I’d see the other girls there, each of them bound to this place. But that was later.
This was the first night. And the first night I ever had this dream—after I found the flyer with Abby’s face on it—it was Abby I was looking for.
I could sense her, a shrinking, quiet presence breathing from some pocket of darkness. The scent was the same from the van. But stronger, closer. She moved and the floorboards creaked; that’s how I knew she carried weight here. She was substantial here. Here, she was real.
I took a step toward the noise. “Abby? Is that you?” My voice scratched, but sound still came out.
I could make out a figure near a window in the next room. When I’d been standing out on the sidewalk I hadn’t been able to see that there were curtains, but from inside I could see the long, dark sails of the closed drapes. The light was brighter in this room, somehow. The curtains had a sheen that seemed to fight the darkness, folds that could hide bodies, grimy tassels that trailed the floor.
She had her back to me.
Her hair wasn’t matted with leaves and sticks, as it had been in my van—at least, as far as I could tell. The curtains hid her enough so I couldn’t be sure. She felt familiar somehow, in a way I couldn’t pinpoint.
I was trying to reach her through the smoke, because I had questions. Questions like: What is this place and what’s burning? Is she really Abby Sinclair from the Missing poster? Does seeing her here mean she’s dead, or is she still alive? Am I supposed to find her?
But it was a dream. And legs don’t work in dreams the way they’re meant to, and my tongue wouldn’t shape the words collecting in my mouth. All I could get out was “Abby?”
The figure didn’t turn around or make any kind of reply. This told me the answers weren’t there in that scorched house. They were outside, somewhere near Pinecliff, my hometown, waiting for me to go out and find them. And for that, no girl in the smoke could help me.
I’d have to wake up.
— 5 —
THERE it was, down a road I’d driven before. To find it, I only had to hang right at the fork instead of left. From there, the winding road led deep into the pines and the entrance I was seeking was just past a blind bend, marked by a cluster of white firs and a blue sign. Most of the sign was obscured by a fresh covering of snow, hiding the words, so only the cutout of the lady herself rose into the darkening sky, two palms raised as if to catch the drifting flurries. She wore a pale blue head scarf, like the Virgin Mary, and had no face, like a ghost. Behind her was a locked gate as tall as the trees.
This was Lady-of-the-Pines Summer Camp for Girls: a place where people from suburbs and cities sent their daughters. The campground was buried in a valley of mosquitoes, pine trees, and poison oak, skirting the edge of a tepid lake. The mountain ridge cut off a view of what was on the other side, beyond this camp, so the girls—and their parents—would have no idea what stood within miles of them. All that nature they’d spend the summer embracing was closer than they might guess to one of the state’s maximum-security men’s prisons, which housed, last I checked, more than a thousand violent offenders, including murderers, rapists, and child molesters.
According to the Missing flyer, this summer camp was the last place Abby Sinclair had been seen. Here, past the gate and beyond those trees.
I pulled in and cut the engine, but Jamie’s car behind my van almost kept on going. He braked in the road and had to back up, scudding over a snowbank. The snowplows hadn’t made it up here since the latest storm, so all the snow made it difficult to find a place to park. When he was closer, he rolled down his window and called out to me in the cold.
“What’s wrong? Why’d you stop?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I called back. “Just get out of the car. Come here.”
I was already climbing out of the van and testing my flashlight. Night came sooner in winter, especially up here with the ridge blocking the sun. I knew it could be mere minutes before the dark dropped down all around us, and I wasn’t sure if the electricity would be working on the closed campground during the off-season. Without a flashlight, we’d be out there unable to see.
The flashlight flickered, and I smacked it against my thigh. Light. I waved it at him, signaling to get him out of the car.
“Your engine didn’t die again, did it?” he called.
I shook my head. He didn’t know why we were here. I hadn’t bothered to tell him that the spot I’d wanted him to follow me to wasn’t a restaurant, as I’d insinuated, but this place. Through the gate was a snowed-out road leading in to what I assumed were the main grounds of the camp, where Abby had spent those summer weeks before she vanished. Only that locked chain-link fence was keeping us from it.
Jamie gave me a look I couldn’t read, but he shut off his engine, pulled up his hood, then stepped out into the cold with me.
I pointed the flashlight at the fence opening, indicating the padlock secured by rings of thick chains. “Can you do something about that?” I asked. “So we don’t have to climb over?” I let the light reveal the top of the tall fence, the razor wire glittering in the falling darkness.
“You’re saying I dressed up for nothing, then?” Jamie tugged at the shirt collar under his coat, his one good gray button-down that he might have even ironed for the night out. But he didn’t seem mad about it, I could tell.
Jamie and I had gotten together over the summer (the same summer Abby, mere miles from us, had been swatting away gnats and rowing canoes and singing campfire songs in repetitive round-robins). It happened fast, between Jamie and me.
Before I discovered Abby, and soon the others—before a fundamental piece of who I am shifted to reveal itself inside me, like an iceberg rising up to show its true and monstrous size from the frigid depths of the sea—I’d been the girl Jamie fell for. Whoever that was. It wasn’t so long ago, but she and I were different people now.
He and I were different, too, but I don’t want to forget all the good things about him. Like how he’s fearless when it comes to braving heights, or breaking and entering; he once scaled the side of my house to reach an open window when I’d locked myself out, balancing on a flimsy gutter high up over the backyard, holding on by his fingertips. There was the way he’d go ahead and do something with me, simply because I asked him to. He didn’t need to know why.
Like right then, in the snow. He was lifting the lock to take a look. A puff of his cold breath hung between us, as if reaching out to touch me, but I was just out of range. Just.
There I was, watching flurries fall and catch in his hair, those unruly curls of his poking out from under his hoodie, wishing I could tell him about Abby. But Jamie didn’t believe in things like ghosts. And how do you tell a sane, rational person that you’ve had an encounter with one? That you’ve connected somehow with a girl whose face you found on a poster? A girl who went missing right here? How she’s reaching out to you, you’re sure of it? How she’s trying to communicate something, though you can’t quite make out the message?
I think bringing him with me was my way of telling him—but no matter what screamed out in the dark of my head while we stood there together at the gate, I guess he couldn’t hear if I didn’t open my mouth and let it out.
NO TRESPASSING signs hung on the chain link above us, glowing, practically nuclear, in the night. Snow dusted the shoulders of his green army peacoat, the one from the thrift store that was made for someone much bigger than him (but he wore it anyway, because I got it for him). He was silent for too long; I thought he’d given up and would say we should just go to the restaurant. Then his face lit up.
“So I can’t pick this lock,” he said, with a small smile. “But the chain? It’s busted.” With one hard tug, he got the chain open. The padlock fell into the snow.
Jamie was trying to meet my eyes, and I was trying not to let him. “So what is this place, anyway?” he asked.
“A summer camp, for girls,” I said as I shoved the gate open into a snowdrift. ??
?They close it up for winter, but I wanted to see.”
I didn’t give him the chance to ask why. I pulled him through to the grounds of Lady-of-the-Pines, abandoned for winter, though from the way it looked that night, expanding into the dark distance, it could have been abandoned years ago, before my mom and I moved to the area, before I was even born.
Jamie and I walked along what I guessed was the main path inside. He took my hand. I don’t know what he thought we were doing there—what my intentions were, seeing how cold it was. It was starting then, my need for distance. I could feel this crawling sense in my skin whenever he touched me, the need to put some molecules of air between us. I could feel the cold sweat on his palm and something greasy, like he’d gotten goop on his hands when he was playing with the lock on the gate. There was an ultra-awareness of him, prickling and uncomfortable. Something so much more important was crowding out all thoughts of him.
We passed a shed and a white structure with the words MAIN OFFICE carved in over the wooden door frame. We went slowly, my flashlight exploring anything of interest, no words between us. Paths split off into the trees, the levels of snow lower to give hints of where they started, but not where they led. The quiet, except for our boots swishing through the freshly fallen snow, grew more and more intense.
Jamie startled me when he spoke. “I thought you said this place was closed.”
He’d found a set of prints, or really a series of indents over which the day’s snow had fallen. A small, squat building made of cinder blocks was to our left, and to our right a fenced-in square with a sign noting it as the compost, though whatever had been in there, rotting into the soil months before, was now frozen solid and shrouded in white.
“Probably only an animal,” I said, and as soon as the words left my mouth, a rustling could be heard, fast and loose like someone breaking into a panicked run. Then we saw it wasn’t someone at all—it was something. A fat little creature trundled out from the darkened patch of woods, over a fallen branch, to the edge of the compost, watching us with two yellow eyes as if waiting for the right moment to pounce.
“Is that a—” I started. “Oh, please no. That’s a skunk.”
“It’s a fox,” he said. “I think.” We backed away slowly, putting distance between us and it.
This might have been our only encounter of the night on that vacant campground if the wind hadn't shifted and let me know she was close.
“Do you smell that?” I asked. “Like something’s burning?” It drifted—the scent of fire—from an unknown source. Faint and far-off, but familiar enough to remind me of the dream. Of her. Of how I felt sure they were tangled up together.
“No, I—” he started, but I didn’t give him the chance to say more, because I was moving faster now, searching now, the smoke-thick veil between my world and her world loosening enough to let me slip in.
At some point during this, I let go of Jamie’s hand.
— 6 —
SHE’D been here.
Abby Sinclair walked this very path, I could sense it. She’d spent whole weeks of her summer in this place before she was gone. She’d raised the flag on this pole and counted out change for candy at that canteen.
The farther in we went, the more it came clear to me. What she saw here, what she felt and experienced and breathed. I sensed, in an abstract sort of way, Jamie following behind me, but I didn’t look back after him, I didn’t explain.
I could feel the sweaty air that hung thick inside the mosquito netting of the camp’s cabins. There was a dampness on my skin, the humidity that clings to this valley in summer clinging now to my clothes. I kept hearing flashes of activity through the trees, remembered noises echoing at me from the darkness. A series of splashes in the lake, the clatter of forks on plates in the mess hall, the satisfying thwack of an archery arrow into a target’s heart.
We kept walking. It felt like we did so without a word to each other, but Jamie could have been saying things and I could have not been responding to what he said.
We found the mess hall and the arts-and-crafts cabin and the sports field. On a raised hill, we could see the ring where fires had been built. There was a large circle of stones, and I imagined the campers gathering here on the hottest nights, here where the thick cluster of pines broke open and the air thinned and where, overhead, there was a clear view of the blanket of stars.
Nothing appeared to be burning, and the scent I thought I’d caught in the woods had drifted, but still I brushed off a stone and rested my weight on it, gazing up. Night had fallen enough by now that the stars had come out. The jagged ridge in the distance was only a fuzzy and faintly shimmering outline, as if not a part of the mountain at all. I tried to see this place the way Abby might have. She was a visitor to this area. Not from here. Not used to this. Maybe our sky looked different to her, outside the suburb she was from. Everything was so much darker up here, away from stores and streetlights. And in the dark, out of view of traffic and neighbors, practically anything could happen.
Jamie cleared his throat. He was right next to me and I’d forgotten. Again.
“What are we . . . are we looking for something?” he asked.
He was occupying himself by throwing stones into the woods beside the fire pit. Sometimes a stone would hit a tree—I could hear the thump of impact, or a whistling rustle into a thicket of branches—but sometimes the stone found only air.
I stood up. She wanted me to keep looking.
“We’re exploring,” I said to Jamie. “We’re just seeing what’s here.”
“Hey, c’mere, hey, Lauren.” He was grabbing for my arm, or my hip, or some part of my body, to pull me closer. But he missed me in the dark, and I made it past him and away from the fire pit and headed down the hill. The decline forced speed on me, and I started running.
I followed the pathways between the sleeping cabins and peeked in through holes in the sagging skins over the windows: the screens and mosquito nets that couldn’t be that much help in keeping back the mosquitoes. The steps leading up to the cabin doors were buried in snow. I noted more animal prints—tracks from deer and raccoons, claw marks that had to be from birds, and a larger set that could belong to a giant owl hiding in the trees. Nothing human, not until me.
There were only five cabins for campers to sleep in. It took three visits with the flashlight to find it.
Cabin 3. Abby’s cabin.
But I didn’t know that at first.
All the furniture had been left inside the cabins for the off-season, the rows of beds with their plastic-cased mattresses stripped of sheets and their yellowed, lumpy pillows left behind in zipped pouches for next summer’s girls.
Jamie was the one who helped me discover Abby’s bed. He’d followed me in, as he’d been following me around all the cabins, and he said, “Hey, check out the walls.”
This was how I discovered that the girls at Lady-of-the-Pines liked to carve their names or initials and the dates of their stay onto the rough-hewn walls beside their beds. Over the years, enough girls had done this that there was a yearbook of sorts, an inmates’ record on the walls of a prison cell.
I circled the cabin hoping, taking my time to check the latest set of names marking each metal-framed bed, which were arranged in two long rows against the walls.
I had a feeling I’d find her, somewhere, and then I did. Abby hadn’t just carved her name into the wooden wall behind the bed she slept in. She didn’t bother to note the year she spent here the way the other girls had. What she’d carved was a clue:
abby sinclair
luke castro
forever
Jamie said it before I did. “Weird. Remember that Luke Castro kid from school? What a douche.”
I knew who he meant—some guy who’d graduated a year or two ago. He played on some sports team, or hung around with the guys who did. I didn’t really remember.
“Maybe it’s the same Luke Castro,” I said, and even as the words came out of my mouth I knew
it had to be the same Luke—this carving of his name together forever with Abby’s told me so.
I don’t think Jamie noticed how I lingered at this particular bed over all the others, how my finger reached out to trace the shape of the lopsided heart Abby had carved into the soft, splintery wood near where she rested her head each night. He had no idea I was trying to picture how she’d carved it, and with what. I was looking back into memories I didn’t own, wanting in.
I heard him down at the other end of the cabin, talking to himself—or, no, someone must have called his cell, because he was talking to someone on the phone. His back was to me and his voice was low, like he didn’t want me to know who it was.
It was then, with no one looking, that it began.
I stood up. I walked on legs that didn’t feel like mine toward the back of the cabin, where there was a line of empty cubbies and a dark bathroom. I kept going, toward the bathroom. I couldn’t hear Jamie on the phone anymore. My ears picked up on something else: a rhythmic slap-slap-slap coming from floor level. Startled, I stopped. The slapping sound stopped. I started walking again, and the sound picked up as before.
It was coming from my own feet, the noise of my own footsteps traveling the floor into the tiled room that held the showers. I could almost imagine that I didn’t have on my combat boots and was wearing summer flip-flops instead. Flip-flops like the one Abby had on in my van.
As I stood in the shower room I realized I wasn’t cold anymore. It was so far from cold, it was stifling, and I needed to undo the buttons on my wool coat to let my neck breathe. I opened my coat all the way. I shrugged off my thick scarf and let it drop.
There was a single window in the shower room, so small only an arm could fit through, but I went to it and shoved it open for some air. It revealed a view of the woods behind the cabin, but not the snow-covered tree branches I expected, not the heavy-loaded pines and the blanket of white gleaming in the winter darkness. What I saw was green.