Chapter Eight

CHAPTER 8

Istare at Javier. "Get her back on the phone."

Javier fumbles with his phone, redials his grandma's number, but can't get through.

"It's the signal," he says. He stands up and walks around the lodge, holding his phone out like that'll make a difference.

"Holy shit," Tasha says. "There was a camp here and people actually died?"

"No way," Paige whispers. "There was nothing in the archives about anybody dying. Not from what I saw."

"What the hell is going on?" Kyle asks. "I thought the only thing that happened was that they made that slasher flick. That's why people come up here, right?"

I struggle to put it all together. As far as I know, the thing that makes Camp Mirror Lake special is that they filmed a cult classic here, but if what Javier's grandmother said is true, we're on the site of a mass murder.

"How do we not know about this?" I ask. "How is that possible?"

"Maybe she's lying?" Porter suggests.

Javier turns and marches back to where we're all gathered. "You calling my grandma a liar?"

Porter puts his hands up in front of him. "Bad choice of words. Sorry. I just mean, maybe she's misremembering. How old is she anyway?"

"Seventy next month," Javier says without missing a beat. "And she's not misremembering anything. If she says that's what happened, that's it. Take her word for it."

"Okay, okay," Porter says. "I believe her, okay?"

Javier tries to get her back on the phone with no luck.

I sit quietly for a moment. "You think your grandma knows Ms. Keane?"

"Who?" Javier asks.

"The shotgun lady," I say. "When she was here, she said, ‘If you knew what I know.' Do you think she knows what happened here? She kept asking if this was all just a game to us. It sounded like she thinks what we're doing here is disrespectful. Maybe she's not talking about the movie at all."

"I mean, it literally is a game for us," Porter says.

"That has to be what she meant when she said we should be ashamed of what we're doing here," I say. "We're really out here just walking over the place where a bunch of people died?"

"There's always someone who has a piece of the untold story," Paige says quietly. "That's part of the rules of horror too."

"Not now, Paige. Damn," Tasha says.

"Didn't that sheriff guy say Ms. Keane lived close by?" Paige asks as she types furiously on her phone. "I'm making notes of everything, but he did say that, didn't he?"

I shrug. "Yeah. So?"

"So don't you think we should know if we're walking over people's bones and shit?" Paige stands up. "I'm a reporter. This is huge. We gotta go talk to her and find out what she knows." She turns to Javier. "I need to talk to your grandma at some point, but right now we gotta go see this Keane lady."

"Wait a minute," Tasha says. "Paige, I know you take your job at the school seriously, but—"

"Very seriously," Paige cuts in. "I'm going to college for journalism. You know this. Imagine what this will look like on my résumé. I help uncover Camp Mirror Lake's shady past?" She squeals. "Get up. We're going."

"You don't even know how to get there," Porter says.

"But you do," Paige says. "Charity is always saying that you know this place like the back of your hand. I bet you know where the property line is and all the trails, huh? You telling me you've never once hopped the fence and gone exploring?"

The corners of Porter's mouth lift into a little smirk that tells me he has definitely done exactly that.

"The woods are not the place to be playing around," I say. "It's not like a city park out there. It's a forest. It's hundreds of acres. There are bears and who knows what else."

"People still use the trails," Porter says. "Some of them are pretty worn. It's trespassing on whoever owns the land behind Camp Mirror Lake, but that doesn't stop them."

"Right," I say. "But I think we're forgetting the most important thing." Everybody is looking at me like I have two heads. "Ms. Keane came up here with a shotgun. She didn't even get in trouble. Now y'all wanna go try to interview her? She'll probably shoot you as soon as she sees you."

Paige is already gathering her stuff and slipping on her shoes.

Bezi stands up and crosses her arms hard over her chest. "You are not going."

"Oh, I'm going," Paige says. "Come on, Porter. You can't pass up the opportunity to show off your trail navigation skills."

I glance at Porter. Paige is right. He's already pulling on his shoes. He's such an important part of our team because he knows his way around these woods, but even he can't know what's too far beyond the fence surrounding the camp.

"This is ridiculous," I say.

"Route 710 is southeast of the trail that runs from the supply shed," Porter says. "And Sheriff Lillard said she was at mile marker seventy, right? We're right off mile marker sixty-eight, so she's less than two miles from here at the most."

"This all feels really, really stupid," Kyle chimes in. "You're gonna just knock on her door?"

"The sheriff didn't seem too concerned about her," Tasha says. "Maybe she's just a little . . . off."

I look at her like she's lost her mind. "You're siding with them?"

Paige marches up to me and takes me by the shoulders. "Listen, if we go now, we'll be back before it gets dark. I'll have my story and maybe I can mend fences so she won't come up here anymore. Porter knows the way." She turns to Tasha. "You coming? You owe me anyway."

Tasha hesitates. "I mean—yeah, I guess."

Bezi sucks her teeth. "This is so stupid. Isn't this against the rules, Paige? Isn't there some horror movie theme about not marching off into the woods to investigate some weird shit you heard or saw?"

"At night," Paige says. "Only at night when it's dark. That would be against the rules."

Bezi throws her hands up in defeat and slumps down into the couch. Tasha comes over and puts her hand on my shoulder.

"It's three," she says. "We'll be back by six." She squeezes my arm and leads a determined Paige and a way-too-giddy Porter out the front door.

"Well, I guess we're never gonna see them again," Javier says.

"Shut up, Javi," Kyle says. "It's not funny."

The sun slants through the big picture windows at the front of the lodge, and dust swirls in the shifting columns of light. I sit next to Bezi and try to think in a straight line.

"According to Javier's grandma, there was a summer camp here in 1971. That's twelve years before they shot The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. And she's saying six people died, but I've never heard of anything like that."

"I hate to be morbid, but you'd think if something like that really happened here, it might get mentioned more," Bezi says. "I feel like it'd be a selling point for this place."

Kyle looks appalled. "Jesus."

"I'm not saying I agree," Bezi says quickly. "I'm just sayin'." She sits up straight.

"What?" I ask. "What is it?"

"I forgot—I meant to tell you." She shakes her head. "When Ms. Keane was waving her gun around, me and Paige barricaded the door in the control center, but we still didn't feel safe so we, uh—we kicked in that locked supply closet."

"What?" I ask. "Did you damage anything?"

Bezi purses her lips.

"Bezi, come on." I sigh. "I gotta fix it if you broke something. There's expensive equipment in there."

"No there isn't," she says. "That's what I'm saying. There's no equipment in there at all. Just boxes of junk. Mostly papers and folders from what we could see."

I pause. "Mr. Lamont said it was extra audio and video equipment. He said it was more valuable than anything else we have out here."

Bezi shrugs. "Maybe there's something in there that your boss doesn't want y'all to see."

I stand and pull Bezi up with me. "Come on. I want to go have a look." I turn to Javier and Kyle. "Y'all coming?"

"Nah," Javier says. "I'm tired. I'm gonna take a nap until Tasha and them come back."

"I need to start cleaning out the kitchen," Kyle says. "We're still tryna get out of here tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah," I say. "As long as we get everything done. Day after tomorrow at the latest."

Kyle looks severely disappointed.

"I'll be back to help in a little bit," I say.

He gives me a smile, and Bezi and I head to the control center.

The door to the supply closet in the control room is halfway off the hinges and the frame is cracked around the lock plate. I narrow my eyes at Bezi. "Y'all busted this thing wide open."

"We were scared," Bezi says. "My adrenaline was pumping. Sorry. I think we can fix it, though."

I nudge the broken door open and glance inside the large closet. Bezi is right; there's no extra equipment, just dozens of boxes filled with file folders and paper. A thick, musty odor lingers in the air and there's a layer of gray dust on everything. A skitter of tiny feet tells me some mice have made this place their home. I grab one of the boxes nearest me and open its water-damaged flaps. Inside are a few folded shirts and red whistles on strings. I pull out one of the tops and hold it up. It's filled with holes where mice or moths or some other creature ate their way through the fabric. Across the front of the yellow shirt in big red letters that have faded so much they're nearly invisible, I can just make out the words Camp Mirror Lake and underneath that, the word Counselor.

"These are uniforms?" Bezi asks. "Like from the movie?"

I try to think about the details of The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. "No," I say after racking my brain. "In the movie, the shirts were white, and the lettering was black."

Bezi opens another box and finds a stack of moldering paper. She quickly closes the lid and pulls her shirt up over her nose and mouth.

"Gross," she says. "There's mold all over it. I don't wanna breathe this stuff in. Who knows how long it's been sitting back here."

"Years, from the looks of it," I say. It's weird that Mr. Lamont lied about what was in the closet. There doesn't seem to be anything in here warranting a padlock and a whole-ass cover story.

I push around some more boxes and find another one filled to bursting with yellowing newspaper clippings, their edges winnowed by some kind of insect that has an appetite for old newsprint. I know because the bugs ate their fill and left behind their translucent corpses when they died. I dust the bodies away and thumb through the first few pages to find several articles about campers missing after a bear was sighted in the area around Mirror Lake. The dates on the papers are from 1976 to 1978. I dig through and find another article dated October 1983, panning the release of The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake and saying the only people who are drawn to horror films are deviants and weirdos. I make a mental note not to share this little critique with Paige when she gets back.

Closer to the bottom of the stack is a tan folder. I pull it out and dump the contents onto the lid of another box so I can look through. A clipping from the Groton Tribune reads, Summer camp closes. Disappearances attributed to inexperienced campers and camp staff.

"Bezi, look at this."

Bezi peers over my shoulder. "It says summer camp. It's gotta be what Javier's grandma was talking about, right? I guess she was telling the truth after all."

"The camp existed, but it doesn't say anything about campers being killed." I set the papers down. "Why does Mr. Lamont have this stuff?"

"When did he buy this place?" Bezi asks. "Maybe he just hasn't gone through all this junk."

"Why would he tell me it's expensive supplies and not to mess with it, then?" I ask. "He's trying to hide what happened here? Why? It makes no sense." I dig through more scraps and don't find anything else about the camp, but I do find several articles about the purchase of the land itself under a nest of silverfish. I shake off the silvery bugs, some of which are still squirming, to find attached to the paper a photocopy of a deed. I gently smooth it out. Dead center is an approximation of Mirror Lake. South of the water is a highlighted area labeled proposed site of summer camp, but the lines and measurements indicating the perimeters of the camp extend far beyond the fenced area.

"I wish Porter was here," I say. "He could tell me what this all means. To me, it looks like at some point somebody bought up this site and all the land behind it. But this is from the sixties. Mr. Lamont isn't that old, I don't think."

"Weird," Bezi says as she stares down at the deed. "Let's take it back to the lodge and show Kyle and Javier, see what they think."

I gather up the clippings and the copy of the deed and stick them back in the tan envelope. Bezi and I are on our way out when something catches my attention on one of the monitors in the control center. I stop and lean closer to the screen.

"What is it?" Bezi asks.

"The camera that monitors the trapdoor under the boathouse is out," I say as I stare at the blank screen.

"Why?" Bezi asks.

"Not sure," I say. All the other monitors are on and showing their designated areas in black and white. "The cameras are pretty new, but I gotta check it before we shut everything down so Mr. Lamont knows to fix it before next season. If there even is a next season."

Bezi loops her arm under mine and pulls me toward the door.

"It'll be fine," she says reassuringly.

I lean against her shoulder, wanting so much to believe her when suddenly, for just a split second, the broken camera blinks on and I see a figure, cloaked in black, standing just under the hatch that leads up through the floor of the boathouse.