‘It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?’ she said in her soft voice. ‘You planning on taking a swim?’
He nodded.
‘Well, don’t let me stop you.’
But there was no way he was stripping to his shorts in front of this woman.
‘I ought to be getting back,’ he said.
‘No, why don’t you stay? We were about to have a picnic.’
It took a few seconds for that ‘we’ to penetrate his brain. He looked around stupidly. There was no one else here. Just him and Abigail. He peered at the lake, in case there was someone out there, swimming, but the water’s surface was flat and unbroken.
She said, ‘Here they are.’
He turned back towards the path just as a boy and a girl appeared, carrying a cooler. They looked at him with clear suspicion. Like, who are you and what are you doing here? The boy was big and red-faced, with peach fuzz on his upper lip. The girl – well, the girl was pretty, with her hair cut short, kind of like Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary. She stared at him with eyes that were big and green and he realised he knew these kids. They were in the year above him at school.
Abigail was beside him. She shocked him by putting a hand on his shoulder.
The two older kids stopped on the path and let the cooler drop to the ground with a thud.
‘This is Goat,’ Abigail said, gesturing to the boy. Then she nodded at the girl. ‘And this beautiful creature is Fox.’
He snaps back to the present. He’s standing by the shoreline, the toes of his shoes almost in the water, and Abigail has gone. He hears the drone of an engine, a speedboat across the lake, and grits his teeth. Somebody shouts and there’s a screech of laughter that makes him flinch.
He feels something touch his shoe and looks down.
It’s a Coke can, bobbing on the water’s surface.
He crouches and picks it up, staring at it like he can’t believe it’s real. But of course it’s real. This is why Abigail vanished. This is a . . . what’s the word? He gropes for it. It’s a word she taught him.
Affront.
It’s an affront.
And a confirmation.
He crushes the can in his fist and stalks back through the woods, too angry to feel the mosquitoes, unable to think about anything except what needs to be done.
Chapter 12
Frankie had gone out while I was talking to Vivian, who had eventually agreed – with much huffing and tutting – to replace Frankie’s mattress. I’m sure I heard her mumble something about ‘goddamn city folk’ as she stomped away.
It was only after Vivian had gone that I remembered what had happened immediately before Frankie had screamed. The ‘inhuman’ face at the window.
Ignoring the clothes and wet towel Frankie had left on the floor, I opened the blind in my bedroom and peered out. The room backed on to the woods, so all I could see were trees.
I went outside to take a better look. There was a clear space of about six feet between the cabin and the woods. The ground was clear. No footprints. No sign anyone had been there.
I was reassured. I must have seen my own reflection, and my imagination, fired up by a mixture of jet lag and Frankie’s comment about the cabin feeling different, had done the rest.
I went back to the kitchen and made myself a coffee. I wanted to go out, to find Frankie and see more of the resort. Perhaps we could go for a drive somewhere. But I needed to see if Vivian would keep her promise, and as I waited for the coffee to brew my eyes fell upon the book Nikki had lent me.
I picked it up. A Night in the Woods by Jake Robineaux. There was Everett Miller’s picture on the cover, peeking out beside a stock photo of creepy trees. This wasn’t his yearbook photo: it showed him in full metalhead regalia, his hair loose and long, dark make-up around his eyes and a piercing through his lower lip. He was grinning at the camera. He looked genuinely happy, maybe slightly sheepish.
I opened the book and quickly became absorbed. It was a short book, around 150 pages, with the first section focused on Robineaux’s stay at the camp – all the hijinks he and his friends got up to, with pen portraits of the other kids, including the locals he’d encountered.
One passage early on stood out:
There was a lot of crazy talk among the kids about the campground being cursed or haunted. Some things went missing from a few kids’ tents. Someone had brought a radio with him, and one girl, Jenna Sankey, had brought along these expensive earrings. These disappeared along with some other stuff, like Brad Dion’s secret stash of candy. There were a lot of accusations flying around, and the teachers, including Mrs. Fredericks, carried out a search. I remember Mrs. Fredericks making a little joke about how it was probably a good thing for Brad to go without candy for a few days. None of the missing items turned up, and Jenna spent the rest of the week crying about her earrings.