Page 41 of The Girl in the Mist

There’s a heavy layer of fog over the camp when we arrive the next morning. It’s as if summer died the night of the killings and fall has set in. I called Detective Garrison while we were eating breakfast and let him know what I planned to do. There are still officers patrolling the area, so he let them know we were coming. Crime scene tape is still up around the front of the parking lot and small evidence flags are visible staked into the ground in the distance. I know they indicate where the bodies werefound.

We follow the same path we did the morning after the murders. It brings us through the stretch of woods that had seemed so beautiful and enchanted in the early sunlight of that morning. Now it’s ominous and foreboding, the mist creeping around the bottoms of the trees and settling in tendrils around the ferns. If someone wanted to create a movie set designed for effect, they couldn’t get it any better than this.

When we reach the shore, I look out over the lake. The water is choppy and gray, agitated by the disruptive weather. The boathouse is off to the side, sitting up on a slight hill and jutting down into the water with a dock that’s partially exposed and partially covered.

“I was really admiring this camp right up until now,” Xavier remarks. He gestures toward the lake. “This wholesituation.”

“It’s a summer camp, Xavier,” I say. “They pretty much all have lakes. That’s kind of part ofit.”

“Not mine,” hesays.

I turn to look at him. “You went to summer camp?”

As close as Xavier and I are, in a lot of ways, he’s still very much a mystery to me. I know next to nothing about his family and his childhood. It’s like he sprung fully formed into the universe one day and roamed around until we met. I’m always fascinated when I discover a new little tidbit about him, like that when he was a boy he took a bunch of glass soda bottles, foil, popsicle sticks, and other bits he reclaimed and turned them into a group of animal sculptures he called the Trash Menagerie. But I just can’t imagine him in summer camp. I can pretty much believe anything about Xavier, but this one is challenging.

“Yep. I got very good at archery. We did not canoe.”

I’m wondering if ‘they’ did not canoe or if Xavier did not canoe.

We walk down the shore toward the boat house. Its dusty blue color and white trim make it look like a tiny version of a house in a New England fishing town. There’s a door on the side and when Sam turns the knob, it opens without hesitation. Inside, the canoes and kayaks are sitting on their frames, ready to be used but likely never will be again. They’ll just sit here like the rest of the camp, still and emptied. Not of the physical signs that something was once here. Only the life.

“This is the worst part of any abandoned place,” Xavier says.

“Boats?” Sam asks.

“Things. Possessions. A structure can just be a structure. It might hold, always maintain a little of the feeling of what that place once was, but it’s just a structure. It could have meant anything to anyone. It could have meant nothing. But this,” he runs his hand over the edge of one of the boats, then walks over to a wooden workbench attached to the inside of the wall and picks up a pair of sunglasses, sets them down, then touches his fingertips to a discarded sweatshirt balled up in the corner. “These. They belonged to someone. They are bits of a person’slife.

“This was a moment in that life. This, right here, happened to someone. They stood in this space, took off their sunglasses, tossed aside their sweatshirt, and took a boat out. But they never finished the chain of events. They didn’t come back for either of these things. Something made them forget. So the things are just here. Waiting. It’s that way all over this camp. Time stopped and there are things all over to show for it. This place is full of brokenminutes.”

My mind goes to the burn on Maude’s arm and a chill rolls through me. I think of everything she left behind here, and for the first time, I wonder what happened to it all. Who was responsible for coming onto the ground and cleaning it up? Who washed away the blood? When they walked into the cabins and camp buildings, what did they do with all of the possessions left behind by the campers andstaff?

I wonder if any of the families were allowed to come here and collect what the survivors left or if someone gathered it up and brought it to them. And the ones who never left. Who collected their things and gave them to the parents who would never be able to welcome them back from summer camp.

Some of it is still here.

“I wonder where exactly the body was found,” I say, walking past the boats and down onto the dock.

Here it’s still contained within the building, making it ideal for bringing vessels back when it’s raining or for instructors to have somewhere to watch without standing in the oppressive sun. Just beyond it, the dock stretches out into the water. It’s not the type of dock that sits high up over the water. Even when the water level is at its lowest, the dock is designed to rest very close to the surface. It makes for easy getting into and out of boats or just the water for swimming.

“He said under the dock in the boathouse,” Sam says. “I’m guessing that means the portion of the dock that’s still covered by thebuilding.”

“Here,” Xavier says, pointing down toward his feet like he’s indicating something. “These planks are newer than theothers.”

I go to where he’s standing and look down. Most of the wood of the dock is well-worn and weathered, reduced to an almost silvery gray color by wind, water, and time. But the pieces at his feet stand out against the discoloration. They aren’t fresh, they’ve been sitting here for some time, but they are nowhere near as old as the others.

“They removed planks of wood to get her body out,” I say. “This is where itwas.”

I walk further down the dock and peer down at the water. The distance between the two looks greater now that I’m standing directly over it. A dark gap between the two is still no more than ten feet at the highest point, but the coloration on the legs shows that this is the highest the water is likely to come.

I go back through the building and exit the back door to walk down the shore toward the water. I lean to look under the dock to see what it looks like from the outside. Several dark masses rise up out of the water and a quick glance around the edge of the lake tells me they are rocks.

“Look,” I say to Sam and Xavier as they make their way down to join me. “Those dark things in the water under the dock. Not the pilings, but the bigger things. They look like those rocks.” I point out the places on the land where rocky outcroppings break the shoreline. I can imagine campers climbing on those and using them to dive out further into the water or to stretch out and soak in the sun. “They could be why the body wentunnoticed.”

“He said she was in a burlap sack,” Sam says. “Suspended from thedock.”

I nod. “He didn’t specify how, but those wood planks aren’t right up against each other. There’s some space between them to allow for warping in the weather. Not much, but enough to thread something through. But that would probably have been noticed by someone searching thebuilding.”

“The pilings,” Xavier says.

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