The Sign in the Smoke (Nancy Drew Diaries Book 12) (9 page)

Inside, the campers flitted around, grabbing their own flashlights from their dressers and flicking them on.

“Who’s first in the bathroom?” Kiki called. “We have three sinks and three stalls, people. Who wants first shift?”

“Me!” called Cece.

“Me!” called Katie.

But I noticed Nina standing in the middle of the room, shining her flashlight beam on each bunk. “Guys . . . ,” she said.

I looked where she was gesturing. Something was missing, but what . . . ?

“Oh my gosh!” I shrieked as it hit me. Maya and all the campers turned to me in alarm.

“Guys!” I cried, pointing at the bare mattresses. “Our sleeping bags are gone! Somebody stole all our sleeping bags!”

“OH NO!”

“Are you kidding?”

“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.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Bess agreed.

We followed the trail—trails, in some places—of footprints across the main camp and into the woods, down the path that led to the lake. The cool breeze off the water made me shiver as we got closer to the beach. While I was starting to believe I’d hallucinated the figure I’d seen—or at least, I really wanted to believe that—the beach still gave me the heebie-jeebies. I’d have to try not to show it when my campers had swimming.

“Oh no,” Maddie moaned as we followed the tracks to the beach. “Please tell me they didn’t . . .”

But they had. The tracks left off just before the water’s edge . . .

. . . And a soggy pile of sleeping bags was visible just beyond the waist-deep water.

“What happened?” Deborah’s voice suddenly came from the path, and when we turned, she sprang out of the woods and onto the beach, her feet clad in bedroom slippers. “Did you find them?”

“I’m afraid so,” said George, gesturing at the sodden pile of nylon and fleece that bobbed up and down with each ripple in the lake.

Deborah looked at the lake and seemed to take in what had happened. “Oh
no
,” she murmured, shaking her head as she stepped closer. “Who would have done this? Did anyone skip the campfire tonight?”

We were all silent. No one had
skipped
it, that I’d known of—all the counselors and campers were present and accounted for. But it had been dark, and everyone’s attention had been focused on Deborah, Miles, or whoever was leading the singing or storytelling. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone to sneak away.

I remembered Bella’s flushed cheeks.
Did she . . . ?
And then I thought of the other counselors who had also been missing when I’d been pulled under in the lake. Sam . . . or Taylor? Could one of them have snuck away from the campfire, too?

“Maybe it wasn’t a person,” Bella suddenly said. While her voice was quiet, it seemed to echo in the silence.

Deborah looked at her, nonplussed. “What does that mean?” she asked.

Bella shrugged, not meeting Deborah’s eye. “Some
thing
in the lake just seems to be really angry,” she said. “What with the thing that pulled you down into the water, the thing that pulled Nancy down, the figure she saw. Maybe something’s going on that’s bigger than just some kid playing a prank.”

Bella looked Deborah in the eye then, and something washed over Deborah’s face. Recognition, or anger, or some kind of unwelcome realization that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Deborah met Bella’s stare with her own intense one, and then the moment was over. She looked out over the lake and sighed, like she was accepting something.

“Miles and I will remove the sleeping bags from the lake and have them all washed and dried,” she said in a low voice. “But I’m afraid there’s no way we can have them ready for the campers to sleep in tonight. I’m very sorry, but you’ll all have to sleep on the mattresses provided, and bundle up in your clothes. Tell the campers they’ll definitely get their bags back tomorrow.”

I glanced at Bess and George. It wasn’t a surprise that the sleeping bags wouldn’t be returned tonight, really—I’d suspected as much once we’d found them in the lake. But I wasn’t sure how our campers would take the news. And I was more concerned about Deborah’s reaction.

“If anyone knows anything about how these bags got in the lake,” Deborah went on, “I would ask you to please come and talk to me or Miles, so that we can prevent it from happening again. I understand that some pranking is normal at camp, but a prank on this scale is unacceptable. Got it? Good. Off to bed, everyone.”

She folded her arms and stared into the lake, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to say any more. I looked around at my fellow counselors, and slowly we made our way back to the path and toward our cabins.

Bess poked my arm as we walked along. “What do you think, Nancy?”

I was silent for a minute. I was trying really hard
not
to think about it. “I don’t know anything you don’t, Bess,” I said finally.

Back at the cabins, we said our good nights quietly, then split up to head back to our respective bunks. I told my wide-eyed crew that the sleeping bags had been taken to the lake—“It looks like someone’s messed-up idea of a prank”—and that we, sadly, would have to make do with the mattresses for now.

“Who would do it?” Cece asked, once we had the lights out and were all lying on our mattresses, trying to snuggle with sweatshirts and jeans. “Who would think that was funny?”

“I really don’t know,” I admitted, trying to quiet my overactive sleuthing brain.

It was a long time before I could get to sleep that night.

“Nancy,” George whispered as she settled beside me on a bench on the edge of the sports field. “I bet you didn’t get much sleep last night.”

I kept looking ahead, watching my campers, who were having a soccer lesson with Sam. “I didn’t,” I agreed. “That mattress was kind of cold.”

“That’s not what I meant,” George scoffed, “and you know it. BESS!” She called across the field to where Bess had wandered. “Bess’s kids have wood crafts this morning,” George explained to me. “They were going to make a picture frame or something? Mine are swimming. I kind of like having these little breaks.”

Bess caught sight of us and jogged over. “Hey, guys,” she said, sliding in next to me on the bench. “Were you talking about the Great Sleeping Bag Heist?”

I cringed.

“We were,” George said, glancing over at me. “Sort of, anyway. I was trying to get Nancy to tell us her theories.”

Bess’s eyes lit up. “Nancy has theories! Awesome!”

I cleared my throat. “
Actually
,” I said, “I have no theories. I have no feelings about the sleeping bag situation whatsoever . . . except that I would like mine back. I hear they’re passing them out, washed and dried, after lunch.”

Bess furrowed her brows. “What?” she said. “You, Nancy Drew, have no feelings about a developing mystery?”

“It’s not a
mystery
,” I groaned.
Please, let it not be a mystery.

George was giving me major side-eye. “You’re kidding, right?” she asked. “This is a
classic
mystery. Weird things happen! More weird things happen! Stakes are raised! You guys, I got, like, five hours of sleep last night.” She sighed. “I never realized how much I need my sleeping bag. I may be a little weird today.”

“How would we tell?” Bess asked with a smirk.