Lost Cipher (2 page)

CHAPTER 3

Outside of town, the road narrowed, switchbacking its way up the west side of the Blue Ridge. Lucas caught glimpses between the trees, down to the farmland they had just crossed. The air rushing in through the truck's open windows was still humid, but up here it was a little cooler and smelled of rotting logs and evergreen needles. Every so often the roadside cliffs glistened with tiny cascades bubbling straight from the rock, like the mountains' cold blood seeping from veins opened by the slice of the highway.

They passed a sign telling them they had entered a national forest, and after that the only buildings in sight were the tin-roofed farmhouses far below. Once they reached the crest of the mountains, Lucas's grandmother asked him to read the directions to the camp aloud, and they finally spotted the tiny, moss-covered sign for Camp Kawani partly hidden by a tangle of roadside vegetation. The forgotten little marker made the camp seem even lonelier, like whoever ran it wanted it completely isolated from the outside world. When they turned onto the gravel road leading to the place he would spend the next seven nights, the knot in Lucas's stomach tightened.

Half a mile down the entrance road, they came out of the trees into a narrow, grassy valley surrounded by forested ridges. Lucas's grandmother slowed the truck in front of a small cabin with a stone foundation and a hand-lettered sign tacked to the front porch that read “Camp Kawani Check-In.” Another vehicle, a pickup much newer than theirs, was stopped in the small parking area.

Lucas forced himself out of the car and surveyed the layout of the place as he followed his grandmother toward the office. The road they were on looped around two rows of four cabins that faced each other across a grassy space. At the far end of the cabins sat a log building with high, horizontal slits for windows, and doors at either end. Behind it were several stacks of brightly colored canoes and kayaks. A circle of log benches surrounded a blackened fire pit at the center of the lawn between the cabins, and a squat stone tower with a large, brass bell on top overlooked the fire circle.
Probably what they ring when a kid tries to escape
, Lucas imagined.

Beyond the buildings, a raised wooden platform perhaps ten feet high looked out over a long, blue-green lake that filled the rest of the valley floor. Though the water looked cold, a few kids were already swimming, and a couple more were doing cannonballs and jackknifes off the platform. The lifeguard, an older boy in a light blue T-shirt, watched from a chair at the top of the platform. Attached to a stout pole on his platform was one end of a long steel cable that swooped out over the lake and disappeared high in the trees on a hill at the far end.

Lucas's grandmother had stopped and was watching him. “Looks like fun, don't it?” she said.

“Looks like a bunch of city kids swimmin' in a pond for the first time in their life,” Lucas grumbled.

She ignored his sour mood and stepped up onto the porch. A wooden plaque bolted above the door was inscribed with the camp's name and a quote from someone named John Muir. He paused to read it while his grandmother went into the office.

I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains.

Whatever
, thought Lucas.

Inside the office, a redheaded woman standing behind the front desk looked their way and smiled. Her hair was drawn back in a long ponytail, and her face was tanned and sprinkled with freckles. The woman wore the same light blue T-shirt as the lifeguard outside.

She was busy talking with a short, dark-skinned man and a boy about Lucas's age.
Mexican or something
, Lucas figured. The boy might have been a little older than Lucas, and even though he was shorter, he looked solid enough. He wore a pair of basketball shoes, and the green backpack leaning against his leg looked new. Unlike Lucas's buzz-cut dirty-blond hair, the boy's was longer, nearly in his eyes, and shiny black like a chunk of raw coal.

The woman behind the desk gave the father and son directions to a cabin, telling them they could pull up behind it to unload. As the boy hoisted the pack onto one shoulder and turned to head out the door, he caught Lucas's eye and gave him a quick, nervous nod. The look on the boy's face reminded Lucas of the feeling in his own stomach.

Lucas's grandmother stepped up to the counter to introduce herself, and the woman at the desk shook her hand.

“Welcome to Camp Kawani,” she said, smiling. “Hope you didn't have any trouble finding us. I'm Maggie Cates.” Then, without glancing at the list of names on the counter, she turned to Lucas and stuck out her hand. “I'm guessing you are…Lucas, right?”

Lucas remained silent but shook her hand. He recognized her name as the one on his invitation. Outside, he heard the pickup's doors creak open and slam shut and the sound of crunching gravel as the truck headed toward the cabins.

“Let's get you checked in,” Maggie said, looking him over.

She spent a minute going over some forms with Lucas's grandmother, then spoke to Lucas as his grandmother signed them. “Did you check the place out before you came in?”

“Sort of,” Lucas replied.

“Good. I guess you noticed we have two rows of cabins. Boys are on the left, girls on the right. That big building down at the end is the bathhouse, with bathrooms and showers.” She grinned. “Don't worry, it's modern, not like an outhouse or anything, but you still have to walk to get to it.”

“Sure,” Lucas muttered, not bothering to tell her he had outhouse experience.

“If you need to make a call home, you'll have to make it from the office here. I don't know if you have a cell phone with you, but we don't have coverage down in this valley, and even out by the road, it's pretty spotty.”

Lucas nodded. He'd never had his own phone, but he didn't plan on calling home anyway.

“Our dining hall is up in the woods past the lake.” She pointed to a map of the camp on the wall behind the desk. “If we're not out on the trail somewhere, that's where we eat all our meals. The recreation barn next to it has a climbing wall, ping-pong and pool tables, and some other good stuff.”

Lucas was only half listening. Outside he heard a small engine start up. A man on a mud-covered, yellow-and-black four-wheeler motored past the window behind Maggie and turned up the road into the cabins. He was towing a small trailer loaded with boxes and cans. The driver gunned the engine loudly, like he was about to accelerate, and looked over his shoulder at the office window. Easing off the throttle, he shot a wave back at Maggie through the blue smoke of the four-wheeler's exhaust.

Maggie waved back and shook her head. “My brother, Aaron. You'll meet him later. That four-wheeler's his favorite toy. That's probably part of your dinner it's hauling up the hill right now.”

“Do we get to ride it?” asked Lucas, though he already figured the four-wheeler was off-limits. He'd never had one of his own, but back when he'd lived with his pa—and closer to his friends—he'd gotten to ride one a few times.

“You're not the first to ask,” she replied. “Actually, we like to stick to
non
-motorized activities around here. Still fun, I promise, just quieter. Did you see our zip line? No one's died on it…yet,” she said smiling. “You'll get to try it this afternoon. We find that screaming for your life is a good way for the other campers to get to know you.”

They heard the gravel crunching again as the other pickup rumbled past the office and back toward the highway. Maggie turned back to Lucas's grandmother. “Looks like you're just about finished up with the paperwork. Cabin One is the first one down the left fork.”

Lucas and his grandmother piled back into the car and pulled up behind Cabin One. A set of steps led up to a landing and a screen door. Once he went through that door, the only faces Lucas would see for a week would belong to strangers. The thought of not seeing his home for so long suddenly hit him hard, and he wished he'd put up more of a fight about the camp.

His grandma seemed to sense how he felt. “Lucas, I know this ain't where you want to be. Especially with all this bad news. But I think it's what your pa would want—to come up here and be with some other boys and girls goin' through what you're goin' through. Heck”—she nodded out the windshield at the lake and the green ridges surrounding the camp—“seems like an awful nice spot to clear your head, if you ask me.”

Lucas didn't plan on clearing his head. “You expect me to just forget about Pa?”

“Lucas, you know that ain't what I mean. I know you'll never forget your pa. In fact, I got somethin' to help you with that while you're up here.” She opened her door and went around to the bed of the truck. Lucas followed.

She pointed to the duffel bag he'd packed with a week's worth of clothes and gear for the camp. “You best lift that up. I surely can't.”

Lucas hefted the duffel out of the truck. What she'd brought had been hidden underneath it all the way from Indian Hole.

“They said you'd need one up here for the hiking they got planned for you,” she said.

It was a Marine rucksack. Desert camouflage.
WHITLATCH
was stenciled in black across the back, right above the letters
U.S.

His father's pack. The sight of it made him want to bawl like a baby.

“Dang, Grandma,” he said, his voice breaking a little. “I can't take this. What if somethin' happens to it?”

“Lucas, that pack's already been through a lot worse.” She looked around at the camp. “This here will be like a vacation for it.”

Lucas shook his head, but he tossed the pack on top of the duffel at the foot of the cabin steps.

“Want me to go in with you? Help you get settled?” his grandmother asked.

Knowing his roommates could already be inside, Lucas figured he'd better keep the good-bye outside. “That's okay.”

“All right then. But remember what I told you in the car. You have any trouble, you have them camp people call.”

He knew she was having a hard time saying good-bye too. Lucas finally met her eyes. “I'll be fine.”

“Then I'll see you next Saturday.” His grandma started to get back in the truck but stopped. “Lucas, you need to remember these other young 'uns all had a rough spell, just like you. Some maybe rougher. Be good to 'em.”

Lucas couldn't imagine anything rougher than the last two months of his life, but he nodded anyway. He watched her start up the truck and put it into gear. She made her way slowly around the loop road behind the girls' cabins and back toward the office. The old pickup finally disappeared beyond the trees, and the crunch of gravel faded, replaced by the shrieks and splashes of the campers at the lake.

Lucas hoisted his duffel onto one shoulder and picked up his father's pack, lugging them up the few steps to the screen door. He propped the pack against a railing and pulled open the door to the little cabin that would be his home for the next week. Inside, the first thing he saw was a new green pack.

The Mexican kid's from the office.

CHAPTER 4

Lucas stepped in quietly, catching the screen door so it wouldn't slam. The cabin was larger than it looked from outside. Besides two sets of bunk beds, the single room had a wall with built-in drawers and an open closet with hooks for hanging clothes and gear. The boy from the office wasn't inside, but his pack was tossed onto one of the bottom bunks, so Lucas hefted his bag onto the other one, across the cabin from the kid's.

Another screen door faced out to the front porch, and Lucas saw the kid out there. For a second, Lucas considered slipping out the back door and walking down to the lake or hiking up the hill to try and find the recreation barn. But the lake was swarming with other kids, and the barn probably would be too. He wished his grandma hadn't just reminded him to be friendly. He pushed open the screen door and stepped onto the front porch.

The boy was in the last of four plastic chairs, his bare feet up on the rail and his socks tossed next to him. He looked up when Lucas came out the door and shot him a quick, tight-lipped smile. Lucas nodded and said, “Hey,” but the boy went back to staring straight ahead.

Lucas took the farthest chair from the boy and put his own feet up on the rail, trying to act just as relaxed. He remembered the boy's father's accent in the camp office and wondered if the roommate he was about to spend a week with even spoke English.

Three girls were on the front porch of the cabin straight across, chatting away as if they'd been friends all their lives. Their easy conversation only amplified the uncomfortable silence between the two strangers on the porch of Cabin One. After a long minute, Lucas finally spoke again.

“I hope they ain't plannin' on cacklin' like that all week,” he said, lifting his chin toward the girls across the lawn.

The brown-skinned boy huffed out a laugh but didn't speak.

Lucas had had enough of the silence. “You speak English?”

The boy threw his head back and laughed out loud this time. “
Sí, mejor que tú!
”

Lucas was confused—and getting annoyed quick by the kid's squirrelly behavior. “So speak it then.”

The boy laughed again. “I said, ‘Yeah, I speak it better than you.' I mean, sorry, I've just never heard someone talk like that. Except on TV, I guess. But I guess I've never been this far out of the city till today.”

Lucas could have said the same about the boy's city accent, but instead he said, “Sorry. I guess I should've figured you could speak English. I just figured since you were just sittin' there not sayin' much. And you're a…”

This time the boy turned and faced Lucas. “I'm a what?”

Lucas wasn't sure how to say it, but he spit it out anyway. “A Mexican, right?”

“Seriously? A Mexican? Not even close,” the boy said. “My dad's Salvadoran. You know, from
El Salvador
? It's a
country.
But, dude, I'm as American as you.” He turned back in his chair, shaking his head as if Lucas were the dullest kid he'd ever met.

“Like I said, sorry,” Lucas stammered. Meeting his first cabinmate wasn't exactly going well, and he had two more to go.

The boy shrugged but didn't look up, and within a few seconds, the silence had closed in on the porch again. It felt like the girls across the grass were sitting right there with them, ready to bust out laughing at whatever stupid words came out of Lucas's mouth. Other than being stuck at the same lousy camp, it looked like he had only one thing in common with the brown-skinned kid, and he sure wasn't going to start talking about their dead parents.

As if the kid read his mind, he leaned forward in his chair and propped his elbows on the railing of the porch. He stared across the lawn, but his mind wasn't on the noisy girls.

“We both know why we're here, right?” he said. “But that doesn't mean we've got to talk about it. Right?”

Lucas laughed nervously. “Hey, me neither. Don't even care.” But he thought about how that sounded.
I don't care if your ma just died. Or my pa.
“I mean I don't care if we
talk
about it,” he spit out.

The boy nodded, like he was okay with their agreement. He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. When he looked over at Lucas again, his fierce demeanor had vanished. “My name's Alex.”

“Lucas. Lucas Whitlatch.” Before he could say more, another car pulled to a stop behind one of the cabins closer to the lake. A girl and her mother got out, hauling out a blue pack and a rolled-up sleeping bag. They set the gear next to their car, and the girl's mother gave her a long hug. Then the girl picked up the gear and disappeared toward the back door of her cabin.

“Where you from, Lucas Whitlatch?”

“West Virginia,” Lucas replied, aiming his thumb west. “Probably what you'd call the middle of nowhere.”

“Actually, I thought
this
was the middle of nowhere. But then, I'm from DC. My backyard's about the size of this cabin.” He looked around at the mountains. “All this nature and stuff kinda feels like another planet.”

“Funny,” Lucas said, “my backyard's pretty big.” He could've told Alex plenty about the mountain, but he doubted a city kid could appreciate it much. Besides, he had a million questions to ask Alex about Washington. A couple of his friends had been, but he couldn't see his grandparents ever taking him, even if they could afford to.

He had just opened his mouth to ask when a loud crash from inside their cabin rattled the little building.

Lucas was through the door first. Another boy lay belly up at the foot of the ladder to the bunk above his. An enormous pack was strapped to his back, and he was rocking back and forth, struggling to get to his feet like an overturned turtle. Some of the pack's contents were scattered on the floor next to him, including a roll of toilet paper that had popped loose and rolled across the cabin floor, unfurling as it went.

The boy stopped moving and grinned sheepishly at Lucas and Alex as they came through the door. He stuck out his arms toward them.

“Little help here?” he said.