Baby-Sitters at Shadow Lake Read online

  “It’s a lovely place,” he said, and sighed. “At least it was the last time I saw it, which was years ago. I remember thinking I’d never seen a bluer sky or breathed crisper air or swum in a clearer lake.”

  We had driven out of Stoneybrook by this time, and were zipping along the highway, Kristy’s mom behind our car, the Pink Clinker behind hers. Stacey had turned around and was teaching the Three Musketeers to sing a silly song about a cow knocking over a lantern in a barn and starting a fire that caused “a hot time in the old town.” Watson said the old town was Chicago, but I don’t know how he knew.

  “Anyway,” continued Watson, “wait till you see Shadow Lake. I remember I never wanted to leave at the end of my visits there. I would always be driven home in tears. There’s so much to do. Swimming, hiking, boating. Oh, they used to put on a boat show. That was fun.”

  An hour and a half later, I knew everything about Shadow Lake — except whether I would find a mystery there.

  “Hey! There’s a sign that says Shadow Lake!” called Karen from the backseat. “We’re there. We made it!”

  “We’re almost there,” her father corrected her.

  We turned onto a tree-lined road. The trees became woods, and then we were driving through a dark tunnel of leaves. In the distance, something glistened. It was Shadow Lake. We drove nearer to it, then turned left and drove alongside it. We passed boats in the lake, boats at a dock, a huge wooden structure (“That’s the lodge,” Watson announced), a row of smaller wooden buildings that looked like stores, and then we drove into woods again.

  As we crept along, Watson kept saying things like, “Hmm. I wonder if that’s old Mr. Beaden. No, he’d be dead by now,” and, “I swear that looks just like Junie Drake. Well, a grown-up version of Junie Drake.” A couple of times he waved to people. “See what a friendly little community this is?” he said to me.

  A few minutes later, after a couple of wrong turns, Watson pulled to a stop before a rambling, one-level house. (It was much too big to be called a cabin.) The other cars parked behind us, their doors opened, and everyone tumbled out, including Shannon and Boo-Boo.

  As Stacey stepped out of our car, Sam trotted up to her and said, “Amazing, dahling. You arrived unscathed. Welcome to Shadow Lake.”

  Oh, my goodness. I should have known that a cabin that could hold twenty people would actually be a good-sized house. Watson wasn’t kidding when he said the place could sleep a lot of people. This is the floor plan of the cabin:

  Each one of the big bedrooms holds six bunks, so right off the bat, twenty-four people can sleep in those two rooms. The small bedrooms can sleep two people apiece. We would not be crowded at all, I decided.

  Everybody had raced into the cabin as soon as Watson Brewer had unlocked the front door. We stepped into a large room which was the living and dining area in one.

  “Gosh,” I said, gazing around, “this is so pretty. And it’s so clean and tidy. Who keeps it this way?”

  “Mitch,” replied Watson. “Mitch Conway. He’s the caretaker.”

  We were all oohing and aahing, except for Andrew. He burst into tears.

  “Andrew! What’s the matter?” asked his father.

  “This is … this is nice!” was Andrew’s angry reply.

  Watson looked confused. “Yes,” he said slowly.

  “But you said we were going to live in some old cabin! Where are the logs?”

  “Oh, no!” exclaimed Kristy, trying not to laugh. “Andrew, you thought we were going to stay in a log cabin?”

  “Yes. Like the one Abraham Lincoln lived in. Karen showed me a picture in a book. I want to see the holes in the walls and the cooking pot in the fireplace.” Andrew paused. Then he added indignantly, “And log cabins do not have carpets on the floor.”

  Kristy managed to calm her little brother down by suggesting that the kids explore the cabin. So they did.

  While Charlie and Sam helped the adults unpack the cars, the members of the BSC led the children around the house. We checked out those huge sleeping rooms first.

  “This is the biggest bedroom I have ever seen,” announced Kristy, who lives in the biggest house I have ever seen. “It is like a dormitory.”

  “We claim it for the boys!” cried David Michael.

  “Yeah!” echoed Linny and Nicky.

  “Why?” demanded Karen.

  “We just do.”

  “No way. It’s for the girls!”

  “Before you get into a fight,” I spoke up, “why don’t we look around the house some more. Who knows what we’ll find.”

  Well, what we found was the other dorm, which looked exactly like the first one — rows of bunks in a sparsely furnished but very pretty room. In both rooms were braided oval rugs, white bureaus, tables made of dark wood, and several windows that opened into the woods surrounding the cabin. At the foot of each bed lay a neatly folded patchwork quilt, probably hand-sewn.

  Nevertheless, David Michael said, “The boys still claim that other room. You girls can sleep here.”

  Karen shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “We like this room better anyway.”

  “Just a minute,” I spoke up. “Excuse me. How many girls will be sleeping in here, and how many boys in there?”

  Stacey counted heads. “Including Sam and Charlie,” she answered, “six boys in there, and eleven girls in here.”

  Mallory cast a long-suffering glance in my direction. “Not fair,” she said. “Each of the boys will have an entire bunk to himself, and the girls will be crammed in here, filling up all but one bed. I’ve shared a room for most of my life. And now … ” She trailed off. Then she perked up. “Oh, well. It could be worse,” she said.

  “How?” asked Claud.

  “We could have shared a room with the boys.”

  “Ew!” cried Karen, Hannie, Nancy, David Michael, Andrew, Linny, and Nicky in one voice.

  Sam and Charlie had been hauling suitcases and bags from the car into the cabin, and slinging them in the living room. Now we began lugging the things from the living room into the bedrooms. The little kids claimed beds for themselves. Luckily for me, the Three Musketeers wanted to sleep in top bunks. Emily Michelle was given a bottom bunk, of course, but I still wound up with another bottom bunk for myself. I don’t mind a top bunk. I’d simply rather be closer to the floor.

  “Okay, let’s unpack,” said Mary Anne when the suitcases had been sorted out. She opened the top drawer of one of the bureaus.

  “Actually unpack?” asked Claud incredulously. “You mean, put things away? In drawers?”

  “Well, what were you going to do with the stuff in your suitcase?”

  “Leave it there.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two weeks. Until we go home.”

  “It’ll get all wrinkly and old-looking.”

  In the end we decided to give ourselves half an hour in which to see how much organizing we could do. Then we went outside.

  “Going exploring!” Kristy yelled to her mother and Watson.

  “Have fun,” they replied. And Watson added, “All the fun things are in that direction.” He pointed. Then he gave Kristy some money and asked her to pick up a few items at the grocery store.

  I went off with the Three Musketeers who wanted to walk along the shore of Shadow Lake. We started off slowly, just dawdling and enjoying ourselves, stopping to smell flowers or to search for the cause of some movement in the underbrush.

  “This is the life,” said Karen a moment later as we stood looking across the lake. “Hey, I see a huge bird. A big crow or something.”

  “I see a sailboat,” said Nancy.

  “I see fish jumping,” said Hannie.

  “I see a cute boy,” I almost said. (I stopped myself just in time.) But I did see an awfully cute guy. He was swimming in the lake. A younger girl was with him. Strolling along a nearby dock were a man and a woman.

  Son, daughter, father, mother, I thought.

  The boy looked about my age.
The girl looked about nine. They were dark-skinned like me, and they were wearing brilliantly patterned bathing suits. I think what I first liked about the boy was that he was so patient with his sister. (He was teaching her to float on her back.)

  Where do they live? I wondered. And at that moment, the man left the dock, crossed the path that ran alongside the shore of the lake, and strode to a nearby cabin. He disappeared inside.

  Neighbors. That cute guy and I were neighbors. Well, that was pretty exciting. Then I realized something. I had nearly forgotten about Quint. Quint is sort of my boyfriend. He lives in New York City, and he’s a ballet dancer just like me. We have so much in common. We don’t see each other often, but we write and we talk on the phone. Once, Quint visited my family in Stoneybrook. I had a feeling that Quint was not roaming around New York looking for cute girls, so why should I be watching this cute boy? On the other hand, what was so bad about just looking?

  “Jessi?” said Nancy Dawes. “Are you coming?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I ran to the girls who had darted ahead of me, looking impatient.

  We stayed on the path for awhile — woods on our right, the lake on our left — and sure enough, we soon reached the “fun” places. After walking through the general store and the tiny post office, I said, “Do you want to look in the lodge? I think we’re going to be eating there a lot. Dinners, anyway. Also, that’s where dances and stuff are held.”

  We ambled inside. For such a plain-looking building, it certainly held a lot of interesting things. Like the dining room, which was enormous; an actual ballroom; a counter where Shadow Lake souvenirs were sold; a weights-and-workout room; and several activities rooms, one with a barre! I was thrilled. I could practice every morning. No, I would practice every morning. For once, I could take a vacation without getting out of shape. Mme Noelle (she’s my ballet teacher) would be pleased. Possibly surprised.

  On our way out of the lodge, the Three Musketeers stopped at the souvenir counter. They each bought a blue Shadow Lake baseball cap.

  My vacation was looking good: happy kids, a barre, and a cute guy!

  On Sunday morning I woke up in a bottom bunk bed in the girls’ room. I sat up and almost creamed my head on the springs underneath the mattress of the top bunk, where Hannie Papadakis was sleeping.

  “Yikes!” I whispered.

  I tiptoed to a window and peered through the screen. (We had slept with the windows wide open since the cabin isn’t air-conditioned.) Outside were trees, trees, trees. Their leaves were bright green and glistened from the shower we had had during the night. I could hear lots of sounds, but they weren’t the kind I used to hear in New York. They were quiet, country sounds — a breeze rustling those green leaves, Shadow Lake lapping at its shores, lone birdsongs.

  Nobody else seemed to be awake yet, so I returned to my bunk and got in bed again. I thought about the day before. I thought about the car trip and exploring the cabin, but what I mostly thought about was Sam. He pretty much only called me dahling. And he was always staring at me. And he said ridiculous things to me that made me blush.

  Across the room, Claudia stirred. She rolled over and looked at me. “Oh. You’re up,” she said. Then she closed her eyes again.

  But she didn’t go back to sleep. And everyone else woke up. That was because Karen Brewer suddenly shrieked, “Spider!”

  “Where?” asked Mary Anne. “Where?”

  In a flash, we were out of bed, putting on shoes. Nobody wanted to go barefoot in the presence of a spider.

  “Oh, wait a sec,” said Karen who had inched her way to the spot where she’d seen the spider. “False alarm. It’s just a piece of lint. Never mind. You can all go to sleep again.”

  But of course after a scare like that, nobody even got in bed again, let alone went to sleep. Instead, we dressed for the day. For a hot, very casual day. Most of us just pulled on shorts and T-shirts. When we had finished washing our faces and brushing our hair (which, as you can imagine, took a considerable amount of time, with eleven girls sharing one bathroom), we stepped into the living room.

  “Dahling, you look ravishing!” Sam cried, touching my hair. (I hadn’t expected him to be up, but he was. Darn it.) He looked at my ratty old shorts and my wrinkled Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. “And your ensemble is —”

  “Ravishing?” suggested Karen.

  “No. Ugly.”

  “Oh, shut up, Sam,” I said. (But I went back to the dorm to change.)

  At breakfast, Sam sat next to me and kept tweaking the ends of my permed hair. Tweak, tweak, tweak.

  I was sitting directly across the table from Kristy and gave her pained looks, but she didn’t notice.

  Finally, Sam tweaked my hair once too often. Just as I was about to open my mouth and really let him have it, not caring that everyone would hear and I would be embarrassed, Kristy stood up.

  “Okay, baby-sitting assignments,” she announced. Kristy had been working out some system in which all the younger kids would be cared for at the lake, yet us BSC members would still have several days off apiece.

  I wound up with one of my days off, and I knew just what I wanted to do with that free time. As soon as breakfast was over and the dishes had been washed, I changed into my bathing suit. Then I walked to the dock, arranged myself on a lounge chair, and prepared to soak up some rays. “Sun, do your stuff,” I murmured.

  I was answered with a wolf whistle.

  Sam.

  I sat up and stared down the length of the dock.

  “Hey, good-lookin’,” he said.

  “Oh, shut up,” I said (again).

  I snapped the lawn chair closed, marched off the dock, past Sam, across the path, and back to the cabin. Sam was being a royal pain.

  I changed into my clothes again.

  Would Sam never leave me alone?

  I tried to figure out what to do next. Everyone had gone off in different directions. I sort of wanted to explore the stores and look at the big boats at the main dock — but not by myself.

  So I was just sitting on the porch of the cabin when I heard Mary Anne cry, “Karen? Nancy? Hannie? Where are you guys? … Karen?”

  “Mary Anne?” I called.

  “Yeah. Stacey, is that you?”

  Mary Anne ran around a corner of the cabin.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “The girls are missing! Karen and her friends.”

  “Missing?” I repeated. And then I couldn’t help adding, “Already?”

  “Yes, already,” said Mary Anne testily. “We were going to take a walk in the woods. We were right behind the cabin. I turned around for about two seconds because I thought I heard Shannon whining. Just two seconds. That was all. When I turned around again, the girls were gone. You know, I saw something like this on True Life Mysteries once. This little kid wandered off and he was never seen again. His mother had just turned her back for a split second — and her life was changed forever.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mary Anne,” I said. “Have you looked for the girls yet? Have you even looked? I think you’re hysterical.”

  “I am not hysterical! I’m just scared.”

  “Well, come on. I’ll look with you. Let’s start in back, where —”

  “Where last I saw them,” Mary Anne interrupted dramatically.

  “Whatever.”

  We ran behind the cabin. “KAREN!” we shouted.

  “Yeah?” Karen, Hannie, and Nancy emerged from the woods. They could not have been far away, since Karen answered so quickly.

  “Where were you?” cried Mary Anne.

  “In the woods,” said Karen.

  Mary Anne sighed. “Don’t go away from me again,” she said sternly, “unless you tell me where you’re going first.”

  “Okay,” the Three Musketeers replied solemnly.

  * * *

  We ate lunch at the lodge that day. (We’d eaten dinner there the night before.) We took up four tables. I sat with Claud, Jessi, and Emily Michell
e. Claud and Jessi and I were supposed to be taking turns helping Emily with her lunch, but Jessi had zoned out on us. She kept staring into space. Or, no … she was staring at something. I followed the direction of her gaze and my eyes landed on a tall, dark-skinned, handsome boy across the room. He was seated with a younger girl and a couple, probably his family. Never once did he look in Jessi’s direction, but I was pretty sure he was who she was looking at. Hmm….

  That afternoon I hung around with Dawn. She said she was solving a mystery.

  “What mystery?” I asked. “We’ve been here for all of one day.”

  “Shadow Lake’s mystery,” she replied. “I knew I’d find one. People up here keep mentioning a mystery, an old mystery. But they don’t say much about it. Then, of course, there’s the Lake Monster.”

  “The what?” I shrieked.

  “The Lake Monster. People have also been seeing this — this monster in the lake. It looks like the Loch Ness Monster. Like a sea monster.”

  “Oh, my lord,” I murmured.

  I had taken a vacation with lunatics.

  “Ow!” cried Mallory. “Ow, ow, OW!”

  “What on earth is the matter?” asked Dawn. My friends and I were walking back to the cabin after our lunch at the lodge. Watson and Kristy’s mom and grandmother were ahead of us. The younger kids were surrounding us, and Sam and Charlie were ambling along behind.

  “Yeah, what’s wrong?” Jessi asked Mal.

  “I’m being eaten alive!” she cried. “Honest. Last night I got five mosquito bites, and now these tiny little bugs are stinging me or something.”

  “What tiny little bugs?” asked Kristy.

  “These,” answered Mal. She pointed to a dot on her forearm. “That’s one. Two more were there but I swatted them.”

  “I hope those tiny little bugs aren’t deer ticks,” I said. “They carry Lyme disease, you know.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Stacey, who thought she’d had Lyme disease once when the seven of us were away at Camp Mohawk.

  “Thank you, Miss Encyclopedia of Bad News,” Kristy said to me. “Those dots are not deer ticks. They’re only chiggers…. But chigger bites really hurt.”