“It looks really fun, Dad,” I said. “Besides, it’s a great excuse to spend some time outside and get to know some new people.”
He nodded. “I know you’ll have fun,” he said, and leaned in for a hug.
“Don’t forget to eat,” Hannah advised as I finished up Dad’s hug and went to hug her. “You’ll be running around a lot!”
I chuckled. “Well, I can guarantee the food won’t be as good as yours,” I promised. “I’ll miss you both. Write to me?”
Dad pulled out some folded paper and a preaddressed envelope from his shirt pocket. “Ready to go,” he promised. “Don’t worry, you won’t miss any of the big news from River Heights.”
“I love you both,” I said, opening the door and squeezing through with my bag.
“Love you, too. Have fun,” Dad said, leaning out to take the door from me and waving in Bess’s direction. “Don’t get in too much trouble.”
I grinned back at him. “When have I ever gotten in trouble?”
I hauled my bag out to Bess’s coupe and loaded it into the trunk, then climbed into the passenger seat. Bess was all smiley and pumped up, and couldn’t stop talking about all the fun we were going to have at Camp Cedarbark. She explained that at Camp Larksong, each week ended with a special campout on a hill by the lake, with a sunset sing-along and ghost stories around the campfire. She’d read on Camp Cedarbark’s website that they were planning to continue the tradition.
We swung by George’s house, where she was waiting in the driveway with her parents. After lots of hugs and kisses (George is an only child, and her parents love her), George climbed into the backseat and we were off.
“Aren’t you excited?” Bess asked, peering at her cousin in the rearview mirror when we were stopped at a traffic light. “Aren’t we going to have the best time ever?”
“Yeeeeeeah,” said George slowly. But she didn’t look like she thought we were going to have the best time ever. She looked a little . . . concerned.
“Is something up?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” she said. But she still wore a confused expression. “It’s just . . . I Googled ‘Camp Larksong’ and ‘Camp Cedarbark’ last night.”
The light changed, and Bess punched the gas with a little too much force. We lurched forward. “Don’t tell me you found some nasty review,” she said. “I’ve been looking at them every few weeks myself. Everyone says they’ve had an amazing time there.”
“It wasn’t a nasty review,” George said, shaking her head. “It was a newspaper article. The headline was ‘Tragedy Closes Camp Larksong.’ It was dated five years ago—the year you said the camp closed.”
Bess frowned. “That’s strange. I never heard about any tragedy. What did the article say?”
George hesitated. “That’s just the thing—I couldn’t access the article. It was taken down a year ago. I just found a link to the cached page.”
Bess looked thoughtful as she pulled onto the highway. Camp Cedarbark was about two hours away from River Heights. For a moment, we were all silent as she merged into traffic and we all thought our separate thoughts.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Bess said after a minute or two, startling me. “If there were really some big tragedy, I would have heard about it, right? I kept in touch with some of my fellow campers for years. Nobody mentioned anything.”
“I guess,” George said, but she was staring out the window with a pensive expression.
Things got quiet again for a while, and I tried to lose myself in the landscape whooshing by and ignore the little worried voice inside my head.
The voice that said, Please don’t let there be a mystery to solve at Camp Cedarbark!
CHAPTER TWO
Welcome to Camp
“WELCOME, COUNSELORS!”
A woman in her early twenties with long, frizzy blond hair and green eyes stepped up to the stage and grabbed the microphone. I dropped my fork back into my spaghetti, startled, and looked around at the other counselors.
“That’s Deborah Jackson, the camp director,” the person across from me, a dark-haired petite girl whose name I hadn’t gotten, whispered to the table.
I nodded slowly. I was feeling overwhelmed. We’d just pulled up the driveway of Camp Cedarbark—which, so far, looked as beautiful as it had in the photos—when a girl wearing a baseball cap had run up to the car, told Bess to park it in the “employee parking lot,” and instructed us to come into the mess hall immediately after—while we’d been stuck in traffic, dinner had already started.
We’d barely had time to grab our bags and pile them in the mess hall foyer for now. Dinner was spaghetti with meatballs and salad—Bess told us that about 70 percent of a camper’s diet is made up of spaghetti—served with “bug juice,” or some kind of red fruit punch. The food wasn’t exactly gourmet, but I was starving, so it tasted great.