She's Got a Way (2 page)

Right.

Sam drew her knees up to her chest, settling into the corner of the couch in a defensive move Gabi recognized from when she'd first arrived at Briarwood. The girl could hotwire a school van, drive across state lines without a license, and probably drink a twenty-one-year-old under the table, but right now, she actually looked scared. Gabi almost felt sympathetic, until she remembered the hours she'd spent on the road last night, praying that the girls were alive.

“How are we getting to this camp?” Eve asked.

“You will be driven there in the school van—using the ignition key this time.” Priscilla smiled, pleased with her little attempt at humor. Then she looked straight at Gabi. “Ms. O'Brien will be taking you.”

Gabi felt her eyes go wide.

Wait just one flipping Barbados minute
.
Oh, no, she wouldn't be.

“I'm sorry, Pris—Ms. Pritchard. I have a flight that evening. We'll need to find someone else to drive the girls.” Gabi knew damn well that Priscilla was aware of her trip. It had taken the woman a full month to hem and haw over whether Gabi could be allowed to
take
the two-week unpaid vacation, but maybe in the chaos of the morning, she'd forgotten.

Gabi felt her stomach clench as her lips tightened. The girls' heads all swiveled to look at her.
They
knew how much she was looking forward to this trip. They'd been cutting out tropical pictures for her bulletin board all spring. They'd planned her sightseeing itinerary down to the minute for her, and they'd loaded up her tablet with ten of her favorite movies to watch on the beach.

Priscilla cleared her throat. “Actually, Ms. O'Brien, we need to talk about your trip.”

Gabi's stomach fell.

Or … maybe she hadn't forgotten at all.

*   *   *

“Boarding-school girls?” Luke Magellan shook his head in confusion later that afternoon.
“Here?”

Oliver nodded, rocking back in his rickety lawn chair as he sent a hand through his shock of gunmetal-gray hair. “Nothing I could do. Briarwood bought the property in April. They own us now. And I guess they're getting started on the ‘using us' part.”

Luke looked out at Echo Lake, glistening in the early summer sun. The beach was quiet, the dock was quiet, the dining hall was empty … just like he'd thought it was going to be all summer. No boys on the tire swings, no boys paddling the lake, no boys whooping and hollering from the diving raft.

Utter, awful silence.

He put his hands on his hips, completely mystified. “I don't get it. First, they buy the place as a completely transparent tax write-off. Then, despite their promises to keep it operating as you've run it for three decades now, they close us down for the summer and hand us a project list that makes it very clear they actually have
no
such intentions. And now they're sending us a group of little rich girls who are
this
close to expulsion? What the hell are we supposed to do with them?”

Oliver blew out a pained breath. “I don't know.”

Luke paced the dock, automatically stepping over the three loose boards he hadn't had time to fix. Then a thought occurred to him. There was no way this Briarwood headmaster would send her students if she knew the true shape of the facilities right now. The girls' parents would shit bricks.

He turned back to Oliver. “They know we don't have anywhere for them to sleep, right?”

“We have tents.” Oliver shrugged slowly.

Luke snorted. “Right. You're thinking a limo full of Briarwood girls are going to roll in here and be okay with us showing them to their army canvas?”

“I'm thinking these particular girls have reached the end of the Briarwood rope, if the alternative was to send them home for good. Tents might be the least of their problems.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “Why didn't they just expel them, if that's what the girls deserved?”

“Two words: rich parents. You piss them off, you kiss your future endowment money good-bye. Briarwood wants the money, so Briarwood has to keep the kids.” Oliver shook his head. “But it sounds like the board insisted on a consequence that matched the crime. Maybe they're using the girls as an example to their other wannabe-miscreants. I don't know.”

“So they chose Camp Echo.” Luke sighed. “They know that besides the dining hall, every last thing here is on its last legs, right? They know you and I are the only staff members left?”

As he said the words, he swore silently. How could they
not
know? They owned the place now, damn it all.

“They know. And it might just be me, but it seemed like the headmaster was actually happy to hear it.”

“Then she must be extremely pissed at this crew. We've got no programs, no counselors, no nothing. And they wasted no time demoting me right down from director to camp handyman. Who's supposed to supervise them all summer? Who's going to keep them from running wild all over
this
property?”

Oliver looked down at his notepad. “Gabriela O'Brien. The housemother. Apparently she drew the short straw.”

Luke felt his eyebrows go skyward as he pictured steel-wool hair and flowered muumuus. A
housemother
? “And is this … housemother responsible for entertaining them?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, this is just.
Shit.
What are we supposed to do with an elderly woman here? We can't make
her
sleep in a frigging tent, Oliver.”

“You want to give up your cabin?”

“Hell, no. It's all I've got left.” Luke rubbed his forehead with both hands. “But I'm not going to put her in a tent, for Christ's sake.”

“Well, not sure we've got other options. I can't put her in the back room of the admin cottage with me. People would talk.”

Luke smiled for the first time as he pictured Oliver's living quarters, which were just about big enough to turn around in, as long as you held your breath so your stomach caved inward.

“We don't have time to build them a cabin, not with our other priorities here. They'll be here in a week.”

Oliver nodded. “Let's play it by ear. Maybe she's not elderly. Or maybe, if she is, she's the type that loves a good summer of roughing it in the wild.”

“She works at Briarwood. The roughest thing they have there is the oatmeal, and even that's probably organic and steel cut and gluten-free.” Luke felt his eyebrows pull together. “We've got a project list a mile long. What we
need
is a work crew, not a bunch of rich girls sunning on the beach.”

“Unless you turn them
into
your work crew.” Oliver bounced his eyebrows.

Luke leveled a look his way. “This is just the first step, Oliver. You see that, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—first they send a group like this, and they frame it as a desperation move, nowhere else to send them, yadda yadda. Next, we hear about how maybe they were a little hasty in their decision to keep Echo running as a boys' camp, because look how well suited it was for their girls. And then we get a bunch of mumbo-jumbo paperwork that excuses us from our positions because their original mission has changed, but best of luck in the future—”

“Yadda yadda?”

“Exactly.” Luke nodded. “I'm just saying. This smacks of a plan, not an emergency at all.”

“Well, it sure
sounded
like an emergency.”

“I don't buy it. They never intended to run this place as a boys' camp, and this is their first step toward reneging on that promise. I'd bet my new handyman salary on it.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “You're the only one calling yourself that, Luke.”

Luke laughed, short and bitter. “Well, I went from running programs for a hundred needy kids every summer to working my way through an endless project list in an empty camp. It's not much of a stretch.”

He sighed. He'd designed challenge-based programs for at-risk kids for ten years now under Oliver's tutelage, and he was damn good at it, because he'd worked his ass off to get there. His own history gave him an auto-in with a lot of the boys, and helping them learn to give a shit about themselves and their futures was a job he took very, very seriously.

It was the best lesson Oliver had ever imparted, and it had started the moment Luke had walked onto Camp Echo property as an angry foster kid determined to make everyone hate him, because it was easier. You knew where you stood.

He knew exactly where these kids could end up without his help, and he didn't want that for anyone. Been there, done that, had the scars to prove it.

He looked out at the lake, where a couple of little sailboats struggled to find a wisp of a breeze. “So what do we do?”

“We welcome them when they get here, we show them where everything is, and then we go on about our merry ways, doing the jobs we're
supposed
to be doing for the summer. The fact that four Briarwood girls snuck off campus and got themselves into this situation isn't our problem.”

“You're going to stick to that?” Luke raised his eyebrows. “You're not going to go all sympathetic when it's clear that this housemother person is completely out of her Briarwood element here?”

“We don't know that she will be.”

“Seriously.”

“Fine. She'll be
completely
out of her element.” Oliver put up his hands. “But she can figure it out. I'm sure she'll have a plan by the time she gets here.”

“And if she doesn't?”

“Then we give her a week to flounder, and we send them home.”

Luke sighed. “You sure we're not being pranked? Not about to be the victims of some new reality show where they send mini-princesses into the wilderness to see who lives through the summer?”

“At this point, I'd believe just about anything.”

“Well, I'll tell you this—if that Briarwood limo pulls in here with a camera van in tow, I'm outta here.”

“Fair enough.” Oliver shook his head. “But you're gonna have to move pretty fast to beat
me
out the gate.”

 

Chapter 2

A week later, Luke strode into the dining hall, two fur balls at his heels, annoyance speeding his steps.

Piper Bellini, temporary camp cook, popped her head up from among a pile of boxes in the kitchen, took one look at his face, and slid back down behind them.

He rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Piper.”

She popped back up. “I didn't say anything!”

“You didn't have to.”

“So you already know you look like you're about to kill somebody?” She pointed at the dogs. “Health department will freak if they know you let them in here, you know.”

Luke looked down at the pups circling his feet, still not quite sure how he'd ended up with them. Six months ago, he'd had an old black Lab who'd followed him everywhere, but a month after Duke had died in his sleep, these little puffballs posing as dogs had shown up on his porch.

Piper reached down to pick up one of them, motioning Luke and the other one out of the kitchen area. “Is this Thing 1? Or Thing 2? And also, when do they get their real names?”

“I've been thinking, okay? How about Ding and Dong?”

She laughed as she covered the dog's little ears. “Not nice.”

“Ping and Pong? Riff and Raff?”

“Wow. You really
are
in a mood.” Piper set the dog down and motioned for Luke to sit down at one of the long indoor picnic tables she'd painted last weekend. She was an art therapist by day, waitress in her family's restaurant by night, and wielded a mean paintbrush when she wasn't doing the other things. When Luke had called her last Friday about doing some emergency spiff-ups, she'd arrived within an hour, her fiancé Noah's truck loaded with a rainbow of paint cans.

She picked up the other dog and cuddled it under her chin. “So when are the preppy chicks arriving?”

He rolled his eyes. “Four hours.”

“You have tents ready?”

“I've got
a
tent ready. But they're going to have to put it up.”

Piper smiled widely. “That ought to be fun to watch. How about a bathroom and shower?”

“We have a perfectly good outhouse. And a lake. If they want a bathroom, then they can
build
a damn bathroom. It's on the project list, anyway.”

Piper stopped petting the dog. “It's good that you're not at all bitter here.”

“Oh, I passed bitter just about the time Oliver had to sign the sale papers, Piper. This place should be busting at the seams with obnoxious boys right now.”

“Is there any hope that you're—you know—wrong? That maybe Briarwood really is planning to keep this place running as a boys' camp after it's brought back up to code?”

Luke pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of his back pocket and spread it out. “I'll let the project list answer that for me.”

Piper took the piece of paper and scanned it quickly. He knew she was seeing shower stalls, a TV lounge, and cabins with central air. Camp Echo would no longer be a rustic camp on the shores of a quiet, beautiful lake. No—it was going to join the ranks of a million other lakefront properties that called themselves camps … but were really just glorified boarding schools. Hundreds of girls who needed … well, nothing … would cycle through here starting next summer, he'd bet his left foot.

Meanwhile, hundreds of boys who needed
everything
would be out of luck.

“Fine.” She pushed the list back toward him. “I see what you mean. So what are you going to do with the little princesses? Got your programs all worked out?”

Luke shook his head. “No programs. Oliver wants to let them figure things out themselves, and I wholeheartedly agree.”