In the Dead of the Night 🏚️ Chapter Four
In which introductions are made...
You are reading In the Dead of the Night, a serialized YA novel by Erin Bowman. If you are new to the story, visit the Table of Contents and start at the beginning.
Copyright © 2024 by Erin Bowman.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or reprinted without written permission.
The cabin is tiny and smells like mildew and damp earth.
It’s essentially one cramped room of about twelve by twelve, with two bunks pushed against adjacent walls. The third wall has a doorway that leads to a small bathroom. (Another reason Durant is so expensive: running water in all cabins.) The fourth holds the entrance Viv and I have stepped through.
Two girls have already claimed the bunks on the far wall, leaving Viv and I the set closest to the main door. She throws her bag on the top bunk, and announces, “I’m Viv, this is Nell.”
“Jocelyn,” says a girl in the process of tacking up photos of her boyfriend against the dark, stained walls beside her bed. At least I assume he’s her boyfriend. He’s shirtless in half the pictures and has his arm slung around her in several others. She’s beaming in every shot, a perfect pearl-white smile contrasting against her olive skin.
Jocelyn barely turns around to greet us, but when she steals a glance over her shoulder, her eyes linger on me a beat too long. With her lips pinched together, she looks different from the girl in the photos. Intimidating and not nearly as approachable. Her dark hair is pulled into a bun that makes her already impressive height seem even taller. She’s wearing gym shorts and a plain white tee, but it somehow looks high fashion. I instantly want to impress her even though everything about her screams I cannot be impressed.
“I’m Gretta,” the other girl says. She’s closer to Viv’s height, but not nearly as slight in build, with red hair that’s plaited into two french braids and a spattering of freckles across her nose. “Are you guys counselors too?”
“I was supposed to be, but they switched me to the kitchen,” I explain.
“No surprise, really,” Jocelyn scoffs. “What else was Goodwin supposed to do? If I was a parent, I wouldn’t want my kids being counseled by a criminal’s daughter.”
“Huh?” Viv looks visibly confused.
Jocelyn rolls her eyes. “Have you been living under a rock the past two days? Her father’s been all over the news. Duncan Bradley? Esteemed wall street banker? Suspected of embezzling funds from his clients and now on the run from the feds?”
Viv laughs sheepishly. “We don’t really watch much TV.”
“Do you not have a phone either? No internet access?”
Viv’s face goes blank and I know instantly that Jocelyn’s hit a nerve.
“I just don’t live on my phone, okay?” Viv says evenly. “Nice meeting you guys. I’m hungry, gonna head back to the mess. I’ll catch you later.”
The screen door thwacks shut behind her.
“Are you gonna go to the bonfire later?” Gretta asks me, as if nothing awkward has just transpired. “The welcome one?”
“Don’t we have to attend?” I ask, shifting uncomfortably.
“I… I don’t know actually. Jocelyn?”
“Yes, Gretta, we have to.”
Gretta turns back to me, awaiting a reply.
“Okay, then I’ll be there.” I eye the door. Viv hasn’t made it far. “I’ll be right back,” I say and race after her. “Hey, you okay? I’m sorry about Jocelyn. She kinda seems like an ass.”
“Don’t apologize for other people, Nell. It’s hard enough to own your own shit.”
She’s got a point there. “Fair enough,” I say.
It’s quiet for a moment, then Viv launches into an explanation, even though I haven’t asked for one.
“My mom stopped paying the cable bill months ago. There’s no internet at the house anymore, and if I go over on data it’s… bad. So I’m only really online when I’m at the library or a cafe or someplace with wifi, and then I’m not reading news. I’m catching up with friends and wasting my time on TikTok like a normal human.” She glances at me out of the corner of her eye. “Was it true? What she said about your dad?”
“Yeah. I guess. It was news to me and my mom when the feds showed up at our apartment. That was on Friday morning. As in two days ago. My dad had already bolted. He must have known it was coming.”
“Do you think he’s guilty?”
The question surprises me. I’d expected her to ice me out like everyone back home. I hesitate for a moment, not because I’m uncertain how to answer her, but because it’s scary to say it out loud. “If he was innocent, he’d have called our lawyer, met with the authorities, and fought the thing. But he ran. He’s in hiding. Maybe he’s even left the country already.”
“Jesus,” Viv says.
“Yeah, well now you know. Just like the rest of the world.” The weight of my phone in my rear pocket seems to triple, as if it can sense the overload of messages just waiting to come through.
“Still, it’s shitty what Jocelyn said. And how Goodwin is trying to hide you in the kitchen or whatever. It’s not like you stole people’s money.”
“That seems to be a hard concept for some people to grasp.”
As we walk, Viv tells me about her dad. He’s dead. Overdosed. He got injured at work last winter, then hooked on the meds he’d had for pain management. One thing lead to the next and then he was an addict, Viv’s mom emptying their savings to try to get him help. In the end, they lost him anyway, and now they’re in serious debt. Hence the lack of cable.
“I wish I could see him again,” she says, eyes glassy. “Just once. Just to have one more day.”
It’s such a foreign sentiment to me; Dad and I were never very close. If Mom hadn’t demanded he start spending one-on-one time with me on Sundays when I was eight, who knows if we’d have ever actually interacted.
The outing was always the same: A quick walk through Central Park. Lunch for me on the terrace while Dad checked his emails. Work never sleeps, he was always saying. When he managed to put his phone down, I had to endure the same never-changing history lesson about how Bethesda Fountain was built to commemorate New York’s first fresh water system. “That lily she’s holding?” Dad would say, pointing at the angel at the center of the fountain. “It symbolizes the water’s purity. You can imagine how important clean water was to a city that suffered a cholera epidemic.”
When these outings started, I could barely comprehend the concept of epidemics, and Covid wouldn’t happen for a few more years. But I do remember when I started to see the irony of lily pads and algae growing in a fountain whose water was supposedly pure. The day I pointed it out, Dad scoffed. His fatherly duties only extended to a one-hour walk and a reoccurring history lesson, not thoughtful conversation.
“You think you’ll see your dad again?” Viv asks.
“Not unless they catch him. My mom thinks he’ll come back though. She’s waiting. Like an idiot, she’s waiting for him.”
“Love’s weird like that,” Viv says with a shrug.
We’ve reached the mess hall. It’s positioned in a perfect round clearing surrounded by trees—like a crop circle was made and the building plopped down in the middle of it.
I feel somewhat dizzy, like I’ve spent the day moving in circles.
“Hey, are you Eleanor Bradley?”
I glance up, bracing for whatever insult or attack is coming. The voice belongs to a boy standing on the path that leads around to the back of the mess hall. He’s wearing a grease stained apron over a plain white tee.
“Yeah?” I say, only it comes out as a question.
He plucks a toothpick from between his teeth, and I spot chipped black paint on his nails. “I was told to come find you. You’re supposed to be prepping lunch with the rest of us.”
“Right,” I say uselessly. “Coming.”
“Catch you later,” Viv says, and bumps her shoulder into mine in parting.
I follow the kitchen boy around to the back of the mess hall, using a rusted metal door—once green, now half orange—to access the kitchen. The scent of grease, burnt food, and tomato sauce assaults me as I step inside. Staff members are bustling about, prepping meals, opening and closing fridges, moving pans on the stovetop in a way that sends flames sparking up toward their eyebrows.
“Yo, Dolores! I found her,” the boy says, signaling a burly woman wearing knee high socks despite the summer weather. Her curly gray hair is trapped beneath a hair net and her eyes lock onto me as she glances up from the clipboard she’s carrying.
“Thanks, Arlo. You can get back to it.”
Arlo leaves, moving toward a sink overflowing with suds. The woman—Dolores—appraises me up and down, then says gruffly, “I don’t care where you come from or what your history is or whether its true what they say your Dad did. I care that you do a decent job in here, show up on time, and don’t slack. I told Goodwin I’d take you, but that’s only if you can pull your weight.”
“I can pull my weight,” I echo, only my voice sounds meek and not very convincing.
Dolores grunts. “Go help, Arlo. You guys are going to be cleaning buddies.” Then she yells across the kitchen, “Arlo, you tell me if she’s not pulling her weight.”
I thread my way between the aproned staff and join Arlo near the sinks and dishwashers. “Hi again. I’m your new partner. What do you want me doing?”
“You can scrub.” He nods at the first set of sinks.
“What about the dishwashers?” There’s four of them, all industrial sized.
“Still gotta get all the baked-on crud off before we load ‘em.” He winks like this is a clever joke, then disappears, carrying a stack of yellow and coral melamine bowls into the front half of the kitchen.
I push up my sleeves, reach a hand into the suds and go fishing. I catch a frying pan with god-knows-what caked onto the skillet. I fish around a bit more until I find a brillo pad, then start scrubbing.
An hour later, I’m still at it, my fingers pruned and pink and aching. Arlo bustles around me, loading and unloading the dishwashers, stacking plates, sorting utensils. He manages to do a bit of everything while I scrub and scrub and scrub, the pile of dirty cookware always growing beside me, chefs dropping off this and that. Pots, pans, cutting boards, knives, spatulas. It’s endless.
The hum and chatter of folks eating out in the mess swells, then slowly fades, until finally, the dishes stop arriving.
“You want me to grab you something?” Arlo says. “It was sloppy joes and salads.”
Sloppy joes. Guess that explains the crud stuck to half the pans. My stomach coils. “No thanks. I’ve kinda lost my appetite.”
“That happens working back here,” he says with a smirk. He lifts a hoodie from a hook beside the door and replaces it with his apron.
I’m thinking that despite the awful labor, it might be a blessing being tucked into the corner of the kitchen with Arlo, who doesn’t seem to realize who I am, when he adds, “See you at dinner, Manhattan. Put some lotion on those baby-smooth fingers in the meantime. They’re gonna be chapped.”
He’s gone, the metal door banging shut in his wake, before I can reply.
Digging Viv and curious to see where things are going with her. Not sure what to make of Arlo yet, and I mean that in a good way.