"She's moving into my cabin in order to get away from one of your other girls, if you want to know the whole truth."
"Which one?" Pat asked. Then, quickly shaking her head, she said, "No, don't bother. I already know. Roxanne, I'll bet."
"None other."
"What did the little bitch do to her? Put a frog in her bed? Drop a snake down her back?"
"Worse."
"How worse?"
"A lot." June lowered her eyes in embarrassment as she told her friend what she knew. "Something happened last night, Pat. Between those two girls. I think – I think Roxanne forced herself on Mimsy against her will."
"You're joking!"
"Would I joke about something like that?"
"What did she do?"
Looking up into Pat's eyes, June saw the same sparkle of interest to know all the dirty details that she had recognized in herself a short while earlier. It angered her that Pat was concerned with such base details, yet understanding the same feelings in herself she could make no denunciation.
"I-I don't know for sure. I didn't make her tell me minute by minute who did what to who. You can use your imagination. But whatever happened, it's made that poor girl almost frantic. Roxanne warned her that if she said anything about it to me she'd hurt her. Hurt her bad, I think was the way she put it."
"The little bitch!" Pat hissed. "I'm going right to Marchant and telling her to get that no-good-…"
"No!" June interjected. "I don't think it's the best idea to tell Marchant about it. Not unless it happens again, or she does it to some other girl."
"Why not? She'd be bounced out of here so fast…"
"Why not!" June laughed ironically. "Why don't you just stop and think about it for a moment? Don't you find it even a little bit amusing that you or I should be the ones to turn in anyone else because they've had sex with another girl?"
"I didn't think of that," Pat admitted.
"Well, I did and I realized how wrong it would be. If we feel the same way ourselves, Pat, we can't very well ruin another girl's life because of one mistake. You know that if Marchant sent her home with a story like that it would put a scar on her forever. It would always be on her records if she wanted to go to another camp or needed any kind of recommendation from this one."
"I have a feeling she's already got a record like that from where she was last year," Pat told her. "Every time I mentioned going back to the camp where she was before, I saw this funny little look come into her eyes. Like she was scared to death of something. I'll bet my whole summer pay that I know just what it is, too."
"Maybe you're right," June sighed, "but we've got to give her the benefit of the doubt. We've got to let her know that we know what happened and if she does it again we'll go to Marchant."
"When you say we, you really mean me, don't you?" Pat smiled. "I'm the one who's got to have the talk with her."
"She's one of your girls, isn't she?"
"All right," Pat agreed heavily. "Tonight when everybody's at the movie, I'll have a talk with her. But I wish to Christ that something good would happen before then – like Roxanne drowning in the lake!"
"She's a very good swimmer, she says."
"That's just what I was afraid of."
CHAPTER FIVE
Pat Fulton paced restlessly back and forth across the floor of her cabin, alternately bringing a cigarette to her lips for a long, deep puff and then glancing down at the watch on her wrist. "The little bitch is late, of course," she muttered aloud. She had told Roxanne to report to the cabin at eight on the dot. It was now going on toward half past eight and there was still no sign of her. If she didn't show up in another fifteen minutes, Pat vowed, she was going straight to the camp's owner, Mrs. Marchant, with the story of what had happened the previous night between Roxanne and Mimsy. "To hell with being fair to her," she thought angrily. "A no-good bitch like that deserves to be treated the way she treats others."
In the back of Pat's mind, however, was the awareness that her anger against Roxanne had more behind it than a mere dislike of the girl's manner and personality. She'd handled difficult campers in the past, many of them far more troublesome than Roxanne, without resorting to Mrs. Marchant as a final solution. If Roxanne were just an ordinary girl with a bitchy streak running through her, Pat knew she could handle her well enough. But there was more to it than that. She had assaulted Mimsy Colberg, and in Pat's mind that was unforgivable. Not because it introduced a lesbian element into the camp life for the summer, for Pat was well enough aware of the logic in June's argument about the pot calling the kettle black, but because she had so desperately wanted the cute little blonde herself and the thought of Roxanne taking her in the way Pat would have liked to was unbearable.
It was strange, this effect Mimsy Colberg had upon her. When she'd walked into the clearing where June held her basket weaving classes and seen the two girls in each other's arms, her first instinct had been one of intense jealousy. Not because another girl was holding June in what looked like a lover's embrace, but because that other girl was Mimsy and June was holding her. It wouldn't have mattered in the least if she'd seen her friend embracing any other girl in the camp, but Mimsy was something special to Pat. She had hungered for her from the first hour the girl had been at camp, and now she was leaving her group for June's and it was all because of Roxanne. If it hadn't been for her, Pat thought bitterly, she might have had a chance of seducing Mimsy during the course of the summer. As the girl's Big Sister it would be only natural for them to be close. There were a lot of things they could have done alone together, without rousing anyone's suspicions or curiosity. Hikes in the woods… meetings at night for moonlight swims… shared confidences… any number of situations might have given Pat an excuse to be more intimate with the girl and take at least tentative steps toward seducing her.
Now it was all gone up in smoke. Mimsy had already moved out of Pat's group's cabin and into June's, being replaced by a pathetic little creature who would have trouble enticing a troll into seducing her. For the rest of the summer, the best Pat could do would be to watch the girl from afar and dream of what might have been if only Roxanne hadn't fouled everything up.
A sudden knock on the cabin door startled her. She crushed out her cigarette butt in an ashtray and strode quickly to the door. Her face was hard with anger as she opened it for Roxanne.
"It's about time you showed up," she snapped. "I thought I told you to be here at eight on the dot."
"Am I late?" the girl purred as she came into the cabin. "Sorry about that. I think that clock watchers are such bores, don't you?"
"So is being kept waiting," Pat cracked. "I've got better things to do with my time than to sit around waiting for you."
Roxanne's eyes flashed with an inner wickedness as she caught Pat's glance. "Yes," she drawled, running the tip of her tongue ever so slightly across her bottom lip, "I'm sure you do."
Once again in the girl's presence, Pat felt herself tensing inside. There was something about Roxanne's manner that automatically set Pat on her guard, as though beneath that mocking, bitchy little smile of hers there was a genuine, if yet unspoken, danger.
"Sit down," she ordered. "You and I have got to have a talk about something important."
"My! How serious you sound, Big Sister!" the girl laughed.
Pat's eyes flashed with rage as she turned on her. "This is no joking matter, Roxanne. You're in very big trouble, whether you realize it or not."
"Oh? Well, in that case, I'd better have a cigarette," she said with a cocky smile. "May I have one of yours, please?"
"You may not!"
"Okay, I'll have one of my own, then. I'm almost out, or I wouldn't have asked for one of yours."