But Mariana started humming theJurassic Parktheme anyway. As she hit the climax, she marched off the dock with her suitcases and backpack, and Claire hurried after her. She caught up with her at the start of the trail. Mariana had stopped and was staring at the trees with awe on her face. “I’ve been to Muir Woods and seen sequoias and redwoods, but there’s something about this...”
“It’s the quantity of trees,” Claire said. “In national parks like Muir, every tree is studied and treasured, visited reverently. But here, there’s miles and miles of forest, and I don’t think anyone’s ever taken the time to pay attention to each individual tree. They’re nameless. Indistinguishable. It makes it all feel... overwhelmingly endless.” According to her parents, this was an old-growth forest, which meant it had never been logged. Some of these trees, they said, were hundreds of years old. It had been an oddly intense conversation. Before this summer, she’d had no idea her parents had such strong feelings about the woods of Maine. They’d waxed poetic about it for at least an hour, beforelaunching into their much-more-in-character spiel in which she was made to promise that she would never leave the trails or the grounds.
“So what you mean is, you can’t see the trees for the forest?” Mariana asked, laughing. “Okay, that was a really bad joke. Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”
Reyva brushed past them. “We’ll survive. As long as there are no puns.”
Mariana followed her. “The tree-o sets off on an adventure!”
Reyva gave an exaggerated groan and picked up her pace, leading the way. She liked both of these girls already, which was a good start.Maybe, Claire thought,this will be okay.Maybe she could be a new Claire here, a never-before-seen version of herself who made friends easily and didn’t freak out about every little thing. She’d come home radiating confidence and calm, leaving the old Claire behind, shed like a butterfly’s chrysalis or a molted snakeskin.Hopefully more butterfly than snake, she thought. Certainly, that was what her parents wanted.
The woods closed quickly around them. Light filtered down between the branches, casting everything in a greenish hue. This late in the day, just before dusk, the shadows were thick in the underbrush. Following Reyva, Mariana lugged her suitcases up the path. Behind her, Claire kept to the center of the trail and watched for poison ivy.
Birds chirped to one another, and the branches rustled with the weight of squirrels as they scampered from tree to tree. The trail wound around boulders, and she had to keep an eye on her footing. The dead needles on the trail were slick, and there wereplenty of rocks and roots threatening to trip her. The air also tasted much more sour than she’d expected for the Great Outdoors.Shouldn’t fresh air be, well, fresh?she thought.
“Anyone know exactly what we’ll be doing here?” Claire asked. “There was no useful info online, not even a website.” She’d done thorough searches, and not only was there no official website, but there was no chatter about the Lake House anywhere, which was weird—or at least bad business for a camp that was trying to reopen. Of course, it didn’t help that the name was so generic.
Mariana gasped.
Claire reached out, ready to catch her if she’d tripped. “Are you okay?”
“There’s no Wi-Fi,” Mariana said. She’d dropped her suitcases and was holding her phone up toward the sky. “I didn’t expect cell service out in the middle of nowhere, but with the house so near—I should be able to see at least the name of their network, even if it’s password protected.”
“It’s not necessary to password protect their network out here,” Reyva said. “Unless they’re worried about the bears stealing their bandwidth.”
I forgot to worry about bears, Claire thought. Not that she thought they’d steal Wi-Fi, but she wasn’t eager to encounter one. Or a mountain lion. Or a wolf. Maine had all three.
“True,” Mariana said, picking up her suitcases and continuing on, “but we should be close enough to—”
In the lead, Reyva halted.
Claire and Mariana caught up to her and also halted.
Claire felt as if she were plummeting from a plane, or what she’d imagined that would feel like. Distantly, she heard the voices of the others, the cries and the gasps, as they all stared at the clearing with the house—or what should have been the house.
Because the house was not there.
It had been consumed by fire.
Only a blackened shell remained.
Two
Of all the potential disasters Claire had imagined, both plausible and far-fetched, this one had never entered her calculations. Yet here it was: the roof had collapsed, half the walls had crumbled to ash, and only the chimney still stood at its full height.
This was why the air on the trail had tasted so sour, she realized. Here by the Lake House, it was worse, bitter, like a wood fire mixed with battery acid. Wisps of smoke rose in tendrils off piles of ash. If there were still hints of smoke, she thought, the fire must have happened recently. She pictured the house ablaze.
“Did they get out?” Mariana asked, dropping her suitcases and backpack. “Please tell me they got out.”
Claire called, “Hello! Is anyone here?”
“Lucky it didn’t burn down the forest,” Reyva said.
“Not lucky if they didn’t get out,” Claire said, but Reyva was right—if there had been any wind when the place burned, all the fallen trees, the dead brush, and the blanket of pine needles would have lit up and it would have spread. Five log-cabin-like sheds had also been destroyed by fire, but the house and the sheds had been separated from the forest by an airstrip with crackedpavement, a weed-infested tennis court, and a charred lawn as broad as a baseball field. She called again, “Is anyone here? Does anyone need help?”
A flock of birds startled from a nearby tree, but otherwise there was no movement.
Shedding her backpack, Reyva started across the lawn.
