The Last Time I Lied(57)

“Is the camera working now?” Franny asks, keeping her tone calm to counter my growing shrillness.

“Yes,” Chet says. “Which means it either malfunctioned overnight or someone tampered with it. I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to climb up there on a ladder and put tape over the sensor.”

“Wouldn’t there be video of that?” Theo says.

Chet answers with a shake of his head. “Not necessarily. The camera is programmed to automatically turn on at nine p.m. and turn off at six in the morning. Someone could have tampered with it before nine and removed the tape right at six.”

Franny then fixes her green-eyed gaze on me. Although current circumstances have dimmed it slightly, I still feel trapped by her stare.

“Emma, have you told anyone else about the camera?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean people don’t know about it. If I noticed it, then others probably did, too.”

“Let’s talk about the paint,” Theo says. “If we can figure out where it came from, maybe it’ll give us a better idea of who did it.”

“Emma’s the painter,” Mindy pipes up. “She’s the one with the most access to it.”

“Oil paint,” I say, shooting her an angry look. “And that’s not what was on the door. It doesn’t run like that. If I had to guess, I’d say it was acrylic paint.”

“What’s it used for?” Theo says.

I look to the center of the room, where Casey’s workstation sits. All those cabinets and cubbyholes, filled with supplies.

“Crafts,” I say.

I edge around one of the circular crafting tables and head to the cabinet against the wall behind it. Flinging it open, I see rows of plastic paint bottles. They’re translucent, giving a glimpse of the colors contained within them. All the bottles are full, save for one.

Basic red.

Sitting nearby is a trash can. I go to it and spot a medium-size paintbrush at the bottom. Red paint clings to the bristles, still wet.

“See?” I say. “Not my paint. Not my brush.”

“So someone snuck in here early this morning and used the paint,” Theo says.

“The door is locked overnight,” Lottie replies. “At least, it’s supposed to be. Maybe whoever was last to leave yesterday forgot to lock it.”

“Or has a key,” Chet adds.

Lottie shakes her head. “The only people with keys are me, Franny, and Ben.”

“Neither Lottie nor I would do such a thing,” Franny says. “And Ben was only just arriving when the paint was discovered.”

“So that means the door was left unlocked,” Theo says.

“Maybe not,” Mindy says. “Yesterday, while everyone was going to lunch, I caught Emma snooping around the other workstations.”

All eyes turn to me, and I wilt in the heat of their stares. I take a step back, bump into a plastic chair, drop into it. Mindy looks at me with a sad, scrunched face, as if to show how much making the accusation has pained her.

“You honestly think I’m the one who did this?” I say. “Why would I vandalize my own door?”

“Why have you done a lot of things?”

Although Mindy says it, I assume that question has occurred to everyone in the room at some point. They might not have spoken it aloud like Mindy, but it’s been asked all the same. It’s in every look of Franny’s green eyes. It’s in the red light of the camera that blinks on when I enter Dogwood.

I have every reason to believe they’d forgiven me. It doesn’t mean any of them trust me.

Except for maybe Theo, who says, “If Emma says she didn’t do it, then I believe her. What we should be doing is asking why someone would do this to her.”

I know the answer. But like that unspoken question, it’s one I can’t say aloud. It’s there all the same, visible in my still-shaking hands.

Because someone at camp knows.

That’s why I was watched in the shower. Why those three birds were released into the cabin. Why someone was at the window and smeared paint across the door.

It was their way of telling me that they know.

Not what I did to Theo.

What I did to the girls.

The realization keeps me pinned to the flimsy chair, even after everyone starts to leave. Before exiting, Theo looks at me with concern, his cheeks flushed enough to make his scar stand out.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“No.”

I picture Vivian, Natalie, and Allison as paint marks on one of my canvases, waiting for me to cover them up. One of the reasons I came back here is because I couldn’t keep doing that. Because I thought that if I learned more about what happened to them, my conscience would be clean.

But now I can’t foresee spending an entire six weeks here. Whoever’s been watching me will continue to do so, stepping up the reminders bit by bit. Trapped birds and paint on the door, I fear, are only the beginning. If there are answers to be found, I have to do it quickly.

“I need to get out of here. Just for a little bit.”

“Where do you want to go?” Theo says.

I think of Vivian’s diary and the call letters of a book.

“Town,” I say.





FIFTEEN YEARS AGO