No Wake Zone
(2026)(The fourth book in the S'more Than Meets the Eye Mystery series)
A Story by Rachel Darrishaw
Last week of September, the summer sessions are over, and Camp Do-Over is trying something new: a shoulder season. Eighteen open-water swimmers have come up for the fortieth running of the Loon Lake Crossing, a mile and four tenths of very cold water, and sixteen leaf-peepers have come up for the maples. It's Maddie "Sunny" Byrne's favorite kind of week — small, quiet, the lake gone steel-colored, Roz making cobbler for half as many people and complaining about it. Then the swim club's magnetic president is found in the reeds at first light, a drunk man and a dark lake and a rowboat drifted a mile north, and the whole camp's shoulders come down with relief, because an accident is something you can survive.
The county agrees. The file is closed by Thursday morning and the investigator drives away, honestly and not lazily. The sheriff tells Sunny to her face that she's wrong — not about the man, but about the water — and it's the first time in her life he's told her that. Then the camp's insurance carrier sends a letter forbidding staff from discussing the incident with any guest, which takes away the only tool she's ever had: asking people things. So Sunny does what Roz points out she's actually been doing all along. She makes a list of every object on the property that can't lie to her — the boat log, the oars, the rack, the cap, the thermos, the laundry, the register tape — and starts interrogating those instead. It turns out somebody did twenty-five minutes of unpaid work at this camp that week. Nobody has ever asked why.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
The county agrees. The file is closed by Thursday morning and the investigator drives away, honestly and not lazily. The sheriff tells Sunny to her face that she's wrong — not about the man, but about the water — and it's the first time in her life he's told her that. Then the camp's insurance carrier sends a letter forbidding staff from discussing the incident with any guest, which takes away the only tool she's ever had: asking people things. So Sunny does what Roz points out she's actually been doing all along. She makes a list of every object on the property that can't lie to her — the boat log, the oars, the rack, the cap, the thermos, the laundry, the register tape — and starts interrogating those instead. It turns out somebody did twenty-five minutes of unpaid work at this camp that week. Nobody has ever asked why.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Rachel Darrishaw's No Wake Zone