True Blue (3 page)

“If I let the two of you lead a cabin on your own,” said Mrs. Keefer, the camp director, “do you think you can manage to keep the campers alive?”

“Alive and happy,” Casey said. “Really, we can do this.”

Of course we can do this, I think, as I watch the camper chaos sort itself out. We’ve been coming to Ten Willows since we were children—camp in the summer, youth weekends in the winter, leadership training, endless volunteer hours cleaning and painting when camp is out.

After everything we’ve done for this camp, I figure we are owed this time to hang out together.

If only the campers don’t get in the way too much.

Casey appears in front of me with eight little girls in tow, including Stephanie. She stands out from the rest. She looks like a doll in her Tinker Bell t-shirt, or an ornament on a cake. She knows it, too. The other girls are looking at Casey and me to see what we will tell them to do next. Stephanie is checking out her reflection in the glass of the camp craft display case, twirling her blonde hair into ringlets.

We load up with bedrolls and backpacks and head off to our cabin. By the time everyone finds their assigned bunks, chooses the cabin name (the Butterflies) and listens to Casey and me go over the camp rules, it’s time to get ready for lunch. We herd the kids outside the cabin and Casey does a body count. She comes up one body short and blows two short blasts on her whistle.

“Buddies!” she calls out.

We’ve paired them up. Alison, Stephanie’s buddy, is alone.

“Where’s Stephanie?”

We all look around the cabin and in the washrooms, calling her name but seeing no sign of her. She pops up twenty minutes later.

“I had no idea you were looking for me,” she says, smiling sweetly and tossing her hair.

We laugh it off. Except for the cold grilled-cheese sandwiches we have to endure, and the Johnny Appleseed grace we have to sing in front of the whole camp, there are no other consequences.

She disappears again after lunch, cutting into the Butterflies’ swim time by fifteen minutes. After swimming, we spend another fifteen minutes shivering in our wet bathing suits, looking for Stephanie. Casey finally spots her hiding behind a canoe, watching us and laughing.

“You need to stay with us,” Casey tells her. “We need to know where you are. You don’t want to keep everybody waiting, do you?”

“If she wants to hide, let’s let her hide,” I tell Casey. “She’ll get tired of it if we ignore her.”

But Casey is determined to win her over. She tries talking with her before lights out.

“We want to get to know you,” she tells Stephanie. “How can we do that if you keep running off?”

“I don’t care if you get to know me or not,” Stephanie says. “And it’s your job to keep track of me, not my job to keep track of you.”

Casey doesn’t give up.

“You need to stay with the group because we’re going to do all sorts of fun things. If you’re not with us, you’ll miss out, and we want you to have a really great time at this camp.”

Little Stephanie just smiles sweetly and chirps, “I am having a good time.”

“That’s enough,” my father said. “I don’t like your tone. If there’s anything else you want to know, I’d like our lawyer to be present. We’ll come to the station.”

“That’s not necessary,” Mom said, but my father ushered Detective Bowen out the door, which he closed and locked behind her. He used the phone in the kitchen to call Gerald Grey, his golfing buddy and lawyer. All the time he was talking, I kept my eyes on my orange juice because I knew my mother had her eyes on me.

“He’ll meet us at the police station in one hour.” Dad made his announcement, then retreated to his basement office.

I pushed back my chair and went to my room. But I couldn’t stay there because I was afraid Mom would come in and I’d be trapped. I had to get out. But I’d have to go by the kitchen, which was at the center of the house. No escape through either the front or back door without going past her.

I paced back and forth.

My bedroom was small. There was room for a single bed, a desk, and a dresser—that was all. I’d rearranged it a dozen different ways over the years, but nothing gave me more space.

Casey’s room wasn’t any bigger, but her father had built her a bug lab in the garage, so she hung out there most of the time.

There was no extra space for me in my house. We had another bedroom, larger than mine, which my mother used for all her crafts and projects. She did a lot of shift work at the nursing home and rarely slept when my father and I did. When she did sleep, it was on a single cot beside her projects. My father slept in their bedroom, surrounded by the same matching set they’d bought when they were first married. Once a year my father took out the tin of wood wax and rubbed it until it shone.

My bedroom furniture was bought when I graduated from the crib. It was grown-up furniture, the same style as my parents’ bedroom set, solid and unbreakable. Once I put Snow White stickers on the drawers of the desk. I had to spend three hours steaming them off and applying a new coat of wax, under my father’s supervision.

“Good things will last if you take care of them,” he said. “This furniture will still look like new when you leave here and set up your own home.” I was five at the time and had no notion of leaving, but when he said that, it felt like I was already halfway out the door.

I paced around in the few feet of space between the bed and the dresser, and thought about Casey, pacing back and forth in her cell.

And then I had another thought—a thought that would fix everything and bring Casey back. She’d be so happy, and her parents would be so happy, that they would all let me go to Australia with her.

I would rescue Casey from jail.

I would bike to the police station, burst in there, and create some kind of diversion like setting off the fire alarm. And while all the cops were running around like chickens with no heads, I’d pull Casey out of her cell and we’d hit the road. We’d find a good hiding place and lay low for a bit. Stephanie’s real killer would be found, and life would go back to normal.

Did I think the police would just run for their lives and leave the prisoners in their cells? Was I picturing a cell out of a Wild West jail, where the key hung from a nail just outside the cell door? I don’t know what I was thinking. I was a little crazy, at that moment.

Crazy or not, at least it made me feel bold enough to leave my bedroom, stride past my disapproving mother with a quick, “I’ll meet you there,” and head out on my bike.

My bike wasn’t really my bike. It was my father’s bike, but he no longer rode it. I used to have my own bike, a very nice one—a silver Schwinn, very sleek, very expensive. I used to have a lot of expensive things. Mom would buy them for me on mad shopping sprees. She’d max out the credit cards. I’d use the things until she crashed, then Dad would return what he could and sell the rest to keep us from drowning in debt. When I was younger I thought my father was always angry with me, the way he took away the nice things my mother gave me. It was years before I understood.

It felt good to be moving, but I had forgotten about the Galloway Labor Day parade. I started off pedaling at full steam but ran smack into roadblocks and baton-twirlers. I had to try several different routes, and by the time I managed to navigate my way through to the right area of town, I felt shaky and uncertain, a little freaked out about the whole thing. By the time I got to the police station, I was less and less sure about my plan.

I rode around and around in the parking lot, getting sweaty both from the sun and from the thought of the magnitude of what I was about to do. I wanted to keep biking until my nerves caught up with my ideas, but I started getting funny looks from people at the Dairy Queen next door. Also, time was passing, and my parents would be at the station soon. If I was going to act, it had to be now. Even then, I almost biked away. But I said to myself, “No, you never stick to anything, You’re not leaving here without at least trying to do what you came here to do.”

I locked my bike to the chain-link fence and went into the police station. I’d find a fire alarm, pull it, and then go hide until the building had cleared out. After that, it would be easy to get to the cells and let Casey out.

I started to feel lucky because there was a fire alarm pull station right inside the foyer, right beside the rack of leaflets about elder abuse.

I raised my hand to get ready to pull the alarm, then I realized it wasn’t the same kind we had at school. I didn’t know how to work this one and had to lean in to read the instructions, which were written in tiny print. I was almost at the point of figuring it out when the door opened.

“Just grab and pull.” Detective Bowen stood in the doorway. “Is there a fire?”

“I just wanted…” I grabbed a leaflet with a sad old woman’s face on the front.

“School project?” Detective Bowen asked.

I nodded.

“Well, good luck with that.”

She went back into the station. I turned and went out of it, back into the sunshine. It took me a full minute to remember that school hadn’t started yet, so I couldn’t have a school project. Detective Bowen had been laughing at me.

I thought about leaving right then and not answering any more of her questions. And I would have left, but just at that moment my parents and their lawyer pulled into the parking lot. I held the door open for my mom.

“You could have changed your shirt,” Mom said as she walked past me.

The lawyer didn’t say anything. Dad took hold of the door and motioned for me to go in before he did. He didn’t say anything, either, but he did put his hand on my shoulder for a second. It wasn’t much but it was something.

August 22

Day 1, Evening

Casey and I take our problem to the Counselors’ Council. The Council is a quick meeting held each evening after the campers are in bed to sort out issues and plan programs.

The counselors who have been there all summer are too tired to get very excited about Stephanie’s behavior.

“I’ll trade you your vanisher for my bed wetter,” one of them says.

“Can we make all the kids disappear?”

The counselors who are fresh because they’d arrived later in the season, look smug—so far, all their kids are behaving.

“Encourage her to join in,” Mrs. Keefer says. “Camp is supposed to be fun. Redirect the child. Help her feel like she wants to be part of the group. Try giving her some responsibility. And I’ll have a talk with her.”

“Couldn’t we just call her mother?” I ask. “I don’t want Mrs. Glass blaming us if her precious daughter gets lost in the woods.”

Mrs. Keefer sighs then nods. The Council ends and Casey and I go with her to her office, a little room off the mess hall. She finds Stephanie’s registration form, dials the number, listens to the answering machine on the other end then hangs up without leaving a message.

“Mrs. Glass has gone to visit her brother in Regina for the week,” she says. “No point in bothering her out there. She left a local emergency contact—Stephanie’s aunt—but this is hardly an emergency. Stephanie is here with us, and its up to us to see that she doesn’t get lost in the woods.”

She says this last bit while peering over her glasses at me. Casey is the one who hears her. I’d be happy if the little brat were to disappear and stay that way. Less work.

“We’ll give her more attention,” she says to me as we head back to our cabin.

“It’s a waste of time,” I say.

But she doesn’t listen to me. She talks on and on about ways we can get Stephanie engaged with the group and feeling excited about being in camp. She is certain that her way of dealing with the kid will work.

Casey always does just what she wants to do.

Maybe it’s different in big cities, but the police station in our small town looked nothing like the police stations on television. Mr. Grey gave our names to the desk clerk, then we all sat on plastic orange chairs and waited. I started to leaf through an old copy of
Reader’s Digest
that had been left on the empty chair next to me, but Mom hissed at me to put it down and I didn’t feel like arguing with her.

The desk clerk must have given some signal to the lawyer, because we all got to our feet and headed down a hall and into a small room. We took seats around a table. When I looked up, I saw myself reflected in the one-way mirrors that lined one side of the room.

Detective Bowen came in, shook hands with Mr. Grey, and got right down to business.

“You and Casey know the property at the Ten Willows Camp quite well, don’t you? In fact, you often go there even when there is no camp in session.”

“We’ve been doing that for years,” I said. “We have permission.”

“I know you do. You are both trusted and thought of very highly by the camp administration. What do you do out there, just the two of you?”

The best times I’ve ever had in my life were when Casey and I were alone at the camp, but the private life of Dragonfly and Praying Mantis were none of Detective Bowen’s business.

“We hiked, had picnics, things like that. Casey looked for bugs and I trained. I’m on the cross-country team at school.”

“You both know the trails?”

“We can do them with our eyes closed. As a matter of fact, we’re going to trying walking on one of the trails blindfolded later this fall. That is, we planned to.”

“Who came up with that idea?”

“Casey. She suggested it when we were on a pause during the hike to the sleep-out area.”

“Is that the pause you were on because Stephanie disappeared again?”

I nodded. “That’s right. We were taking the kids across the creek on an old log that acts as a bridge. It’s not high but to little kids, it can be scary at first. When we got everyone to the other side, we did a body count. Stephanie was missing again. She reappeared ten minutes later, the way she always did. While we were waiting, we talked about how well we knew the trails, especially the Willow Trail, which was the one we were on. That’s when Casey came up with the idea.”

“When Stephanie disappeared, you didn’t go looking for her right away?” Detective Bowen asked.

“We made sure she hadn’t fallen in the water, which is just a few inches deep. But we knew she hadn’t gone far. Her buddy saw her just before we did the body count. Mrs. Keefer, the camp director, told us not to pay much attention to Stephanie’s disappearances because then she might stop doing them. So we were supposed to pause and wait fifteen minutes before starting a search. We’d tried everything else to make her stop taking off.”

“So you and Casey know the Willow Trail well?”

“Every root, every tree, every branch, pretty much.”

“Casey searched that particular trail many times after Stephanie’s final disappearance, isn’t that right?”

“Sure she did,” I said. “Casey thought Stephanie might have wandered back to the camp that way from the sleep-out, since that’s the trail we followed to get there. She searched as hard as she could. It was raining heavily that day; the rain soaked right through her rain gear, but she stayed out anyway.” It felt good to be defending my friend.

“You had to leave the sleep-out in the middle of the night to rush one of the children, Deanna Brown, to the hospital, and when you returned the next morning, you asked Casey a very strange question.”

I knew what Detective Bowen was getting at. “It was just a joke, a dumb joke.”