Blumberg let out an abrupt, bitter laugh. “Answer that and you get the prize.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Nobody knows what happened.”
“You called it ‘a perfect storm.’ What did you mean?”
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong.”
“Can you tell me about it? It could be important.”
“It could be important? It was important enough to destroy Camp Brightwater—a camp that had been in business, for your information, for fifty years before the thirty-eight years I ran it. An institution. A tradition. All destroyed.”
Gurney said nothing. He waited, knowing Blumberg would tell the story.
“There was always variability—better years, worse years. I don’t mean the business, the financial aspect. That was always solid. I’m talking about the personality mix. The emotional chemistry. The spirit of the group. How the bad apples would affect the rest of the barrel. Some years the spirit was cleaner, brighter, better than other years. To be expected, right? But then, thirteen years ago, that one year everything fell off the wrong end of the chart. The feeling in the air that summer was different. Uglier. Nastier. You could feel the fear. Counselors quit. Some kids wrote to their parents to come and get them. There’s a phrase people use nowadays: ‘toxic environment.’ That’s what it was. And all that was before the event itself.” Blumberg shook his head again and seemed to get lost in his recollections.
“The event?” prompted Gurney.
“One of the boys disappeared.”
“Disappeared . . . permanently?”
“He was present at dinner. He was missing at breakfast. Never seen again.”
“Did the police get involved?”
“Sure, they got involved. For a while. They lost interest when it started looking like the kid just ran away. Oh, they searched the woods, put out those missing-person notices, checked the bus stops, put his picture in the local papers. But nothing came out of any of that.”
“Why did they think he ran away?”
“Homesick? Hated being here? Maybe was being pushed around a little? You got to understand something. This was thirteen years ago—before all the uproar started about the bullying thing. Don’t get me wrong. We discouraged it. But the thing is, bullying was part of growing up back then. A fact of life.”
A fact of life, thought Gurney. And, occasionally, a fact of death. “So once the police adopted the theory that he ran away, was that the end of it?”
Blumberg laughed again, more bitterly than before. “I wish to God that was the end of it. That was far from the end of it. A boy disappearing, possibly running away—that was the reality. The camp could have survived that. What the camp couldn’t survive was all the crazy bullshit.”
“Meaning?”
“The rumors. The whispers.”
“Rumors of what?”
“Every kind of evil thing you could imagine. I told you the spirit of the place that summer was nasty even before the disappearance, and it only got worse afterward. The stories some of the boys were spreading, even some of the parents—beyond belief.”
“For example?”
“Anything you could imagine, the more horrible the better. That the missing kid had actually been murdered. That he’d been used as a human sacrifice in a satanic ritual. That he was drowned and his body was chopped up and fed to the coyotes. Incredible shit like that. There was even a story that some of the boys, some of the bad apples, got it into their heads that he was a little fagelah, and they beat him to death and buried him in the woods.”
“Just because he was gay?”
“Gay?” Blumberg shook his head. “What a word for it, eh? Like it was some kind of happy way to be. Better they should call it ‘fucking warped’—be more accurate.”
Gurney couldn’t help feeling a little sick at the thought of the boy’s experience at a camp where the ultimate authority viewed him that way.
“Did the police follow up on any of the ugly stories?”
“Nothing came of any of that. So many wild ideas going around that none of them seemed real. Teenage boys have grotesque imaginations. My opinion? I’d have to agree with the police—that he ran away. No real evidence of anything else. Just crazy talk. Unfortunately, crazy talk is like electricity. Lots of dangerous energy.”
“The crazy talk killed the camp?”
“Killed it dead. Next summer we filled less than a third of our bunks, and half of those kids left before the season was over. The crazy talk came back, like an infection. The life of the place was dead and gone. Goddamn shame.”
“The bad apples—do you remember any names?”
Blumberg shook his head. “Faces, I recognize. Names, I’m not so good. I’m thinking some of them had nicknames. But I can’t remember them, either.”
“Can you recall the name of the boy who disappeared?”
“That’s easy. It came up a thousand times. Scott Fallon.”
Gurney made a note of it. “The fire that destroyed the main building with all the records of your campers’ names and addresses—was there an investigation?”
“An investigation that went nowhere.”
“But despite everything, you stayed here. And reinvented the camp as a bungalow colony. You must be very attached to the location.”
“Camp Brightwater was once a magical place. A happy place. I try to remember that.”
“Sounds like a good idea. How’s the bungalow colony business?”
“It’s shit. But it pays the bills.”
Gurney smiled and handed Blumberg a card with his cell number on it. “Thank you for your time. If you think of anything else about that bad year, anything that happened, any names, any nicknames, please give me a call.”
Blumberg frowned at the card. “Your name is Gurney.”
“Right.”
“Not like the cow.”
“No, not like the cow.”
CHAPTER 35
On the drive back to Wolf Lake, Gurney tried to relate what he’d learned from Moe Blumberg to everything else he knew about the case.
Homophobia seemed to be a common factor—which made him curious to find out if it had surfaced in Hardwick’s meeting with the Teaneck detective regarding Leo Balzac’s suicide.
He pulled off onto the shoulder, took out his phone, and called Hardwick’s number.
The man picked up on the first ring—a good sign.
“What’s up, ace?”
“Just wondering if you managed to get to your guy in Teaneck.”
“Got to him, sat with him, listened to him. Bottom line, the man is highly pissed off at the politics of the case.”
“The politics?”
“Unexplained orders from above. Orders serious enough that they damn well better be followed, but ambiguous enough to be deniable. Only clear thing is that they’re descending from the stratosphere where the flick of a finger can send your career into the toilet like a dead fly.”
“What does your new detective friend have to do to avoid the fatal flick?”
“Hang back, stay off the minefield, and trust that the situation is in good hands.”
“There’s that minefield again.”
“Huh?”
“Fenton told me I was stumbling around in a minefield.”
“Nice when everyone’s on the same page.”
“Did you ask him if he knew in whose ‘good hands’ the case now resided?”
“He said he’d been given a hint that their identities couldn’t even be hinted at.”
“Echoes of Robin Wigg warning us to back away. What do you think’s going on?”
“Fuck if I know. Fuck if the guy in Teaneck knows. All he knows is that he’s not supposed to know anything, say anything, or do anything. And he finds that very irritating.”