The Summer We Forgot, page 6
A hand paler than bone sunk into black water.
I barricade the mental image by drawing lukewarm air through my nostrils and releasing it as a huff. Whatever caused my episode at the party must’ve resulted from Tatum, not Spooner.
We’re terrible people.
Spooner was drunk. He didn’t mean what he said.
My vision hazes. I touch the spot above my forehead, a drugged sensation clawing through me. Bone white in black marsh. Water denser than tar and smelling of rust in June heat.
A memory drifts from somewhere deep. I tauten as it binds me like tentacles, the boutique darkening into a room tucked within my subconscious. I lie coughing on hardwood floor, my intuition swearing I’ve experienced this before, aromas of mothballs and pine.
Terror that chills me from the inside out.
I’m not alone. A girl splays on the mildewed planks. She wears a camp T-shirt dotted with red stains, her blonde hair in a ponytail. Without a word, she lifts her face.
Hornets swarm inside my stomach. I blink and gasp and stumble back a step. Get me out. I can’t look at her. She’s the fake. Or maybe she’s me. One of us did bad things.
With the yank of a cord, a lightbulb clicks on. I no longer sit on the floor but in a metal chair. And somewhere in the room a voice deep and grating calls out to me.
Do you want to forget?
The response is static.
Eliza grasps my wrist. “Darby?” She comes into focus, the boutique a backdrop of whirling fans and beachy music. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m tired, that’s all.” I force a smile, my cell phone nagging at my hip. I am good. My friend group did good things. We spent a summer as camp counselors and played pinball.
We didn’t stand on a dock or wear bloody T-shirts or ask to forget.
But I did forget something. I sense the absence like a missing sock. I won’t find the memory behind my dresser, stuck in a dryer. What happened two years ago, what I did or what was done to me, remains an unlit bulb in my head’s dark room.
Forgotten, no different from abandoned Barbie dolls buried under weeds. Once, I found a toddler’s shoe in the Publix parking lot, and I thought about it for weeks. Not sure why. Maybe everyone wants to believe children are spared from loss.
I got a similar feeling when I gazed into Spooner’s eyes. He didn’t seem innocent or sacred, just forgotten. And I have the feeling about myself, that I’m buried in the kudzu and honeysuckle of getting older, that my memories have been discarded like childhood toys.
“Next time a part-timer shoplifts, I will freaking explode,” Eliza says with a huff. She watches the middle schoolers with her arms crossed, perhaps to intimidate them.
Adults tell us not to grow up too fast. They say we’ll miss these years and our freedom. But none of the high schoolers I know consider themselves free. We all rush forward to find independence, and that’s healthy. Wanting to grow up is a good thing. It means we believe the future is a place worth going.
On the flipside, can kids grow up without really growing up? Can we experience a bad thing and think the pain, or the grit that comes from it, is maturity?
Eliza’s younger brothers charge into the store holding waffle cones piled high with ice cream. She points at them. “Boys, out. No food allowed in here. Raiden, I mean it!”
“You need to chill, Midori.” The eleven-year-old waves his Cookie Monster ice cream at her, grinning from ear to ear. He uses his sister’s first name to irritate her. A dangerous game.
Referring to Eliza as Midori is like dropping Mentos into a liter of coke.
“Out. Now.” Eliza takes one step toward them, and they sprint out the door. She groans. “Why couldn’t I have been adopted by Daddy Warbucks?”
Rolf and Lulu married after college, he from Germany, she a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Japan. They couldn’t have kids of their own, so they decided to adopt. Eliza became a Becker on her sixth birthday. Raiden, Matz, and Peter followed over the years. They created a blended family, each of them with a different heritage. An anomaly on 30A.
My cell phone vibrates again.
I abandon the window display and follow Eliza to where her mother sorts jewelry. Lulu puts us to work packaging friendship bracelets in organza bags. We made similar bracelets at Camp Choctawhatchee. Morgan fastened a navy and white chevron next to the one I made for him. Yes, I remember tying string to my Hydro Flask and weaving patterns.
There are bracelets in my head’s dark room next to blood dripping and a hand sinking. I went to Camp Choctawhatchee two summers ago—that I know for sure—and something bad happened. What I remember tastes like sweet tea, raspberry sorbet, and Kraft Easy Mac heated in the camp kitchen. What I remember smells of bonfires and cheap waterlily shampoo.
My phone buzzes for the ninth time.
“Your pocket keeps having seizures,” Eliza says. Her brow creases. “Who’s texting you?”
“Cyrus.” I lift my phone into view and place it facedown on the jewelry counter. It vibrates against the wood, glowing with a rim of blue light.
“Are you mad at him?” Eliza tightens the drawstrings of a bag, then drops it into a glass bowl. She glances at my phone each time it hums.
“Of course not.” I continue to package bracelets. My heart pounds. It beats in my chest, toes, behind my eyes.
Grandma had dementia for the last five years of her life. She forgot everyone, and without her memories, she acted like somebody else. Maybe what we remember determines who we become. And everything we don’t call to mind . . .
Maybe truth lies with the buried Barbies.
I’m not sure I want to remember that summer. It’s a black room in an otherwise light house.
What damaged me so much I wanted to forget it?
Who was Darby Wallis before my mind erased her?
“Okay. The suspense is killing me.” Eliza flips my cell phone and stares down at its illuminated screen. I tell her to stop. I reach for the device, but she bats my hands and scrolls though Cyrus’s texts. Her smile vanishes.
Acid stings the back of my throat.
“Police found Dr. Horowitz in the marsh near Camp Choctawhatchee. Someone killed him two years ago.” Eliza looks up from my phone, her eyes wider than I’ve ever seen them.
My stomach drops. I clamp my lips to keep from puking.
He taught my science classes throughout middle school.
“Did you already know?” Eliza goes rigid when I shake my head. “Then why’d you bring up the camp? We haven’t talked about that summer in ages.”
He smelled like mouthwash and had a pet flounder, which he kept in a tank behind his desk.
His glasses fogged up whenever he went outside.
“Spooner,” I breathe. “He mentioned Camp Choctawhatchee last night.”
I should’ve connected the dots. Horowitz organized the marine retreat at Camp Choctawhatchee, a program for middle schoolers. He interviewed and hired students from Emerald Coast High to work as counselors, then spent two weeks training us for the job.
He vanished that summer.
My debate team hosted a vigil for him the first week of sophomore year.
“Lulu, do you recall that summer Eliza and I worked as counselors?” I ask Eliza’s mom as she bags the last bracelet. “Police found Dr. Horowitz’s body near the camp.”
“He was murdered,” Eliza adds.
“Oh?” Lulu pivots toward us, but her focus shifts to Mom. “Did they find anything else?” She fidgets with the organza bag, an uneasiness saturating her voice.
The topic of Horowitz’s disappearance plagued 30A for months. Someone leaked a rumor suggesting he’d been involved with criminal activity, which stopped the fuss over his whereabouts. Still, why did someone kill him and dump his body in the marsh?
I brace my weight against the jewelry counter, a lamp flipping on inside my head’s dark room. A single memory. I’m standing on the lakeshore of Camp Choctawhatchee. I wade through reeds, mud oozing between my toes. Dr. Horowitz calls my name from a dock. He tells me not to walk in the marsh, says I’ll get stuck and drown.
His death must’ve been the bad thing I forgot.
“What happened?” Mom joins our cluster. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear and taps my back, her way of telling me to correct my posture.
Lulu jumps in. “I felt weird about that camp. Eliza, you came home with a horrible bruise on your cheek.” Lulu swaps glances with Mom. “Police found Horowitz.”
Mom turns bone white.
“A bruise?” Eliza touches her cheek. She meets my gaze. She must think, as I do, the timing isn’t a coincidence. Spooner, my episode at Kip’s party, now a body—it all coalesces to form a picture, a truth buried deep within us. We saw what happened to Dr. Horowitz.
Then, someone or something made us forget.
“You told me Cyrus hit you with his fishing pole by accident,” Lulu says. “I would’ve called the cops if Dr. Horowitz hadn’t gone missing.”
“Why?” Eliza asks.
Lulu grabs a basket and props it on her hip. “The bruise was shaped like a hand.”
My body grows numb. I’m in this vacuum of space where I’m still and cold and nowhere in particular. Lulu keeps talking. I don’t understand though. She’s a face above water, peering down at me as I sink.
Spooner must remember what happened at Camp Choctawhatchee, or at least know more than Eliza and I do.
What if he’s been keeping the murder a secret all these years?
“Darby—” Mom watches me with tears glossing her green eyes. She tugs her blouse to straighten any wrinkles, then smooths the sides of her updo. “Better not think too much. Sometimes we must let the past stay in the past.”
I flinch, my heart racing out of control. “What do you know, Mom?”
Her controlled expression conceals secrets and bins and hidden pill bottles, lies about her therapy sessions and Christian’s behavior in Tallahassee. She brushes my cheek with her index finger. “You should do a mask once a week to perfect your complexion.”
Mom and Lulu head to the checkout counter.
Eliza interlocks our hands, trembling like Spooner did last night. “I have no memory of a bruise,” she whispers. “I barely recall Horowitz and the camp. What happened to us, Darby?”
“I’m not sure,” I tell her, “but we’ll find out.”
Someone did this to us.
And our moms seem aware of the damage.
“First day of training, Kip got food poisoning from a can of tuna and barfed all over my bunk. I remember that and the game room.” Eliza follows me to Paloma’s office. She lingers in the doorway, her almond complexion now ashen. “Where are you going?”
“To talk with Spooner.” I grab my purse from a bin and slide its strap over my shoulder.
“Should we call the police?”
“And tell them what? That we might’ve witnessed a murder two years ago?” I sigh. “Until we have real information, we need to keep quiet.”
Eliza nods. Her eyes glisten with tears and something else, maybe the realization we’re more screwed up than we thought. She returns my phone. “Be safe, okay?”
“If somebody wanted to hurt us, they would’ve done it by now.” I kiss her cheek and muster a smile. “Tell Mom I ran home to grab lunch. I’ll text you when I get to Spooner’s.”
My stomach in knots, I slip out the back door and hurry to a bicycle rack.
Crimes are uncommon on 30A, especially homicides. We have petty thefts and the occasional drunken mishap, but overall, people behave themselves. Nobody expects a man to turn up dead in such a beautiful place. No one steps onto their porch, looks out at the ocean, and thinks, A murder happened here. That’s what most disturbs me, knowing a body has been rotting down the street where I once kayaked and dipped my toes.
I unlock my beach cruiser from the rack and wheel it onto Quincy Circle. Vacationers swarm the road, searching for parking spots, weaving their golf carts and bicycles around traffic. Their eyes seem to watch me.
They must know what I did or didn’t do that bad summer.
My heart beats faster as I sling a leg over the crossbar and launch into motion. I pedal alongside 30A, past beach homes and palm trees. None of it seems honest, not the sun on my scalp or wind in my hair. Even the ocean might be a liar.
I swerve onto a sidewalk, my knuckles pale against the handlebars, my calves burning as I speed toward Seagrove and Spooner’s house, a cottage on stilts with a mermaid weathervane perched on its roof.
Once upon a time our friend group came here weekly for game night. We gathered on the porch, where Mrs. Hudson prepared a spread of Uno cards and potato chips. We played until Eliza grew tired of losing, then we piled into Spooner’s hammock to watch fireworks from the Comber.
Each night ended with Spooner yelling from the driveway, “Have a nice day!” He grinned and waved as we biked away. But he doesn’t stand in the driveway now.
A breath catches in my throat. Two police cars have taken his place.
I dismount my bike and drop it onto the front yard. I go toward Mrs. Hudson, who stands near a palmetto, talking with a pair of officers. She looks different from how I remember. Dark lines circle her eyes. Her runner’s body carries a few extra pounds. Granted, I haven’t seen her since the divorce put an end to game night.
Mrs. Hudson looks at me and gasps, her tired eyes widening. She abandons the officers and hurries across the lawn. “Darby, have you seen Spooner?”
She poured out love and hospitality like iced tea. Whenever I had a bad day, she baked snickerdoodles, wrapped me in blankets, and stroked my hair while I talked about my problems.
I guess when you lose the boy, you lose his mom too.
“No,” I say when she repeats the question. “Isn’t he here?”
Mrs. Hudson touches my arm. She fights back tears, her expression reflecting the nightmare of every mother. “Darby . . . he didn’t come home last night.”
Chapter 5
Morgan
JUNE 14
GRAYTON BEACH
Yellow tape slashes a line across the road. It crisscrosses trees, where Spanish moss hangs still. The streak of color means caution, stay out, jerk the wheel, and drive far away.
I shift my car into Park and sit frozen as the air conditioner blasts cold air against my hot face. The world outside is a link chart of yellow string in branches.
No one expects murder at a summer camp, like no one looks for sharks in a public pool.
Cyrus elbows me when I cut the engine. “Um, why’d we stop? You said we wouldn’t stop.” He sucks diet soda through a bendy straw until a gurgle vibrates the bottom of his Tom Thumb cup. “This is how people die in scary movies—”
“Horowitz got murdered years ago. Whoever killed him isn’t waiting around for us.” I prop my forearms on the steering wheel, Darby’s bracelet slipping to the widest point of my wrist. I tunnel fingers through my hair and take deep breaths to lessen my unease.
My stomach churning, I climb from my Jeep and move toward a faded sign built into the roadside. It rises on pillars, a wooden marker engraved with the words “Camp Choctawhatchee: Fostering Education and Exploration since 1973.”
A Methodist church owns the property. For years, they rented out the facilities when camp wasn’t in session, hosting everyone from Boy Scouts to youth groups.
Even Dad came here for discipleship weekends when he was a teenager.
“Hey, where are you going? Morgan, get back here.” Cyrus steps onto gravel and hurries toward me, his shoes adding prints to the mud.
Evidence of this morning’s discovery scars the road. Divots from police car tires. Footprints and Whataburger trash. If I study the signs long enough, I can almost see the crime-scene investigation reenact itself: forensic officers walking between vehicles, medics wheeling a gurney . . .
Lifting a body bag into their ambulance.
“What are we looking for?” A loon calls from somewhere in the brush, making Cyrus jump. He scans the pines and dense scrub, its collection of No Trespassing and For Sale signs. “We shouldn’t be here. If police catch us—”
“This won’t take long.” I duck under the tape barricade and walk toward camp, my cell phone buzzing in my swimsuit pocket. I should’ve put on flip-flops.
Mud oozes between my toes.
“Police searched this area. If they found evidence, they would’ve taken it.” Cyrus flanks me as we approach the camp. He glances over his shoulder every few steps and swats the air, perhaps to deter mosquitos. “We really shouldn’t be—”
“I didn’t bring us here to hunt for clues,” I say with a laugh.
“Why then?”
“Not sure. Maybe to help us remember.”
Cyrus leans down and pries a stick from the brush. “Nobody’s murdering me before dinner,” he says with a swing of the branch. “Nanna’s making duck fesenjan.”
“Dude, we won’t get murdered—”
A twig snaps. Cyrus and I spin toward the sound. We study the woods in silence, listening for breathing or footsteps, anything to prove we’re not alone.
Eventually, we resume our walk.
Camp Choctawhatchee, accessible only by an unmarked road that snakes off Highway 395, forms a cavity within Grayton Beach State Park. Whoever first bought the property must’ve struck a deal with Florida’s Department of Natural Resources. The fifty acres stretch across the park’s southern border, where coastal forest merges with lake marshland.
To get here, Cyrus and I drove a mile down a dirt path, almost broke an axel on a pothole. We didn’t spot a single hiker or bicyclist, not even a trailhead.
Buildings appear in the tangle of vegetation. Roofs blanketed with pine needles. Walls camouflaged by vines and weeds. The camp seems all but swallowed.
As if nature wanted to erase what happened.
“Do you remember this place?” Cyrus asks, his Adam’s apple jerking. He lowers his branch when the road widens into a lot paved with oyster shells.
My hair stands on end. I rub my forearms, but the sun-bleached strands won’t lie flat. I scan the landscape. Cabin windows boarded with plywood. Debris stuck to porch screens.
