08/08/2024
Fiction from Leah Flynn Gallant
It was the last week of August on the lake, and the fog from that morning’s rain lifted lazily up from the water. Rain dripped from the trees and onto the rocky shore below, the lake still and quiet. Joe Wesley was putting the final touches on shutting up the sprawling fifty-acre summer camp, hanging up the lifejackets in the boathouse, washing off the kayaks and canoes, and racking the oars up inside the old wooden building that smelled mustily of seaweedy lake water and sunscreen. He checked to ensure the door was shut tightly behind him and then he made his way up the steep lawn to the mess hall.
The century-old camp wasn’t as foreboding as the yellow mansion that sat up on the hill across the lake, or that woman’s headstone in the cemetery in town, but it still had its ghosts. Joe felt it the most this time of year when the kids had all left, the cabins had been swept and emptied, the boondoggle and tempera paints stowed away, and an eerie hush fell over the grounds and trails. Not that he minded, of course. His father’s father bought this camp over seventy years ago, and it was inevitable that Joe would inherit it somewhere down the line.
The camp had been his whole life, first as a camper, then as a junior counselor, later as a cook, and finally as the owner and director. Joe’s summers had never been truly his; they had been owned by the countless weeks of summer camp, the thousands of children that had inhabited the cabins and dove off those rickety docks, boating in the brightly colored canoes wearing neon orange life jackets and sporting sunburnt cheeks, eating countless s’mores by thousands of nightly campfires. Joe didn’t know a life other than this camp; a childless widow at fifty, he’d lost his wife Mary to cancer a decade ago. The campers were his and Mary’s kids, and the camp had always been his home.
Joe gingerly stepped up the steps to the mess hall, kicking himself for not yet getting that final step fixed, stepping up and back down on it again, testing its ability to hold his weight. That’s when he heard a noise coming from inside, an indistinguishable crash. Thinking that he may have balanced too many metal bowls on top of each other on the high shelves in the kitchen, he pushed through into the main hall. As he moved through the sea of wooden tables, he paused to look at the decades of its etchings: Grady was here, Ben and Ellie 4-ever, Kristin, Summer of ’91, and the one he always made sure was still there on the last table by the kitchen, Evie Murphy, ’55.
He ran his fingertips over the grooves of the letters and remembered the stories his father told around the campfire: Evie was found dead one summer back in ’59, the wrong man convicted, the murderer still free. Joe’s hair rose on the back of his neck and his head shot up as he heard a noise again in the kitchen, someone moving around. Had Bree forgotten something in her kitchen and come back to get it? He hadn’t noticed any cars in the parking lot when he was walking up from the boathouse.
“Hello?”
To read this entire story, pick up Issue Six of Bluff & Vine at Longs’ Cards and Books in Penn Yan, or by visiting https://www.amazon.com/Bluff-Vine-Issue-Literary-Review-ebook/dp/B0BM4X83V2/.
