Chapter 6

6

CAMP SUNNY PINES WAS A FEW MINUTES’ DRIVE FROM THE CENTER OFtown, on a road that ran alongside a low and slow-moving creek. The sign was made of brown wood, with the camp named burned in and painted white. The road wove through the trees for a moment, then opened up into a wide expanse of fields and low buildings. Carson parked and the trio got their things out of the back of the car. They followed Carson to the large dining pavilion, hauling their suitcases and bags over the gravel of the parking area. Stevie’s cheap suitcase had even cheaper wheels, which gave up once they got a stone stuck in them. She dragged the bag the rest of the way, scraping it along the concrete floor of the pavilion and leaving grass and skid marks as it went. Inside the pavilion, a woman was supervising a small crew that was assembling welcome packages while fielding phone calls.

“That’s Nicole,” Carson said in a low voice. “Agree to everything she says. We’ll work it out later.”

This was an ominous statement.

Nicole looked up and noted their arrival with a nod but no smile, and came over while she continued her conversation, which turned out to be about septic tanks. Nicole was a tall woman, probably about six feet, with her hair tied back in a brown ponytail. She wore long swim shorts, a fitted running top, and a whistle around her neck. Stevie could see many things in Nicole all at once. Whatever time you woke up, Nicole woke up earlier than you, when the day was young and the sun just born. She made a complete breakfast, which contained protein, fruit, and maybe even a vegetable. She accomplished things that she’d put on a list the night before. She stretched in the fresh air. She forged a trail. She punched into the future with a mighty fist. She knew who she was, where she was going, and why she was better than you. But go ahead, whine about how tired you are. She will listen. She will crush you with her eyes. You will emerge smaller from the encounter because she has compressed your spine.

Or something like that. She had a whistle, anyway.

After the first general round of introductions was made, Nicole took a long nasal inhale and gazed across the picnic table at the assembled.

“Just so we’re clear . . . ,” she began. “This is a camp. It’s for kids to have fun over the summer. It’s also part of a community. Sunny Pines is not about what happened in 1978. That’s in the past. Terrible things have happened at a lot of places. You move on. It’s not a murder mystery thing.”

She stared at Stevie for a long moment. Stevie wanted to politely reply that it was kind of a murder mystery thing, what with the murder, and the mystery. But Stevie did not say this, because she did not want to eat a whistle.

“So when you’re at this camp, you work for the camp,” Nicole said. “That means you do your job and take care of the campers. A few basic rules that you’ll hear again in the main orientation, but hear them now as you’ll be here for a few days. No swimming on this side without a lifeguard present. No night swimming. No jumping off the rocks, ever. No open fires that aren’t a part of authorized camp activities. No smoking or vaping. No alcohol, and no use of marijuana products. Violations of these policies will result in your dismissal, even if you are here with Carson.”

Carson was fingering a set of meditation beads and staring at the ripples on the lake.

After that, there were forms to sign, conduct policies to read. They were all given welcome packs, sets of information, maps, and a list of emergency numbers to put into their phones.

“I’ll give them the tour,” Carson said. “I know you’re busy.”

Nicole gave him a long look and returned to whatever she had been doing. They left their bags at the pavilion and followed Carson out into the grassy fields that surrounded it.

“She’s the head of the good times committee, huh?” Nate asked.

“I liked her,” Janelle said. “She’s a strong woman.”

“I’m afraid of everyone,” Nate reminded her, and Janelle nodded in acknowledgment.

“You have your tree,” she said.

A blissful smile crossed Nate’s face once again.

Camp Sunny Pines was a collection of brown-timbered buildings around a lake, interspersed with large pavilion structures. At the center of it all was Lake Wonder Falls, which seemed like a weird name now that she looked at it. There were no falls in sight, and very little wonder. It seemed like a nice and ordinary lake, the water a brownish color, and still enough to reflect the clouds and sky above. Little docks jutted out all around it, and there was a floating dock in the middle for swimmers and divers.

“The lake is sort of shaped like an hourglass,” Carson said. “This part down here is smaller, flatter, and shallower. Then it gets really skinny—the road goes over that part. The other side is open to the public. It’s higher, with the big rocks, and it’s a lot deeper. It’s really like two separate lakes with a little channel between them. This is the child-friendly side.”

On this side of the camp, the lake was about a hundred feet across, surrounded by a narrow edge of beach, with some swampy, reedy areas (snaketown) cutting into it. There was a swimming pool, tennis court, fields, and a large assembly area with a firepit in the middle. Carson showed them all around, pointing out the racks of canoes, the rows of communal bikes, and a yoga and dance pavilion. They worked their way around to the tidy wooden bunkhouses that butted up against the woods. They were built on raised concrete platforms, probably to protect them if the lake flooded its banks. Stevie noticed that while all the windows had screens in them, they also had metal latticework. She suspected this was installed in the wake of the murders, to ensure no one could get in from the outside.

“This”—Carson pointed at a cabin with the word PUMAS painted over the door—“is the cabin Brandy Clark was in the morning the bodies were discovered. As you can see, it’s close to the tree line. The first body was found this way.”

He led them down a wide grassy opening in the trees, which narrowed to a path about eight feet wide, surfaced in cedar wood chips.

“Eric Wilde was found right about here,” he said, taking his tablet out of his messenger bag and pulling up the black-and-white photo he had shown them the night before. “You can see that he was lined up more or less with that tree there with the double trunk.”

Stevie took the tablet and compared the spot. Eric had been found facedown, with his head pointed in the direction of the camp.

“It looks like he was heading back,” she said.

“It was a dirt path then, so they had a footprint trail for at least part of it. What seems to have happened is that he was attacked and injured probably at the primary site, and he ran through the woods to escape. He must have largely stayed off the path to keep away from his attacker. He was almost back to the camp when the killer caught up with him. He almost made it.”

The landscape and the path looked very much the same. Standing here, she could see that the path veered around the performance area, meaning there was no clear line of sight to the camp. Eric had been close, but not close enough.

“Now,” he said, “ready to go to where the main event took place? We’ll need the car for that one.”

Nate mouthed the words main event.

They got back into the car and drove over the short bridge that spanned the narrow of the lake. This route continued back past the camp buildings and into the woods. It was startling how quickly things went from manicured and inhabited to entirely forested and overgrown. The canopy of trees was so dense that the woods were dark in the bold light of day. The road bent gently to the left and merged with the dirt track they had seen earlier. It was a narrow, bumpy trail, more holes than solid ground. The Tesla handled it but was clearly used to more refined surfaces, and the group bounced up and down in their seats like popping corn. After a few minutes, Carson pulled over and stopped the car on the side of the road.

“This is it,” he said. “Blink and you’d miss it.”

They stepped out into the woods. The air here had a rich smell of leaves and plant life, and the sun occasionally poked through the cover in a thin finger of light, but mostly it was subdued and soft. Their footsteps fell silently on the dirt and soft pine needles underfoot.

“This is like being inside of a meditation app,” Nate said, looking around.

Carson pointed at a small stake in the ground by the path with a black ribbon tied to it.

“People come here and mark the spot where you should stop your car. The parks department takes the stake out all the time, and someone puts one back in.”

He cheerfully marched on, into the trees. Stevie was about to follow, but Janelle put out her hand, which held a bottle.

“Tick spray,” she said. “There are going to be so many ticks in here, and Lyme disease is no joke.”

Ticks. Snakes. This is why camping was bad. This and every other reason.

After spraying themselves, they followed Carson down an indistinguishable path, a random and winding walk through the trees, full of roots and snags and branches that reached out to grab hair and clothing. They shortly arrived at a small clearing. The only thing that indicated anything at all might have happened here was a small ring of stones where a fire had been, with a few melted-down candles in the grass.

“This is it,” he said. “People come here, as you can see. It’s a big murder tour and goth hangout.”

The first thing Stevie noticed was that the spot was so . . . unremarkable. When she’d read that this occurred in a clearing in the woods, she expected a wide-open space. This was a spot between some trees, maybe a little larger than most, but it wasn’t special.

“I’ve worked out all the spacing from studying the photos,” Carson said. “Many of the trees are still here. That fire pit is about right. People have been coming here long enough to mark the spot that they basically made the campfire area permanent.”

He stood on a spot to the left of the stone circle.

“There were log seats there, and there. Everything here at this site was left in an undisturbed state. No sign of a fight of any kind. There was a blanket that would have been about here, the tray of grass was on it. The box was this way. . . .”

He continued on, back into the woods.

“He’s creepier than you,” Nate whispered to Stevie. “How does that make you feel?”

“Honestly, pretty good,” she replied.

The path this time was much thicker, harder to walk down. Stevie had to press back branches with every step. This was where the wild things were, quite literally. When Carson stopped again, there was barely a clearing—just a narrow space between trees.

“It was right here,” he said, leaning on a thick oak tree. “The infamous box. In actuality, it was a hunting blind.”

“What exactly is a hunting blind?” Janelle asked.

“Basically a place to hide,” Carson replied. “It looks like a box. It has a slit open in the side, just big enough to see out of. Hunters sit in the blind and look out and wait for animals.”

“That seems fair,” Nate said.

“And literal,” Stevie added. “In this case. Do we know what happened to it?”

“The police took the lid,” Carson said. “Souvenir hunters took the rest, years ago.”

“So the crime scene walked away,” Stevie said.

They tramped back to the clearing. As she stood there on the spot of a notorious quadruple homicide, Stevie had a strange feeling—and not the strange feeling that you would expect to get on the site of a notorious quadruple homicide. The sun was bright overhead. A soft summer breeze came through the trees. Everything smelled soft and fresh. This spot was . . .

Nice. It was a nice, normal spot. A good spot for a picnic, or to hang out under the stars with your friends. Its remoteness almost added to the feeling of security. It was padded by woods—a nook. A little oasis. Sabrina, Eric, Todd, and Diane had come here, set up their blankets and music and snacks, set about their rolling and talking and having fun. Someone had waited, perhaps behind one of these very trees, for the right moment.

“What are you thinking?” Carson asked.

What was she thinking? What was the feeling? What was it, this little sensation, like a finger tracing its way up her spine?

“I knew it was out in the woods,” she said, “but I guess I thought it was closer to the camp. This is remote. And it’s so . . . it’s not a place you’d stumble upon. You’d have to know where to go. There were four of them. Four teenagers. One was a football captain, but it sounded like they were all physically fit. So a lone murderer, or even a pair, they’d be outnumbered. How do you subdue four young adults in a remote place like this, that they may know better than you do?”

“Gunpoint,” Carson said. “That’s one way.”

“But they were all stabbed. If you have them at gunpoint, you shoot them.”

“And there were drugs in their systems, but they weren’t sedated or anything like that,” Carson said.

“So they’re maybe high or drunk, but they’re conscious—conscious enough that Eric could run four miles in the dark. Probably not gunpoint. Maybe you separate them, or they’ve separated themselves. You go two by two. Lots of killers have taken on couples.”

“Like Zodiac,” Carson said a little too eagerly. “Make one tie up the other.”

“Creepy man, creepy man,” Nate sang under his breath. “This is a creepy, creepy man.”

“Another thing,” Stevie said. “There were no other tire marks, right?”

“Right.”

“So this person or these people probably came on foot. That’s a lot of night hiking in the woods. Whoever it was came with supplies. Someone went to a lot of trouble to kill four camp counselors. Who does that?”

“Besides Jason Voorhees,” Nate said.

“This is my question,” Carson said. “There’s something messed up in Barlow Corners, something no one’s ever gotten to the bottom of. Someone has to know something. The answer is here, if we look for it. I’m a disrupter. I like to make things happen. We’re going to disrupt this situation and crack it open.”

“Oh my god,” Nate said in a low voice. “I gotta get in my tree.”