The Last Time I Lied(55)

I flip to the next page, where she had jotted down that strange set of numbers.

150.97768 WEST

164

At first, I think they might be coordinates on a map. But when I grab my phone and check the compass app, I discover that 150 degrees points southeast. Which means it’s something else. Only Vivian knows for sure. But I’m certain she wrote down the numbers for a reason. Like everything else, I get the sense that she’s urging me forward, step by step, to find out what she learned all those years ago.

I’m in the process of taking a picture of the numbers with my phone when the door to Dogwood opens and Miranda, Krystal, and Sasha burst inside. Their sudden presence sends me once again scrambling to close the book and shove it under my pillow. I’m not as quick this time around, allowing them to catch me in the act.

“What are you doing?” Sasha asks, eyeing first the corner of the book poking from beneath my pillow and then my phone, which remains clutched in my hand.

“Nothing.”

“Right,” Miranda says. “You’re totally not acting like someone just caught looking at porn.”

“It’s not porn.” I pause, trying to see if the girls believe me. It’s clear they don’t, so I tell them the truth, minus any context that would make them ask more questions. “I’m trying to decipher something. A code.”

Miranda’s face lights up at the idea of solving a mystery. “What kind of code?”

I glance at the picture on my phone, reading off the number. “What does 150.97768 WEST mean to you?”

“Easy,” Miranda says. “It’s the Dewey Decimal System. Some book has that call number.”

“You positive?”

She gives me a disbelieving look. “Um, yeah. I’ve spent, like, half my life at the library.”

The library. Maybe that’s where Vivian went when she claimed to be shopping. While there, she found a book important enough to note its call number in her diary. It’s clear she was looking for something. I even think she might have found it.

I recall her entry about getting somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. The Big L is the Lodge. F is Franny. Simple enough. But Vivian frustratingly failed to mention exactly what she found there and what she managed to steal.

Still, she wrote enough to thoroughly unnerve me. Thinking about Franny’s reaction to her snooping sends a chill flapping through me. It doesn’t sound like Franny at all, which makes me wonder if Vivian was being paranoid. It certainly seems that way, especially Vivian’s line about wanting to tell me what she was doing in case something happened to her.

I’m close to finding out her dirty little secret.

It turns out something bad did happen, only there’s no proof it had anything to do with Franny or a deep, dark secret. Yet some events are too connected to be mere coincidence. This feels like one of them.

I know the truth.

The idea that I might be closer to learning what happened to the girls should excite me. Instead, a hard ball of pain forms in the pit of my stomach. Worry snowballing inside me. I assume Vivian experienced this exact feeling when she scribbled those last two words in her diary.

I’m scared.

So am I.

Because it’s possible I’ve stumbled upon something sinister, even dangerous.

That after years of wondering, I’m on the cusp of getting actual answers.

Above all, I’m scared that if I keep digging, I might not like what I’ll find.





20


That night, my dreams are haunted by Vivian.

It’s not like the hallucinations of my youth. Never do I think she’s really there, returned from the ether. There’s a cinematic quality to them—like I’m seeing one of the film noirs my father still watches on Sunday afternoons. Vivian in expressionistic black and white. First running through a forest as wild as one of my paintings. Then on a barren island, holding a pair of scissors. Finally in a canoe, rowing mightily into a rolling fog bank that whooshes over her, swirling and hungry, ultimately consuming her.

I wake clutching my charm bracelet as reveille blasts through camp. To my utter surprise, I have slept through the night. My eyelids flutter, tentatively facing the light of morning. Even before they’re fully open, I can make out something at Dogwood’s sole window.

A shape, dark as a shadow.

A gasp catches in my throat, lodging there, momentarily blocking all breath as whoever’s at the window flees. I can’t tell who it is. All I see is a dark figure streaking away.

Only when it’s gone do I swallow hard, suppressing the gasp, forcing it back down. I don’t want to wake the girls. Nor do I want to scare them. When I notice Sasha squinting down at me from her upper bunk, I can tell she didn’t see whoever was at the window. All she sees is me sitting up in bed, my face as white as my cotton pillowcase.

“I had a nightmare,” I tell her.

“I read that bad dreams can be caused by eating before bed.”

“Good to know,” I say, although I’m pretty sure my dreams of Vivian were caused by her diary and not what little I ate last night.

As for what I saw at the window, I’m certain it wasn’t a dream. Nor was it my imagination or a play of the light, like I tried to convince myself is what happened at the latrine. This time, there’s no talking myself out of it, no matter how much I’d like to.