From there, the winding road led deep into the pines and the entrance I was seeking was just past a blind bend, marked by a cluster of white firs and a blue sign. Most of the sign was obscured by a fresh covering of snow, hiding the words, so only the cutout of the lady herself rose into the darkening sky, two palms raised as if to catch the drifting flurries. She wore a pale blue head scarf, like the Virgin Mary, and had no face, like a ghost. Behind her was a locked gate as tall as the trees.
This was Lady-of-the-Pines Summer Camp for Girls: a place where people from suburbs and cities sent their daughters. The campground was buried in a valley of mosquitoes, pine trees, and poison oak, skirting the edge of a tepid lake. The mountain ridge cut off a view of what was on the other side, beyond this camp, so the girls—and their parents —would have no idea what stood within miles of them. All that nature they’d spend the summer embracing was closer than they might guess to one of the state’s maximum-security men’s prisons, which housed, last I checked, more than a thousand violent offenders, including murderers, rapists, and child molesters.
According to the Missing flyer, this summer camp was the last place Abby Sinclair had been seen. Here, past the gate and beyond those trees.
I pulled in and cut the engine, but Jamie’s car behind my van almost kept on going. He braked in the road and had to back up, scudding over a snowbank.
The snowplows hadn’t made it up here since the latest storm, so all the snow made it difficult to find a place to park.
When he was closer, he rolled down his window and called out to me in the cold.
“What’s wrong? Why’d you stop?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I called back.
“Just get out of the car. Come here.”
I was already climbing out of the van and testing my flashlight. Night came sooner in winter, especially up here with the ridge blocking the sun. I knew it could be mere minutes before the dark dropped down all around us, and I wasn’t sure if the electricity would be working on the closed campground during the off-season. Without a flashlight, we’d be out there unable to see.
The flashlight flickered, and I smacked it against my thigh. Light. I waved it at him, signaling to get him out of the car.
“Your engine didn’t die again, did it?” he called.
I shook my head. He didn’t know why we were here. I hadn’t bothered to tell him that the spot I’d wanted him to follow me to wasn’t a restaurant, as I’d insinuated, but this place. Through the gate was a snowed-out road leading in to what I assumed were the main grounds of the camp, where Abby had spent those summer weeks before she vanished. Only that locked chain-link fence was keeping us from it.
Jamie gave me a look I couldn’t read, but he shut off his engine, pulled up his hood, then stepped out into the cold with me.
I pointed the flashlight at the fence opening, indicating the padlock secured by rings of thick chains. “Can you do something about that?” I asked. “So we don’t have to climb over?” I let the light reveal the top of the tall fence, the razor wire glittering in the falling darkness.
“You’re saying I dressed up for nothing, then?” Jamie tugged at the shirt collar under his coat, his one good gray button-down that he might have even ironed for the night out. But he didn’t seem mad about it, I could tell.
Jamie and I had gotten together over the summer (the same summer Abby, mere miles from us, had been swatting away gnats and rowing canoes and singing campfire songs in repetitive round-robins). It happened fast, between Jamie and me.
Before I discovered Abby, and soon the others—before a fundamental piece of who I am shifted to reveal itself inside me, like an iceberg rising up to show its true and monstrous size from the frigid depths of the sea—I’d been the girl Jamie fell for. Whoever that was. It wasn’t so long ago, but she and I were different people now.
He and I were different, too, but I don’t want to forget all the good things about him. Like how he’s fearless when it comes to braving heights, or breaking and entering; he once scaled the side of my house to reach an open window when I’d locked myself out, balancing on a flimsy gutter high up over the backyard, holding on by his fingertips.