The Sign in the Smoke (Nancy Drew Diaries #12)(29)

Kiki, who’d been shaking me awake, jumped back, startled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, waving for her to come close again. “I was just having this awful dream. . . .”

“Nancy, you have to get up,” she replied, all business. “The cabin is flooding!”





CHAPTER TEN





An Unexpected Clue


I SAT UP IN BED and looked down, and that was when I noticed the other girls, shouting and splashing through the foot or so of water that covered the floor. Maya opened the front door, and all at once the water level decreased as a stream of water escaped.

“Oh my gosh! What happened??” I asked, jumping down from my bed. I hit the floor with an icy splash and shrieked. The water was freezing!

“Someone turned on all the showers and sinks,” Maya replied. She was soaking wet from the waist down. “Cece got up to use the bathroom, and she found it.”

“Did someone turn everything off?” I asked, sloshing through the water to the bathroom.

“Yup,” Winnie replied. “Maya did it. Then she came to wake all of us up, but you were sleeping pretty hard.”

Sleeping pretty hard. I remembered my nightmare and sighed. Clearly the whole situation at Camp Cedarbark was stressing me out. And now this—was this one more weird event to add to the list?

“All right,” I said, taking stock of the situation. All the girls in the bunk were up, standing before me in various states of soaking-ness. “Let’s get out of the cabin, then. We need to tell Deborah what happened.”

“We do?” asked Cece. “What if this was just a prank?”

“It’s a pretty destructive prank,” I replied. “Flooding the cabin could cause a lot of damage, not to mention that someone could have gotten hurt if they slipped or something. No, I think this is bigger than a prank.” I paused, watching Harper carefully arrange all her books on Kiki’s top bunk. “Harper? Come on. Your books will be okay.”

Harper glanced at me, clearly not convinced. “I don’t want them to fall into the water,” she said. “They’re first editions.”

“They’ll be fine,” I said, suppressing a frustrated sigh. “Come on, guys. Let’s get Deborah and start cleaning all this up.”

I half expected to see a commotion when we got out of the cabin—water spilling out of the other cabin, other counselors and campers lining up in the clearing—but we were met with dead silence. It looked like this “prank” was aimed at Juniper Cabin. Could I have been the target?

I asked Maya to watch the girls while I went to wake up Deborah and Miles.

I pounded on their front door for a few minutes. Finally I heard noise inside, and Deborah appeared in a terry-cloth bathrobe over a cotton nightgown. I wasn’t surprised to see her and not Miles.

“What’s up?” she asked.

I explained what had happened, and Deborah’s expression turned serious. “It only happened to your cabin?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She let out a deep sigh. “Do you think it’s related to the other things?”

I breathed in. “Yeah,” I said. “I think someone has figured out that I’m onto them.”



In the end, Sam the sports counselor was also woken up by the commotion and came over to help. It took all of us about an hour of mopping and pushing the water out the door to get the cabin dry enough to go back inside to sleep. In the morning, we were understandably a little cranky. Breakfast was quieter than usual, with us silently chewing our pancakes, many of us staring into space.

“Why would someone come after us?” Maya asked suddenly, her eyebrows raised in confusion. “Only us?”

I could tell that the prank had rattled my normally optimistic CIT, but I didn’t know how to comfort her. Who would target only us? Someone who knew I was getting closer. Maybe Bella? Or . . . Miles? But it was hard to imagine a grown man sneaking into our bunk to flood it. It just seemed . . . juvenile.

“We don’t really know what it was, Maya,” I said slowly, but I couldn’t help looking across the mess hall to the eleven-year-olds’ table, where Bella was laughing so hard she looked like she was snorting. “Don’t worry. Will you guys excuse me a minute? I’m going to talk to Deborah.”

I stood up and walked over to the table by the kitchen where Deborah was eating with Sam, Taylor, and Sandy. Deborah looked up as I approached. “Hi, Nancy,” she said, pulling out the empty seat next to her. “Come sit down.”

Sam looked up curiously. She was wearing her ever-present Yankees cap. “Oh, hey. Did your bunk all get back to sleep last night?”

I nodded. “Eventually,” I said.

Deborah quickly shoveled her last bite of pancakes into her mouth and touched my shoulder. “Can I speak to you privately for just a moment, Nancy?”

“Sure.”

I waved at the other counselors and the lifeguard, then waited while Deborah bused her tray and led me out the front door to the main clearing.

She took a deep breath. “I’m having trouble with something.”

“What’s that?” I asked. There already seemed to be plenty of trouble at the camp. . . . Was something even stranger going on that I didn’t know about?