The Wild Dark - Dark Summer AU (Part 1)

(i know. i'm so sorry. i'm so ashamed of how many stories i'm starting lately and not finishing. i'm still cooking the epistolary fic in the background, and then there's the cyberpunk AU, the recruits story that needs a proper ending... but this idea grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go until i wrote some of it out, so i figured i'd share. please forgive me/i hope it's fun! it's basically a mash-up of a lot of different things that i enjoy, and i've always loved this kind of midsommar folk horror summer camp vibe!

however, please be warned: THIS IS A HORROR STORY. well, it's also a mystery/thriller, but it IS intended to be scary, and pretty dark. even my own planned chapter titles were kind of freaking me out. like "they wait in the ferns" type shit. there is murder and death and dread therein, so beware! if you are sensitive to horror, i wouldn't recommend reading!)

PROLOGUE

The Pathless Ones

It was, everyone would agree later, the summer to end all summers. The kind of summer stolen from the back of a glossy, nostalgic magazine published in a bygone era, a season sun-drenched and humming with the sounds of cicadas and the clean woody smells of damp mulched peat and crushed pine. A summer of pure, acid-blue skies and rumbling, comfortable thunderstorms; a summer of skinned knees, breathless laughter, the grit and grip of rubber bike handles under the palms and the bright tang of metal and sweat. A summer of picnicking on squashed soft sandwiches in the woods, gulping down lukewarm sugary soda cans with relish, playing games of make-believe and high-flying adventure, hacking away at nettles with long swishing sticks or stabbing each other through the armpits with dramatic death-groans. Children started their days with knocks on their best friend’s door, ended them with long gentle twilight and their mothers silhouetted in doors, calling them to come in as the bats rose out of the trees in dark winding necklaces that flew up and up, as if to adorn the heavens themselves. It was the kind of summer that would never end.

There were some who were a little uneasy, given the disappearance ten years before, but such adult concerns were beyond the three children who went into the woods that day. If they’d known about the worry, their response would have been prompt and robust: they knew the forest better than they knew the veins on the backs of their hands, moving through it with the streamlined and unselfconscious economy of young deer leaping down lifelong game trails, just as one with the place as the bees zipping in and out of their secret hives, the ants marching in earnest trails up the leaning oaks, the rabbits bringing their kits out to play among moss-thickened stones that may have once been ancient graves. Their confidence was unimpeachable, in-bred and insurmountable. They could have no more fathomed getting lost than they could have contemplated growing up, becoming different from who they knew themselves to be.  

And besides, their leader would have added stoutly, they had three rather than just one. And unlike the one who had disappeared, they had grown up in this place all their lives. They knew how to find their way home.

In a way, the prevailing belief held true, the townspeople would sigh later, shaking their heads over the last memories of those children sailing into the woods, trailing jubilant shouts and calls after them like sparkling comet-tails. The three of them would become immortalized, passing into story and legend the way that everything in those woods became suspended in time. They would never have to see that summer come to an end.

CHAPTER ONE

Dark Summer

The thing about it was, Ayla thought sourly, kicking along the bundle of firewood, tied together by thin, fraying twine. The thing about it was—there were rules.

Now, she’d never been a stickler for rules herself. Growing up, in fact, she’d actually been kind of a rebel. Skipping school, spray-painting rude messages on grubby highway billboards under the cover of hot summer nights, kicking the shit out of stupid Penner Anstruther for making fun of her braid and clothes… Not being a delinquent, exactly, she’d never done anyone any real harm—except the aforementioned Penner Anstruther, who’d deserved it—but she’d certainly been the type to tell people where exactly they could shove their rules. A stern talking-to about discipline and authority, delivered to her, was likely to have gotten someone bitten back then.

But then, well, things happened, and she’d grown up and gotten her act together. And then she’d found Camp Everwood.

When she’d first been hired on as head camp counselor, Ayla had been dubious about her abilities to “foster sincere friendships with children of all backgrounds” and “make the summer fun for everyone!”—as the chirpy orientation packet demanded. Sure, she had the wilderness survival skills, picked up from multiple solo backpacking trips and jobs as a rafting guide down the country. And yes, she was totally comfortable acting as the camp’s groundskeeper when the camp wasn’t being used for its seasonal sessions, which meant spending long stretches keeping an eye on things alone, peppered infrequently by visits from deliverymen, maintenance staff, that kind of thing. The campgrounds were on a vast, remote parcel of private land deep in the Everwood Forest, unpatrolled by forest rangers or parkkeepers or anything of the sort. That meant that a lot of times, it would just be Ayla, making sure everything was up-to-snuff ahead of the return of the campers.

She’d been fine with all that. Hell, she even preferred it: such solitude sounded delicious to her, a large and untroubled queendom that she would only have to share—with temporary occupants—three-quarters out of the year.

But kids…

Oh, she’d been skeptical about that.

Then they had their first session of the summer, and Ayla—to her unending, startled surprise—had loved it. She’d been in charge of all the staff, who looked to her with pliant, cheerful obedience: no one signed up to be a camp counselor just to be a fly in the ointment. And children of that age—nine through twelve, at least that first time—they were so guileless and easy. A lot of them had been frightened out of their wits, being away from home for the first time: they’d latched on to her gruff and steady confidence, her fearless authority, and soon enough had been touched with enough of it that they were stringing bows and paddling on the lake as breezily as if they’d always lived there. Even the ones who started out as little shits were dealing with their own personal dramas; it didn’t have anything to do with her. In fact, sometimes she saw herself in them, and dealt with them with a kinder touch than what she’d been given as a shithead kid. In doing so, she earned their undying loyalty forever.

The girls, especially, were fun: at that age, they had a weird sense of humor that was equally disgusting and innocent, bawdy and naïve. They loved her thick, unpretentious braid, her boyish practical clothes, her overall demeanor. They often took to mimicking her, rolling their sleeves up to the biceps and chewing on pieces of broken straw or sweet grass and imitating her natural swagger, her bright tough jabbing slang, which was harmless enough once you got used to it.

And with the job, of course, had come rules. Endless lists of rules—Number #2, if you get lost, what do you do? You sit down and yell! Number #13, if you’re caught out of your cabin after curfew, you lose a free activity and have to work in the commissary for a day. On a second infraction, you’re dismissed from camp entirely—a litany of orientations and recitations and dumb little pledges and gold stars.

But, after a while, it had all started to click in Ayla’s head. You needed rules. Humans could be feral little animals, given enough of a lead—and in a place like Camp Everwood, a large lead was dangerous. The wilderness pressed up all around them like an over-familiar cat, crowding darkly against the windows, especially at night. You couldn’t risk anyone getting lost. You had to impose order on the chaos.

So, she thought dourly, stooping to pick up some twigs that had slipped out of the firewood bundle. The rules mattered.

Just not to the rich, apparently.

She’d known that Camp Everwood was built by some wealthy family from out-of-state. They’d purchased a huge tract of these woods wholesale, and no one had really protested: the nearest town, ten miles away, was dead and shuttered, so there were no real locals to bother. When they’d proposed to turn the area into a thriving campground, promising minimal impact on the environment, Ayla hadn’t seen the harm in it. (Others had, but she couldn’t see the problem: this whole region, not far from where she’d grown up, needed an injection of cash and new people, or else it would die off entirely.)

But she hadn’t known the owners would also be using the camp as their own personal vacation spot in between sessions, the cabins specially outfitted to house their well-off family and friends when they decided to go hunting every year. They couldn’t even hunt in a way she respected—high-vis jackets and stalking ducks through the trees, crouching up in deer hides smeared with dark green camo paint. They did it like—like rich people did, with smart little outfits and their own special horses shipped in on trailers and an army of staff and servants at their beck and call.

Well, that last part was only what she’d been told would happen over the next few days. Right now, it was just her and the women in Cabin #7, along with the kitchen staff for the canteen and the head groundskeeper. Everyone else had been sent home at the end of the last official session, or were due to arrive back in the next few days, in preparation for the grand “Naveen Hunting Excursion” that was due to take place at Camp Everwood every year from here on out.

That left the part of playing servant for Cabin #7, evidently, to her. Which was not in her contract. (Or at least not that she could remember. She hadn’t read the whole thing as closely as she ought to have, in retrospect.) They’d wanted to come alone, these three women, ahead of the big boisterous crowd, to spend a few private days with their “intimates”—Ayla only figured out belatedly that they meant confidantes or chums, and not their private parts—and “commune with nature” or whatever trendy divine feminine twaddle was being thrown around these days.

She didn’t actually mind the leader, Lavinet, some kind of wealthy heiress who was big in fashion or cosmetics or some such. The buxom woman was sleek and glossy, with a tumble of rich, luxurious curls—Ayla’s total opposite—but she was at least polite and respectful. She smiled and laughed, seemingly sincerely, even at Ayla’s surly commentary, and seemed unaffected even in her striking beauty. She made eye contact with Ayla when they spoke—like she was a real human person!—and listened diffidently to her instructions, like Ayla was the hired expert she was and not just a placeholder lackey. Plus, she seemed athletic enough. They’d shot at clay pigeons, on their second day, and it was painfully obvious she was the only one among the lot who could handle a gun worth a damn.

The other two were far lower on Ayla’s personal list. One of them, the ridiculously-named Moonsilk, had an ethereal kind of beauty—one of the kitchen staff had whispered to Ayla that she was an obscure haute couture model—but she seemed like she was doped up on sedatives or valium or something, because she hardly ever got a sensible word out of her mouth, at least in Ayla’s hearing. Quiet as a mouse, that one, sleepy and dreamy and just weird… But at least she didn’t make too much of a fuss.

The third, Prihine Naveen, was Lavinet’s younger cousin, and just an all-around snot in Ayla’s opinion. She was petulant, immature, whiny, and spoiled; she even stamped her foot and got a grating, complaining moan to her voice whenever she didn’t get her way, which set Ayla’s teeth on edge. She didn’t know why she could deal with children who did the same thing: she just knew she certainly didn’t get the urge to shake them until their eyes rattled around in their skull and they shut the hell up. Not like she did with little Miss Priss Naveen.

Problem was, Prihine’s family was the one who owned the camp. So it was her giving the orders. And of course it was her who couldn’t follow the rules.

Like the one about always taking a flashlight with you when you needed to use the washroom in the middle of the night. (She seemed to expect Ayla to materialize out of the dark whenever she opened the door, as if it had some kind of trip-alarm that would alert Ayla to come guide her whenever she needed to pee.) Or the rule about bagging up leftovers and food wrappers so that bears and wildlife wouldn’t come into camp. She just… dropped them on the ground for someone else to pick up. “Someone else” meaning Ayla.

And now… now she hadn’t shown up to breakfast in the canteen.

Surely, Ayla thought, clumping up the stairs to Cabin #7, surely it could not be her job to personally wake the young lady like she was some kind of handmaid in a Jane Austen novel. Lavinet and Moonsilk had showed up to the canteen right on time, for their luxurious breakfast of yogurt parfaits, fresh fruit, and gluten-free oat pancakes, served thin and brown and lightly crispy as French crepes. But they’d only blinked owlishly at Ayla when she inquired after their youngest member. Prihine hadn’t been in her bunk when they awoke; they got washed and dressed assuming she was already in the canteen.

Which she had not been. Ayla figured it was a case of crossed wires: likely the Little Miss had been in the bathroom when the other two woke up, then trudged back to the cabin after they had already left. She probably fancied a lie-in and didn’t think at all about how it would affect everyone else’s schedules. She’d also risen late and dragged her feet for the previous three days, so she probably knew what she could get away with now. Maybe she’d even gone back to sleep.

Ayla scowled and threw open the cabin door with a bang, dumping the stack of firewood in her arms on the ground. “Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey!” she barked into Cabin #7’s cool, dim depths. She’d be the hotel wake-up call, all right, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be obnoxious about it.

A golden silence greeted her, sawdust and glittering motes swirling in the serene morning light slanting in through the windows.

Nothing. The cabin was empty.

A shiver of premonition ran up Ayla’s arms then. She froze, intent, poised on the balls of her feet, like a hare unsure if she’d been spotted by a hawk. She waited several beats, counting, listening to the sudden high thrumming of her heart. All of the bunks empty, Lavinet’s made neat as always, the other two carelessly disheveled, makeup bags and curling irons strewn everywhere. Nothing significant missing. Prihine’s suitcase, her clothes, even her fine fur coat—all still there.

And yet an unexpected dread slowly closed around Ayla’s gut then, like oil settling at the bottom of a lake. She was suddenly afraid to move, certain that once she did, this crystallized moment would shatter, shred her into pieces. Leave her cut and bleeding on the ground forever.

Because she knew in that moment, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain—a tingling absence in the air, her survivalist’s instinct, some kind of dark scent, that remarkable déjà-vu-like intuition from the reptilian hindbrain that science still didn’t quite understand—that Prihine Naveen was gone. And Ayla didn’t think she was coming back.

She let out a slow breath. “Ah… shit.”

CHAPTER TWO

Everwood

“So,” Trouble said around a mouthful of mints—Blade wouldn’t let him smoke in his car, so his backup tactic was to annoy his partner by crunching, insistently and blithely, on a handful of Altoids in an act of not-so-silent protest—“missing person, sure. Creepy nowhere woods, fine. But why’d they call in Murder?”

He could feel Blade’s disapproval radiating from the other side of the car: not the heat of anger, but the chill of flat contempt that made Blade so intimidating to work with—for other detectives, anyway. It had never managed to penetrate Trouble’s thick skin yet. “Do you never read the file before we leave?”

“I know you’re going to tell me all about it anyway, so why should I? Plus, it’s, what, a five-hour drive? Gotta talk about something on the way.”

Blade made a low, huffy sound in his throat. “There have been rumors of a killer in this area for some time. It’s extremely isolated, hard to get to. There used to be a small town nearby, population less than three hundred people. One country store, two restaurants, that kind of thing.”

“Kind of place that doesn’t warrant a stoplight. One road town?”

Blade nodded curtly. “Twenty years ago, a child went missing in the woods a few miles from town.”

Trouble grimaced; he never did well with kids in peril. “Ah.”

His partner went on, cool, clipped, unmoved. “That child, one Zori Ward, was never found. They’d been camping in the woods with their aunt, uncle, and three cousins in an old trailer. Went off to the river for water one morning and never came back. Even though the river was found to be less than a hundred feet from the treeline. Nothing.” He shook his head. “But no one thought much about it at the time—those woods are huge and dark, and after a while it became easy to believe they’d had some accident and were simply never discovered. And no one knew the family: they were strangers from out-of-state. Nothing known about their motives, their backgrounds. Eventually the case went cold. Written off as an unproven misfortune, not murder.” He paused briefly, then continued, “Ten years later, three more children disappeared.”

Trouble let out a slow hissing sound through his teeth.

“The entire town, which was larger then, mobilized. There was a sizeable media campaign, police and canine units called in, that kind of thing. All three children were very capable, everyone said, and knew those woods intimately. One of the quotes in the file claimed that you could blindfold and deposit them in any glade of those woods, and they’d be able to make their way home without question. And they were always together. If something had happened to one of them—if one had fallen into a ditch, say, or twisted an ankle—the other two would have known to run home for help at once.” He shook his head. “But all three seemingly vanished into thin air. Even their bikes went missing. Weeks later, they found one bloody shoe, belonging to the girl in the trio, Surya.”

“Ah, shit,” Trouble said, rubbing his mouth. “But no bodies?”

Blade shook his head curtly. “None. And from analysis of the blood, it was likely Surya’s—but it couldn’t be determined if she’d actually been attacked. It very well could have been that she’d injured her foot—cut it somehow—put the shoe back on, and then lost or discarded it when it soaked through. But no other evidence was ever recovered, and within a few years, the town had dried up. People began whispering of a child-snatcher, some sort of killer. There had been some deranged man living in those woods once, some elders claimed.”

“The usual urban legend? Man with a hook for a hand, hides under your bed and licks your palm pretending to be your dog?”

His partner didn’t smile; just blinked cat-like out at the lazy summer afternoon glow, the empty highway rolled out in front of them like a grey, sinuous carpet. The car, whisper-quiet, pulled them up winding switchbacks with a sway like a boat’s. “I don’t know the details,” Blade began. Then there was another very long pause before he continued, in an almost pained, careful voice, “There was also talk of fey. A monster or dark god in the woods, taking children away as sacrifices…”

“Ah. I suppose you get that kind of talk, away from the city.”

Blade brushed this away as if it were some irritating fly. “Regardless. The case of the three missing children—and the ensuing panic—did its job. No one wanted to live in a town that had been marked with so much tragedy, especially when it was left unresolved. Most of the young families packed up and left. The work followed. As far as I know, that town has been abandoned for the last several years, though we’ll have to make our own inquiries.”

Trouble crunched another mint in apparent agreement.

“And now,” Blade finished simply, “this. Prihine Naveen, aged twenty, heiress to the Brunen Brothers fortune.”

“And Brunen Brothers makes…?”

Blade’s voice was very dry. “Jam and other sundry, from my understanding.”

“Wow. A jam heiress.” Trouble, at least, knew the next bit: the Naveens had bought out the land around Everwood, deserted as it was, and converted it into their own private camp. Prihine, her older cousin, and a family friend had gone ahead to the camp for their own little retreat when she’d gone missing sometime yesterday morning or the night before. She was discovered absent from her cabin at 7 AM by the head camp counselor; they’d spent three hours frantically searching for her before calling the authorities, which happened to be the county sheriff’s office nearly two hours away. The sheriff’s deputies had arrived on-site sometime around noon, did a basic canvassing of the area, conducted interviews, launched a ground search. At that point, they still would have had to establish that she hadn’t just left to go somewhere on her own: she was an adult, after all, and didn’t need to report her whereabouts to anyone. She could have gone on a walk to clear her head, or even stormed home in a fit of pique.

But then the dogs had found footprints, somewhere like two miles from camp. A trail of faint heel indents that just stopped, as if she’d been bodily picked up by a mythical harpy that had dropped down from the sky. And her hair ribbon, snagged against a low branch. And a little smear of blood, the trace of a handprint against a tree.

Given the overall pattern, he supposed it was reasonable why the rural deputies would want to call in the big guns. Pressure from Lavinet Naveen, too, had summoned them even ahead of the official news getting out—not an easy task to achieve, when it came to Haven’s elite Murder Squad. But a lucky thing, too: once journalists got wind that a wealthy jam heiress had vanished from her family’s own summer camp, everything at the crime scene would be trampled, cross-contaminated. They needed to get to the witnesses and the evidence while they were still pure.

Still, Trouble was skeptical. “A serial killer spanning across thirty years, though? What are the odds?”

“It’s happened before. Ritualistic hunting, periodically resurfacing throughout the years… A killer could view this place as sacred ground.”

“Hm. Especially if he feels compelled to do it. The jam heiress doesn’t really fit the profile of the kids, though. Unless he’s upset about the richies coming in to build their sleepaway camp, d’you think? Wanted to punish them for disrupting his hallowed grounds?”

“It’s possible.” Blade didn’t like drawing conclusions or speculating before he’d seen the evidence for himself, but Trouble could draw one into conversation as easily as a siphon drew water. And he liked to bat around theories like a toy basketball. “Then one of them gets up in the middle of the night, decides to go for a walk… The killer sees his chance.”

Trouble rolled another mint around his mouth, thoughtful. “And they call us in because… that’s way too many disappearances for at least one of them not to be a murder.”

Blade nodded tersely, and a little silence fell. There wasn’t much either of them could say about that.

#

The camp seemed eerily quiet by the time Blade and Trouble pulled up, their sleek black sedan now covered in rosy dust. It had taken a long time after pulling off of the growling asphalt highway to navigate the lurching, unpaved, snakey road leading all the way up to Camp Everwood. No wonder it had taken the deputies so long to reach the campgrounds, Trouble thought as he shielded his eyes against the glowering orange sun. This place was truly the definition of isolated. They hadn’t passed a car or an occupied building for well over an hour and a half.

The camp was like any he’d glimpsed in brochures—the kind with font composed of rustic, broken sticks and wooden signboard headers—or the movies. He’d never been to summer camp as a kid—somehow he doubted Blade had, either—but Everwood exactly fit the idea he’d always held in his imagination. There were three long buildings to the right of the camp entrance, to the south: one was the Canteen, where the campers ate their meals, with a covered patio and several fire pits lining its front. The next was a building called the Great Hall, which contained a nurse’s office, some supply rooms, the tiny mail room, a few rooms that could be used for activities on rainy days, and a large community center that seemed to be intended for dances and plays. Lots of crafts tables and benches were scattered around the outside of this. The third building was the Staff Quarters, where kitchen workers and other seasonal staff resided.

In the middle of the camp was a flagpole, a giant elm tree, and a notice board, plastered with fliers, maps, daily schedules, and little announcements. This seemed to be the popular meeting spot for the day; Trouble could see all of the paths in camp converging back to the bulletin board under the elm tree, including the ones that lead further back into the Everwood Forest itself. Then there was a tiny commissary, a little windowed shack with snacks and everyday knickknacks the campers could purchase, flashlights and mosquito repellant and such.

On the south end of camp were the fourteen cabins—seven for boys, seven for girls, dotting a hillside covered with dry golden pine needles, despite being mostly cleared of trees. Washrooms and showers were at the bottom of the hill. A bridge over a little creek pointed the way further south, leading to the archery fields, the lake, the now-empty corral used for horseback riding.

There were only three other cars in the parking lot when they pulled in, which made something in Trouble’s gut tense. Way too few. One of the cars was from the county sheriff’s department; the other was a luxury SUV, a rental; and the third was a gnarly old beater with chipped red paint. But the place should have been swarming with officers, with teams of volunteers; this was a pretty young rich lady, and it hadn’t even been forty-eight hours since her disappearance. There was still time to find her: there were some stories of stranded hikers being found after three weeks, even months. Was it truly because this place was so isolated, that they couldn’t drum up the numbers to keep the search going?

Or had everyone already decided to give up?

Blade seemed to take note of the numbers, too, his dark eyes passing over the whole scene before they sharpened at something in the distance. He cocked his head at Trouble meaningfully, that old sign between them that meant, Stay alert. Trouble straightened and rolled his shoulders out, the way he used to before a big fight. Now he did it when he sensed a big case.  

A young man in a tan county deputy uniform, little more than a kid—twenty-two and hardly old enough to shave, by the look of him—was hurrying out of the shadows of the Staff Quarters, his eyes round with both relief and muted alarm. He looked spectacularly out of his depth, and by the time he drew to a halt in front of them, he was as jumpy and cowed as a dog at a fireworks show. “Thank God you made it,” he puffed out, “sirs. I’ve been waiting here alone for hours.”

“Takes six hours to get here from Haven, kid,” Trouble told him blandly. Normally he didn’t go in for pulling rank—“sir” was for desk jockeys, in his opinion—but he got the feeling that it was something of a comfort to the young deputy. “Came here as fast as we could. What’s gone on?”

The kid—whose name was Nyle Rothesby—straightened eagerly and gave his report. Deputies were generalists and first-responders, so it was all fairly routine: he and his partner had arrived and secured the scene, canvassed the area, began the basic searches, and taken down first witness statements. Rothesby had taped off Cabin #7 himself, he told them proudly, to make sure none of the evidence was disturbed, and kept an eye on the whole camp to make sure no one tampered with anything. According to the witnesses, no one had seen Prihine Naveen after eleven o’clock the night before she was discovered missing. There hadn’t been any unusual behavior, no fights witnessed by the camp staff or anything of the sort. She’d been tired and cranky after a day of swimming in the lake, where she’d been bitten by mosquitoes. She’d made the camp cook brew her a hot chocolate and gone to bed at same time as her cousin and friend. Both Moonsilk and Lavinet claimed they’d slept through the night, awoke to find Prihine gone, assumed she was already down at breakfast, and then… discovered otherwise. Then the search for her had begun—then the deputies were called—more searching—reinforcements summoned—and finally, at five o’clock the previous evening, the dogs had found her trail.

“But it was the damnedest thing,” Rothesby said, his voice high and gabbling now. Trouble guessed he couldn’t have been on the job more than six months. “I’ve never seen canine units act that way, never. They picked up her scent, found her footprints two miles into the woods, north of here—but the footprints only went a little way down a muddy track before they just… stopped. We couldn’t pick them up again anywhere. And we searched all night and into most of the morning. And the dogs… they started acting real funny. Whimpering and whining and turning themselves around. Like they were confused, or…” His face blanched. “Or scared of something. I don’t know. Made us all real uneasy.”

Trouble was careful not to look at Blade, who would have been broadcasting disdain if his face wasn’t so unreadable to strangers. “All right,” he said carefully. “And the blood and the ribbon?”

“I’ll show it to you in a bit—when you’ve had a look around, I mean.” He glanced nervously up at the sun. “But yes, there was a half a handprint on a tree near her footprints. Don’t know whose blood it is, yet. Couldn’t take samples, because of the—you know, the chain of evidence and all that…” He looked hopefully at Blade, as if expecting some approval for this textbook knowledge, then wilted again under the flat, unmoving stare. “And her hair ribbon. Her cousin said it was definitely hers, Prihine Naveen’s, I mean—but the queerest thing is, it wasn’t like it’d just come off. Someone had tied it to the branch. In a pretty knot.”

A brief silence, during which they both stared at Rothesby.

“All right,” Trouble said again, in the same guarded tone. “But that could have been Prihine herself, right? Tying a ribbon to the tree to serve as a marker, in case she was lost or wandering around in circles?”

But Rothesby was shaking his head over and over. He had an unfortunate set of ears, sticking out of the sides of his head like flaps, and an Adam’s apple that quavered distractingly up and down his neck. “It’s not like that,” he said firmly. “Wait until you see. Something about it is wrong.”

Trouble blew out a breath and shrugged. “Whatever you say.” But he was thinking—Country folk. He must have grown up around here, had his head filled with the stories, because kid’s scared out of his wits. Probably from seeing the other officers freaked out, too. That’s probably why they all took off in a hurry and left him.

Rothesby hurried on with the other details. His partner had gone back to the station after the discovery of the blood, to call in the big bad detectives from Haven. (The implication was that he hadn’t been back since: leaving poor old Rothesby alone to keep watch over camp?) Lavinet Naveen had also made her own calls, telling all of the friends and associates who’d been waiting to descend on the camp to cancel their trip, but without telling them exactly why. She didn’t want them all arriving and muddying up the evidence, stampeding over the crime scene, getting in the way of the investigators; but neither did she want the news getting out about Prihine just yet, having journalists descend on the place and producing pretty much the same outcome. Smart woman, Trouble thought with approval. She’d informed Prihine’s parents, of course, but they were on a business trip somewhere halfway across the world; they wouldn’t get back to the country for at least another two days, let alone out to remote Everwood itself. The soonest anyone could expect to see them would be three days.

“So who’s left?” Blade asked then, speaking for the first time and making Rothesby visibly jump. “The other two from Cabin #7, the head counselor, and you?” He glanced frowningly at the three cars.

Rothesby looked guilty at that. “Ye-es,” he hazarded. “There were the kitchen staff and the groundskeeper, but after we took their statements, and after the blood was found—they wanted to take off. We couldn’t get them to spend another night in these woods. They’re staying at a motel back before the old Everwood town, about forty minutes away.”

Blade’s expression didn’t change, but somehow the air around him seemed to get heavier. “You didn’t think we’d need to speak to them?”

“I couldn’t keep them here against their will,” Rothesby argued piteously. “They’re not suspects, they’re not under arrest, and… according to their statements, they didn’t see anything useful. Once they decided to leave, I couldn’t make them stay.”

Trouble decided now was a good time to change the subject. “Right,” he said, cracking his neck. “You might as well show us around.” He glanced up at the sinking sun: it was only four-thirty, but somehow the air was becoming cooler, as if the growing, bristling shadows were sapping the ground of heat. “We’ve got to work fast if we don’t want to lose this light.”

#

They reviewed the crime scenes, but nothing stood out to Blade and Trouble any more than it had to the officers who came before them. Prihine hadn’t taken anything from her cabin—not even a flashlight—to indicate that she planned to leave or even go on a walk. She’d driven here in the same car as her cousin and friend, so it wasn’t as if she’d driven off in a vehicle. And there was the bloody handprint on a tree two miles from her cabin, just where Rothesby said it would be.

“We’ll have to call forensics in,” Blade said to Trouble, bending to take pictures in situ with the old point-and-snap from his car. “If her blood isn’t anywhere on file, they’ll have to analyze what they get from her parents.” Even though the area had been cordoned off and a kind of tarpaulin stretched overhead to protect the evidence, he also—very carefully—took a swab of the blood with the kit he kept in his trunk. There was no telling how long it would take for a forensics team to get here, and in a remote forest like this—with unpredictable wildlife, the elements, and the weather—things could degrade beyond usefulness very quickly. Already the little heel prints that Rothesby claimed were Prihine’s were fading as the mud on the path dried and turned pale. There was only a confused line of them, curving unsteadily, for about six feet before they stopped. In no time at all, it would be as if they had never existed in the first place.  

There was the ribbon, too, dove-gray silk fluttering in the wind like a rippling flag. Rothesby was right—someone had tied it there on purpose, in a bow like the kind you put on a Christmas present—but Trouble could no more sense the “wrongness” of the thing than he could understand why Rothesby looked so nervous. The deputy kept twisting his neck to look at the woods around them, as if he expected some sort of primordial beast to come lurching out of the thickening shadows. It made Trouble nervous, too—if only because he hoped Rothesby didn’t have an itchy trigger finger.

The man got even more tightly-wound when they got back to Blade’s car, only to find that his two-way radio wasn’t getting reception.

“Of course it wouldn’t,” Blade finally snapped at Rothesby, who was wringing his hands in the background, utterly silent but still managing to project sheer panic at them, his tension as heavy and battering as a trapped bat. “The nearest repeater tower has to be miles away. If your sheriff’s station is two hours out…” He made a slight noise of disgust, as if belatedly realizing the futility of arguing with poor Rothesby. He looked at Trouble and said, “We’ll have to go back to the highway for it to work.”

“There’s a landline, isn’t there?” Trouble asked, cocking his head at the Great Hall. “That’s how they called the sheriff’s guys in the first place.”

“Or,” Rothesby began eagerly, “I could go back to the station and call it in myself. I was going to start heading back soon anyway…”

Exasperated, they let him scurry off, primarily so he’d get out of their hair; he promised elatedly that he’d come back bright and early in the morning. Blade still went into the Great Hall for the landline anyway—he didn’t trust Rothesby to remember the number he’d given him—and Trouble, while Blade was on the phone, decided to pay his own call to their remaining witnesses.

#

The detectives, at least, seemed more useful than the miserable county deputies.

Ayla had to admit to being impressed by the look of them. Their eyes were hard and sharp, bright as falcons’, taking in every detail even when they were trying to politely pretend they weren’t. Detective Alder, the shorter one, was of average height, stocky but fit and dense with muscle, with good shoulders and close-cut blond hair. He looked like a boxer, or maybe a fighter pilot. She’d been expecting some smarmy, gelled city-slicker in a suit, but this guy had rough, blunt features and intense blue eyes, a battered leather jacket and the kind of presence that left heat streaks in the air where he walked. When he talked, his accent was all inner-city Haven, subtle but deliberate, like a challenge. She got the feeling he’d had a rough time of it, growing up. Maybe he was a kindred spirit, in that sense.

The other guy, Detective Bronwyn, was closer to being the tailored, formal city detective from her imagination, with a suit and everything, but other than that, he was even harder to get a read on than his partner. He was handsome in a lean, fine-boned way, with dark eyes like chips of obsidian and a very serious, intent manner, listening to everything with an air of utmost gravity and alertness, and he had the crisp, polished tones of someone from a well-mannered family. But his hair was also terrible and he moved like he was constantly prepared for you to charge him and he was readying five different techniques to put you in the ground, which made people uneasy. Ayla got the feeling that it was his partner who did all the talking, which turned out true enough.

They—really, Trouble—got her in a room alone and asked her all of the standard questions again. When had she last seen Prihine, did Prihine say or do anything unusual over the last few days, what had made Ayla decide to go looking for her, why there… By this point, Ayla felt as if there were locusts boiling under her skin, all of this fidgety, irritating energy wanting to burst out in a kind of scream. This can’t be happening, she kept thinking stupidly, sitting there hot-eyed under the glowing, moth-bumped lights of Cabin #1, where they were all staying tonight. This can’t be happening, it can’t be. Not at Camp Everwood, not during her first summer, not on this job that she actually liked and which was totally fucked now that she’d gone and lost the camp’s bloody owner…

She wouldn’t get in trouble for all of this, could she? Surely no one would hold her liable—not criminally responsible, or anything like that? Sure, she was technically in charge of Prihine’s safety, but she wasn’t a freaking Secret Service member: no one would have expected her to track the girl into the woods at night when everyone was supposed to be asleep, right? She hadn’t thought she needed to peek in on the bunks like she did with her campers: these were three fully-grown adult women, for God’s sake! She’d assumed they wanted their privacy, not for her to lurk on them like Igor checking in on his slumbering master. She’d have been sued if they caught her standing over their beds, gazing down into their faces, Ohhh, so sorry, madams, I was just making sure you were safe and sound and asleep…

Mostly she was fretting about Prihine, and trying to take her mind off of that. She liked the Everwood, always had, but even if one didn’t buy into the stories, there were wolves, and steep ravines, and bears and snakes and poisonous plants…

Her attention suddenly snapped back, caught by something Trouble had said. “What’d you say?”

He raised his eyebrows at her, but repeated in a mild enough tone: “Does anyone live around here?”

“No idea. Not along the road, clearly, but deeper in…” The Everwood was a tangled, ancient place, and before the Naveens had bought it, it had been perennial witness to many stories. Settlers and pioneers, hunters and campers, clandestine lovers and adventurous children… No, don’t think about that. “A lot of this land isn’t monitored or patrolled in any way, so there could always be houses way further in, off-the-grid type of stuff, and no one would ever know. Not if there was no official road that led there.” In fact, she remembered one spring night a few months back, she’d seen a wisp of smoke curling up through the trees, and wondered if it had been a camper’s bonfire, but had seen no glint of open flame… And then, a few weeks later, smoke again in the same spot.

Trouble made a little chicken scratch mark in his notepad when she described this. “Which direction did you see it in?”

Ayla told him. And then, suddenly: “And you know about Thurl, right?”

They both glanced quizzically at her, and immediately she regretted saying anything at all, feeling foolish for having even thought of it. She sank down into her seat, folding her arms, but Trouble said genially, “Who’s that now?”

Ayla felt an unwelcome embarrassment heating her cheeks. Just three weeks ago, she’d caught a young girl, little Anabeth, weeping one night alone in her bunk while her friends toasted marshmallows outside.

“They were talking about Th-Th-Thurl!” she’d gibbered at the time, her face shiny with genuine, hysterical tears. “Even th-though C-Counselor R-Raven said we weren’t supposed to!”

Ayla had hidden a grin. They’d actually talked about this at her own orientation. It was customary for campers to exchange ghost stories, passing the same half-dozen tellings on from generation to generation. Some told them with a smirk, a kind of glee at the opportunity to instill fear in others; others spoke of them with a hushed reverence, as if afraid that keeping the terrible knowledge to themselves would somehow doom them, so they had to disseminate the information as widely as possible. “But the little ones get so scared,” her director at the time had said. “So, please, let’s curtail the ghost stories.”

Only Thurl was no ghost story—not exactly. “He lived around here somewhere like fifty years ago,” Ayla told the detectives. “I guess he was the descendant of settlers, pioneers, who’d settled in these woods in a kind of commune not too far from here. One day Thurl ran off into the woods to live on his own: he didn’t fit in, the others rejected him, or there was some sort of religious conflict or something like that. Or maybe he killed someone, I don’t know. Anyway, he went off into the woods, and his community thought they’d seen the last of him. Only they hadn’t. He’d come back, periodically, every year, to ritually slaughter more of them. He’d say that he’d become a part of the forest, that it was making him do it.”

“No way,” Trouble said, in an unguarded tone of naked incredulity.

Ayla jutted her chin out stubbornly. “You can look it up. He was eventually arrested, shipped off to a prison three hundred miles away from here. He died there. But the ugly stain of him remained. Some survivors of that commune always claimed that he’d replaced himself with a changeling, so it wasn’t the real Thurl they’d arrested. Others claim his ghost still walks these woods to this day.”

Another blank silence. “Is that who you think took Prihine?” Blade asked finally. His tone was even, but she got the feeling he was mocking her. “The ghost of Thurl?”

Ayla bristled. “No way! I’m not an—but it could be connected, couldn’t it? That story’s well-known in these parts. If there is someone living out there, and they know the story—”

“A copycat,” Trouble said thoughtfully. He didn’t look exactly convinced, but he was turning the idea over in his head. “Maybe a devotee, maybe even a relative. Maybe he had a son who wants to continue the legacy.”

Ayla took a little breath, thinking it at the same time as he did. Those kids who disappeared…

Blade made a sharp, abortive gesture; this had officially strayed too far into the speculative territory for his liking. “We’ll expand the search area in the morning, get the teams to check for homes in the forest rather than just for evidence of Prihine,” he said. Then he locked eyes on Ayla. “Last thing. You’ve been here since the camp was first completed, haven’t you? And you grew up in the area.”

“Not in Everwood town,” Ayla put in then. “The next town over.”

Blade made a faintly impatient twitch of his hand, as if to brush the protest away like a cobweb. “Have you ever come across anyone who was unhappy about the camp, who stands out as someone who might have been an enemy to Prihine or the Naveens?”

Ayla chewed on that for a moment. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, but…

This was a missing persons case. Maybe—though she hoped to God not—maybe even a murder case.

“Yeah,” she said heavily, taking a deep breath. “I do know someone like that.”