The Sign in the Smoke (Nancy Drew Diaries #12)(9)

The water was too murky to make out much more than a shadow. But I could clearly see arms, legs, a head. This was no reed!

Terrified, I yanked one more time on my foot.

This time, it came free.

I didn’t hesitate. I paddled my arms toward the surface, kicking behind me as hard as I could.

It was probably only a second or two before my head broke the surface of the water, but it felt like days. I gasped in a huge mouthful of air, which just pushed more water down my throat, making me gag again. But the air felt heavenly. I pushed my hair back from my forehead and blinked rapidly, trying to see.

When my vision returned, I saw Deborah watching me curiously from the pier. “Nancy, are you all right? That’s exactly where I went down. There must be a reed. . . .”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t a reed!” I called.

Deborah looked surprised. “No?” she asked. “Well, you probably can’t be sure. Did you see—”

“It was a person!” I yelled. “I saw a figure underwater! It looked like a person!”

Deborah looked at me for a moment, confused, and then her expression hardened to a frown. Meanwhile, the other counselors behind her tittered and began whispering to one another. Bess and George exchanged a concerned glance and then both looked back at me, as if to say, Really?

That’s when I realized how insane it sounded.

How would a person be able to breathe underwater? Where had he or she come from? What possible motive could he or she have to attack me—or maybe Deborah and me—under the water?

But as I remembered those terrible few seconds underwater, I was sure of it. I could see the curve of the figure’s shoulder, feel its fingers on my ankle. They were fingers on my ankle. Not leaves or reeds. I was positive.

Wasn’t I?



“We’re having someone come out to trim the reeds at the bottom of the lake,” Deborah announced at dinner that night. “We think this should address any problems we had during swim tests today.” She glanced at me, and I looked down at my chicken nuggets.

No one believes me. I’m not sure I believe myself.

Deborah cleared her throat. “This means we won’t be having any swimming tomorrow, when the CITs arrive, which means we’ll have to conduct their swim tests at the same time as the campers’—but that’s probably all right. Better safe than sorry, I always say.”

She put down the microphone and went to sit down at her table to finish dinner.

George took a sip of bug juice and then put down her cup, studying me across the table. “Could it have been your shadow you saw?” she asked, not even bothering to introduce the subject. We’d been talking about it on and off all afternoon.

I shrugged, picking up a french fry. “I don’t think so,” I said. “It looked like another person.”

“But just . . . how?” Bess asked, chewing thoughtfully on a french fry herself.

I couldn’t answer her question. I hadn’t been able to answer it all day. What would another person be doing underwater? How could they breathe? What about—

Bella cleared her throat. “I think we all know how,” she said in a low voice.

All eyes turned to her.

“Oh, come on, Bella,” Taylor chided. She’d started feeling better after lunch and had been in training with us since then. “Not that old story again. We know that’s something you just made up to scare us.”

Bella scowled. “No, that’s not what you know. That’s what you decided to make yourselves feel better.”

George tilted her head. “So it’s just a coincidence?” she asked. “You told us this scary legend about the camp and then planned this awesome prank to freak us all out on the first night? I doubt it.”

Bella glared at George and then turned to look at Maddie. “Maddie’s heard it too,” she pointed out. “Didn’t you, Mad? You said that last night. You heard the story about the drowning too.”

Maddie brought a forkful of carrots to her mouth and chewed deliberately, looking down at her tray. “I heard something happened here,” she corrected.

“Something involving a drowning,” Bella prodded.

“Something involving a camper,” Maddie said, nodding. “And . . . the lake.”

Everyone was silent for a minute. I felt Bella’s eyes on me and looked up.

“Maybe what you saw in the lake,” Bella said, standing up, “wasn’t alive at all.”

With that, she picked up her tray and stalked off.





CHAPTER FOUR





Standoff at the Lake


THE NEXT MORNING THE CITS began arriving at nine a.m., just after breakfast. As soon as the first car pulled up and the first grinning face emerged into the sunlight, the mood at the camp changed. We’d all been tense the night before, arguing about what had happened at the lake, whether I could be believed in the first place, what the figure could have been. By the time we went to sleep, long after lights-out, Taylor and Maddie seemed close to siding with Bella and believing that something supernatural was going on at the camp. George, unsurprisingly, flat-out refused to believe this, and Bess, Charla, Sam, and I were skeptics too. Still, I couldn’t deny a little flutter of fear that went through me every time I remembered that shadow in the water.