Stevie stood up and faced the wall.
It wasn’t that Stevie had no fears. Stevie had a lot of fears and anxieties. There had been times when they had ruled her life. Someone was playing a game. Someone had presented her with a locked-room puzzle. And this wasn’t scary as much as it was perplexing. If she had a mental puzzle to work on, her fears took a back seat.
Face the problem. Look at it hard. What did she see?
The message was painted on the top third of the wall, not the eyeline. The word was painted in blocky, sloppy capitals. The paint had run a bit, like a spooky horror font. She climbed back up on the bed next to Janelle and looked at the brushstrokes closely. There was something weird about how the paint ran down the wall.
“Look at how the drips all cut off at the same point,” Stevie said, pointing. “Like a clean line.”
Janelle leaned in to look. “Someone wiped the paint,” she
said. “You can see the trace where they wiped it to keep it from dripping too much. How considerate.”
Stevie gave a long exhale and stepped down. “Let’s check under the bed,” she said.
They pulled the camp bed away from the wall. Stevie got down on the floor, examining it with her phone’s flashlight, looking over every inch. She found two dead flies, a small piece of used tape, a leaf, a spiderweb, and then . . .
“Here,” she said, pointing to a small spot of white paint. “Look.”
Janelle got down next to her.
“So the bed wasn’t there when that message was painted on the wall,” Janelle said.
“Exactly. This didn’t happen last night, unless we can sleep so soundly that someone can drag my bed away from the wall, set up some kind of stepladder, paint a message, and then push me back again.”
“That makes it a little better,” Janelle said, nodding. “At least someone wasn’t in here with us. So what do we do now?”
“Well . . .” Stevie sat on the edge of her squeaky camp bed. “We can’t tell Nicole about this. She doesn’t really want us here, and she’s definitely not going to like this, especially on the day the other counselors are coming. She might tell Carson we have to leave.”
“But I think we should make sure this place is secure. What if Carson could get us some plug-and-play cameras?”
Stevie pulled out her phone to text him.
“He’ll be thrilled about this,” she said grimly. She took a few pictures of the message and sent the texts. His reply came within a minute.
Will be there as soon as possible with cameras. Have something to show you.
“Cameras are coming,” Stevie said. “You shower and I’ll stay here. Then I’ll go.”
Janelle quickly gathered up her shower basket, towel, and clothes and headed off to get ready. Stevie went outside to sit on the tiny concrete porch of the cabin, hanging her legs over the side and letting her bare toes tickle the dirt. It was early, but she needed to make a phone call.
To her surprise, David answered right away.
“You’re awake?” she said.
“Long drive today,” he said. “We left at six. How’s camp treating my princess?”
“Could be better,” she said. “Someone wrote the word SURPRISE above my bed last night.”
“Is this . . . some kind of sex joke?”
“No. Someone painted a message on our wall. It’s the thing that was written at the crime scene in 1978.”
“Okay,” David said, sounding maybe not so okay. “First of all . . . are you all right?”