by Laura Wolfe
That other weekend had only been for two nights. This time we were meeting for four. At least now I could drink. I exhaled, envisioning the twelve bottles of wine clinking in the back.
As Charlotte sped along the highway, we lamented the two times we’d planned to meet for dinner but had to cancel at the last minute, once because of an emergency illness with Marnie and the second time because of an unexpected conflict with one of Kaitlyn’s daughters. Just like our weekends away, life had gotten in the way, and we’d stopped trying.
My legs ached by the time we reached the tiny airport, which was located amid dozens of empty fields carved into the forest. I perched in the back seat, staring out the window. A single prop plane accelerated down a runway beyond the underwhelming brick building that housed only four gates.
My phone beeped with a text message from Sam: Got our luggage. Out in a sec!
“They’re coming out.” My hands sweat as I waited for my first glimpse of Jenna and Sam.
Kaitlyn turned from the front passenger seat and clapped her hands excitedly. “It’s happening!”
Charlotte’s fingers gripped the steering wheel. “I’ll pull into the pickup lane.” I caught a glimpse of her eager smile and reddened cheeks in the rearview mirror. She must have been tired after so many hours of driving, but Sam and Jenna’s arrival had energized all of us.
“There they are.” Kaitlyn lowered her window. “Hey guys!” She waved and smiled as her designer sunglasses reflected in the late-afternoon sun. “Oh my gosh. Look at what Jenna’s wearing!”
I craned my neck to see Sam and Jenna ambling toward us, pulling wheeled suitcases behind them. A sparkly, silver headband with the number “40” stuck up from two antennas on top of Jenna’s head. I couldn’t help but smile. Jenna had always loved being the center of attention. But the lilt in her step caused me to lean forward and hold my breath. Even after all these years, she hadn’t fully recovered from the accident.
“Too funny.” Charlotte unlocked the doors and jumped out.
I watched my friends hop up and down and load their suitcases in the back. I moved back to the third row as nerves bubbled in my stomach. The doors swung open.
“Megan!”
“Hi! So good to see you.” I extended my arms as they ducked inside, taking turns hugging Kaitlyn and me while we commented on Jenna’s headband. The flowery scent of Sam’s perfume, coupled with the low-pitched intonation of Jenna’s laugh, immediately soothed me, like the time I’d returned to my childhood home and found the rusty swing set standing in the same corner of the backyard. My friends had changed but were recognizable in all the important ways—Sam’s vibrant white smile set off against her dark skin and black hair, the sparkle in Jenna’s sea-blue eyes as she slid the glittery headband over her blonde crop cut. Only minor differences had emerged—a few more crow’s feet around the eyes, deeper lines around the mouth, a stray silver hair peeking through from Sam’s ebony tresses. It was both comforting and disconcerting to know that time didn’t stop for anyone. Well, maybe except for Kaitlyn.
“I’m so happy you found flights that landed at the same time.” Charlotte peeked over her shoulder as she pulled away from the curb.
“There was only one flight from LaGuardia every day,” Jenna said.
Sam shook her head. “I know. Same from Denver. It’s crazy how it worked out.”
As Charlotte exited onto a two-lane highway and drove toward our destination, Jenna updated us about her life in New York City and a case she was working on representing an environmental group fighting to keep pesticides out of the city. She motioned with her arms as she talked, sitting a few inches taller than me and looking over her shoulder every minute or two. She’d been a soccer player in college and hadn’t lost her athletic build.
I slipped my phone out of my purse and texted Andrew: Just picked up everyone from the airport. On our way to the cabin. Not sure if I’ll have time to talk later. Kiss Wyatt and Marnie for me. xx.
A minute later, he texted back: Have fun! Love you.
Despite the flippant goodbye this morning, Andrew was good to me. Sometimes I didn’t think I deserved him. I tried to remember the last time he’d taken a weekend for himself, away from the kids, but couldn’t. I swallowed back the guilt rising in my throat and focused on Sam’s voice as she filled us in on her family in Denver. Her sons, Leo and Brett, were eight and six now and obsessed with Legos.
“How’s your MedTech company?” I asked, remembering all the hard work Sam had put in over the last fifteen years. She’d left her research position at a major hospital to pursue an idea to make affordable prescription drugs available online for everyone.
“It’s going great. We had our biggest profit margin ever this year. I can tell you more about it later.” Sam’s brown eyes found mine as she tucked her thick hair behind her ear. She had plucked her eyebrows into perfect arches and her maroon lipstick accentuated her dark complexion. Her hair wasn’t frizzy anymore, like it had been in college. She was even more beautiful, more confident.
“Wow. Look at you, overachievers.” Kaitlyn flashed her movie-star smile from the front seat.
Sam threw her head back. “Look who’s talking! How many charities are you running this year, PTO President?”
“I dropped out of the PTO. Some of the parents were too much.” Kaitlyn waved her manicured hand in the air. “I’m focusing my time on a new initiative to get books into the hands of inner-city and rural kids. And I’m still helping new immigrants get settled.”
“Kaitlyn saves the world. Again,” Charlotte said, a smile pulling at her lips. Jenna and I chuckled.
Sam nodded her approval. “Good for you, Kaitlyn.”
“I love that.” I nodded toward Kaitlyn and noted the familiar sinking feeling she had always sent through me, like I should be doing more with my life. Kaitlyn had never stopped using her privileged position to help others. I imagined she didn’t quite fit in with the country club set where she lived.
The trees flitted past outside the car windows as we caught each other up on our day’s travels. I looked around at the women who sat near me inside the minivan. They were my closest friends in so many ways, but the passing of time had also made them strangers. Besides an occasional photo one of us posted on social media, I knew close to nothing about their day-to-day lives. I studied their faces as they talked, wondering which of us would still be friends if we met each other today, rather than twenty-two years earlier. My eyes traveled from Sam to Jenna in the second row to Kaitlyn and Charlotte in the front seat. I pinned my elbows close to my body and didn’t let myself think too long about the answers.
Chapter Three
The tires hit another pothole and I pressed my palms into the seat to steady myself. The forest swallowed the minivan, blocking out the sunlight. Eventually, Charlotte turned down another road identical to the one we’d just been on, but with even fewer cars. It was the second weekend in September and the summer travelers had already returned south for school and work.
Jenna narrowed her eyes out the window. “Where is this place we rented?”
Kaitlyn squinted at the GPS directions on her phone. “I don’t know. I knew it was kind of far out there, but this is crazy.”
“I’m looking for a sign for Crooked Lake,” Sam said, craning her neck toward the far side of the car.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere.” Charlotte kept her eyes focused on the bumpy road. “But don’t worry. I have a cooler of food, Kaitlyn brought four bags of groceries, and Megan brought every bottle of wine in her house.”
“True story,” I yelled from the back, picturing the bags of groceries and twelve bottles of wine rattling behind me.
“What more could we need?” Kaitlyn motioned toward the window. “This is what we wanted, right? Seclusion, nature, no distractions. Just four days of catching up.”
Jenna stared at the passing landscape. “I’ve never seen so many trees before. It’s such a nice break from the city.”
We sat in silence for a minute, watching the trees flit by, the same scene repeating over and over, like the backgrounds of old cartoons.
“I’m hungry. What time do the food trucks come by?” Jenna asked, making the rest of us laugh.
“We’re having pizza tonight. I hope that’s okay. No meat.” Kaitlyn winked at Jenna and then looked back at me. Jenna and I were vegetarians—Jenna, since college, and me more recently, after watching a horrific documentary about factory farms.
“Thanks,” I said. It was just like Kaitlyn to be so accommodating. Outside of party planning and fundraising, empathy was one of her top strengths.
“I brought a salad too and some appetizers.”
“Wow. Thanks,” Sam said.
Jenna shifted. “Yeah. That’s great.”
“I can’t wait to get there.” From my spot in the back, I strained against my seat belt, fighting the onset of nausea. All the lurching and bumping gave me the feeling of being trapped in a cave during an earthquake.
“Hey, Charlotte. Slow down.” Kaitlyn leaned forward. “I think our turn is coming up.”
The minivan slowed as we passed a few run-down storefronts attempting to pass for a town. A gas station featured pumps reminiscent of the 1950s; only a discolored pickup truck lingered in the corner of its crumbling parking lot. A beauty salon doubled as a real estate office: The Hair Cuttery. $12 cuts! And below it: Wooded lots for sale! Next door, a grocery store displayed a black-and-white sign through a murky front window: Night crawlers * Live Bait.
Sam squealed. “Oh my God! We’re staying in a place that sells worms in the grocery store.”
I cringed at the sign as belly-aching laughter filled the van.
“There’s a lake near the cabin, so it kind of makes sense,” Kaitlyn said.
More jokes about scheduling haircuts with the town realtor followed as the fleeting glimpse of civilization faded, and our vehicle was submerged back into the forest. A mile or so later, we approached an unmarked dirt road.
Charlotte slid her hands lower on the steering wheel. “Is this it?”
Kaitlyn scrolled through the GPS. “It looks like this is the turn. We still have twelve miles to go down this road. Then we take a right for half a mile. Then a left, and we’re there.”
“Twelve miles! Seriously!” Jenna leaned toward the front seat. “Where is this place?”
A motor rumbled behind us and Charlotte sped up. I caught her nervous glance in the rearview mirror. “Look at this guy. Why is he following so close?”
I turned toward the back window where a black pickup truck hovered only a foot or two behind the minivan. The truck sat on oversized tires and had an extra exhaust pipe affixed to the hood. A reflection on the windshield obscured the driver’s face.
“I can’t go any faster. I’ll fly off the road,” Charlotte said.
Kaitlyn rubbed her arm. “Just ignore him. We’re the only cars here. He can pass you if he wants.”
Jenna leaned past me toward the other driver, throwing her arm in the air. “Go around us, jerk.”
The minivan hit a pothole and I clutched the door handle to keep myself steady. “Slow down, Charlotte.”
An engine revved from behind as the truck swerved to the side and sped past us. A tattered sticker of a skull and crossbones was affixed to the truck’s back window. A cloud of black smoke trailed behind the mammoth vehicle, polluting the otherwise pristine air.
Jenna scowled. “Looks like someone’s not concerned about his carbon footprint.”
“I’m guessing he’s a local,” I said.
“What makes you say that?” Jenna asked with a straight face, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.
With the truck out of sight, Charlotte’s shoulders had relaxed, but her eyes remained glued to the road as we continued traveling at a slightly slower speed.
“Where are you guys taking me?” Sam asked.
Kaitlyn glanced back. “Isn’t there a land trust that owns over a thousand acres of forest out here? I remember something about it in the rental listing.”
“I didn’t realize it was so remote.” Charlotte shook her head. “The cabin looked charming online.”
“We got a good deal,” I said. “I can’t wait to get there.”
I thought of the cabin we’d agreed to rent for our long weekend. After running into a few dead ends on the mainstream vacation rental sites, Jenna recommended a mom-and-pop site specializing in off-the-grid properties. Charlotte had quickly bookmarked the cabin based on its location and price. The heading read: Secluded Cabin on Crooked Lake Sleeps Six. The online pictures portrayed a rustic country cabin with baskets of red geraniums hanging along a front deck. A steep wooded incline led to a private lake. The property sat on over thirty wooded acres, surrounded by a thousand acres of forest owned by a land trust on one side and a two-hundred-acre summer sleepaway camp on the other. Beyond the camp sat state-owned forest land. Although the cabin’s description presented it as “a no-frills escape to rustic living,” it cost less than half the price of everything else we’d seen and was relatively close to the small airport. Charlotte claimed their money was tight. She and Reed were saving up to take Oliver to Europe the following spring. Jenna had her heart set on going “off the grid” for a few days.
It’s kind of like glamping, Jenna had written in one of our group texts, which had made the description sound more appealing. None of us cared about going out to restaurants or bars, so the decision had been easy.
I envisioned the photo of the glassy lake in the early morning light with a sailboat gliding past. “I can’t believe it has a private lake. It sounds so peaceful.”
“What the heck.” Kaitlyn smacked her phone against her hand a few times and pushed the power button. “The GPS is frozen. It says we’re still back on the County Road.”
The minivan continued bumping along the dirt road, nailing a pothole every few seconds despite Charlotte’s attempts to swerve around them.
Jenna’s eyebrows furrowed as she studied her phone. “My phone’s not loading either. Don’t tell me there are no cell-phone towers out here.”
I leaned toward her, noticing my phone had lost its bars too. “The rental listing said something about spotty phone reception. It was in the fine print below the description. I told Andrew he might not hear from me until Monday.”
“Yeah. I told Derek we might have to drive into town for me to call him.”
Jenna looked back at me. “Yeah. I saw that too, but I thought it said reception was ‘spotty,’ not non-existent!”
“I warned Reed that I might be off the grid for a few days.” Charlotte adjusted her hands on the steering wheel. “Hopefully it will get better once we get to the cabin.”
Sam held up her phone and frowned. “Mine’s out too. At least I texted Thomas from the airport. He knows we’re headed out to the boonies.”
“How far do you think we’ve gone?” I asked. “You said twelve miles on this road and then a right, followed by a left.”
“Yeah.” Charlotte glanced over her shoulder. “I’ll keep going for another five or six miles and then we’ll look for a turn.”
The sun sank lower in the sky as we rambled down the road. Kaitlyn sat motionless in the front passenger seat; her euphoria had evaporated. A crease of worry formed across her forehead every time she turned back to look at us. Meanwhile, Jenna relayed every detail about a new series she’d been watching on Netflix and then told a long story about an attractive man who owned her favorite vegan food truck in Brooklyn. Jenna was the only one in the group who wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, and it was exciting to live vicariously through her. But there was one thing about Jenna that had always been aggravating; she made it difficult to get a word in.
A wooden sign flew past my window, blending into the trees.
“Wait,” I yelled, interrupting Jenna’s story. “There was a sign.”
Charlotte slammed on the brakes. We lurched forward against our seat belts.
I pointed behind us. “You just passed it.”
The minivan reversed for five seconds until the sign materialized in the trees. The placard was homemade, constructed of plywood, with messy white lettering painted across it.
Sam read it out loud, “Camp Eventide. Next Right.”
My eyes traveled over the uneven words. “That sign is so creepy. It looks like a serial killer painted it. Who would send their kids there?”
“Next right to your death, kiddos. Hahaha!” Jenna said in a bad imitation of a villain’s voice.
Sam covered her face with her fingers. “You guys are horrible.”
“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this.” Kaitlyn studied the sign then flipped back toward the rest of us. “I saw that camp on the map yesterday when I was looking for the nearest grocery store. I wondered what Camp Eventide was, so I looked it up.”
“What is it?” Charlotte asked, her wide eyes reflecting in the rearview mirror.
Light filtered through the window and cast wavering shadows across Kaitlyn’s face. “It was a summer retreat for at-risk youths. The place shut down earlier this summer after someone on the staff died.”
“Who was it? A counselor?” Charlotte asked.
Kaitlyn pinched her berry-stained lips together. “I don’t know. Probably. The person who died was a woman, but the article was vague. It was written right after it happened, so the police hadn’t even notified the victim’s family yet.”
