“Where are you going?” Krystal asks, eyeing my backpack.
“Canoe trip.”
“Alone?” Sasha says.
“That’s the plan.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Each year, an average of eighty-seven people die in canoe and kayak accidents. I looked it up.”
“I’m a good swimmer. I think I’ll be okay.”
“It’s probably safer if someone is with you.”
Next to her, Krystal slaps her comic book shut and sighs. “What Miss Wikipedia here is trying to say is that we want to come along. We’re bored, and we’ve never been canoeing.”
“Yeah,” Sasha says. “That’s what I meant.”
“That’s not a good idea. It’s a long trip. And there’ll be hiking involved.”
“I’ve never hiked, either,” Krystal says. “Please, can we come?”
Sasha bats her eyes at me, the lashes fluttering behind her glasses. “Pretty please?”
My plan was to cross the lake, find the spot marked on Vivian’s map, and proceed from there. Sasha and Krystal will only slow me down. Nevertheless, a sense of duty tugs at me. Franny told me the purpose of reopening Camp Nightingale was to give the campers new experiences. That remains true, even if I’m currently pissed at Franny.
“Fine,” I tell them. “Put on life vests and help me with the canoe.”
The girls do as they’re told, grabbing dirty life vests that hang from the sides of the canoe racks. They slip them on and help me lift a canoe off one of the racks. It’s heavier than it looks and so unwieldy that we come close to dropping it. We remain a sorry sight as we awkwardly carry the canoe to the lake’s edge, Krystal holding up the front and me taking the rear. Sasha is in the middle, hidden beneath the overturned boat, just a pair of knobby legs shuffling toward the water.
Our struggle is enough to tear Miranda’s attention away from Chet. She trots over to us and says, “Where are you going?”
“Canoeing,” Sasha says.
“And hiking,” I add, hoping they’ll be dissuaded by the fact that there’s more to this trip than just paddling across the lake.
Instead, Miranda frowns. “Without me?”
“Do you want to come along?”
“Not really, but . . .”
Her voice trails off, the sentence unfinished but its meaning perfectly clear. She doesn’t want to be the only one left behind. I know the feeling.
“Go get changed,” I tell her. “We’ll wait for you.”
Another person means another canoe. So while Miranda runs back to the cabin to fetch shorts and a pair of sneakers, Krystal, Sasha, and I wrangle a second canoe to the water’s edge. When Miranda returns, we climb in, she and Krystal in one canoe, Sasha and me in the other. Using oars, we push off and start to drift out onto the lake.
The bulk of the rowing in my boat falls to me. I sit in the back, paddling on alternating sides of the canoe. Sasha sits up front, her own paddle across her lap, dipping it into the water whenever I need to straighten things out.
“How deep do you think it is here?” she says.
“Pretty deep in parts.”
“A hundred feet?”
“Maybe.”
Sasha’s eyes widen behind her glasses as her free hand unconsciously clasps her life vest. “You’re a good swimmer, though, right?”
“I am,” I say. “Although not as good as some people I know.”
It takes us a half hour to cross the lake. We slow when the water’s surface is darkened by tall pines along the shoreline, their reflections jagged and unwelcoming. Just beneath the surface are the remnants of trees submerged when the valley was flooded. Stripped of leaves and whitewashed by time, their branches seem to be grasping for fresh air that’s just beyond their reach. It’s a discomfiting sight. All those blanched limbs tangled together as mud-brown fish slip between them. Because the lake’s been lowered by drought, the farthest-reaching branches scrape the bottoms of the canoes, sounding like fingernails trying to scratch their way out of a coffin.
More trees jut out of the lake in front of us. Although to call them trees isn’t entirely accurate. They’re more like ghosts of trees. Bare and sun-bleached. Trapped in a limbo between water and land. Gone are their bark, their leaves, their limbs. They’ve been reduced to sad, brittle sticks.
After passing through the graveyard of trees, we come to the shore itself. Instead of the welcoming flatness Camp Nightingale was built upon, the landscape rises sharply—an ascent that eventually leads to the rounded peaks in the distance. The trees here tower over the water. Pines, mostly, their limbs connecting to form a pale green wall that undulates in the slight breeze coming off the lake.
To our right, a heap of boulders sits partway out of the water. They look out of place, like they had rolled down the mountain one by one, eventually accumulating there. Beyond them is a cliff where the land has been chipped away by the elements. Small, tenacious vines cling to the cliff wall, and mineral deposits stripe the exposed rock. Trees line the ridge atop the cliff, some leaning forward, as if they’re about to jump.
“I see something,” Miranda says, pointing to a ragged-looking structure sitting farther down the shore.
I see it, too. It’s a gazebo. Rather, it used to be. Now it’s a leaning structure of splintered wood slowly being overtaken by weeds. Its floorboards sag. Its roof sits slightly askew. While I’m not certain, I think it might be the cabin-like structure marked on Vivian’s map.
I start to row toward it. Miranda follows suit. On shore, we step out of the canoes, paddles clattering, life vests discarded. Then we drag the boats farther onto land to reduce the potential of them drifting away without us. I grab my backpack and pull out the map.
“What’s that?” Sasha asks.
“A map.”
“What does it lead to?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I frown at the woods before us. It’s dense, dark, all silence and shadows. Now that we’re on the other side of the lake, I have no idea how to proceed. Vivian’s map is short on details, and the accuracy of what she did draw is questionable at best.
I run my finger from the spot that probably-is-but-might-not-be the gazebo to the ragged triangles nearby. I assume those are rocks. Which means we need to make our way northeast until we reach them. After that, it looks to be a short walk north until I find the X.
Our route now set, I open the compass app downloaded to my phone the morning I left for camp, rotating until it points northeast. Then I snag a handful of wildflowers and, with Miranda, Sasha, and Krystal in tow, march into the forest.