Page 41 of Hide And Seek

The device looked homemade, pieced together from a mismatched collection of parts. Lengths of maintenance wire. A cleat normally used for securing rappelling rope. What looked like a fitting from the boatshed.

Someone had built this from materials found around camp.

Someone who knew the camp very well.

I photographed every inch of it. Then I stepped back and swept my light across the surrounding ground, searching for boot prints, disturbed earth, or anything else the killer might’ve left behind. The dirt around the mechanism was scuffed, but nothing stood out. The marks could’ve belonged to anyone who'd walked through the area at any point during the last few days.

I photographed them anyway, just in case.

When I finally lowered my phone, Rhys was standing right behind me. I hadn't even heard him approach.

“Done?” he asked.

“Yeah. Done,” I murmured.

What followed was the worst twenty minutes I’d ever experienced, and I suspected I wasn’t alone in that.

Removing Delia from the harpoon required four people working together. I didn't watch the actual moment they slid her off it. Instead, I turned to look at the woods, unable to shake the feeling that whoever had done this was still lurking out there somewhere.

Watching.

Waiting.

Someone eventually found a sheet in the nearest cabin. It was plain white, the same kind used on the kids' bunks. Tenminutes later, I watched it settle over Delia's body inside the old woodshed.

For a moment afterward, we all just stood there outside the shed. Thirty-one people in the dark, the camp silent in every direction except for the sounds of crying that several people had stopped trying to suppress.

“Brad. Olivia.” Rhys turned to find them in the group. “You're still leaving at first light.”

Brad nodded, jaw set. “I know. And believe me, we’ll be walking as fast as we possibly can.”

Beside him, Olivia nodded, arms wrapped around herself as she stared distantly into the woods.

“Everyone else.” Rhys looked around the assembled faces. “Lock your cabin doors. Don't go anywhere alone. Don't open your door for anyone you can't see and identify through a window first.” He paused. “If anything happens, scream your head off to alert the rest of us.”

“And then what?” Zach asked, brows furrowing.

Rhys looked at him. “We deal with it together. However we can.”

The walk back to the cabins was the quietest I'd ever heard such a large group of people be.

Jasmine walked beside me with her arms crossed tight over her chest, eyes moving between the path ahead and the dark spaces between the trees with a vigilance that was completely unlike her usual easy stride. Neither of us spoke.

We reached our cabin and slipped inside, and I locked the door behind us and stood there for a moment with my hand still on the bolt, listening.

"I keep thinking I'm going to wake up,” Jasmine said in a low voice. “And this will all turn out to be a bad dream.”

I turned. She was sitting on the edge of a bunk with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring at nothing in particular.

“Me too,” I said softly.

Neither of us moved toward our bags or changed into pajamas. We just sat on opposite bunks in the stripped-down cabin that still smelled faintly of the girls who'd slept in it last night. At some point Jasmine reached over and turned on a small bedside lamp. Neither of us suggested turning it off, even after we finally decided to lie down and try to sleep.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking about Delia and the conversation I'd overheard in the hallway yesterday morning.

What if someone really knows?she’d asked.What if one of the others said something?

She was dead less than twelve hours after saying that. Coincidence, or something far more sinister?