The Ghost of Danny McGee, page 23
“I’m Hugo goddamn Baker.” Hugo laughs, his cheeks flushed red. “Who are you, fatass?”
Logan stands frozen in place, wishing she had left the scene when she had the chance. Max looks like he might hit him. “You think you’re so cool. Everyone thinks you’re so cool.” He is on his toes, as straight as Logan has ever seen him stand, to meet Hugo’s eyes. “But you’re not that cool in the middle of the night, are you?”
Hugo grunts. His smile melts. “Shut up.”
“We can all hear you in our cabin. Every night. I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me!” Max’s voice goes high and whining. “What are you dreaming about, Hugo? What didn’t you do?” Somehow, now, he is looking down at Hugo, lumbering over him.
“Shut up!”
“Because, if you ask me, it kind of sounds like you did it!”
“I said shut up!” Hugo lunges forward and shoves Max in the shoulders. Not too hard, but hard enough to knock him off his tiptoes.
Max catches his balance. There is a flash of embarrassment in his face, and his eyes narrow. “Fuck you.”
It happens too fast for Logan to see. In the blink of an eye, they are on the grass, grunting and spitting and hitting. She shouts and leaps back. “Hey!” she cries out loud—either to get the boys’ attention or the attention of someone, anyone around, to come and stop them. The counselors are far away, filling their water bottles.
The boys roll and Max sits straddled over Hugo, pinning him down. He reaches back with his good arm and hits him hard in the face.
“Max!”
He hits him again. Logan sees blood, a flash of red over tumbling white and tan and green. She dives forward and tries to catch Max by the arm, but Hugo’s kicking feet launch her backward. From her back she sees a short bob of hair sprinting toward the tussle. Milly must have been watching the whole time—she comes dashing in to help Hugo.
“Knock it off, Maxie, get off him! Get—ow!” Milly takes a flying elbow to the eye. “What the shit?”
“Milly?” Max sits upright, and Hugo takes the opportunity to slug him hard in the stomach. It’s only then that a counselor arrives.
All four of them are marched to the office. They sit on the porch in the hazy sunshine, silent aside from the occasional whimper and groan. Hugo has bloody tissues stuffed in each nostril, and Milly’s left eye socket is swollen and glassy. Max still looks woozy after vomiting on the lawn. Logan is just miserable. They listen to the happy, clattering sounds of lunchtime from the mess hall down the hill. Behind the closed office door, Mr. Campbell and a few older counselors are deciding what should be done with them. They were hastily questioned by Dane, then handed ice packs and told to wait. This is unfair, Logan thinks. At least she and Milly should be allowed to leave.
Footsteps crunching over the trail toward them make Logan turn. It’s Taps—coming for Max, she assumes—but he only shoots them a little smile and steps inside, closing the door behind himself. A minute ticks by, then another. It’s so hot, Logan thinks she might faint. The voices in the office pick up. Someone is shouting. They all lean curiously closer to the door.
“Do you think they forgot about us?” Hugo whispers, straining through his plugged nose.
Logan chews on her lip. “I hope not.” She cannot distinguish the words from inside, but something tells her the shouting has nothing to do with them. She catches a name she hasn’t heard in weeks: Phoebe.
The door flies open and Taps steps out. Behind him, Logan sees angry adult faces. He stomps across the porch and down the steps. Then he stops, turns on his heel and comes back. He crouches in front of the bench where Max is sitting. There is something sad in his face, something nervous—a look a grown-up should never wear.
“Who hit first?” he asks Max softly.
“He did,” says Max. Hugo doesn’t argue.
Taps smiles. He reaches out to grip his shoulder. “Listen, buddy. I have to go. Something . . . came up. I have to go home. They’re gonna move one of the other counselors in with our cabin, okay? Can you tell the other guys for me?”
Max nods.
“Thanks, dude. I’m gonna miss you. Really.” As Taps walks down the porch steps again, Nick appears in the office door. He has his hands on his hips, frowning. He looks at Taps, and again, it isn’t a grown-up look at all. They look at each other like something horrible has happened. The world has flipped upside down. Taps stands on the trail. He shakes his head. “I’m done,” he says. “I’m done with this.” He stomps back toward them, up the steps, back to Max. Nick watches them with a hand stretched halfway out, as if Taps might pick his camper up and run away with him, like in their campfire skit.
“Taps?”
“Max, buddy, listen to me.” His voice is quick and hard. “I have to tell you something. None of this is real. You know that, right?”
“Taps . . .” Nick’s eyes go wide.
“Listen. You know where you are. You know who you are, Max.” Taps has a hand on the back of Max’s head, bowing their foreheads together. “You’re an adult, you’re forty-five years old. This is your wife.” He swings his head along the bench, from Logan to Hugo. “This guy is a murderer. You’re adults, you’re all—”
“Christian!” Nick seizes Taps by the shoulder and drags him back, away from the bench.
Now Taps is shouting. Logan looks on. Everything is shimmering in the smoky heat. They are trapped inside a snow globe, shaken up in ash and glitter.
“You’re adults! This isn’t real, it’s a dream! It’s a fancy dream, Max! You’re asleep, you’re over there, across the lake!”
As Nick struggles to get his arms around Taps, Dane comes bursting through the door. They shove him up against the side of the building, shushing him, trying to cover his mouth. Taps keeps shouting around their hands. The words make no sense. His voice is clear and high, streaming over them.
“None of this is real! You’re in a fake body, all of you! In a couple of weeks, they’re going to kill you to wake you up! They’re gonna kill you, Max! And Poppy, Poppy Warbler—”
Hands close over Logan’s ears. Someone is lifting her, dragging her off the bench and across the porch; she is tossed to the carpet behind the office door. The rest of them follow. Mr. Campbell slams the door behind him. The air conditioner roars inside. Logan sits up and sees Max staring back at her, and Hugo, his eyes huge, his face bloody.
Outside, the shouting is muffled. She can still hear it. None of this is real.
“Don’t listen to any of that, kids. Don’t listen. He’s sick.”
It isn’t the air conditioner. It’s something inside her head. Louder, louder it whirs and hums. Max reaches toward her on the carpet. He is saying her name. She falls back against Milly’s side.
Max. Max has a beard and gray-flecked hair. Max sits at his drawing desk in the window. Max holds the baby to his chest in the dewy morning. Max kicks the kitchen table and slams a plate, and he cries, but he never shouts.
None of this is real.
She can see Max, and she can see herself. She is looking down at her from above. She is naked, lying in a hospital bed. Logan grips her head between her hands. “No,” she says out loud. The tears are cool on her hot cheeks—she didn’t know she was crying.
Mr. Campbell picks her up and lifts her in his arms. She falls against his shoulder. “Easy,” he says. “Easy. You’re all right.” He rocks her like a baby. The lights in the ceiling are screaming at her; her head is shattering. Logan sobs, but she doesn’t know why.
When Nurse May arrives, she hands her a glass of cold water and a little blue pill. “Take this,” she says. Logan shoves the medicine into her mouth and swallows, and everything melts away.
week nine
Logan
They have to stay the night in the infirmary. It isn’t really fair—Logan and Milly weren’t even involved in the fight. As far as she can remember. The heat has them all woozy and tired, and they’re quiet as they eat their dinner together at a folding table on the infirmary porch. While the rest of the world is at campfire, Nurse May reads to them from a wordy chapter book.
There are three bedrooms in the infirmary. Logan and Milly are assigned to the one with a bunk bed—Logan on top and Milly on the bottom, like back at the cabin. Max and Hugo each have their own room. Logan took a long nap in the afternoon, and now, as strange and sleepy as she feels, she is sure she won’t be able to fall asleep. She rolls and wiggles on the creaky top bunk.
“I’m sorry you have to be here,” she says out loud, not sure if Milly is awake to hear it or not.
After a pause, Milly says, “It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault. Anyway, my eye looks kind of cool.”
Logan laughs. “Yeah, it does.”
“What were they fighting about, anyway?”
“Me, I guess.”
From the bottom bunk, Milly sniffs. Logan can hear the starchy rustle of her infirmary sheets. “Logan?”
“Yeah?”
“My name’s not really Millipede. It’s Camilla.”
Logan smiles. “I’ll still call you Millipede, if you want.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
There is more to say, but Logan doesn’t know how to say it.
Eventually, steady breaths below tell her that Milly is asleep. She waits, thinking, wondering if sleep will find her. She can’t get comfortable. Earlier she took a little blue pill to calm her nerves, and it has taken the tracks right out from under her train of thought. She is scattered, dizzy, and a little afraid. After some time, she sits up, puts on her glasses, and climbs as quietly as she can down the side of the bunk bed. The nights have been so warm lately. In just her cotton shorts and tank top, she tiptoes barefoot for the bedroom door.
She steps out into an outdoor corridor. In front of her is the bathroom, and beyond it the infirmary itself, where Nurse May is sleeping—soundly, Logan hopes. On either side of her are the other bedrooms, all in a line under a single sloping roof. Logan hesitates. She looks up at the crescent moon. It casts a sharp glare of silver across one of her lenses; she stands still for a moment, turning her head this way and that, watching the beam dance. Then she steps toward the door on her left.
After three soft taps, she hears a mattress creak. Padding footsteps. The curtain in the window is decorated with cartoon squirrels. As Logan watches, the squirrels are shoved aside and a pale face peers out at her. Hi, he mouths. Logan smiles back.
Hugo opens the door, just a crack. His pajama pants are printed with dancing bears in a checkered pattern. “Hey. What are you doing?” In the soft light, Logan can see how his nose has swollen. Little purple lines like war paint bloom beneath both of his eyes.
“I can’t sleep,” she admits.
He opens the door wider and lets her into the room. They tiptoe together back to the bed—the same bed Logan slept in before, the night she had her period. Hugo climbs in first and holds the blanket open for her to lie down next to him. They face each other, on their sides, hands stuffed beneath the pillows. Logan rests her folded glasses on the bedsheet. They whisper.
“Are you okay?”
He nods. “Mm-hmm. It doesn’t hurt too bad.” Logan knows he is acting tough. She saw him whimpering on the office porch, the bloody tissues crammed into his ballooning nostrils.
“I’m sorry. About all this.”
“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”
“I don’t know.”
Hugo Baker smiles at her and wiggles down into the mattress. His hand on the pillow stretches out and stops just short of touching her. His hair has grown long over the summer. It sticks out at funny angles from his bruised face. “I meant what I said, you know,” he whispers.
What he said on the campfire stage, he means. The same thing he said in the boathouse. It sounded silly, at first, but now Logan thinks she understands: he didn’t mean it the way adults do. Adult love is complicated. It has rules attached, like work. Love, she thinks, is supposed to be pure and whole and accidental, and lying here in the darkness, with their heads together and their knees touching and the bears dancing on his pajama pants, she can’t imagine anything more clear and true than this very moment, being twelve.
Her memories of the afternoon are sticky. Taps was angry. He said things to them that they weren’t supposed to hear. Things about Max. Things about her, and about Hugo. She could recall his exact words now, if she wanted to. She doesn’t want to. They flicker in her head, on the brink of disappearing into foggy oblivion. Logan deliberately pushes them over. There is no time to worry about sticky things, things that make her stomach hurt and her skin crawl with flies. More pressing issues are at hand.
“Listen,” she says to Hugo. “I think we’re all in danger.” She watches the whites of his shifting eyes as she tells him the theory she and Max cooked up: that Danny McGee is a murderer. A killer ghost.
“Makes sense. Yeah. That’s why they’re all so scared to talk about him. I bet he goes after someone every summer.”
“He’s trying to kill Poppy, I think.”
“When she fainted?”
“Exactly. He almost got her.”
It all makes sense. She remembers one thing Taps said, the last thing that got through to her ears before Mr. Campbell’s hands closed over them. Poppy, he said. Poppy Warbler. Something about the story, as it is, still doesn’t fit quite right. There is a missing piece. It clicks into place, and she gasps.
“You know, in the story, he’s trying to get revenge on his bullies. But . . . what if it’s different than that? What if they weren’t bullies, the kids that trapped him on the dam?”
“You mean, they were the good guys?”
“Maybe Danny was the bully. Or worse. Maybe he wanted to kill kids back then.”
“And even after they got rid of him, he’s still trying to do it.”
“It’s not about revenge. He’s just a murderer.”
“Murderer,” Hugo repeats. “Yeah. That’s a better story.”
They gasp and giggle together. Happiness pours over Logan. The facts are shuffling themselves into order in her head. “I don’t think it’s a story. He’s real. I know he is. I’ve seen him. He’s real, and he’s after Poppy.”
The ghost is real, and the ghost is the murderer, and the counselors know. They have been hiding it from them all summer. Because every summer, he wants to kill someone, and this summer, he wants Poppy. That’s why they were so scared when she fainted, why Sam sprinted so fearfully when she fell in Capture the Flag. It all makes perfect sense. Logan speaks these thoughts out loud to Hugo, letting them flow through her, bolstered by the cover of darkness. She believes every word that passes her lips. She isn’t telling a story, just channeling the simple truth.
Hugo takes it all in. “Well, if he’s real, and he’s going after a Hummingbird, we should do something about it. Shouldn’t we?”
Logan nods. They are playing make-believe. Just being kids. It doesn’t matter—the game feels too good not to lose herself completely in it. “We should find him.”
“And trap him.”
“And kill him.” She lets her head drift on the pillow, her eyes falling slowly shut. She is so tired. “Kill him,” she says again, “for real.”
Sam
“Campbell wants me to show you how this works.”
Nick sits on the edge of his bed. Sam faces him, cross-legged on the other bunk—the mattress is bare, now, and the shelves beside it are empty. Dane has moved into the Hawks’ cabin. Nick brandishes the black metal tube on the end of his lanyard. He shrugs the looped cord off his neck and passes it to her. She takes it hesitantly.
“Don’t worry. You’d have to be really stupid to hurt yourself with it.”
Sam nods. At the moment, she does feel stupid. She is halfway dressed, straps sliding from her shoulders, strands of hair stuck to the sweat on her brow. Whatever she came here to say to him, to confront him about, fell dead behind her lips when he kissed her. It’s so much easier to look the other way. Now he sits here in his bare chest with his jeans still undone and looks at her with a blank, adoring smile. He looks at her like she is something pretty.
Sam clasps the little black cylinder. It’s cold in her fingertips.
“Press that button on the side,” he tells her. “There—you kind of have to dig your fingernail in.” She does, and a slim band of metal peels away from the tube on either side. A notched wheel circles it, near the top. “Now—carefully—turn that gear. Four clicks to the left . . . now three to the right . . . and four to the left again. Good.”
The top of the tube springs open in three parts, like flower petals. Inside is a tiny silver nub. The needle is tucked in its casing, its point hardly protruding enough to pierce skin.
“There. Now, don’t touch it, okay?” Nick reaches out to take the tube—the needle—back from her. He holds it gingerly at half an arm’s length from his face. “It’s spring-loaded,” he explains. “You just hold it up to the skin and press it down, and it’ll inject.” He gives the flower-petal top a nudge and the cylinder folds itself back together. The carefulness fades from him as it does. He gestures over his body with it. “Upper thigh, inside wrist, or side of the neck.” Nick lifts his chin and prods the lethal little tube against his throat. “It shouldn’t take more than a minute. That’s it.”
Sam nods. “Four to the left, three to the right, four to the left,” she murmurs, committing it to memory.
“Good.” He smiles at her as he hangs the lanyard over his head again. “There’s only two in Camp. I carry this one, and Gus keeps the other one downstairs. You’ll never have to use it, you know. You should just know how, now that you’re an AD. Just in case.”
“I won’t use it on Poppy.”
