It was the best view you could ever hope to see. Below, Lake Wonder Falls stretched out, reflecting back the early sun. There was nothing like seeing dawn break from up here. After this moment of reflection, it was an easy trip downhill and back over to her cabin at Camp Wonder Falls for a quick （cold） shower. At seven thirty exactly, she picked up the clipboard with that day’s activities and switched on the loudspeaker.
“Good morning, Camp Wonder Falls!” she said. “Welcome to another beautiful day!”
She meant it, too. The runner’s high stayed with her for a while.
“This morning we have”—a quick glance at the clipboard that read “menus”—“pancakes in the dining pavilion, and it’s softball day, so everyone let’s get up and at ’em!”
She switched off the loudspeaker and ticked “announcement” off the daily to-do checklist. Even if you knew your
routine like the back of your hand, a checklist was still important.
She ran down the rest of the day. The local stable was coming by and bringing five horses for riding lessons. There was a water safety test. Cabin 12 had developed a leak in the roof. Someone was taking a canoe out at night and she needed to find out who it was, and some other joker had put a snake in the girls’ changing rooms at the junior pool. She would start by calling the stable and . . .
Then there was a scream. A single, unbroken scream.
Screaming was common at the camp. Campers screamed when they swam and played and sometimes simply for the sake of screaming. But this scream had a high, clear ring to it, and it did not break for almost ten seconds. It lingered over the water before it sounded again, this time louder, more insistent. She had never heard its equal, not when Penny Mattis almost drowned in the lake, or when that counselor a few years back fell out of a tree.
Susan did not hesitate. She grabbed her walkie-talkie from its charging base as she went to the small porch of her cabin to survey the camp. It was impossible to know exactly where the scream had come from, but it was certainly on the other side of the lake, from the direction of the cabins.
Her walkie crackled to life.
“Susan, did you hear that?”
It was Magda McMurphy, the camp nurse.
“Yes. Not sure where it came from.” Susan was moving
quickly toward the footbridge. “I think it was over toward the edge of the woods, over by archery.”
The scream came once more, and it stirred the whole camp.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Magda said. “I’ll meet you over there with my bag.”
It didn’t take Susan long to locate the source of the scream—the camp had all turned in its direction, many moving toward it. She made her way through, encouraging people to go back to what they were doing as she went. When she reached the edge of the woods, she found one of the younger campers, Claire Parsons, standing outside of her cabin in her little terry-cloth robe. She looked up at Susan and pointed toward the path into the woods.
“She went that way,” Claire said.
“Who did?”
“Brandy.”
“Go inside and get dressed, Claire,” Susan said as she hurried off.
“He’s asleep.”
Susan had no time to try to work out what that meant. She moved faster. Behind her, there was the sound of a bicycle. Magda skidded up, hopping off the bike and then dropping it on the grass. Before them, the path bent gently to the left, going deeper into the woods, toward the camp’s theater and archery range. They came upon a strangely calm scene. Brandy Clark, one of Susan’s most reliable counselors, was
kneeling on the ground, looking straight ahead. In front of her, maybe twenty feet or so, there was a figure on the path. Susan recognized the curly head of hair at once. Eric Wilde.