Clayton Dickinson is working here as handyman this summer. He's Earl's cousin, I believe, and is going to help him. The kids are understandably upset. Do you think you could give us a hand? We're going to gather in the dining hal and sing some songs. Mabel is getting together some cookies and milk. The counselors have been terrific, but the kids need some more adult reassurance."
“No problem," Sam replied, abandoning his morning sail with only a slight trace of regret. "Before you start your hootenanny though, I think you'd better talk about what's happened. There's the possibility that someone may have some information, but mostly you want to keep it al out in the open or you're going to have them jumping ship in droves."
“Don't I know it. One kid has already demanded to leave. His parents are on a barge in Burgundy, pretty unreachable, as he wel knows, but he's stirring up the others"
“Is this one of Samantha's group? She said there was a boy who was pretty annoyed at his mother and father.”
Jim nodded. "Geoff Baxter. He may have been too immature for such a long sleep-away session.”
Pix went over to Samantha and began to help her move the kids into the dining room. Sam went to another group. "Hootenanny?" Had her husband been listening to his old Pete Seeger records while the family was away?
The clingers were stil clinging and Pix gently pried the little girl away from Samantha. Pix had the distinct impression that the campers around Samantha, and especial y those who had commandeered each of her daughter's hands, were not so much scared as excited, despite appearances to the contrary. There was definitely something in the air. She made a mental note to talk to Samantha about it later—and also ask her how she liked being the object of such devotion. The crushes at Maine Sail were beginning to resemble some sort of food chain—
beginning with Samantha's on Valerie.
“Now, listen to Samantha. She's right. It's just a rotten trick. What's your name?" The girl gulped, took a tissue Pix offered, and blew her nose. "It's Susannah." Obviously the effort was too much and she began to cry, adding the tearful protest, "I didn't do it. I don't know who did it!"
“Shut up, Susannah, and stop showing off." It was one of the boys in the group. "Nobody thinks you did it. Besides, you would never have the guts”
Pix was inclined to agree with him. Whoever had done it would have had to have nerve and some to spare. The sails had been fine the day before, Samantha said, so the deed involved getting up in the dead of night, raising the sails, painting them without leaving a trace of the evidence on one's person, then making everything shipshape before going back to bed.
It would have been very difficult for any of the campers
—or counselors—to do without someone detecting his or her absence.
That left ... Arlene supplied the name uppermost in everyone's minds, whispering to Pix as she swept by, several charges in tow, "It's just creepy Duncan again. If this doesn't get him sent away, I don't know what wil ." She was smiling.
In the cavernous dining room, the commotion was deafening and it took Jim several minutes to get everyone quieted down. During that time, Pix saw Valerie and Duncan slip in through the side door. Valerie looked furious. Duncan's mouth was set in a tight line. He looked as if he hadn't slept—or changed his clothes—for a few weeks. When Pix tried to read the expression in his eyes, al she could come up with was fear. If there was red paint on his body, it wasn't anywhere that showed.
“Campers, staff, I know how upset everyone is, and believe me, I feel it just as much as you do—more. Right now, what we need is to stay calm and do everything we can to help Sergeant Dickinson figure out who did this.
While the kitchen crew gives us a little snack, we'l have a few songs and practice for the parade. I'm going to be in my office in case any of you wants to come to talk to me. If you want to bring a friend, fine. I'm prepared to treat this as a very bad joke—something that maybe seemed like a fun idea at midnight, to scare your friends the next morning. But I wil find out who did it.”
Jim Atherton was definitely displaying the non pussycat side of his camp-director role this morning.
Nobody but nobody messed with Maine Sail.
Samantha joined her parents. Pix took the opportunity to ask her a few questions as the group began to sing
"There Was a Tree," volume increasing as they went along, until it sounded like any other camp group. Al they needed was to be on a bus or tramping through the woods.
“What did the kids mean by the other tricks?"
“Oh, those were just the normal things that go on in a place like this—salt in the sugar bowls, short-sheeting the counselors' beds—the ones who don't have sleeping bags
—and cow-pats in people's shoes.”
Pix nodded. These were the typical perils of camp existence. "Nothing else? Nothing like the mice?"
“Not that I know of, though the kids have been saying they hear creepy noises at night—scary music, rustling in the bushes—but I'm pretty sure it's one or two kids wanting to get the others worked up."
“Now what is this about the mice?" Sam demanded.
He real y wanted to be sailing. It was a gorgeous day and through the window he could see luckier folk skimming the surface of the water just beyond the vandalized boats moored in the camp harbor. They did look pretty dreadful and reminded him of an. ancient Greek myth, only those sails had been black. He shuddered slightly and put any and al implications firmly out of his mind.
They fil ed him in on the mice and he commented, "The sole connection I can see is blood and gore. Kids this age love it, but I'm damned if I can figure out how a kid could have done it."
“The Athertons were at the clambake al afternoon; someone could have snuck away then," Pix proposed.
“Except the whole camp was here practicing for the Fourth of July parade. The counselors have planned an elaborate routine where the campers flip cards as they march and sing, like at sports events. If someone was missing, it would have been spotted right away. You couldn't do that much damage in the time it might have taken to go the bathroom"
“Samantha's right, which leaves an outsider.”
Samantha elaborated. "Which leaves Duncan. We know he had a wicked big fight with his parents. What better way to get even than try to get the camp closed down? If Jim can't keep this hushed up, there are a lot of parents who'l want their kids out of here. You know, `Kid's Camp Cult Target'—that sort of thing.
“Duncan had plenty of time to do it while the rest of us were eating lobster—or he could have done it later after everyone was asleep." Or, she said to herself silently, he could have been coming from his painting party just in time to surprise us at the cabin.
“Wel ," Sam said, rubbing his hands together, "I don't see that there's too much more we can do here." The group was lustily singing "One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wal " and it was time to leave—tide or no tide. "Why don't we go talk to Jim, see if anything more has turned up, and skedaddle." Skedaddle? Pix thought. What was happening to her husband's vocabulary. He definitely needed to be around his family more.
“I'l come, too. Are you staying, darling?"
“Mother! Of course! It's my job. Besides, I want to.”
Samantha went back to her post. The worshippers were waiting.
“It seems odd that little Susannah would have felt it necessary to protest her innocence," Pix remarked to her husband as they started across the ground, so heavily carpeted with years of fal en fir needles that their every footfal released a strong scent of balsam as they crunched along.
“Maybe she's the salt/sugar culprit. She has the perfect face for it—those big baby blues and that sunshine from-behind-the-clouds smile.”