We ran for the Nature Mountain buddy board and the canoe that should have been next to it. I got there first and looked around for our ride back to camp. I kept thinking that I just couldn't see it in the dark, but after bending down and kicking and reaching into nothing, I realized the truth.

“Where's the canoe?” Rachel asked, coming up next to me.

“Gone,” I said.

“It can't be gone.”

“It is.”

Rachel did her own version of reaching into the darkness and running back and forth on the beach in denial.

“Troy said he's going to sneak over to our camp on Friday to see me,” Carin said, apparently not hearing or caring about our transportation problem. “He said to meet him on the beach at two in the morning. Isn't that so sweet?”

“We have a little bit more to think about right now, Car,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like how we're going to get back camp without a canoe.”

Rachel came back to us madder than heck. “Somebody stole our canoe! Somebody from this camp knew we snuck over and took our canoe so we couldn't back. I'm glad I toilet papered them.”

“Nobody stole our canoe,” I said.

She flung her arms out, motioning to the canoeless beach. “Then where is it?”

“It probably got pulled back into the lake by the waves,” I said. “It's not like we tied it up or anything. We just left it there.”

“Troy is a football player,” Carin said. She twirled around the buddy board in a lovesick dance. “Quarterback.”

“That's what he told you anyway,” Rachel grumbled.

“How are we going to get back to camp?” I asked.

“We could swim,” Rachel said.

I thought about that. I could make it across the lake, and Rachel obviously thought she could since she had suggested it, but I didn't have high hopes for Carin’s swimming abilities, especially when she was in a boy daze. Plus I didn't know how smart it would be for even strong swimmers to attempt to swim from Nature Mountain to Camp Spirit in the dark at two-thirty in the morning.

“I don't think so,” I said. “Do you know how to get back to Spirit from the road?”

“Sure, I know how to get to camp from the highway, but the trick is to get to the highway from Nature Mountain. It's not like the turn to Camp Spirit where you turn off the highway and bam there's Ben’s old cabin.” She shook her head. “I've only been to Nature Mountain one other time for a church picnic, but that was in the daylight and I remember there were a lot of turns and twists in the road and other paths you could go down to people's hunting cabins and stuff.”

Carin had finally had enough of dancing around the buddy board and plopped herself between us, an arm around each of us.

“Where's the canoe?”

“Gone,” Rachel said from what sounded like clenched teeth.

“Oh. How are we getting back to camp?”

“We could walk all the way around the lake,” I said. “Eventually we'll get to Camp Spirit.”

“Do you have any idea how long that would take?” Rachel asked.

“I always thought it was a pretty small lake.”

“It is, but it's not perfectly round. It has lots of juts off where people have cabins you can't even see. Plus we’d be walking on everybody's private property.”

“Ooh,” Carin said, squeezing our shoulders. “Private property.”

“I hate to say this, but I think we need to call somebody to come and get us,” I said.

“No way,” Rachel said immediately. “No way.”

“What other choice do we have?”

“We could take one of their canoes.”

“Rachel, that's stealing!”

“There's no other option. I don't want to, but how else can we get back? It's not like we're going to keep it forever. Tomorrow the lifeguards will see that there's a canoe on the beach labeled Nature Mountain, and they'll give it back.”

I stood there and thought about that while Rachel went to the Nature Mountain boathouse. There's no way I wanted to steal a canoe. What would Lindsay say about that? It would be way worse to be caught sneaking out if we had stolen a canoe then if we had just used ours.

“Dang it!” Rachel muttered.

I went over to the boathouse, Carin trailing me.

“Is it locked?” I asked.

“Just pick it,” Car said, pulling out a bobby pin from her hair.

Great. Now whenever one of us saw a lock, our first impulse would be that we could pick it. That’s probably not the kind of lesson most parents send their kids to Christian camp to learn.

“Combination lock,” Rachel said glumly.

“Now what do we do?” Car asked.

“I think we're out of options,” I said. But even calling somebody from camp to come get us would require finding a phone, sneaking into whatever building had that phone, and making a call without getting caught by Nature Mountain dean, counselor, or staff member. Even that, our worst but only available option, sounded impossible.

“Hey!” Rach exclaimed. Her voice echoed over the water. She toned it down and said much softer, “Troy could take us home. Your boyfriend owes us one, Car.”

Why hadn't we thought about that before? It was so easy. We could pile into Troy’s car, he could drive us back camp, and we'd all sneak back to where we were suppose to be, end of story.

“Great idea,” I said. I headed up the path to the boys cabins. “Let's go get Troy again.”

“There might be a little problem with that idea,” Carin said reluctantly.

I stopped. No, no, no! No problem. It was the perfect solution. This had to work, or we were sunk.

“What?” Rachel snapped. She was at breaking point, I could tell. She was going to lose it any minute now unless we got back camp.

“He doesn't have a car. He rode up to camp with a friend.”

There went that brilliant idea. Back to no plan at all.

“What do you mean he doesn't have a car?” Rachel asked. I heard the panic in her voice, and that sent flutters of panic into my throat as well. If Rachel, who loved adventure and could get out of any situation unscathed, was panicking, we were in deep, deep trouble. “What kind of idiot doesn't drive himself to camp?”

“Don't call Troy an idiot! He's fifteen like us. You didn't drive yourself to camp either, Rachel.”

“If you could just meet boys at our own camp like normal people, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Troy is the only person we know at this camp. He has to have a car!”

That wasn't true though, and finally I saw a way out of all this.

“You guys, Troy isn't the only person we know at Nature Mountain,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” Carin said. “He's also the cutest—”

“And the person I'm thinking of has a great respect for raids and wouldn't care at all about what we had done.”

Silence. Even Car stopped yakking about Troy. I smiled and pushed away the panic butterflies.

“Cord,” Rachel realized.

“Yep. Get out the map, and let's find the staff cabins.”