Breaking Camp

About Breaking Camp

Juniper Bend is two places sharing one name: the summer travelers who roll through the river-loop campsites for a night or a week, and the handful of permanent oddballs who've had rigs parked in the back forty for years. Faye Tillman has run the campground and RV park for two decades — reading license plates the way other people read name tags, keeping the camp store, the dawn rounds, and a registration logbook she treats like scripture. The one true friend she made all season was the quiet long-hauler at the far site, the man who fixed her temperamental water pump and shared the store porch with her at dusk.

So when he's simply gone one morning, rig and all, the whole camp shrugs — drifters drift, restless folk move on in the night. Everyone shrugs except Faye, because he left his old dog shut in the shower house, and a man does not drive off into the dark and leave his dog behind. When the camp turns on its nearest oddity — the harmless back-loop hermit, blamed for the crime of being strange — Faye can't let it stand, not for the one soul who'd have mourned her too.

With a heartbroken hound and a cooler-raiding raccoon trailing after her, she opens the footlocker her friend stored in the camp barn and finds that the man she shared a hundred quiet evenings with wasn't who he said he was — and didn't roll into Juniper Bend by chance. He came looking for someone.