The Glory Hand (10 page)

'CassieV

A familiar figure barged through the crowd.

'Robin!'
Cassie ran over and hugged her.

'Come on. I saved you a seat.'

'But what . . .?'

'You didn't expect me to stick around Nantucket after I heard where you were going . . .'

'But how . . .?'

'Are you kidding? My mom's been bugging me to go to Casmaran since
last
summer. She's been driving me out of my gourd, telling me what a great time
she
had.'

'Your mother went there, too?'

'Dahling
, the girls from
all
the "right" families wouldn't be caught dead anywhere else.' Robin put the back of her hand against her forehead in mock agony: 'What I go through for you.'

'I'm counting on you to keep Cassie out of trouble, Robin,' Clay said. 'You're supposed to be the responsible one.' At the mention of the word 'responsible,' the two girls looked at each other and broke up.

Three deafening blasts from the bus horn, and the campers squirmed away from their parents' hasty kisses. Cassie searched for a face in the crowd.

Robin laughed: 'You waiting for Todd to come kiss you goodbye?'

'I wrote him ... I hoped he'd see me off . . .' Cassie said.

'He must be royally pissed. Anyway, how does it go? "Absence makes the heart grow . . ."' Clay wrapped his arms around Cassie, and Robin stopped herself. 'You two are unreal.' She climbed into the bus. 'If you're thinking about changing your mind, Cass, forget it. I'm not going without you.' ■

Cassie hugged her father tightly. She didn't like the feeling, the two of them balancing in each other's arms, as if one of them were about to fall from a high place. With her eyes closed, the diesel fumes and the din of the jostling mob wrenched her back to another time, another frantic moment. She couldn't block out that other goodbye high on the shuddering scaffolding, so cruel, so unexpected. To escape the memory, she pulled away from him and climbed into the bus.

You chose to do this,
she tried to comfort herself as she fought her way down the crowded aisle.
It's what she wanted for you.

Part Two

THE WARNING HAND

Chapter 8

Cassie tried to figure out how long it had been: the campers had worked their way through 'Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer On the Wall' so many times she had lost count, the song a monotonous counterpoint to the knocking engine and the rattle of empty Tab cans rolling back and forth in the aisle. Enough peanut butter cups and Hostess Twinkies had been consumed, their wrappers hurled out of the windows, that they could have used the litter to retrace their route all the way back to Bangor, Maine.

But by now, the girls' voices had grown hoarse, and they stared dumbly ahead, their faces sickly in the pine shadows. The New England brick houses, darkened with coal soot, the lath and plaster English Tudor tracts in the suburbs, had long since given way to a never-ending wall of trees. They had seen their last house, their last person, at the 'john' stop an hour ago, and the forest, miles and miles of it, made Cassie begin to wonder whether she had done the right thing to talk her father into letting her go.

Her back ached. The seats of the rickety yellow school bus were little more than benches; their springs had rusted years ago. In a tight Casmaran T-shirt that showed off her bust and fashionably oversized sunglasses, the counselor who drove hardly turned the wheel at all. The bus sped along, as if it knew the way by heart.

Robin was slumped against Cassie's shoulder, asleep, a smile on her lips. Cassie envied her friend for being able to shut her brain off at moments like this. Hers was always switched on, darting, weaving, twisting around corners like the bus, racing down dark roads before she quite had time to know where she was going, or even where she had been.

The bus jolted through a pothole and Robin woke up. She looked out the window at the same wall of trees that had been there when she had dozed off. 'If Casmaran turns out to be the pits,' she said, 'it's your ass.' To distract herself from the thought, Cassie opened the copy of
Cat's Cradle
she had brought along, but the brooding, endless corridor of trees meant that even at noon it was hard to read.

Robin picked up the brochure Cassie had been using to mark her place, the brochure that had come in the mail along with Cassie's acceptance letter, and read it aloud in a melodramatic baritone: '"
The oldest girls' camp in America ... In operation under the same management since 1889.'
Great. I bet they've also got the same plumbing. "
What began as a retreat devoted to training daughters of prominent New England families in deportment, the household arts, and lawn sports
..." Are they kidding? "...
now offers progressive program in a setting of ten-thousand unspoilec acres . . ."'
Robin stuck a finger down her throat as though she were trying to puke.

'Give me a break.'

'You won't believe this:
"Casmaran's three C's - Citizenship, Camaraderie and Courage - have remained our hallmark since its founding.'"
Robin turned the brochure over. 'No photographs. Are they trying to hide something? Or are they just cheap?'

'They don't need pictures,' Cassie said. 'Anyone who'd need a brochure to learn about Casmaran wouldn't stand a prayer of getting in anyway.'

Robin handed Cassie back the brochure and closed her eyes again. Cassie tried to focus on the forest, but the sunlight strobed through the pine boughs, blurring the trees together into one continuous flight of crows. The forest was so dark that even in daytime, Cassie thought, night bristled here like a thorn thicket, taking root in the rocky soil. When the road narrowed from two asphalt lanes to a single, gravel one, it seemed as though the walls of evergreens would slam shut in a dead end.

The girls behind her broke into song:'
We're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here . . .!'

Robin opened her eyes and stretched, it's about time.'

Suddenly the unrelenting wall of evergreens gave way to poplars and birches, and the pine scent dissolved into the aroma of rain-fresh grass. Maples arched their boughs over the road to form an arbor of sun-dappled green. And through the trees, an image shimmered like a mirage, ethereal as a memory. Washed-out in the sun like a faded sepia photograph, were old buildings, but upside down, as if they had been projected out of Cassie's mind's eye. She realized she was seeing a reflection in a lake, the picture so sharp because the water was perfectly still, a mirror-image of the camp. She wondered whether her mother had felt this same exhilaration when she had seen Casmaran for the first time.

The bus doubled back behind a grove of pines and they lost sight of everything. Then the gears whined and clanked as the bus lurched down a final steep grade, the tires churning off the gravel onto dirt.
Casmaran - Founded 1889
a sign scorched on a knotty-pine board announced, and the bus barreled through open split-rail gates. She glanced over her shoulder: the picturesque wooden fence was edged with barbed wire.

The bus rumbled out of the shade into blinding sunshine, and with surprising suddenness, Cassie found herself in the midst of the picture she had glimpsed from a distance. She realized she must have expected a hodgepodge of jerry-built tent-cabins and outdoor privies, like the camp her father had attended. She couldn't have been more wrong. Lining both sides of an impeccably trimmed lawn were freshly painted white clapboard cabins with gingerbread latticework around the eaves, and forest-green window-boxes overflowing with geraniums. Even the smallest of the cottages was solidly built, as if from a time when everything was constructed with a loving attention to detail. At the head of the lawn, austere and dignified between the two rows of cheerful cabins, an enormous windowless structure of ivy-covered granite seemed all the more imposing because it was built up on fieldstones six feet above the ground. Behind it, near the woods, were two smaller, but equally severe granite-faced facades that reminded Cassie of the shelters built to withstand blizzards, where mountain climbers found refuge on Alpine slopes. It seemed as though the buildings - all of them - had been here so long that they had taken root, as natural, as permanent, as the forest. The deep green of the lawn ended in the turquoise blue of the lake. Limpid and serene, the water was a far cry from the brooding, hungry sea, she thought, water that was too clear to hide the ocean's secrets.

The bus lurched to a stop in the dust before the brass-bound doors of the massive stone building which, Cassie guessed, must be the main lodge. The campers shoved their way down the aisle, exploding onto the lawn.

'Please claim your baggage, girls. Every camper is responsible for her own baggage
. . .' A counselor in a Lacoste tennis dress and spotlessly white tennis shoes, with gold ear studs to match the gold chains around her neck, spoke with a politeness that didn't jibe with the bullhorn in her hand.

if I'd wanted to suck up to debutantes,' Robin said, 'I would have gone to Newport for the summer.'

'Come on, she was probably a camper here herself once,' Cassie said.

'That's what I'm afraid of.'

Half a dozen other counselors in equally stylish sports clothes waited on the porch of the main lodge as the campers spewed out of the bus, their manicured fingers toying nervously with the whistles on lanyards around their necks.

'Campers are requested to locate their counselors immediately for bunk up . . .'

Clipboards on their hips, the counselors descended the steps of the lodge to the lawn with what Cassie thought was considerable reluctance. The counselors directed, rather than helped, the campers heft their footlockers out of the baggage compartment of the bus, and Cassie edged away from them, starting cautiously across the lawn, as if to get her land legs.

Daisies and snapdragons overran the grass in bright constellations, up to the forest's edge a hundred yards away. Cassie remembered that her mother had mentioned the flowers in her letter, and knelt down and touched the pastel petals. They dissolved between her fingers like sherbet.

Then she stood up and turned slowly, taking it all in: the main lodge, like a fortress, the two smaller, equally severe stone structures behind it, the cheerful white clapboard cabins flanking the lawn. The cabin closest to the lodge was for the seven- and eight-year-olds, she guessed, from the swings and slide beside it. A weathered shed extended out over the lake - probably the boathouse - and half-hidden by a stand of pines was a rambling red barn. Somehow they all seemed in harmony, tied together by the ivy and the wildflowers, the lush grass, and the glittering sweep of the lake. Her mother had been right to think she would love it, she thought.

'This place looks prehistoric,' Robin groaned.

'Campers report to their cabins at once, please. Bunk assignments are made on a first-come, first-serve basis . . .'

Cassie ignored the bullhorn, and grabbing Robin's hand, led her away from the cabins.

'You act like you've been here before,' Robin said.

'I almost feel like I have.'

Behind the lodge, at one end of a baseball diamond, was a square enclosed by a white picket fence, the grass inside mown as smooth as felt.

'Croquet!' Robin shook her head. 'Looks like it's going to be one hell of an exciting summer.'

Cassie laughed and headed towards the two small stone buildings behind the lodge. One smelled of turpentine and leather, and a frost of sawdust coated the leaded windows. Above the door hung a sign: '
Idle hands are the Devil's workshop
'Arts and Crafts?' Cassie peered inside through the open door. A rack along one wall gleamed with the blades of a surprising number of chisels and knives.

'Very convenient . . .' Robin pointed to the adjoining granite building, identical, except for the red crosses painted on its shutters. 'If you lop off your pinkie with one of those knives in Arts and Crafts, you only have to carry it a few feet to have it sewn back on.'

Cassie read a cardboard sign someone had tacked to the infirmary door: '
Germ City
.' A lizard scurried up the tiled wall of the waiting room where an aqua vinyl sofa was stacked with dog-eared copies of
Today's Health.
Beyond it was a row of spartan army cots. A tray on a chipped enamel table held a syringe.

'Reminds me of this movie I saw on the late show,' Robin said. '
The Torture Chamber of Doctor Sadism.'

'I bet it keeps the kids from getting sick.'

'Get this . . .' Robin was studying a chart posted on the door:
'To Tell Whether a Snake is Poisonous
.' Diagrams compared the scale formations, head shapes, and fangs of different species. 'God, this is confusing,' Robin said. 'By the time you figured out if the snake that bit you was poisonous, you'd be dead!'

The trail behind the infirmary weaved through a grove of pines. 'What the hell's that?' Robin stopped and gripped Cassie's arm, pointing out a silhouette dimly visible through the trees, a creature about four feef tall, crouched on its haunches. They approached cautiously, pushing aside the pine boughs.