by Ritter, Todd
“Here,” he said, shoving the cup at Nick. “I figured you’d need this for your drive.”
“Where am I going?”
“Camp Crescent.”
Nick was confused. He thought it might have been from caffeine deprivation. But two mighty gulps of coffee later it still didn’t make sense.
“Aren’t you going, too?”
“I can’t,” Tony said. “We got the dental records of both Noah Pierce and Dennis Kepner. A dental anthropologist from Harrisburg is driving up later this morning. Hopefully by the afternoon, we’ll know which of the boys was found beneath the mill.”
Until they found the model rocket, Nick had been certain the remains he discovered belonged to Noah Pierce. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
Neither was Tony.
“I called Gloria,” he said. “She’s ordered a full search of the state park, just in case it was Dennis that we found. For all we know, the remains of the other boys could be there, too.”
Nick didn’t need to ask Tony if he had told Gloria Ambrose about his involvement in the investigation. If he had, there was a good chance he wouldn’t be talking to him now.
“So while you guys search Lasher Mill State Park, you want me to poke around the camp where Dwight Halsey disappeared?”
“Exactly,” Tony said. “Just be discreet about it.”
Nick thought he could handle that. He liked the idea of Tony beating the shrubbery at a public park while he got to do the investigating. It was a refreshing change of pace.
He showered, shaved, and yanked his clothes from the rod where they had been hung out to dry the night before. They were as stiff as cardboard and had a funky smell that was part lake, part mildew, and part cheap hotel. Once in the car, he rolled the windows down in an attempt to air them out.
According to the directions, Camp Crescent was located in the heart of a large swath of forest two hours southeast. Instead of music, Nick spent the drive listening to news reports about the Chinese astronauts’ progress. The lunar landing was slated for about four that afternoon, with a moon walk to take place roughly an hour after that. If someone was planning on abducting another little boy when it happened, the time to prevent it was running out.
The entrance to the camp itself was a good five miles off the main highway, at the end of a pothole-riddled road enclosed by trees. When Nick pulled up to it, he found no sign marking it as the location of Camp Crescent. All he saw were a metal gate blocking the road and at least four separate signs warning trespassers to stay away. Since Nick wasn’t really a trespasser, he got out of the car and, with the help of his cane, crawled under the gate.
There was more road on the other side, which sliced deeper through the trees. Eventually, the road split and a weathered sign sat in the middle of the fork, finally welcoming him to Camp Crescent. Next to it was a smaller sign with arrows pointing to various locations within the camp—cabins, mess hall, latrine. Nick followed the one directing him to camp headquarters.
The headquarters turned out to be a two-story cabin built in the Adirondack-style. The foundation was fieldstone. The exterior support beams were peeled logs. A rocking chair sat on the porch that wrapped around the side of the building. Although the structure had clearly seen better days, the chair signaled that someone still used it from time to time. So did the uncovered furniture Nick spied through the smudged windows. But when he knocked on the door, no one answered.
Walking along the porch, he moved to the back of the cabin. An overgrown meadow stretched from the porch to a thin line of pines about a hundred yards away. Through the trees, he glimpsed a bit of lake and a boat dock that was now mostly submerged.
In the middle of the meadow was a circle of rocks. A few benches surrounded it, only one of which was still fully intact. A fire pit, Nick guessed. From when Camp Crescent used to be a real camp. It certainly wasn’t anymore. Nick didn’t know when or why, but the camp had closed up shop long ago.
He stepped off the porch and into the meadow, heading toward the remains of the fire pit. He got about three steps before he heard a familiar noise behind him. He remembered the sound well from his days in the state police. Once someone heard the hammer click of a 12-gauge shotgun, they didn’t forget it.
A man’s voice accompanied the click. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?”
Frozen in place, Nick said, “I’m with the state police.”
He knew it was the best way to get the man to lower the gun, even though it wasn’t entirely the truth. Semantics went out the window when someone had a 12-gauge aimed at your head.
“Turn around.”
Nick rotated slowly, coming face-to-face with the man holding the gun. He appeared to be in his early seventies, with a bald head and a wild, sand-colored beard. His solid frame hinted that he had been strong once, although most of the muscle was now gone. As he held the shotgun, the skin on the man’s upper arms drooped in wobbly flaps.
“What’s your name?”
“Nick Donnelly. What’s yours?”
“Before I tell you anything, how ’bout you tell me why the state police is coming around here snooping.”
“Does the name Dwight Halsey sound familiar?” Nick asked.
“What about him?”
“Did you know him or not?”
The man lowered the gun and hung his head with it. “Yeah, I knew him. That goddamn boy ruined my life.”
*
His name was Craig Brewster, and he owned the land Camp Crescent sat upon. He ran the camp, too, back when it really was a working camp and not a pile of rotting timber. Now he lived in its former headquarters during the warm months and rented an apartment in Philadelphia in the winter. He was seventy-two, unmarried, and needed a pacemaker to keep his heart from stopping.
He told Nick his sad tale from the back porch of the cabin he now called home. Nick imagined he sat there quite a bit, surveying everything he owned—and all he had eventually lost. According to Mr. Brewster, the blame rested with one kid who vanished in 1971.
“Were you here the night Dwight Halsey vanished?” Nick asked.
Craig nodded. “Of course.”
“And do you remember any suspicious activity going on? Anyone acting strange?”
“No, sir. Not until the next morning when we realized he had run away.”
“Do you mind if I take a look around the camp?”
“Not at all,” Craig said, pushing himself out of his chair. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”
They walked the perimeter of the meadow, veering left onto a dirt path that led to a wooded area. Among the trees, the other structures that made up the camp sprouted from the forest floor like giant mushrooms.
“My father was a big fan of the outdoors,” Craig said. “He taught me a lot. I learned at an early age that two things make you strong—discipline and nature. I’ve always followed that advice.”
He told Nick that he joined the army at age nineteen. After he was honorably discharged, he found work as a guard at a juvenile detention facility. His father died in 1969, leaving him a lot of money, which he used to purchase one hundred acres of forest.
“I saw a lot of bad boys in juvie who were good boys deep down. They just didn’t have the upbringing I did. I thought they could benefit from a place like this, where they could fish and hike and just be kids. Nothing turns a boy into a man better than the outdoors. That’s how Camp Crescent was born.”
“Interesting name,” Nick said.
“It’s symbolic. A crescent moon is just a sliver, barely formed. But over time it grows, becoming a full moon that brightens the night. The boys who came to this camp were the same way—small, unformed, but with the potential to be bright lights.”
They paused at a wide, low-slung building constructed of logs. A sign over the door indicated it was the mess hall—incredibly apt, considering its condition. Half the roof was missing, having caved in ages ago. Growing through the remains of the rafters was a large maple tree
.
“I opened the camp in 1970,” Craig said, “taking in boys who had been in trouble with the law or were on their way there. It did them some good to be outdoors. Waking up at dawn, going to bed at dusk. Learning how to get along with others. It made a difference, and I was proud of that. Then the Halsey boy showed up.”
“When was this?” Nick asked.
“June 1971. He didn’t take to the camp like the others. Hell, he didn’t take to it at all.”
“Not a fan of the great outdoors?”
“Not to speak ill of the dead,” Craig said, “but he was a city punk through and through. Full of lip. Lots of attitude. Had a police record a mile long, and he was only twelve. Shoplifting. Vandalism. Got kicked out of school for showing up with a knife.”
He didn’t need to go on. It was clear Dwight Halsey was no angel.
“How’d he get along with the other kids?” Nick asked.
“Not too well. Right off the bat, he started causing trouble.”
Nick recalled the photograph of Dwight from Maggie Olmstead’s collection. The boy looked mean in it, like he was in the process of challenging the photographer.
“What kind of trouble?”
“The usual. You know how boys can be at that age. Taunting. Name-calling. A few fistfights. He got into one the day he ran off. Had a pretty big shiner, if I recall.”
He guided Nick deeper into the camp, which was in just as much disarray as the mess hall. Passing the meager latrine, Nick saw that the walls and roof had crumbled, leaving a row of toilets sitting out under the open sky.
“How do you know Dwight Halsey ran off?”
“Because he hated it here,” Craig said. “He said as much every day. So when the other boys in his cabin reported him missing the next morning, I automatically assumed he made a run for it.”
“And got lost in the woods?”
“That’s what we figured. Me and the police that came to investigate thought the same thing. The woods surrounding this place are deep, Mr. Donnelly. It’s not too hard to get lost in there. And once you get turned around like that, chances are pretty slim you’ll get out alive.”
“But if he was trying to run away, why didn’t he just follow the road?”
“Sometimes we don’t know why boys do what they do.”
They had reached an area circled with cabins, most of which had collapsed in on themselves. Those that were still standing had a broken-windowed look of deep neglect. Craig led Nick to one of the survivors, although the pine shingles on the roof were overrun with moss and the door was missing.
“This is the cabin he was staying in.”
Nick stepped into the doorway but made no move to actually enter. He had learned his lesson at the mill the day before. In addition to cobwebs, bird nests, and a dead mouse on the floor, he saw two sets of bunk beds built into the wall. Previous occupants had scratched their names into the cabin wall. Among them were a Bobby, a Kevin, and a Joe. Nick looked for a Dwight but couldn’t find one.
“Each cabin held four boys,” Craig said. “Close quarters, but it taught them how to get along. Dwight was in bed at curfew. I know because I checked the cabin myself.”
“What time was curfew?” Nick asked.
“Ten. Reveille was at six the next morning. By that time his bunk was empty and he was gone.”
“Did he take anything with him?”
“Not that I’m aware of. All of his stuff was still stowed under his bunk.”
“If you were going to run away from someplace and never come back,” Nick said, “wouldn’t you take your belongings with you?”
Craig Brewster stroked his beard as he mulled over the question and then dismissed it. “Not if it meant waking up the other boys in the cabin. He needed to go quietly.”
“So the other boys in the cabin didn’t see or hear anything?”
“No, sir.” Craig sighed. “The police already asked me these questions a long time ago. They talked to the boys. They talked to the camp counselors. No one saw a thing and everyone thought the same thing—that Dwight fled into the woods and died there.”
“How do you know he’s really dead?”
“Because he never resurfaced,” Craig said. “And if he had, my life would have turned out a whole lot differently.”
He started to lead Nick back to camp headquarters, explaining how Dwight Halsey’s disappearance was instant bad publicity for the camp. The next summer the camp hosted only half the number of kids it had the summer before. In 1973, it was even less. After ten more summers of barely scraping by, the camp closed for good.
“It was the only thing I could do,” Craig said. “I tried to rent or sell the place to another camp, but no one wanted it. This land was forever stained by that Halsey boy and I lost everything.”
Nick wanted to feel sorry for the camp owner yet couldn’t bring himself to do it. Something about the man struck him as insincere, as if he only really regretted how Dwight Halsey’s fate affected the camp and not what happened to the boy himself. The feeling grew more pronounced when Craig said, “You never told me why, after all these years, the police are suddenly interested in Dwight Halsey again.”
“Between 1969 and 1972, six boys of similar ages vanished in similar locations,” Nick told him. “All but one of them looked accidental. All of them happened at the same time man was walking on the moon. Dwight Halsey was one of them.”
Craig’s face grew so pale that Nick expected even his beard to change color. “You’re telling me that Halsey boy didn’t run away?”
“That’s correct,” Nick said. “Someone most likely abducted him. Just like the other boys.”
“Then what did he do with them?”
Nick blinked. In that brief moment of darkness, he pictured the bones from the lake arranged across the stainless-steel table. That was all that was left of either Dennis Kepner or Noah Pierce. And, he suspected, all that was left of Dwight Halsey. Somewhere.
“He killed them,” he said.
“But that just doesn’t make sense. Why would someone pick the Halsey boy to kidnap and kill?”
“That’s one of many things we don’t know,” Nick said. “But why wouldn’t they?”
“He was a strong boy. Could handle himself in a fight.”
“But you said he had a black eye the day he vanished.”
“He did,” Craig said. “But you should have seen the other kid. If you wanted to come into a camp and take a kid, there were other, weaker targets.”
Nick had a feeling that Dwight, like all the other boys they were hunting, was simply a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He imagined him waking up in the middle of the night to take a leak and being jumped on his way back from the latrine. Or sneaking out to the boat dock for a late-night smoke, only to be surprised by someone already there. Many wrongful deaths could be chalked up to bad timing.
“We’re not even sure someone came in and took him,” he said. “Whoever did this might already have been here.”
“You think it could have been a worker?” Craig asked, once again growing pale.
“Perhaps. Do you still have the employment records from 1971?”
“No,” Craig said, a little too quickly for Nick’s liking. “They’re long gone.”
“Do you remember having problems with any of your employees? Maybe a counselor who paid a little too much attention to the kids? Something along those lines.”
A dark, angry expression crossed the camp owner’s face, like a storm cloud rolling over a meadow. “Are you saying that what happened to Dwight and those other boys is somehow my fault?”
“Of course not. But it could be the fault of someone you hired.”
“The workers here were good people, Mr. Donnelly. I made sure of that. Some of them I knew from my days as a guard. Others were college kids. None of them were killers.”
Nick raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I’m sure you did. None of this was your fault.”
Craig Brewster’s face brightened again. The storm cloud was gone as quickly as it had appeared.
“I trust you,” he said, although Nick wasn’t sure he really meant it. “I’m just a little sensitive about it, even after all these years. I went through a lot after Dwight vanished like that. I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sure as hell sorry it happened here.”
They had reached the meadow and the fire pit again. Making their way back to the main cabin, Nick asked how easy it would have been to trespass onto the property in 1971. Craig shrugged his response.
“Not too difficult, I imagine. It’s a ways off from the main road, but easy to get to if you put your mind to it. And, of course, if you know where you’re going.”
Nick knew what he was getting at. Getting into the camp wasn’t hard. He had been able to do it with a bum knee and only one cup of coffee under his belt. Someone in better shape would have had an even easier go of it. But in order to reach Camp Crescent, you needed to be aware of its existence. That meant whoever took Dwight Halsey back in 1971 didn’t stumble upon the place by accident. He knew what it was, where it was, and, most important, what kind of potential victims were waiting there.
TWENTY-THREE
Norm Harper blew his nose, took a quick peek at his handkerchief to see what surprises it yielded, then stuffed it back into his shirt pocket. Old men could get away with such things. Norm was so old that he could do this mere inches above his early bird special and no one watching would bat an eye.
“Mort and Ruth Clark. I remember them. Good people.”
“So I’ve been told,” Kat said.
She was sitting across from Norm at the Perry Hollow Diner, two booths down from his usual spot in the corner. The other members of the Coffee Crew—five ancient men wearing plaid, khaki, and Aqua Velva—were still there, shooting Kat dirty looks because she had the nerve to pull away their perpetually disgruntled leader.
For his part, Norm didn’t seem to mind being culled from the herd. Judging from his blow and show earlier, he felt just as comfortable with her as he did with his friends. Kat wasn’t sure if this was a good thing.
