When Archie woke up the next morning, the cabin was suspiciously silent. Too silent, especially for a room that was normally packed to the breaking point with twelve-year-old boys.
“Hello?” he called. “Where is everybody?” But no one answered, because he was the only one there. He checked his watch. It was barely 5:30 a.m.
With a vague sense of panic he couldn’t identify, Archie pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and, without even brushing his teeth, headed out the front door to find a mass of campers of all ages standing around in front of the cabins and down along the path toward the lake.
“What’s going on?” he asked no one in particular.
“Miss Hiss is on a rampage,” a boy he didn’t know answered. “We’re supposed to all meet up in front of the main hall; at least that’s what people are saying. All the counselors are there already, but nobody wants to be the first one to go down there. I think Miss Hiss might actually hurt someone this time. My friend said he saw her shove one of the counselors so hard he fell into a tree.”
Down the row of cabins, closer to the lake, a shout went up from one of the older girls. “Oh my God, look!” she said in a loud, dramatic voice that begged a response. It was that girl from Vivian’s cabin, Lily, with the long hair, the one they’d conned at Field Day the first week. “Look at the dock!”
Half the kids rushed to see what she was pointing at. For Archie, the panic that had started as just a small twinge when he woke up began to grow like a balloon, filling his stomach with air. Even though he’d barely walked ten paces, he felt like he’d run a marathon.
Fighting the lump in his throat, he followed the group headed toward Lily’s voice and pushed his way to the front.
The dock—the old, beat-up dock, the only way in and out of the lake without wading through all the weeds—was gone.
He, along with the rest of the campers, stared in disbelief.
But looking more closely, he realized it wasn’t gone entirely. It just wasn’t anything resembling a dock anymore.
Pieces of wood, cracked and broken, floated out into the mucky water of Lake Joyless, moving farther and farther from shore by the second.
He sensed the shape of a person beside him. “Oh no.” It was Mitchell the Unconnable, and he sounded as distressed as Archie felt. “Oh no.”
Archie whirled on him, and whispered fiercely, “What happened? Do you know?”
Mitchell let out a deep sigh that sounded almost like a sob. His face was a mask of horror. “Not really, but I think it’s all my fault. I mean, it has to be—because I was talking to some of the boys in my cabin last night, about you know, that thing you were telling me about—” His voiced dropped even lower. “The map.”
“You told people?” Archie didn’t care at this point if anyone heard him. He was too shocked.
“I just wanted their opinions, that’s all,” Mitchell said.
Typical Mitchell. Archie rolled his eyes. “And then what?”
“Well, we spent all of dinner going over it, you know, where the treasure might be. And one of the guys said if there was really treasure in the lake, then you were probably right, that it was probably under the dock—I mean, that’s the only place where it wouldn’t have forced its way up to the surface, right? Over a hundred years? Isn’t that what you said?”
“I guess so. . . .” Archie said. He only vaguely remembered what he’d said to Mitchell. It was just the sort of stuff he said when he was conning someone. People were only supposed to believe him enough to take the bait. It wasn’t supposed to end up like this.
“Anyway, some of them—they went out last night and tried to find it. They tried to pry up part of the dock to see what was underneath. And you know it was practically broken anyway. . . . Then this happened. They’re lucky nobody got badly hurt, just a few splinters, and one kid scraped up his leg. But they’re going to be in massive trouble once Miss Hiss figures out who they are.”
Archie put his hand to his head. “I see,” he said, trying to sound calmer than the growing balloon in his stomach made him feel.
“I don’t think they found anything, if you’re wondering about that,” Mitchell said. “They would have told me.”
“Of course they didn’t find anything!” Archie snapped back. “It’s just—they—but—” He was too upset to even get the words out.
A crackle of feedback from the camp intercom broke through the murmuring sounds of the other campers. And then, Miss Hiss’s voice boomed over the whole camp, sounding more menacing than it ever had before.
“All campers must report to the flagpole immediately. IMMEDIATELY. That means RIGHT NOW.”