The Lake

by Natasha Preston

  “I was impressed with how you both performed yesterday. You made your groups feel welcome. Were there any issues last night? Homesickness?”

  “Nothing,” Rebekah replies.

  “I’ve never seen anyone fall asleep so fast,” I say.

  He laughs. “The first night is always like that. I assure you it won’t be the same tonight.”

  “When Kayla and I were campers, we never fell asleep before lights-out. We’d whisper for hours,” I say. It seemed like midnight back then, but in reality we were probably all asleep before ten p.m.

  Rebekah adds, “The same with my camp.”

  Andy shakes his head. “It’s been a long time since I was a camper.”

  “You came here?” I ask, surprised.

  “Yes, probably before you two were even born.”

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  Rebekah’s eyes go round as if I’ve just asked Andy to strip.

  “What?” I mouth at her.

  “Almost thirty,” he replies, not taking his eyes off the notice board where he’s pinning up camp expectations.

  See, he didn’t care. He knows how old we are anyway.

  “The boys snore.”

  Rebekah, Andy and I all startle at Olly’s voice.

  He walks into the hall, rubbing his eyes. “Is there coffee?”

  Andy laughs. “Not yet. I’ve opened the hall so you can make some. I moved the coffee maker into the kitchen now that the campers are here.”

  Olly frowns like that was a dumb idea.

  “We don’t want a bunch of seven- to ten-year-olds caffeinated to their eyeballs,” I tell him. And I don’t want to share with even more people.

  Andy nods. “The coffee is for the staff.”

  I’ll never get used to that being me.

  “Please hurry,” I tell Olly. “I’m dying for coffee.”

  “Well, if your life depends on it…,” he says, smirking at me as he walks past. His eyes are playful, and I turn away before I blush brighter than the bottles of ketchup on each table.

  Rebekah’s gaze moves between me and Olly. When I look up, she turns around as if embarrassed to be caught looking.

  6

  You know what sucks?

  Volleyball in thirty-thousand-degree heat.

  All right, I don’t know the exact temperature, but thirty thousand feels pretty damn accurate.

  The campers still don’t seem to care. They all have water and hats and are young enough for extreme heat to take a backseat to fun. I can’t remember being like that, but I must have because I definitely didn’t complain about the weather when I was here as a kid.

  Maybe I really am an almost-adult. Is that what seals your grown-up fate? Being too hot or too cold?

  “Well done, girls,” I say to my group as they play against Cora’s.

  Kayla and her group are off with Tia and Mary’s. They’re swimming in the lake, where normal people are in high temperatures. There’s an instructor teaching the campers the butterfly stroke.

  We’re in the lake after lunch, and I cannot wait.

  Cora calls another point for my team and the girls play on.

  Cora blows out a breath and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m dying.”

  “I know the feeling,” I say, sucking on the straw of my water bottle. “I should have picked a cooler state to be a CIT.”

  Laughing, she replies, “Yeah, it’s hot. Stick to the shaded areas and drink plenty of water. As far as I know, we’ve never had anyone suffer sunstroke.”

  “The first will probably be me.”

  “Take a drink.” She turns to the girls. “All right, great game. Let’s wrap it up and go inside for lunch.”

  There’s a collective cheer as we head to the hall for food.

  Cora and I follow the girls inside.

  We’re a little late. Everyone else is already sitting down. The air-conditioning welcomes me, making the skin on my forearms pebble.

  It’s loud, with dozens of conversations merging together to make one big chorus of noise.

  The girls get food and head to a table together. Cora and I wait until they’ve gone to get ours. I add some salad to my plate of mac and cheese and sit at the table with Kayla, Tia, Rebekah, Olly and Jake.

  “Tomorrow night, we’re going around the lake and into the forest on the other side,” Rebekah tells me, her eyes wide like she’s not at all comfortable with this.

  I don’t like it around there, but I say, “Sounds good.”

  I look over at Kayla. She has a brilliant poker face, but her anxiety shows physically. She will trip on air or fall up steps. Basically, she turns clumsy when she’s anxious.

  Kayla stabs her fork into her pasta, but the fork slides and she flings a noodle into the center of the table.

  And there it is.

  She looks up and her worried eyes meet mine.

  A couple of the others chuckle. No one but me picks up on her nervous energy.

  “Slippery?” I ask.

  She clears her throat. “Mascarpone sauce.”

  She worries about me overthinking and blurting the wrong thing out. I worry about her clumsiness giving us away.

  I want to ask her again if we’re sure being here is a good idea.

  We’re guilty of a crime that no one even suspects us of.

  My parents are superbig on honesty. “The truth always comes out, Esme.”

  Cold cases get solved. Not many—2 percent according to TV documentaries I’ve watched—but better technology means criminals are being caught years later.

  Could our DNA still be at the scene ten years later?

  Unlikely.

  7

  The next morning is filled with excitement. It’s like the kids think we’re going to Disney World, not hiking.

  Kayla and I will be with Cora. I don’t think we’re trusted to take a group off into the woods alone yet.

  Despite being a competent map reader, I’m really okay with this. I don’t remember the trails from before. Back then I was messing around with Kayla and the other girls from our cabin.

  The campers chow down on breakfast like they’re fed only once a day. I’m sure they eat about as much as the staff.

  I’m sitting at a table with Olly and Tia. The rest have finished and gone back to the cabins.

  “We have the night off,” I say with a grin.

  Tia’s dark eyes light up. Her hair is tied back in another sleek bun today. “Oh yes. Remember, we’re going around the back of the lake tonight.”

  “Sure.”

  I look out the large window in the hall, my eyes following the dock, then out across the lake to the line of trees that hide a secret.

  I gulp down the last of my water and pick up my plate, the half-eaten croissant now unappealing.

  “You’re already done, Esme? You’ve barely eaten anything,” Olly says.

  “Too hot,” I reply, as if it’s perfectly reasonable to go hiking on a few bites of pastry. “I’ll see you guys outside.”

  I dump my food and put the plate on the trolley.

  Andy raises one hand as I walk past him. He half covers his mouth, chewing at the same time as he says, “Esme.”

  I stop beside him. “What’s up?”

  He stands. “Are you feeling okay? I noticed you throwing away your breakfast.”

  I blink. Is there anything he doesn’t notice? When we leave camp, I hope he’s not as sharp-eyed.

  “Um, I’m fine, just not very hungry.”

  “Perhaps you should take something? We’re going to be hiking all morning.”

  I nod. “I’ll grab an apple.”

  I know he said to keep an eye on the campers and make sure they’re all eating enough and especially drinking e
nough water, but I didn’t think he would be policing me, too.

  Weird.

  Andy smiles and moves out of my way. I duck past and leave the hall with a Granny Smith apple in my hand.

  Kayla is ready when I get back to our room. She’s sitting on her bunk chatting to Cora.

  “Esme, good. We were just going over a few things,” Cora says, leaning against the wall.

  “What’s that?”

  “You and I will walk at the front of the group; we’ll try to keep them in twos, but it doesn’t always work. Kayla will be at the back.”

  “Okay.”

  “We need to check their backpacks and make sure they have the appropriate gear: a compass, map, sun hat, sunscreen and water. If we each check bags, that would be great.”

  “I think they’re ready,” Kayla says, laughing and nodding toward the sudden noise in the room adjoining.

  “Let’s do it.” I grab my bag and we all head into the main bedroom.

  The girls are stuffing things into their bags. I go straight to the two bunks right at the end that sleeps the four girls in my group.

  I take Isabel’s bag first and look inside. “Okay, everyone make sure you have the map and compass on your bed and put it in.” I run through the final few things and double-check that we’re all set.

  Once we’re done, we meet up outside with the other groups, and Andy assigns trails to us. There are four trails in total.

  I pull my cap on my head. Cora and I lead the group along the red trail. Inside the forest there is welcome shade.

  The girls behind us are superexcited for a little trek in the woods. Getting away from the camp for a while was one of my favorite things as a camper; it kept it exciting rather than seeing the same campsite and activities for weeks.

  “How long have you been a counselor here?” I ask Cora.

  She smiles. “Three years full, one CIT. Do you think you’ll be back next year?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I am enjoying this, but the responsibilities counselors have scare me a little.”

  “By the time the campers are picked up again, it won’t seem scary at all. It’s like that for everyone. You’ll realize soon that the kids actively prevent themselves from starving, and drowning too.”

  Laughing, I reply, “Well, that’s good to hear.”

  I don’t know why I worry so much. At eight I was relatively independent and fairly good at knowing I shouldn’t run toward danger.

  But then I got tangled up in something bad…

  “You should definitely consider coming back next year,” Cora says. “You’re great with the girls and they love you. It’s always easy to figure out who will make it. I can tell ten minutes after they’ve met the campers.”

  “Are you ever wrong?”

  She straightens her back with pride. “Nope.”

  “So, you’ve worked with Andy a lot.” I want to ask about the Buttercups, but I don’t want to seem nosy, and I don’t want her to know that we’ve nicknamed them.

  “Yeah, Andy, Mary and Catalina have been here for years.”

  So they have all been here before.

  “Cool.”

  She side-eyes me and lifts one dark eyebrow. “What do you want to ask? I can tell there’s something.”

  “No…Yes. Well, it’s just that I can’t figure him out,” I say, stumbling over my words.

  “Andy’s cool. A little old school sometimes, and he loves rules. I don’t think he has broken one. Ever.”

  I nod and step over a fallen log. Ahead I see a red rag tied around a tree branch.

  When we get past the trail, the girls will have a go at orienteering, leading us away from the mapped-out path to get back to camp. At least, that’s the hope.

  “Are the other groups near us?” a girl asks.

  “Not really, we’re all spread out,” Cora replies.

  “I saw someone.”

  Cora stops and everyone else does too. I turn around with Cora and see Ava’s big eyes looking up at us.

  “What’s going on?” Kayla calls from the back.

  “What did you see, Ava?” I ask.

  I don’t like this.

  With a frown, Ava steps up to me.

  “Someone in the woods. They were really far away, so I can’t be sure, but I think it was a boy.”

  “It was a child?”

  She shakes her head. “Um, no, a grown-up. They were tall.”

  My heart sinks.

  Cora tells the girls to sit down and take a water break.

  Kayla joins us, her face full of worry.

  “Ava, are you sure?” Cora asks.

  “Yeah. I was going to point the person out, but when I looked back, he was gone.”

  The girls are all chatting about who it could have been. The word killer almost makes my eyes roll. They’ll be telling campfire stories about this all summer, imaginations going wild.

  Cora and I look at each other. Some trees have fallen; others have been cut down. Ava could have seen one and thought it was a person. When she looked again, she saw nothing because there are only trees.

  The land we’re on is private. It belongs to the camp.

  “Ava, what did the person do?” Cora asks, wrapping one arm around her.

  Her head tilts all the way up. “He was just standing there. I’m not making this up.”

  “No one thinks you are,” I tell her, glancing back in the direction she said “he” was. I point. “Do you think it could have been a tree? You see there, the tree stump with no branches nestled between the normal ones?”

  Ava frowns as she looks. “You think it was that?”

  “It could have been,” Cora says. “I’ve done the same thing. Some of the trees are cut down for firewood, which makes a few of them human size. You did the right thing telling us, though.”

  “So there’s no crazy guy out there?” Isabel asks.

  “Definitely not!” Cora says. “All right, girls, everything is fine. The forest sometimes plays tricks on you, so remember you can come to us if you’re ever unsure of anything. Let’s get going again or we’ll be the last team back. I might have heard Andy saying there’s a surprise for the first team home.”

  The girls leap to their feet, the madman in the forest forgotten as they try to guess what the treat will be.

  We’ve just stopped for five minutes to play Find the Human-Looking Tree. We might not win.

  Cora and I lead the girls, with Kayla taking her place at the back.

  I look at the trees, toward where Ava thought she saw something.

  It would be very easy to hide.

  8

  Cora doesn’t seem to give the idea of a person running between trees watching us a second thought.

  I’ve given it a third, fourth and fifth thought.

  I know what Ava saw wasn’t really a person the way I know that I won’t be instantly killed the second I turn off my light. But does that stop my imagination from trying to convince me otherwise? Nope.

  My eyes dart back to the woods, getting lost in the density of the trees.

  Why would anyone be watching us? It could have been someone passing by; we’re close to the camp’s perimeter. Perhaps they veered off course, saw us and realized where they were, then dashed back onto public land.

  Cora has switched from small talk with me to singing with the girls. I wish she would stop that and ask me random questions again. I don’t much feel like joining in with their poor rendition of “Alice the Camel.”

  They finish the tenth song and Cora takes a breath. “Okay, I don’t think I can do another one,” she says.

  She doesn’t need to. The girls start to sing their own, “Baby Bumblebee,” which has to be one of the oddest and grossest camp songs. Why would anyone lick a smashed bee? Y
ou deserve to throw up, in all honesty.

  “We’re almost to the orienteering point,” I say, glancing at my map. The red trail curls back around, but we’re not going there. We’re going to go off course and find our own way home. Hopefully, we should arrive back at camp in time for lunch. That’s if the girls don’t get us lost.

  Five more minutes of walking through shaded heat and we reach a clearing. It’s a man-made area with a firepit. It belongs to the camp and we’ll use it for building dens and cooking later in the summer.

  The girls cheer from behind me.

  “Thank goodness for that!” Cora says. “Okay, everyone have a drink and then we’ll let small groups of you lead at a time. Make sure you have your map orientated. If you start off wrong, you will never find where you want to be.”

  Isabel stops in front of me, her big eyes as worried as the day she had to say goodbye to her mom.

  “Esme, was that really a tree Ava saw?”

  My heart pounds. “Of course. It’s easy to assume something perfectly innocent is something really scary in situations like this. Don’t worry.”

  I smile to load up the reassurance. All the while my mind is going, Killer in the woods.

  Isabel smiles, her posture relaxing as she takes a breath. “Okay. Good. Can you help me with my map? I don’t know which way it’s supposed to be.”

  “Sure,” I reply, really hoping it will be obvious. With few landmarks, it’s not likely to be straightforward.

  Isabel holds out her map. My three other girls shuffle over to us, and I take a look at the map.

  “Ah,” I say, pointing to the trail. “This is where we’ve come from, look. We took the red trail to this clearing. Straight ahead is where it continues, but we’re not going to go that way. We want to head directly back, so where would you go to do that?”

  I peer up from the map and all four girls are staring at it with matching frowns.

  Maisie points. “Well, this would be a straight line back to camp.” She looks up. “I’d go between those two big trees with curly branches.”

  “Good, Maisie.”

  Cora, hearing us, calls, “Girls, Maisie has figured it out first, so we’re going to let Esme’s team lead for the first part. Make sure you follow on your maps as you’ll all get a chance to take over. Now, the little crosses along the map represent landmarks. Where those crosses are on the map is where red ties will be on trees.”