Mother-Daughter Book Camp (The Mother-Daughter Book Club, Band 7) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Vogel Frederick is the award-winning author of the Mother-Daughter Book Club series, the Pumpkin Falls Mystery series, the Patience Goodspeed books, the Spy Mice series, and Once Upon a Toad. An avid fan of small towns like Pumpkin Falls, Heather and her husband live in New England, close to where Heather grew up. You can learn more about the author and her books at HeatherVogelFrederick.com.

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Mother-Daughter Book Camp

Emma

“And then something happened which changed Elizabeth Ann’s life forever and ever!”

—Understood Betsy

“I can’t believe I gave up my internship for this,” moans Megan, staring glumly out the rain-streaked window.

Cassidy turns the windshield wipers on the minivan to the highest setting. “Whose idea was it, anyway?” she asks, scowling at the road ahead.

“C’mon, you guys!” Jess protests. “It’s not that bad.”

My friends have been needling Jess ever since we left Concord. Not that I blame them—I haven’t seen this much rain since that soggy year I lived in England. It drizzled all week back at home, but Mother Nature really turned on the faucets when we crossed the border from Massachusetts into New Hampshire a couple of hours ago.

“Things won’t seem so bad once it clears up,” says Becca, who is calmly filing her nails.

I give her a sidelong glance. Becca’s not usually this cheerful. I’m guessing her good mood is the result of the care package she got from Theo Rochester, her long-distance crush. He sent it care of Pies & Prejudice, Megan’s grandmother’s tea shop, where Becca has been working part-time after school. It’s kind of our hangout—and by “our” I mean the mother-daughter book club that we started back in middle school and that’s been going strong ever since.

We all happened to be at the tea shop when the package arrived yesterday afternoon.

“Box of snakes?” Cassidy had asked, smirking.

Snakes are Theo Rochester’s passion in life.

Becca had refused to take the bait. She’d just laughed and opened the box eagerly, pulling out a University of Minnesota T-shirt—the one she’s now proudly wearing—some fudge, and a small stuffed gopher with an M on the front. Goldy Gopher is the university’s mascot, as Becca has told us about a zillion times since she got her acceptance letter. A gopher isn’t exactly the most inspiring mascot—it’s not like a tiger or a bear or something—but Becca is so ridiculously happy about the fact that she’s heading to Minneapolis for college this fall that no one wants to burst her bubble.

“Where are all the other cars?” asks Megan. “I haven’t seen one for ages. It feels like we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s because we are in the middle of nowhere,” Cassidy replies, scanning the road ahead from under her baseball cap—her favorite Red Sox one, of course.

Jess suddenly lets out a screech. “There’s the sign! On the left!”

“Sheesh, Jess, way to give me a heart attack!” Cassidy slows, flipping on the blinker, and a moment later we turn off onto a gravel road marked CAMP LOVEJOY.

She pulls into a parking area in front of a small log cabin. There’s a sign over the front door that says OFFICE, but no lights are on inside, and as far as I can tell, no people, either.

Cassidy frowns. “Are you sure this is the right place? It seems kind of deserted.”

“I thought for sure we were supposed to check in at the office,” Jess replies. Pulling the hood of her rain jacket over her head, she opens the minivan door and hops out. “You guys wait here, I’ll go check.”

We watch as she picks her way gingerly across the puddle-pocked gravel, knocks on the door, peers through the window, knocks again, then looks over at us and shrugs.

“Nobody’s there,” she reports, climbing back in beside me again and shaking raindrops from the end of her long blond braid.

“Oh good, we can go home,” chirps Megan. “Maybe Wolfgang will still let me be an intern.”

“Shut up, Megan,” Jess snaps.

Megan was offered an internship at Flash magazine this summer, and even though the editors assured her that it wasn’t her only chance, and that she could take them up on the offer any time she wanted, and even though she signed up of her own free will to be a counselor here along with the rest of us, she’s been lamenting her choice ever since we started our road trip this morning.

“I guess we should head down to the Dining Hall,” Jess says, pointing Cassidy to where the road disappears into a forest. “We’re kind of late, so maybe everyone else is here already.”

The minivan lurches and swerves as Cassidy tries to avoid the potholes in the unpaved road. A moment later, we plunge into darkness. The sky is completely obscured by tall trees overhead. Tall, wet trees, their branches dripping nearly as much rain as the clouds above.

“They should call it Camp Sleepy Hollow instead of Camp Lovejoy,” says Megan. “It feels like the set of a horror movie.”

“Megan!” Jess protests again. Her face is flushed. “Will you knock it off!”

I reach over and pat her knee. She’s my best friend in the whole world, and because I know her inside and out, I can tell she’s just about had it.

The thing is, though, Megan’s got a point. It’s only 4:30 in the afternoon and it’s the middle of summer, but this road is as dark and gloomy as something out of one of Grimms’ fairy tales.

I stare glumly out the window. This was supposed to be a fun adventure—what could be better than spending our last summer before college together, working as camp counselors?—but so far the adventure hasn’t been off to a good start. I’d been so looking forward to getting away from Concord. Too many memories in our hometown right now, and too much heartache.

Stewart and I were done. He’d gone off to Middlebury College and gotten himself a shiny new girlfriend, and even though we’re technically still “friends,” it’s been really hard seeing him around town all the time these last few weeks. Which is pretty much inevitable, since he’s Becca’s brother and the Chadwick family and my family live on the same street. Plus, Stewart got a summer job at Vanderhof’s Hardware, just a few doors down from Pies & Prejudice, and we’d been crossing paths almost daily ever since he got home from Vermont. So when the opportunity came to get out of town and head to a camp in the New Hampshire woods, I’d jumped at the chance.

Jess’s mom and aunt were the ones who suggested it. I guess they went here when they were kids, and Jess was a camper for a couple of summers too. Her aunt and uncle own an inn not too far from Lake Lovejoy, and when her aunt saw an ad in the local paper that said the camp was hiring, she told Mrs. Delaney and Mrs. Delaney told Jess.

Technically, Camp Lovejoy prefers that their counselors spend a summer as CITs first—that’s short for “counselor-in-training”—but we were all too old for that program. Jess’s aunt Bridget is good friends with the camp director, though, and she vouched for us, so here we are.

Cassidy swerves to avoid another pothole, and Jess and I bump shoulders. She glances over at me. “Everything’s going to be fine, I promise,” she whispers.

She’s not just talking about the weather. Jess is my best friend in the whole...