Darkheart

The Past: Peaches & Cream

The Spanish counselor was definitely gone. Jeremiah had been with the other workers prepping the dining hall for dinner the better part of an hour, and the counselors had already come and gone; there'd been only four of them--three girls, one guy. They came and ate and left, always early enough to get back out and occupy the resort's children while the adults wandered in. This was Jeremiah's third shift since the Fourth--a dinner shift--and Crystal and Heather had been scheduled with him for the lunch shift yesterday as well as today's breakfast / dinner shift. The fact they'd all been together for two days was presumably a quirk of the schedule because when they'd perused the next two weeks' line-up, they'd found that while Heather had nearly all the lunches, Jeremiah and Crystal had breakfasts and dinners. The girls hadn't seemed particularly unsettled by the separation, unlike Jeremiah. Kevin had insisted, hadn't he? And Kevin was older, seemed like he had it together. In fact, Jeremiah felt like Kevin's plan was the only thing keeping him sane. Stay together, and look for evidence. It was what Jeremiah had been told to do, and so it was what he was going to do.

They weren't having luck with the evidence part, though. Jeremiah had no idea what to look for, and he certainly wasn't going to go snooping around. He'd been on eggshells the lunch and breakfast he'd already worked, and the thought of walking out of the dining hall in the dark, tonight--heading down that little stretch of resort road, even amongst a crowd of others--was eating away at him.

Jeremiah had at least had some outside party to talk to. Unlike Crystal, who didn't want to involve her sister, Jeremiah hadn't had any trouble telling Caroline about what he'd seen. He'd not given her all the specifics, not the freaky masks and the naked stuff, but he'd told her he'd witnessed a murder on the resort. Predictably, Caroline had told him to go to the police, but he'd explained, too, how that had turned out. She was invaluable--Caroline. It's why Jeremiah had told her. His other sisters were quite wrapped up in themselves, but Caroline (probably due to her solitary life indoors) read a ton, and she loved a good murder mystery. She'd seen Jeremiah's experience as an excitement, a chance to offer investigatory advice, play a little detective by proxy, and even though her brother soon began to feel she believed him less than he'd have liked her to, her exhilaration dulled the sharp edges of his fear. And she did offer some ideas, one of which was to speak with the other counselors. Unfortunately, Jeremiah was too afraid to do that.

The young people had filled the dining hall. The little ones didn't come to dinners; there was an age requirement. Something like twelve and up. So the preteens and teens came first, around six thirty, and then the adults arrived closer to seven thirty. And once there was work to do, Jeremiah's focus shifted from his own nerves to doing his job: filling pitchers and taking drink orders, bringing plates to and from, supplying spare silverware and cleaning up spills. It helped that he wasn't serving the tables of the two adults who'd talked to them that night. That Mr. Lawson, grinning and laughing with what appeared to be his family, and the woman, who sat with a group of adults who looked too serious to possibly be on vacation, were seated far enough away that he at least hadn't had any interactions with them. Everything felt so normal--the fat ruddy early-evening sunbeams pouring through the upper windows, the lively conversation and laughter of those sharing meals, the buzz of his peers as they went about their business--that he nearly forgot about the nightmare of a couple days before . . . nearly.

Every so often, Jeremiah experienced the sensation that eyes were on him, and he'd snap around with the certainty that someone was quickly looking away. He never quite caught anyone in the act, but he knew--he knew they were doing it. All of them were watching him; all of them remembered him. Hadn't they all been there, the adults? He didn't know about the children, but that casino had been filled with people, and those people knew that he knew. Was he next? Were they plotting against him, even as they sat there eating their shrimp scampi and rib-eye steak?