Great. Super great. Working alone? Check. Cleaning vomit off a passed-out person before even waking up completely? Perfect.
“Where?” Bridget asked, whipping around toward Claire.
Claire pointed toward the path. Bridget tore off in that direction, her whole demeanor screaming “J’accuse!” Brandy trailed behind her. This morning was the worst.
Beyond the cabins and the bathrooms, there was a parting of the woods and a slender dirt path that snaked back toward the archery grounds and the structure that was generously referred to as the “open-air theater.” A few yards up the path, there was a figure, fast asleep, facedown in the dirt.
“That’s not Diane,” Bridget said, her voice dripping with disappointment.
Bridget was right. The figure on the ground wasn’t Diane. It was a guy, a guy with a head of blond curly hair. That and the red jersey T-shirt told Brandy it was Eric Wilde.
“What’s wrong with him?” Bridget asked.
“Go brush your teeth, Bridget,” Brandy said.
“I want to see.”
“Bridget.”
Bridget narrowed her eyes but backed up as directed.
Brandy continued down the dirt path. She could see now why Claire had said he was sticky—there was something darkening the dirt all around him, some explosion of bodily emissions. This was going to be a bad one. That it was Eric was at least less trouble. She would be obligated to cover for Diane, help her shower. That was what bunkmates did. With Eric, though, the obligations were less arduous. Just shake him awake and get him moving. Not her problem after that.
“Eric, you moron,” she called, stumbling down the dirt track in her bare feet. “What the hell?”
Eric didn’t stir.
Now that she was closer, Brandy could tell something was off about his position—he’d fallen facedown, his arms and legs extended like he was in Superman position. Such a weird way to fall. His vomit—or whatever it was—dribbled all down the path to where he had landed and pooled out around him. The underside of his skin was faintly purple, and there was something wrong with his hair. It was darker than it should have been.
“Wake up,” Brandy said, coming up to the unconscious figure and kneeling down. “Eric, come on. . . .”
His stillness was unnatural. He made no sound. There was only the soft birdsong and the sound of the trees and the chatter of the camp as it woke.
“Eric?” she said.
She rolled him over.
Someone was screaming. It took her a moment to realize it was her.
2
THE NEXT MORNING, STEVIE PLANTED HERSELF AT THE KITCHEN TABLE with a bowl of cereal and an Ellingham library book that she had been permitted to take home for the summer. This was one of the many perks of Ellingham, and of being on good terms with Kyoko, the school librarian, who had specially ordered it for her.
“What’s that you’re reading?” her mother said as she passed behind Stevie. She paused, leaning in to look, as Stevie knew she would. “Is that a dollhouse?”
“Sort of,” Stevie said, flipping the page.
Her mother made a noise that sounded like a hamster being gently but persistently pressed until flattened.
The scene depicted was a kitchen lovingly crafted in miniature. The walls were papered in a cheerful pattern of deer and flowers. There was ironing on the small board, a pot in the sink, two potatoes on the draining board, each no bigger than a child’s pinkie nail. From the curtains to the line outside the window pegged with bras and stockings to the pile of folded linens, everything about this scene was made with care. This included the unmistakably dead figure on the floor by the oven, a doll-size ice tray under her hand.
“It’s called The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” Stevie said. “They’re dioramas made in the thirties and forties to teach investigators how to look at crime scenes. This one is called Kitchen. Look at the incredible level of detail. See these tiny cans on the shelves? Those labels are accurate reproductions. See the carefully printed tiny newspapers stuffed in the cracks of the doors? And all these doors have tiny, functioning keys. Everything in this scene has been made and put in here to be examined. It all means something. Did the woman stuff the paper in the door herself to gas herself? You can tell it’s gas for sure. The jets are open on the stove, and her skin has been painted so you can see the blush you get from carbon monoxide poisoning. But did she do it herself or did someone knock her out, then stuff the paper in the doors and leave her in there? See, she’s in the middle of taking things out of the oven. . . .”
Her mother stared at Stevie grimly.
“The woman who made these was named Frances Glessner Lee,” Stevie went on. “It used to be that when someone died, there was no set method for examining the body and the scene. All kinds of people would be sent who had no formal training, and they’d move things, or they’d guess at what happened, or they’d contaminate the scene. Sometimes people would be accused of murder when it was an accident and the other way around. So this woman . . .”
Stevie flipped to the photo of the grandmotherly woman with the old-fashioned glasses and bun who was peering lovingly into a skull.
“. . . was the heiress to a tractor fortune, and she was friends with the chief medical examiner in Boston. He told her about all the trouble he was having with how bodies and scenes were being treated, and all of the things you could learn about a death from the scene and the body. She basically established forensics in the United States. Then she made these miniatures, each depicting an unexplained death. Each one is a contained mystery. They still use them to train detectives.”
Her mother walked over to the counter, shaking her head. Stevie observed her surreptitiously.
“I wish you’d get another hobby, but . . .”
The sentence was left unfinished.
Stevie flipped back to the kitchen scene and let a few moments tick by while she waited for her mother to speak again.
“What are you up to this afternoon?”
“I was going to read,” Stevie said.
“It’s a gorgeous day. You could get some sun.”
Stevie hmmmmed and leaned in close to the picture of the death kitchen.
“I got a note,” she said casually, “from a guy who owns a summer camp. He read about me, what I did at Ellingham. He asked if I wanted a job working there as a counselor. I guess he thought I’d be an interesting addition, you know, something extra for campers.”
“A summer camp?” Stevie’s mom said. “You?”
“I know,” Stevie said. “Right?”
Stevie had never precisely been the outdoor type. They had camped once as a family, when Stevie was twelve and the neighbors down the street invited them to come on a week’s trip to a state park. Stevie spent most of the week huddled under their RV awning trying to read, while her parents and the other family drank iced teas and beers and talked about television shows and what was “wrong with America.” No one could swim in the lake because apparently there was some kind of brain-eating bacteria in it. Periodically someone would encourage her to walk through the woods or try out the mountain bike. Stevie viewed these offers with grave suspicion and declined. Stevie couldn’t listen to anything or talk to anyone because her parents had taken her phone in order for her to experience some “offline time,” which she had been anyway because they were in the middle of nowhere with no real signal and no Wi-Fi.