“Better this than face the wrath of Mindy.”
“Want to know a secret?” Casey says. “Her real name is Melinda. She goes by Mindy to be more like Franny.”
“I get the feeling Franny doesn’t like her very much.”
“I can see why. She’s the kind of girl I went out of my way to avoid in high school.” Casey blows out a stream of smoke and watches it languidly float in the night air. “Honestly, though, it’s probably for the best that she’s here. Without her, it would be open season on poor Chet. These girls would eat him alive.”
“But they’re all so young.”
“I’m a teacher,” Casey says. “Trust me, girls that age are just as full of raging hormones as boys. Remember how you were back then. I saw the way you fawned over Theo. Not that I blamed you. He was a fine-looking young man.”
“Have you seen him now?”
Casey gives a slow, knowing nod. “Why is it that men only look better with age? It’s completely unfair.”
“But he’s still just as friendly,” I say. “I didn’t expect that.”
“Because of what you said last time you were here?”
“And because of what people are saying now. I saw some of the responses to your Facebook post. They were pretty brutal.”
“Ignore them.” Casey gives her hand a casual flip, as if brushing away the smoke still spouting from her cigarette. “Most of those women are just adult versions of the bitchy teenagers they were when they went here.”
“A few of them mentioned that this place gave them the creeps,” I say. “Something about a legend.”
“It’s just a silly campfire tale.”
“So you’ve heard it?”
“I’ve told it,” Casey says. “That doesn’t mean I think the story is true. I can’t believe you never heard it.”
“I guess I wasn’t here long enough.”
Casey looks at me, the cigarette held between her lips, its trail of smoke making her squint.
“The story is that there was a village here,” she says. “Before the lake was made. Some will say it was full of deaf people. I heard it was a leper colony.”
“A leper colony? Was an ancient Indian burial ground too much of a cliché?”
“I didn’t make up the story,” Casey snaps. “Now, do you want to hear it or not?”
I do, no matter how ridiculous it seems. So I nod for her to continue.
“Deaf village and leper colony aside, the rest of the story is the same,” Casey says. “It’s that Franny’s grandfather saw this valley and decided on the spot it was where he was going to create his lake. But there was one problem. The village sat right in the middle of it. When Buchanan Harris approached the villagers and offered to buy their land, they refused. They were a small, tight-knit community, ostracized by the rest of the world. This was their home, and they weren’t going to sell it. This made Mr. Harris angry. He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. So when he increased his offer and the villagers again refused, he bought all the land surrounding them instead. Then he built his dam and flooded the valley at the stroke of midnight, knowing the water would wash away the village and that everyone who lived there would drown.”
She lowers her voice, speaking slowly. Full storyteller mode.
“The village is still there, deep below Lake Midnight. And the people who drowned now haunt the woods and the lake. They appear at midnight, rising from the water and roaming the forest. Anyone unlucky enough to encounter them gets dragged into the lake and pulled to the bottom, where they quickly drown. Then they become one of the ghosts, cursed to search the woods for all eternity looking for more victims.”
I give her an incredulous look. “And that’s what people think happened to Vivian, Natalie, and Allison?”
“No one truly believes that,” Casey says. “But bad things have happened here, with no explanation. Franny’s husband, for example. He was a champion swimmer. Almost made it to the Olympics. Yet he drowned. I heard that Franny’s grandmother—the first wife of Buchanan Harris—also drowned here. So when Vivian and the others disappeared, some people said it was the ghosts of Lake Midnight. Or else the survivors.”
“Survivors?”
“It’s been said that a handful of villagers escaped the rising waters and fled into the hills. There they stayed, living off the land, rebuilding the village in a remote section of the woods where no one could find them. The whole time, they held a grudge against the Harris family, passing it on to their descendants. Those descendants are still there, hidden somewhere in the woods. And on nights when the moon is full, they sneak down to the land that used to belong to them and exact their revenge. Vivian, Natalie, and Allison were just three of their victims.”
It turns out that Casey’s an expert tale-spinner, for as she finishes, I feel a chill in the air. A light frisson that makes me look to the woods behind her, half expecting to see either a ghostly figure or mutant forest-dweller emerging from the tree line.
“What do you really think happened to them?” I say.
“I think they got lost in the woods. Vivian was always wandering off.” Casey drops her cigarette and grinds it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Which is why I’ve always felt partly responsible for what happened. I was a camp counselor. It was my job to make sure all of you were safe. And I regret not paying more attention to you and what was going on in that cabin.”
I stare at her, surprised. “Were there things going on I didn’t know about?”
“I don’t know,” Casey says as she fumbles in her pocket for another cigarette. “Maybe.”
“Like what? You were friends with Vivian. Surely you noticed something.”
“I wouldn’t say the two of us were friends. I was a senior camper her first summer and then came back to work as a counselor the two years after that. She was always a troublemaker, but charming enough to get away with it.”
Oh, I know that all too well. Vivian excelled at charm. That and lying were her two greatest skills.
“But something about her seemed off that last summer,” Casey continues. “Not majorly different. Nothing that someone who only knew her casually would notice. But she wasn’t the same. She seemed distracted.”
I think of the strange map Vivian had drawn and the even stranger photo of the woman with long hair.
“By what?”
Casey shrugs and looks away again as she irritably puffs out more smoke. “I don’t know, Emma. Like I said, we weren’t that close.”