"Well, well, well!" Mrs. Marchant cracked, her voice like the slash of a whip. "So this is the urgent business you had to see June about, is it? This – this filth! This depravity! And right under my very nose! When someone called and said there was a fire in the gate house, I never expected to find this!"
"The light!" June thought hopelessly. Someone must have seen the glow of the oil lamp through the window and mistaken it for flames. Or was it that way, she suddenly wondered? Maybe the call that had summoned Mrs. Marchant had been made for no other reason than to have the woman discover June with Gary. It seemed to make a lot more sense, especially when she thought about who might have made such a call.
"So she's won after all," she thought bitterly. "Pat's finality had the guts to turn me in."
"Get your clothes on, both of you," Mrs. Marchant snapped. "As soon as you're dressed, young man, I want you off these premises. If I find you here again. I'll call the police. And as for you, June." Her eyes narrowed into dark slits of outrage as they stared at the girl. "I'll expect to see you in my office in fifteen minutes to discuss how quickly we can arrange for you to be sent home."
"Sent home!" June's heart dropped like a dead weight. "Oh, no, Mrs. Marchant! Please!" Being sent home would ruin everything. She'd never see Mimsy again, never have a chance to further their wonderful relationship. At all costs, no matter what she had to agree to do or what sacrifices she'd promise to make, she had to stay at the camp for the rest of the summer.
"We'll discuss it in my office," Mrs. Marchant said. As she turned to the door to go back to her car, the sound of many girls' voices drifted across the still night air. "What on earth? Who's this running down the road now?"
"Mrs. Marchant! Mrs. Marchant!" one of the girl campers screamed as she raced toward the open door of the gate house. "Come quick! Something terrible's happened! Mimsy Colberg is in the lake!"
"What?" June gasped. She felt as though a dagger had just been plunged into her chest and for a moment her legs felt like they were going to buckle in under her. She staggered toward the door and leaned heavily against it as the other girl rushed up to the woman.
"She's in the lake, Mrs. Marchant!" the girl sobbed. "She's in the lake!"
"At this time of night?" the camp owner snapped angrily, not understanding, as June did, the significance of what was being told her. "Is she drunk? Nothing would surprise me this night…"
"She can't swim, Mrs. Marchant," June said her voice a dry rattle in her throat.
"That's right!" the other girl cried. "She's just floating there near the dock, face down. I-I think Mimsy is dead, Mrs. Marchant."
They were the last words June heard before the blackness that had been spinning through her mind suddenly closed in and she fainted.
CHAPTER TEN
"Are you sure you don't want to stay here another day or two?" Pat asked softly, as she watched June pack the last of her things into her suitcase the following morning. "Until you're feeling a little better, I mean?"
"No," she answered, her voice cold and lifeless, as she felt inside. "Gary's going to drive me back home. He's waiting in the parking lot for me to finish packing."
"If you wanted to stay, I'm sure Mrs. Marchant would let you. After – what else happened last night, I don't think she even remembers about you and Gary."
"I do, though," June thought. It was something she would never in her life be able to forget. How ironic, she thought, that she should have made love to Gary in the gate house only to spite Pat, when it was Mimsy she'd heard outside in the darkness. Poor Mimsy, who hadn't understood what she'd seen June doing and in her despair had thrown herself off the dock and drowned. In a way, June thought, it was almost poetic justice. In trying to hurt someone else, she had brought the most intense pain she'd ever known into her own life.
"I can't stay here any longer, Pat," she said. "You must be able to understand why. If for no other reason, how on earth could I ever face her parents?"
"I guess you're right." She watched June close the lid on her suitcase and snap the locks into place. "I'm sorry, June," she whispered. "More sorry than I'll ever be able to make you know. I never wanted anything like this to happen; please believe me."
"I know," June said. "I guess we all do things for one reason at some time in our life and see it turn around and backfire on us."
"I'd never have sent that letter to Gary if I'd known…"
"Let's not talk about it any more, Pat. It's time for me to go and my head's spinning."
"Before you leave…"
June turned her head and saw the girl holding out a small stack of letters bound with a scarlet ribbon. "I think these belong to you," Pat said, handing them to June. "I don't deserve to keep them any more."
"You can, if you want to."
"They don't matter any more," Pat said sadly. "It's all over for us, what's in those letters. I only wish I'd realized it sooner. Then maybe…"
"Maybe not. Maybe it would have happened anyway, some other way." She took the letters and shoved them inside her purse. "Who can say what might have happened? We only know what did – and what didn't."
"I wish I didn't feel so much like it was all my fault," Pat said, her voice close to tears.
June offered her hand and, when Pat took it, squeezed hers hard. "It's no more your fault than it is mine. No one's to blame, really. It was all just one unfortunate circumstance after another."
"Do you forgive me for sending that letter to Gary?"
June had to swallow hard before answering. "Yes. I do."
"Are you going to marry him when you get back home?"
"I don't know," June sighed wearily. "I'll have to think about it. He loves me…"
"But you don't really love him."
"No," she agreed, shaking her head sadly. "But what difference does that make? I can't spend the rest of my life alone; I've got to find somebody and it might as well be Gary as anyone else. It really doesn't matter." She knew the words she spoke were the truth. Never again would she be able to love as she had loved Mimsy. All of that part of her lay buried somewhere on the bottom of the lake that had taken her sweet young lover away from her. "I'll write and let you know what I decide," she promised.
"Please do, June. It would make me so happy."
June did her best to force a smile on her face as she offered Pat her hand. "Well, I guess this is goodbye."
Tears were running freely down Pat's face, but June's eyes were clear and dry. Tears, too, were something that would be buried with Mimsy Colberg.
"Can't I at least kiss you goodbye the proper way?" Pat whispered.
June dropped her suitcase and embraced her, then offered her lips in a passionless kiss of farewell. When the girls parted, June picked up her case and walked with it to the door without saying another word or even so much as a glance back over her shoulder. It was like she was leaving not only the world of Summer Sisters behind her, but everything that had anything at all to do with life and living.
As Pat walked behind her to the door, then leaned against it to watch June walk away from the cabin and toward whatever sort of life she was going to make for herself in the future, she felt a cold shudder run down her spine. She pressed her fingers to her mouth and felt her lips as cold as ice.
"Like kissing a corpse," she murmured sadly.