“Sure,” I agreed.
“Anyway,” Deborah went on, “finally we had to give up and start dinner. After dinner, while it was still light, me and one of the other counselors swam out and tried to find it again. But we didn’t have any luck. We had the campfire, and Lila seemed like she was okay, she was over it. She was singing and telling stories with everyone. So when it was time to go back to our tent and go to sleep, I figured it was over.”
I figured it was over. “Wait—you were her counselor?” I asked suddenly.
Deborah looked at me matter-of-factly. “Yes,” she said. “You didn’t know that?”
Bella’s tale suddenly came back to me. A counselor went crazy and drowned a camper! Did Deborah know that, in the rumors and stories about what had happened, she’d been painted as the culprit? Was that why she felt she had to have a folder full of research on the incident?
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “But I’m sorry to interrupt. Go on.”
Deborah cocked an eyebrow at me, but then went back into her story. She looked uncomfortable now. “The next thing I knew,” she said, her words slowing, “I was woken up by screaming. It was the middle of the night, and one of the other campers had woken up and noticed Lila was gone,” she said. “They were all freaking out. They thought it was a bear! She’d been attacked by something! In all the commotion, it was a few minutes before we got out of the tent and I noticed the footprints leading down the path toward the lake. . . .” She stopped there.
“She’d gone to the lake?” I prodded gently.
Deborah nodded, her face tense. “When I got there, I could hear her struggling in the water.” She paused. “I screamed. It was all I could think of to do. God, I didn’t even jump in after her! It was another counselor I’d woken up with my screams. She jumped in and found Lila under the water. I thought she was dead.” Deborah’s voice broke on the word “dead.” I reached out and put my hand on hers sympathetically. But Deborah pulled her hand away.
“She wasn’t dead, of course,” she went on after a few seconds. “One of the other counselors pumped the water out of her chest and got her breathing again. We called an ambulance, and she was rushed to the closest hospital.” She took in a deep breath through her nose. “She must have gone back into the lake to find her ring,” Deborah said finally. “She was in the hospital for a long time, I know that. She’d been without oxygen for too long. There were rumors of brain damage. But I heard she recovered.”
“You heard?” I asked.
Deborah looked up at me. Something flashed in her eyes—annoyance or defensiveness, I couldn’t tell which. “Her parents were pretty angry with the camp, and me specifically,” she said. “They sued Camp Larksong. That’s what cost the previous owners all their money—they ended up settling with the family. Anyway, I couldn’t exactly go to visit Lila. I’ve lived with the guilt of not waking up earlier every day of my life since it happened. But I couldn’t tell her how sorry I was.”
Silence enveloped the office. I stared down at the folder, taking all of that in. It wasn’t Deborah’s fault—or was it? I tried to imagine one of my campers sneaking out to the lake in the dead of night. Would I hear it? If I heard it, would I be able to jump in after her and save her life?
What would it feel like to see one of my campers dragged out of the lake, barely alive? Hauled off in an ambulance to be in the hospital for weeks?
I shook myself, trying to disperse the terrible feeling that came over me. I glanced at Deborah, who was staring out the window, pain in her eyes.
“It sounds really hard,” I said finally. “I’m sorry.”
Deborah nodded slightly. “Don’t be sorry for me,” she said quietly. “I’m sure it was much harder for Lila and her parents. But maybe you can understand why, the lake . . . the thought of anything else like that happening there . . .” She stopped and shook her head. “I know what people say around this town. I know they say the camp is haunted, that something even worse happened here. But it didn’t.”
She was quiet for just a few seconds. “If there is someone behind the strange things happening around camp,” she said, “they must know about Lila. Or they know some version of the story.”
I let out a breath and pulled the manila folder into my lap. Carefully, I arranged it right side up and opened the cover. Inside were newspaper articles, pieces printed off the Internet, legal documents. I leafed through them all until something stopped me dead in my tracks, sending spikes of ice up through my chest.
A photo accompanied one of the articles. I held it up for Deborah to see. “Is this Lila?” I asked.
Deborah looked at the photo and nodded. “That’s her,” she said. “Lila Houston. She was thirteen years old.”