“You cannot be serious right now. . . .”
The campers all let out cries of disbelief as I swept my flashlight beam over all the bunks in the cabin. But there was no mistaking it: not a single mattress held the sleeping bags that each camper had brought with them and laid out on the beds just that morning.
“Where are we going to sleep?” asked Maya, her usually cheerful expression crinkled up into a frown. “Nancy, do you think this is a prank?”
A prank. I remembered what Bella had said when she’d led us all outside to scare us the first night of training: It was just a prank. Bess had agreed that pranks seemed to be a normal part of life at camp. But would someone steal all our sleeping bags as part of a prank?
There was only one way to find out. “Maya, keep an eye on the bunk for a minute. . . . I’m going to check some things out.”
Maya scarcely had time to reply with an “okay” before I’d turned around and walked back out of the cabin. The footprints! I shone my light down onto the dusty path leading into the cabin. There they were: They looked like Converse sneaker tracks—a pretty common shoe wherever lots of young people congregated. They led away from the main camp, I realized now—toward the path to the lake. Could someone have . . . ?
“Nancy! Did it happen to you guys too?”
A voice came from behind me, and I swung my flashlight around to see Maddie, who had the nine-year-old bunk, standing in the doorway of Acorn Cabin.
“Did what happen to us?” I asked. Old sleuthing trick: never give away what’s going on. Make them say it first.
Maddie sighed and shook her head. “Our sleeping bags are all missing!” she said. “Do you think it’s some kind of prank?”
“It happened to us too,” I called, as another voice chimed in from the darkness:
“Me too! I mean, us too!”
It was George, I realized, and swung my flashlight around to find her at the doorway of her cabin.
“Who would do this?” George asked, frowning. “Is this, like, a normal camp thing? Because I have a bunkful of exhausted kids here.”
I heard someone running across the grass and quickly zoomed my flashlight around to catch Bella, coming from her cabin. She looked upset. “Are you guys missing your sleeping bags?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Do you know anything about it?”
Bella stopped short and glared at me. “Oh, because I pranked you once, I’m responsible for everything that goes wrong at camp this year? Thanks for the warning!”
I shook my head and tried to make my voice less accusatory. “I’m just asking,” I said. “You’ve been to camp before. You know what the normal pranks are.”
Bella sighed. “Well, this might be a normal prank if it happened to one bunk. But it looks like it happened to all of us.”
“Who would steal every sleeping bag out of every bunk?” Maddie asked from close behind me, making me jump. She must have walked across the clearing while I was talking to George and Bella. “How would you even do it? I mean, you would have to make several trips.”
“If you were working alone,” George pointed out. She had walked over to join the group too. “Maybe it was several people working together.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t human at all,” Bella muttered, looking off toward the lake.
We all fell silent, staring at her.
“What?” she asked. “It’s not like we have an angry spirit on the loose here or anything.”
“You’d better keep your voice down,” George whispered fiercely. “If my campers hear a word of this . . .”
Bella shook her head. “We could have taken care of all this last night,” she murmured sulkily. “If you’d just let me have my séance.”
I frowned, but turned my face so she couldn’t see. Why is Bella so obsessed with her séance and the supposed ghost? What did she know? It was all very weird.
“Guys, there are footprints right here,” I said, shining my light on the Converse tracks. “And unless ghosts commonly wear Chuck Taylors, I think our suspect is fully human—and it looks like she took several trips toward the path.”
“She or he,” a familiar voice piped up behind George. I glanced over to see Bess joining our little disgruntled circle. “Let’s not be sexist. We’re all missing sleeping bags, I’m guessing?”
“Yup.”
“Uh-huh.”
We all nodded.
Bess sighed. “Well, great. This was a lovely welcome for all the campers. I went to Deborah and Miles’s house and let them know what’s happening. Deborah was already in her pj’s, but she was going to throw on clothes and come over.”
“We already found footprints,” I said, shining my light on the Converse tracks again. “Let’s follow them. Maybe if we hurry, we can catch the thief in action. Deborah will find us.”