The Sign in the Smoke (Nancy Drew Diaries Book 12) (13 page)

“Oh,” she said, looking away. “Well, I hope you figure it out soon.”

Me too,
I thought, patting Harper on the back.
Me too, kid.

I was at a campfire, and Bess and George were sitting across the fire on different logs, but I couldn’t get to them. There was a terrible wailing in the woods, like a young girl crying. It went on and on. Then, suddenly, the smoke from the campfire grew tendrils that formed arms and legs and a horrible smoke-bearded face! The smoke creature lunged toward me, snagging me in its long, spindly arms. I screamed, but no sound came out, and nobody noticed. I felt panic welling up in my chest as it lifted me up, carrying me away from the campfire, into the woods, where the wailing was getting louder and louder. Just as I was finally able to get my voice out—and let out a real scream—the smoke monster suddenly tossed me in the air, and I was spinning through the darkness, falling and falling, until with a SPLASH I was submerged in the icy lake. . . .

“Nancy!” Something grabbed my arm and shook it, and I shot straight up in bed, the shock of the icy water still making my heart pound.

“
What?
” I cried, startled. “What is it? What?”

Kiki, who’d been shaking me awake, jumped back, startled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, waving for her to come close again. “I was just having this awful dream. . . .”

“Nancy, you have to get up,” she replied, all business. “The cabin is flooding!”

I SAT UP IN BED
and looked down, and that was when I noticed the other girls, shouting and splashing through the foot or so of water that covered the floor. Maya opened the front door, and all at once the water level decreased as a stream of water escaped.

“Oh my gosh! What
happened 
?” I asked, jumping down from my bed. I hit the floor with an icy
splash
and shrieked. The water was freezing!

“Someone turned on all the showers and sinks,” Maya replied. She was soaking wet from the waist down. “Cece got up to use the bathroom, and she found it.”

“Did someone turn everything off?” I asked, sloshing through the water to the bathroom.

“Yup,” Winnie replied. “Maya did it. Then she came to wake all of us up, but you were sleeping pretty hard.”

Sleeping pretty hard.
I remembered my nightmare and sighed. Clearly the whole situation at Camp Cedarbark was stressing me out. And now this—was this one more weird event to add to the list?

“All right,” I said, taking stock of the situation. All the girls in the bunk were up, standing before me in various states of soaking-ness. “Let’s get out of the cabin, then. We need to tell Deborah what happened.”

“We do?” asked Cece. “What if this was just a prank?”

“It’s a pretty destructive prank,” I replied. “Flooding the cabin could cause a lot of damage, not to mention that someone could have gotten hurt if they slipped or something. No, I think this is bigger than a prank.” I paused, watching Harper carefully arrange all her books on Kiki’s top bunk. “Harper? Come on. Your books will be okay.”

Harper glanced at me, clearly not convinced. “I don’t want them to fall into the water,” she said. “They’re first editions.”

“They’ll be fine,” I said, suppressing a frustrated sigh. “Come on, guys. Let’s get Deborah and start cleaning all this up.”

I half expected to see a commotion when we got out of the cabin—water spilling out of the other cabin, other counselors and campers lining up in the clearing—but we were met with dead silence. It looked like this “prank” was aimed at Juniper Cabin. Could I have been the target?

I asked Maya to watch the girls while I went to wake up Deborah and Miles.

I pounded on their front door for a few minutes. Finally I heard noise inside, and Deborah appeared in a terry-cloth bathrobe over a cotton nightgown. I wasn’t surprised to see her and not Miles.

“What’s up?” she asked.

I explained what had happened, and Deborah’s expression turned serious. “It only happened to your cabin?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She let out a deep sigh. “Do you think it’s related to the other things?”

I breathed in. “Yeah,” I said. “I think someone has figured out that I’m onto them.”

In the end, Sam the sports counselor was also woken up by the commotion and came over to help. It took all of us about an hour of mopping and pushing the water out the door to get the cabin dry enough to go back inside to sleep. In the morning, we were understandably a little cranky. Breakfast was quieter than usual, with us silently chewing our pancakes, many of us staring into space.

“Why would someone come after us?” Maya asked suddenly, her eyebrows raised in confusion. “Only us?”

I could tell that the prank had rattled my normally optimistic CIT, but I didn’t know how to comfort her. Who
would
target only us? Someone who knew I was getting closer. Maybe Bella? Or . . . Miles? But it was hard to imagine a grown man sneaking into our bunk to flood it. It just seemed . . . juvenile.

“We don’t really know what it was, Maya,” I said slowly, but I couldn’t help looking across the mess hall to the eleven-year-olds’ table, where Bella was laughing so hard she looked like she was snorting. “Don’t worry. Will you guys excuse me a minute? I’m going to talk to Deborah.”

I stood up and walked over to the table by the kitchen where Deborah was eating with Sam, Taylor, and Sandy. Deborah looked up as I approached. “Hi, Nancy,” she said, pulling out the empty seat next to her. “Come sit down.”

Sam looked up curiously. She was wearing her ever-present Yankees cap. “Oh, hey. Did your bunk all get back to sleep last night?”

I nodded. “Eventually,” I said.

Deborah quickly shoveled her last bite of pancakes into her mouth and touched my shoulder. “Can I speak to you privately for just a moment, Nancy?”

“Sure.”

I waved at the other counselors and the lifeguard, then waited while Deborah bused her tray and led me out the front door to the main clearing.

She took a deep breath. “I’m having trouble with something.”

“What’s that?” I asked. There already seemed to be plenty of trouble at the camp. . . . Was something even stranger going on that I didn’t know about?

Deborah looked pained. “The big end-of-camp campout is coming up,” she said. “You know, it’s supposed to be tomorrow night.”

I did know the campout was coming . . . but it surprised even me that it was only a night away. Where had the time gone? I felt like my campers and I were still getting to know one another.

“Wow,” I said, having a sense where she might be going with this. “And you’re . . .”

“I’m scared something else will happen,” Deborah said plainly. “Up until last night, I could explain everything away as pranks gone wrong. The sleeping bags in the lake, some kid playing silly games in the water. But last night was different. It could have caused major damage to the property. And . . . with the water element, it
does
all seem to lead back to the lake, and what happened to Lila.”

I nodded slowly. “And what happened to her happened at the campout,” I filled in.

“Exactly.” Deborah paused. “Even if these
are
just pranks . . . I feel like I can’t jeopardize my campers’ safety by putting them in a situation where someone might try something stupid.”

I raised my eyebrows. “But the campout is such a big deal to the campers. I know
my
bunk has been talking about it nonstop since they got here.”

Deborah sighed. “That’s the problem.” She looked me in the eye. “You know everything that’s happened so far, Nancy, and the whole history. Do
you
think I should cancel it?”

Before I could respond, the mess hall door opened and Bella stepped out. She glanced at us. “Oh, hi. I just realized I forgot my bug repellent this morning, and I’ve already got, like, a million mosquito bites. I was just running back to the cabin to get it. . . .” She trailed off, her eyes narrowing as she looked from me to Deborah. “What are you guys talking about?”

“Just a minor incident that happened last night,” Deborah said stiffly. “It doesn’t concern you.”

“Oh, you mean the flooding of Nancy’s bunk?” said Bella. “I heard all about it from her campers. That’s a real shame, Nancy. Gosh, it’s like something’s cursing this place this summer, huh?” She tossed her head and headed off toward her cabin, leaving her snarky words lingering in the air.

I watched her until she disappeared into the cabin, then turned back to Deborah. “Don’t cancel the campout yet,” I told her. “I have a lead.”

The sun was high in the sky as Maya and I led our campers through the woods on the southwest edge of camp property. “What other leaves can we find?” I asked. I already held a fistful of different-shaped leaves that we’d matched to a chart Deborah had given us. So far on our nature hike, we’d seen six kinds of bugs and seven different species of birds, and we’d found poop—we called it “scat” at camp—from a raccoon and a rabbit.

“Here’s a funny one!” Cece knelt down and picked up a leaf from the ground that had rounded edges. “It looks like it has polka dots.”