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I look over at her again. She has taken a step closer. Her eyes are slightly widened like she has opened them more to let the memories shine out.
“At Camp Hollow?” Iask.
She nods.
“Can you tell me a little about it?” Iask.
“I lived in Cherry Hill at the time. That was a very hard year for me. My husband had just died very suddenly of a heart attack and I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. I had only just turned 50 and his death felt like it put me in such a strange position. I felt terrible for even thinking that way. He was the one who died, but I was the one who lived. I had to figure out how I was going to keepgoing.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I tell her, but she shrugs it off. It’s one of those things people say when they’re not sure what else to say, and she knowsthat.
“That age felt far too young for him to be gone. I didn’t feel like one of the dark-veiled widows I remember from the war days. We had so much ahead of us. So much planned. There was way too much life left for him to be gone. And at the same time, I felt too old to start over again. The only time I’d ever worked was when I was in my twenties, as a nurse during the war. After my husband came home, we settled down. He got a job, I became a housewife. I didn’t know anything else.
“The one thing I had going for me was that I’d kept up my nursing license over the years. Growing up when I did, I learned that the unexpected comes more often than you think and when it does, it’s up to all of us to get through it together. What I had was my nursing skill. Taking the time to keep up with my education and keep my license valid meant I could help when the next war or tragedy came. And it did. It always did. I volunteered my time and my skills several times.But I never thought I was going to have to use it as acareer.
“When Henry died, it was all I had left. I suddenly went from having him take care of me to being on my own for the first time in decades. My children were grown and had moved on to their own lives. They scattered across the country when they got to be adults and I don’t see much of any of them. Especially in those days. Three of them went to San Francisco together to join the youth there. I got the occasional postcard from them, but I didn’t see them for almost ten years. The other two married and started their own families in other states. We’d see each other on holidays most years, but that was it. I was essentially bymyself.”
“So you started nursing again,” Isay.
She nods. Leaning toward the table, she picks up one of the leather-bound volumes she’d brought along with the microfilm. I hadn’t gotten to that one yet. She opens it up, revealing an old brochure from the camp affixed to the page. The next page has the back of the brochure and when she flips the pages, I see the inside.
“There are copies of these from every year the camp was open. This was 1964.” She puts her finger on the page, indicating an image of herself two decades younger.
The caption beneath the picture gives her name, Maude Smith, and describes her simply as the infirmary nurse. It’s perfunctory and without any embellishment, unlike the descriptions of the director at the time, the counselors, and the instructors there to help with activities such as canoeing and archery. Further down on the page, the cooks and other workers in the mess hall are given largely the same degree of attention as Maude. The fact that they were all middle-aged women stands out to me.
“We were invisible,” she says as if reading my thoughts. “Women of a certain age just ceased to exist out in the world. We were supposed to be home being wives, mothers, and grandmothers, and it made people uncomfortable to see us doing anything else. The workforce was for the young, particularly the young and the male. Things were changing then. Not a lot, but they were. But it was still difficult for any woman to get employment when they were no longer fresh-faced.
“That’s what brought me to the camp. I had tried to find jobs in other places, but no one would hire me. They all thought I was too old or that I couldn’t keep up with the new technology in the way things were done. But I needed to find something. My husband took good care of me, but he didn’t leave enough behind to sustain me for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to completely go through our savings and have nothing to fall back on. He worked so hard to make sure I had even that much, and I knew he would be disappointed in me if I emptied the account and didn’t set any aside for a rainy day. And one thing you can always depend on in life is that it will getrainy.”
I can’t help but think about the storm that raged through the camp lastnight.
“Did you stay at the camp? Were you there when it all happened?” Iask.
“I did. I was the only nurse on staff, so if anyone got sick or hurt during camp, I was the one to take care of them. It meant I had to be there and be available all the time. Twenty-four hours a day. If my doorbell rang, I had to be ready to do whatever needed to be done. I wasn’t too worried about that. This was mostly poison ivy and bee stings. I’d dealt with far worse. I thought the worst I was going to see that summer was when one of the campers decided to jump from one canoe to another while they were moving and broke hisleg.”
Maude pauses and looks back down at the picture of herself. I can see the memories of what she went through that night rising back up to the surface. Part of me feels like I should comfort her and reassure her that she doesn’t need to talk about it. She doesn’t need to tell me what she experienced. But a much stronger part wants to know. She’s the first person I’ve encountered who was actually there at the camp when the murders happened. Detective Garrison responded to the scene, but he wasn’t there when it was actually happening. I want to know what she saw andheard.
“What do you remember?” I ask.“Anything you can tell me would help. I don’t know if it’s connected to this new case, but…”
Maude nods in understanding. “My sleeping quarters were attached to the infirmary. That way I could easily get to anyone who needed help. That’s where I went after eating dinner each evening. The campers would go to the campfire and then to bed. Most nights were uneventful. Scraped knees, bug bites, the occasional sprained ankle if they were running around. Maybe a finger burn from someone touching the end of one of the forks after roasting a marshmallow or getting their hair singed after adjusting the fire. And a couple of kids got sick in the middle of the night and needed to stay in the infirmary until morning when we could call their parents. But for the most part, things were quiet at the end of theday.
“That night I was in my room reading. I hadn’t changed into my pajamas yet and was planning on taking a shower before bed. That was one of the little luxuries I was afforded working there. I didn’t have to use the bathhouse. There was a bathroom with a shower in my sleeping area. That was much more comfortable for me not having to share the space with the young counselors or the campers. Of course, the director had far more impressive amenities in his own cabin, but that’s beside the point.
“I thought I was in for the night, but then I remembered I’d brought my clothes to the laundry earlier that day and hadn’t gone back to dry them because there was a sudden rush of bee stings and I’d gotten distracted. It was dark out, but I was used to it so I didn’t have my flashlight on, but I brought it with me. When I was walking, I thought I heard something in the woods, but I didn’t think much of it. There were always animals out there, and if the kids thought we didn’t know they were sneaking off together, they were very wrong. That just wasn’t my problem. I was there to make them feel better, not to chase them through the dark and scold them for theirimmorality.”
She gives a soft laugh that feels like it’s coming from that woman twenty years ago, the one who had seen so much change in her fifty years on this earth and watched as society shifted its views on so many things and kept them firm on so many others.
“Did you think it was the campers?” Iask.
“I didn’t really put much thought into it. I didn’t hear any voices and it didn’t seem like anything was wrong. I got to the laundry and put my clothes into the dryer, then sat down to read while I waited. After a while, I heard the first screams. I didn’t realize what it was at first. The dryer was loud and the sound was muffled. But after hearing it again, I realized that was what it was. I went outside and saw someone running from the edge of the woods. It was too dark to see, but I know now it was MaryEllen.”
“She was running?” I ask. “She made it out of the woodsalive?”
“Yes. There was something about the way she was running that stood out to me. Of course, I didn’t know what had already happened to Brad. I realized later she must have been hurt. She’d stopped screaming. I don’t know why, but I thought maybe it was a game. She was just being silly and it was going to be up to the counselors to get her back in line. I went back into thelaundry.
“But something started bothering me. I don’t know how to describe it. Something didn’t feel right. I’d never been one to believe in things like mystical powers or clairvoyance, but something that night told me everything was not alright. Something was wrong. I just didn’t know what it was. To this day, I can’t explain completely why I did it, but I turned the light off. I sat there in the dark feeling like I was being silly and I almost got up and turned it back on. But I just knew not to. I couldn’t turn that lighton.”
“What stopped you?” I ask.
