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I do, no matter how ridiculous it seems. So I nod for her to continue.
“Deaf village and leper colony aside, the rest of the story is the same,” Casey says. “It’s that Franny’s grandfather saw this valley and decided on the spot it was where he was going to create his lake. But there was one problem. The village sat right in the middle of it. When Buchanan Harris approached the villagers and offered to buy their land, they refused. They were a small, tight-knit community, ostracized by the rest of the world. This was their home, and they weren’t going to sell it. This made Mr. Harris angry. He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. So when he increased his offer and the villagers again refused, he bought all the land surrounding them instead. Then he built his dam and flooded the valley at the stroke of midnight, knowing the water would wash away the village and that everyone who lived there would drown.”
She lowers her voice, speaking slowly. Full storyteller mode.
“The village is still there, deep below Lake Midnight. And the people who drowned now haunt the woods and the lake. They appear at midnight, rising from the water and roaming the forest.Anyone unlucky enough to encounter them gets dragged into the lake and pulled to the bottom, where they quickly drown. Then they become one of the ghosts, cursed to search the woods for all eternity looking for more victims.”
I give her an incredulous look. “And that’s what people think happened to Vivian, Natalie, and Allison?”
“No one truly believes that,” Casey says. “But bad things have happened here, with no explanation. Franny’s husband, for example. He was a champion swimmer. Almost made it to the Olympics. Yet he drowned. I heard that Franny’s grandmother—the first wife of Buchanan Harris—also drowned here. So when Vivian and the others disappeared, some people said it was the ghosts of Lake Midnight. Or else the survivors.”
“Survivors?”
“It’s been said that a handful of villagers escaped the rising waters and fled into the hills. There they stayed, living off the land, rebuilding the village in a remote section of the woods where no one could find them. The whole time, they held a grudge against the Harris family, passing it on to their descendants. Those descendants are still there, hidden somewhere in the woods. And on nights when the moon is full, they sneak down to the land that used to belong to them and exact their revenge. Vivian, Natalie, and Allison were just three of their victims.”
It turns out that Casey’s an expert tale-spinner, for as she finishes, I feel a chill in the air. A light frisson that makes me look to the woods behind her, half expecting to see either a ghostly figure or mutant forest-dweller emerging from the tree line.
“What do you really think happened to them?” I say.
“I think they got lost in the woods. Vivian was always wandering off.” Casey drops her cigarette and grinds it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Which is why I’ve always felt partly responsible for what happened. I was a camp counselor. It was my job to make sure all of you were safe. And I regret not paying more attention to you and what was going on in that cabin.”
I stare at her, surprised. “Were there things going on I didn’t know about?”
“I don’t know,” Casey says as she fumbles in her pocket for another cigarette. “Maybe.”
“Like what? You were friends with Vivian. Surely you noticed something.”
“I wouldn’t say the two of us were friends. I was a senior camper her first summer and then came back to work as a counselor the two years after that. She was always a troublemaker, but charming enough to get away with it.”
Oh, I know that all too well. Vivian excelled at charm. That and lying were her two greatest skills.
“But something about her seemed off that last summer,” Casey continues. “Not majorly different. Nothing that someone who only knew her casually would notice. But she wasn’t the same. She seemed distracted.”
I think of the strange map Vivian had drawn and the even stranger photo of the woman with long hair.
“By what?”
Casey shrugs and looks away again as she irritably puffs out more smoke. “I don’t know, Emma. Like I said, we weren’t that close.”
“But you noticed things.”
“Littlethings,” Casey says. “I noticed her walking alone around camp a few times. Which never happened the previous summers. Vivian was always surrounded by people. And maybe she just wanted to be left alone. Or maybe...”
Her voice trails off as she takes one last draw of her cigarette.
“Maybe what?”
“She was up to no good,” Casey says. “On the second day of camp, I caught her trying to sneak into the Lodge. She was hanging around the steps on the back deck, ready to run inside. She said she was looking for Franny, but I didn’t buy it.”
“Why would she want to break into the Lodge?”
Casey shrugs again. The gesture contains a note of annoyance,almost as if she wishes she’d never brought up the topic of Vivian. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she says.
—
My final stop on cabin check is Dogwood, where I find all three girls on their beds, phones in hand, faces awash in the ice-blue light of their screens. Sasha is already under the covers, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose as she plays Candy Crush or some similarly frustrating time-waste of a game. A cacophony of chirps and beeps erupts from her phone.
In the bunk below her, Krystal has changed into baggy sweats. The matted teddy bear sits in the crook of her arm as she watches a Marvel movie on her phone, the soundtrack leaking out of her earbuds, tinny and shrill. I can hear blips of gunfire and the telltale crunch of fist hitting skull.