The Ghost of Danny McGee, page 26
“Cool!” Hugo gushes over the firefighters.
Logan finds them creepy. She doesn’t like the way they laugh and tease each other and try to talk to all the kids. She thinks if they are here to fight off a fire that might kill them all, they should be more serious about it.
The night after their encounter with the ghost of Danny McGee, Logan hardly sleeps. She tosses and rolls in her sleeping bag, listening to the branches and crickets outside the window. Listening for footsteps. She wants to tell Milly about what happened to them, but she can’t seem to find the words. Thoughts rush and tumble in her head, worry over worry, and when she finally falls asleep her dreams are bright and vivid. The next morning, she is so tired she feels like she is still dreaming. The smoky darkness doesn’t help.
At breakfast, Mr. Campbell approaches their table and quietly pulls Sadie aside. Logan strains toward their whispers but can’t hear anything. Sadie nods. Then he clears his throat and waves toward her and Milly, asking them to come with him.
They follow him out of the mess hall and wait outside while he dashes back in. He returns, to Logan’s surprise, with Hugo and Max in tow. “You guys,” Mr. Campbell says to the four of them—excitedly, even though he looks so tired and droopy—“are a special group. You’re going to be helping me and some of the counselors out with a really special project.”
“Why us?” Hugo asks immediately.
“Well, aren’t you all friends?”
They look at each other. Logan pushes up her glasses. Max sniffs and swipes at his hair. Milly shrugs.
“Don’t you want to know what the project is?”
Logan glances at Hugo, who stands with his chest pushed out, squinting with suspicion into grown-up eyes. Slowly, she nods. “Okay.”
The project, it turns out, is not very special at all. After a few more quick bites of breakfast, Katie comes by to swoop Logan and Milly from their table and bring them back to the dorm, where they pack an overnight bag. She leads them to a little cabin up the hill, next to the infirmary. Logan had never noticed it before. Inside, the place is cobwebby and smells like mildew. There is a living room with a few old chairs and a couch that pulls out into a bed, a bedroom with another pullout couch, and a few shelves stacked with old photos and nonsense. Their project is to paint a mural on the back wall of the cabin—for visitors to see, supposedly. Logan can’t help but wonder what kind of visitors they’re talking about. The firemen are the first strangers to show up at Camp all summer.
Dane arrives with the boys, their packed bags slung over their shoulders.
“Why are we staying the night?”
“For fun,” says Katie curtly. They stand outside the cabin, ankle-deep in spiny brush, staring at the peeling wood-paneled wall. She hands Logan a bristly paintbrush. “We’re having a camp-in. It’s going to be fun.”
It is fun. First, they coat the wall in a chunky layer of white. Then Katie sets them loose with their imaginations and all the colors they want. For an hour or two, Logan actually forgets about the smoke and the fire and the ghost. They laugh and wipe paint on each other’s clothes. Counselors come and go. Nick brings them lunch, and they eat it on the cabin porch, peeling the dried paint patches off their arms and legs. A breeze picks up and the smoke is suddenly thinning; a bright beam of sunshine reaches Logan’s face and warms her skin. She closes her eyes and turns her chin up to it, drinking it in. In that sunbeam, she feels a flash of what summer was until now. What it should be.
They stay at the little cabin all day, through dinner. During campfire time, Elias shows up with his guitar. He plays, and they beat on benches and boxes and sing along.
The more we get together, together, together,
the more we get together,
the happier we’ll be.
With each verse, they get louder. Singing turns into shouting. Like at the lookout above Pike Falls, they stand and jump and beat against their chests.
‘Cause YOUR friends are MY friends,
and MY FRIENDS ARE YOUR FRIENDS . . .
Logan stomps against the floor, feeling the beams creak beneath her, hoping they might break open and let her through. She shrieks into Milly’s face, and Milly shrieks back:
THE MORE WE GET TOGETHER,
THE HAPPIER WE’LL BE!
They grip each other’s arms and swing each other around, flinging their bodies onto the open futon and cushions scattered across the cabin floor. They howl like wolves. They laugh until Logan thinks she might puke.
“Rage!” cries Elias over his guitar. “Rage, children!” From the doorway, Katie shakes her head at them.
At night, they lie in their sleeping bags on the dusty floor. They fought over who should get the futon, boys or girls, so the counselors folded it away and laid out camping pads for them all instead. They flip and rustle and whisper in the dark. Katie and Dane are outside on the porch. Logan can hear their voices through the walls. Datie and Kane, Elias called them once, that night in the barn loft.
“We saw him, yesterday,” Hugo whispers as quietly as he can. “He lives in a cabin in the woods. He’s not a kid, like he was when he died. He’s an old man.”
“How do you know it was him?” Milly asks. Max is silent, thoughtful.
“You would’ve been sure, if you’d been there. It wasn’t human.” Hugo’s hand reaches up in the dark, twisting at the wrist, grasping toward the ceiling. He looks a little like a ghost himself.
They don’t say much else about it. Max and Milly might not believe their story, but they have to be thinking about something, silent and awake as they are. No one says it out loud, but Logan knows they all feel strange. It can’t be a coincidence that Camp has locked them all away together. No one else has been given a special project, no one else has had a camp-in. She stews over the possibilities. Maybe they’re being punished for releasing Spark. Or for the beer during the midsummer dance. Or the fight after the soccer game. Maybe they are here to prevent them from telling other kids the truth about Danny McGee—or maybe to protect them from Danny himself, who knows now that they’re on to him.
Sometime in the middle of the night, she wakes up and rolls over to find Max lying close next to her on the floor. He is wide awake, his eyes two wet glimmers. The memory of Pike Falls rushes over her, the smell of crushed leaves and river water, the chirping crickets and bitter, cold night air. She breathes his name, but he doesn’t answer.
The next day dawns and nothing has changed. Curtains of smoke, glaring sun. They have breakfast in the cabin. In morning period, Sam arrives, and she brings Poppy with her. They paint the wall. Poppy proudly shows them her brand-new tooth. She cries when her picture doesn’t come out the way she wanted, and Hugo helps her fix it. The way he wraps his arm around her shoulders to comfort her reminds Logan of the afternoon they met, all those weeks ago.
Dane and Nick drive them out to Lobster Point and let them splash in the warm water. It feels good; they push and dunk each other and end up swimming. Logan floats, pretending she’s a crocodile. With only her eyes and nose above the surface, she looks flat across the lake like a murky pane of glass. From this angle, the dam isn’t so scary. She can’t see the water rushing over it or the steep drop on the other side. It’s just a concrete barrier, a soft gray line between here and there.
They finish the mural after dinner. The cabin wall is coated in pictures, splashes of color and handprints and looping signatures. It doesn’t look particularly good, all in all. Maybe that’s why they painted it in a place no one will ever see.
Time passes slowly, and they get bored. They read from chapter books and listen to Dane’s stories as the sun goes down. Logan wonders what the other Ravens are up to. She wonders where Poppy is, if she is safe. She listens for ghostly footsteps. The counselors leave them with the lights still on to sit outside on the porch.
“Tell me again,” Max says after a long silence. He lies stretched out on the futon. The book he has been reading rests facedown on his chest, open to his page. The way he props one arm behind his head makes him look almost like a grown-up. “About the ghost.”
Logan tells him. She might be exaggerating what they saw and heard in the woods, but she desperately wants him to believe her. When she is finished, Max nods and picks up his book again. Milly speaks up next. “Guys. Why are we here?”
They look at each other and chew on their lips. No one has an answer.
•••
“Logan. Logan.”
Logan’s eyes snap open. It takes her a moment to find herself—she is lying on the floor, on a camping pad, in the dusty cabin. “Hmm?” She sits up, her sleeping bag crinkling.
Max holds a finger to his lips. He crouches by her pillow, wearing his hoodie. Next to him, Hugo leans over Milly.
“What’s going on?”
The boys shush them and motion for them to stand. They tiptoe out the back door of the cabin, into the smell of burnt air and fresh paint. It’s lighter here, moonlight streaming weakly through the smoke. Logan blinks and adjusts her glasses to get a look at them. Not so long ago they were beating the life out of each other; now the two boys grin excitedly back and forth. “Look,” they whisper. “Look what we got.”
Four long air rifles are leaning against the new mural, black smudges in the artwork. Logan stares at them for a long, sleepy moment before she figures out what they are. “We bent the locker door open. With a big stick,” Max says proudly.
“What the shit?” Milly gasps. “What do you guys think you’re doing?”
Hugo beams at her. “We’re going after him. All four of us. We’re going to set a trap.”
They talk about it for some time in quiet voices. Katie and Dane are sleeping in the back bedroom of the cabin. If they heard the things the four of them are talking about, Logan thinks, they would have them sent home the very next day. Milly looks at Logan with a face so serious it’s almost sad. “You really, really saw him?” she asks her with those serious eyes. “You know he’s real?”
Logan nods. “He’s real. I know it.” A shudder runs down her spine as she says it. For once, she is in charge, and Milly is the one doubting the adventure. Milly is the one who will have to jog to catch up.
They never really had a choice. The four of them, the dam, the ghost—it’s the only way, the last thing they need to do before the summer ends. Logan feels like she is walking the tightrope again. She has to keep pushing forward. She can’t stop. She can’t look down, or she’ll fall.
Back inside, they tie their sneakers and flip their hoods over their heads. They shut the back door carefully behind them. The air rifle is cool and solid in Logan’s grip. Like masked robbers, they sneak along the trails, backs hunched, guns cradled to their chests. Someone laughs in the distance. The counselors are all out of their cabins, doing whatever it is they do at night. Logan leads the way up the Hummingbirds’ porch steps. She knows Poppy’s bunk is the closest to the door; she saw it while she talked to Sam. She pushes the door silently open. While the other three stand guard on the porch, she crawls inside and crouches at the foot of the bed.
“Poppy,” she whispers. The blond head rolls over. She blinks up at her, sleepy and confused. Logan holds a finger to her lips and smiles behind it. “Hey. You want to go on an adventure?”
Sam
Sam. You there?
Sam lifts her head. She is lying on the Nest floor between Rosie and Elias. They’ve been lying like that for close to an hour, drifting, not talking. Quiet conversation trickles around them. The beer in her hand is half empty and warm.
She reaches for her radio. “I’m here.”
You need to tell everyone to go to bed.
The conversation dies. Everyone in the Nest pauses to look at her. Bottles lower slowly from lips.
“Why?”
Tell everyone to go to bed, then meet us at the guest cabin, please. Katie’s voice crackles into the silence. And bring Elias.
Elias sits up at the sound of his name, his eyes puffy and sleepy. He is wearing his old contraband T-shirt—Sam gave it back to him a few days ago. It was a weak gesture of apology. The crinkled word GOD glints white over his sweatshirt zipper. He frowns, and Sam shrugs back.
“Well,” she says out loud to the group. “Go to bed, I guess.”
The three of them wait until the Nest has cleared, then they finish their drinks and climb down the ladder, shutting off the barn lights behind them. For the first time in days there is a visible moon in the sky. In its dim light they hurry across Camp, listening to the ruffled mutters of the other counselors branching off toward their cabins ahead of them. Katie and Dane step down from the guest cabin porch to meet them on the trail. Their faces are glazed with exhaustion. Katie’s lip trembles as she tells them.
“What do you mean, gone?” Sam rubs her eyes, for a moment entirely convinced she is dreaming—half drunk, asleep on the Nest floor. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know, but . . .”
“But what?” Her heart sinks. She knows, just by the guilt and pity in their looks, whose name is to follow.
“We checked all the cabins. Poppy’s not in her bed.”
“What? Why would they take Poppy with them?”
“We thought you guys might have an idea.” Dane nods between Sam and Elias. “Anything weird Hugo said, El?”
Elias shrugs. “Not to me. How long have they been gone?”
“I don’t know. We thought they were asleep, and we left for, like, a minute.”
Sam squeezes her head between her palms, trying to make sense of it. Four preteens and Poppy, vanished into the smoke. The murderer among them. Is she dead? he asked, frantic and scrambling, a scared little boy. It reads like a riddle she is too tired to solve. “What do we do?”
It’s Rosie who acts first. She steps up on the trail, and Sam understands with a sinking weight in her stomach how utterly misplaced her own promotion was. It should have been someone else, if things were really fair—it should have been Rosie. “Let’s start looking. I’ll go check Hummingbirds again. Someone go down to the lake. If we don’t find them in an hour, one of you should call Campbell.” At Dane’s look, she shrugs. “The longer you wait, the madder he’s going to be.”
They split up. Dane rallies the other assistant directors, and they search through Camp as discretely as they can. Elias checks his cabin; Sam checks the Ravens’. They look through the boathouse, the crafts shack, the game room. Flashlight beams shimmer through the branches, hoarse whispers calling, haunting the dark spaces between them. A fruitless hour goes by. Just after midnight, Gabe finds something that sends them all over the edge of panic: in the shed at the air rifle range, the storage locker has been broken into, the metal door bent backwards on itself, lock still intact. At that, they decide to call Campbell.
“Not like they’re going to hurt anyone with BB guns,” Elias mutters.
“It’s not that, dipshit. It’s the fact that whatever they’re up to, they thought they needed to take guns with them.”
“Maybe they’re just running,” Sam suggests. “They know. Maybe they’re just trying to run away.”
“What about Poppy?”
Sam shakes her head. Her lips twist and pinch, exhaustion tugging at her eyes. “They know about her, too.”
Campbell’s voice over their radio channel is as furiously alarmed as anyone could have expected. Dane chokes back giggles; Katie smacks him. With the call over, there is nothing left to do but wait. Sam excuses herself from the huddle and wanders, alone, to the office. She is thinking about coffee, and maybe a quiet minute alone.
The lights are on, she sees from the trail. Sam steps inside to find Nick sitting at his desk—she thought he was still out looking with everyone else. His hands are folded over the desktop, his head resting on them, like he is sleeping. His hair is shaggy and overgrown from the summer. At the rattle of the screen door, he sits upright, startled. His eyes are rimmed in red. Sam pauses in the doorway. The fluorescent overhead light is jarring in the surreal hour.
“How ’bout it, freckles?” A sad smile twitches over Nick’s face. He wipes his nose with the back of his wrist. Unfathomably, he is crying.
“Hey.” Sam crosses the room toward him. Reality wavers just slightly as she moves, as it has so often lately. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” He swivels in his seat and reaches for her. Sam lets him. His arms wrap around her waist, pulling her into him, resting his head on the soft part of her stomach.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She runs a hand over his hair.
Nick blinks up at her. “Why?”
She doesn’t know why.
“Listen.” He lifts his head from her belly and brings his hands around to her hips. “You know that scar on my back? The one you asked me about a while ago?”
Sam nods. Whatever has him in this state clearly has nothing to do with the runaway campers. It’s something else, something personal—one beam has slipped and the whole house is tumbling.
“The thing is, I have no idea where I got it. I’ve been thinking about it. I know something happened, and it was when I was a kid, I think, but I just can’t remember.” Nick shakes his head wildly. His grip on her tightens. “I know that next week, when all of this is over and I get home, I’ll remember again, but I can’t right now.” He gulps. “It’s like that every summer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every summer,” he goes on, tugging her closer to him, his knees on either side of hers, squeezing her. “I forget little pieces of who I am. It’s like, I’m someone out there, and I’m someone else in here—and those people aren’t even the same. And I always wonder if that’s how the kids feel, too. I’ve been sitting here thinking about it, and I can’t see why not. I don’t see any reason to think we won’t wake up next Saturday and our lives will be almost over.”
