The Sign in the Smoke (Nancy Drew Diaries #12)(3)

“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.

Now the counselors around us all started applauding, so I looked around at my friends and then joined in.

“Welcome to Camp Cedarbark,” the woman—Deborah—went on. “We’ve been having a fantastic summer so far, and this week promises to be no exception! Thank you all so much for applying to be counselors for our Best of All Worlds camp—this week, instead of focusing on one activity, like arts and crafts or sports, our campers will get to try it all! And so will you.” She paused. “But of course, you won’t have to do it alone. You’ll all be leading a bunk of six campers, but you’ll each be assigned a CIT, a counselor-in-training, to help you. The CITs will arrive in two days and will have one day of training with you before the campers arrive. Make no mistake, though, you ladies are in charge. I expect you to all be responsible, and to remember that these girls’ parents have entrusted their precious children to you. Let’s make sure everybody is safe and happy—and if you have any concerns, you can always speak to me or my husband, Miles. Miles, wave at everyone!”