The Sign in the Smoke (Nancy Drew Diaries #12)(19)

Miles touched the lighter to the torch, and it blazed into a huge flame. I gasped. It was surprising and beautiful. When I looked over at Bess, I saw that her eyes were wet. She glanced at me and gave me an embarrassed smile.

“Oh, shush,” she whispered. “You know this camp means a lot to me.”

I hope it’ll mean a lot to me after this week too, I thought. For the first time since we’d arrived, I felt really grateful to Bess for convincing us to come to Camp Cedarbark.

As I was turning back to the fire, I caught a glimpse of Bella out of the corner of my eye. She was wiping her eye too, staring into the flame. And her cheeks were bright pink, like she’d just been running, or—crying?

I wondered what was going on with her.

The rest of the campfire passed in a haze of songs, games, and one “spooky” (but not really) story from Miles about a bear he claimed used to hang around “a camp just like this one!” It was more corny than scary, but still, the campers shrieked and giggled. I was glad they were having a good time.

By the time the campfire ended and it was time to lead my campers back to Juniper Cabin, I felt ready to drop. I clicked on the flashlight I’d brought and slowly trooped up the path back to the main camp. Juniper Cabin was completely dark. I noticed footprints on the dirt path leading up to the door but figured we must have made them earlier, when we’d stopped by the cabin before the campfire.

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!”





CHAPTER SIX





A Sleepless Night


“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.”