between them?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I feel like that last year there was something strange with them…” He trailed off, thinking about it. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, they had a falling out or something. We were all teenagers then, though, and it was hard to keep up the friendships from when we were kids. Who’s the same person that they were at six when they’re fourteen, you know?”

  “They just grew apart naturally?”

  “That last year was a weird year. It was the year after Preston Michaels drowned.”

  “Preston who?”

  “Oh, you don’t know about that? Yeah, it was real sad. This guy, Preston, he was another lifer at the camp, but he wasn’t the kind of kid of has any friends. He was a little chubby, so people picked on him, but that might not have been a big deal if he’d been a good sport about it. Boys tease each other. It’s part of growing up. If he’d taken it and dished it back a little bit, he might have been fine. Honestly, I felt bad for the kid, but he was just… he was a know-it-all. He always tattled, and he always tried to get special treatment, and he was… well, anyway, he went out late one night and went swimming in the lake, at least that’s the official story, that he went swimming and couldn’t get back to shore.”

  “Official story?”

  “Well, I kind of always thought that maybe that kid killed himself. It seems stupid now. Camp is a zillion years ago, and who cares about that crap, but I think he felt really alone. And maybe his home wasn’t much better? If your parents are packing you off to camp year after year, they’re probably not paying much attention to you, you know? I don’t have any real idea one way or the other, but that’s just what I feel. Anyway, the point is, everything was different after that kid died. The whole atmosphere of the place changed. There were more rules. Everyone was uptight. It just wasn’t fun. So, it was a weird year anyway, but I’m pretty sure that Duke and Gilbert just weren’t friends anymore at that point.”

  “And you don’t have any idea why?”

  “Not a clue. Sorry.”

  * * *

  “So, did you find out why Duke hated my brother?” said Miles from the doorway of my office.

  “Not yet.” I was sitting at my desk staring at the picture of all the campers. I had identified Preston. He had red hair, glasses, and a face full of freckles. Poor guy. I wasn’t sure if he had anything to do with all of this, but I found the story curious. A possible suicide covered up by a camp? It was the kind of thing that interested me. I wanted to find out more. “Do you remember hearing that a boy died at this camp that Gilbert went to?”

  “No,” said Miles. “But I was out of the house by then. Gil and I weren’t close in age. I didn’t pay attention to everything that was going on with him.”

  “This kid.” I held up the photo. “Drowned.”

  Miles squinted. “He looks like he’d float.”

  I gave him a nasty look. “You’re awful. This poor kid is dead and you’re talking about his weight.”

  “Sorry.” He spread his hands.

  “You know of a secret your brother shared with Duke?”

  “A secret?”

  I got the letter and crossed over to show it to him. “Here. What do you think?”

  Miles read silently. Then he shook his head. “I got no idea about that, I’m afraid. But I do know who Bryn Peterson is.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, he escorted her for her cotillion.”

  “Cotillion? That’s a real thing, not just something they do on Gossip Girl?”

  “Yeah, it’s real.” He eyed me. “Wait, you watch Gossip Girl?”

  “Watched,” I said. “It’s not on anymore.”

  “It doesn’t seem like the kind of show you’d watch.”

  “I didn’t watch it that often,” I said. “Let’s move on. So, if he escorted her, that means that they were dating?”

  Miles nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess so. They were friends, anyway. I mean, he spent a lot of time with her in high school, but I didn’t get the sense that it was really romantic. Of course, what do I know? I’m not the most romantic guy myself.”

  “And you didn’t live at home when he was in high school, so you didn’t see him that often.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I took the letter back. “Well, that’s where we are with that.”

  Miles cocked his head. “You really think some frat boy had something to do with the shooting? Gilbert had the gun, right? How are you explaining that away?”

  “Miles, I’m just following this lead wherever it takes me. If it goes nowhere, we’ll have to put this whole thing to bed. But at the very least, maybe by searching, I’ll find out what was going on in your brother’s head that day. In case I’m wrong, and he did shoot those kids.”

  “But you don’t think he did.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess that’s good enough for me.”

  I smiled. “So, enough talk about the case for tonight?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You want to get going?”

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “Well, that’s up to you, I guess. You want to go out for dinner since we didn’t last time? You want to go to my place?”

  “I have to check on Regan before we do anything,” I said.

  He laughed. “You and that dog.”

  “She’s good for me.”

  “She is,” he agreed. “Okay, well, then, in that case, we go back to your place?”

  “Do you mind if we just eat there?”

  “You cooking again?”

  “I could,” I said. “I went grocery shopping, and I could put something together. I have chicken and vegetables and I think some rice somewhere. So, if you want, I could cook.”

  “You don’t mind?” he said. “It doesn’t seem very date-like. It seems sort of…”

  “Settled?” I said. “Domestic? Maybe I kind of like that.”

  “Yeah.” His voice deepened. “Me too.”

  I grinned at him then. I couldn’t help it.

  And he grinned back.

  We were like a pair of grinning teenagers, I swear. And I felt light and happy, goodness coursing through my veins, from my head to the tips of my fingers.

  Miles moved closer. “I want to try something.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  His hand went to my cheek, cupping my jaw, holding my face in place.

  And his face dipped down, his lips coming for mine.

  My eyes snapped shut. My heart started to race.

  And then his mouth found my mouth.

  And I was lost in the sweetness of our kiss.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
/>   “So, I haven’t been to the bar in days,” I said, gripping the steering wheel of my car. “Not since I got Regan, in fact. I woke up without a hangover again today, and it felt amazing.”

  “That’s great,” said Brigit. “Really, it is. But I don’t think that getting a dog is going to cure your addiction.”

  “Maybe it’s not an addiction,” I said. “Maybe I just needed someone else in my life to take care of, you know. Someone to keep myself in good shape for.” I was babbling because we’d been driving for quite some time, and Brigit and I didn’t agree on music. She pouted whenever I tried to play my classic rock, and I refused to listen to country music, which was all she liked. After a while, the silence had started getting to me, so I’d just started talking.

  “Maybe,” said Brigit. “I really hope everything works out for you, Ivy. How’s Miles?”

  “He’s good,” I said.

  “So… what are you two going to do? Are you going to be celibate for him or something?”

  “That’s really none of your business,” I said.

  “I just don’t really see it working out,” she said. “If he’s really asexual—”

  “Brigit,” I said, “is that the turn?” She was supposed to be the navigator.

  “Oh, shit, sorry,” she said. “Yeah, you should turn there.”

  “I thought so.” I’d been tipped off by the big sign saying Camp Maplewood. I turned the car into a tiny road in the middle of the woods. The trees were thick on either side and so close that they scraped the car on the passenger’s side. The road was bumpy, and I slowed down, creeping over the bumps and tapering speed around the turns.

  But at last we arrived at a parking lot, the whole of the camp spread out in front of us. It looked about as you’d expect. There was a big man-made lake in the center of everything. Ringing it were lots of small cabins, built to look rustic. Some larger buildings stood on the far end of lake, probably a mess hall and some place for kids to do arts and crafts. The camp office was next to the parking lot, and its style was just like the cabins.

  Brigit and I got out of the car and went over to the camp office.

  I knocked on the door.

  Nothing happened.

  I knocked again.