Kate’, June went on after a minute, in a new tone of voice, no longer passionate but rather stilted and hesitant. ‘That’s not the only reason I’m glad you’ve come. That’s not the main reason.’
‘What is it?’ Kate asked curiously.
When June spoke, her voice was almost a whisper. ‘The main reason is that I’m afraid.’
Kate felt a crawling sensation inside her stomach, as if the roller coaster had begun its downward plunge, but she tried to smile incredulously. ‘Afraid!’ she exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you afraid of?’
‘You mustn’t laugh’, June said. ‘It’s not my imagination. Listen, Kate. A week ago I was walking with Bobbie on the river bluffs. I walk around here a lot. I always have. That hill out there behind the little house is the start of a bluff. It rises for just a few hundred yards, getting steeper and steeper, and then there are rocks, and the bluff drops almost straight down into the river. It’s quite wild all along the shore. The bluffs go on for miles, and there are lots of little nooks and caves. I guess nobody knows them all, unless it’s Professor Hatfield. Felix said you met him on the way out here. Well, on one of the bluffs about a mile down the river from here, Bobbie started barking and barking. I thought it was at some animal so I began to explore. Over the crest in a kind of steep place I found a little cave I’d never noticed, because a juniper tree spread out from the bank right smack above it. It was sort of hard to get down, but I’m a pretty good climber, and inside there was an old blanket and some whisky bottles and an electric torch and a kind of tin lunch box that I didn’t look into. Bobbie was still yelping on top of the bluff, because she couldn’t get down, and all at once I had the most awful creepy feeling that someone was near. I don’t think I heard anyone. I didn’t see anyone. It was just a feeling, but it was so awful I could hardly climb back around the juniper.’
‘I can imagine that’, Kate exclaimed. ‘I’d have never dared climb down in the first place. I suppose it was just some camper. Or perhaps a hunter, if anything’s in season.’
‘I don’t think it was an ordinary camper’, June said.
‘But why not?’ Kate asked. It almost scared her to feel such relief that June’s fear was irrational: what had she been expecting anyway?
‘Wait a minute’, June said. ‘I’ll be right back.’ And she hurried out of the room.
Kate wouldn’t have believed how empty June’s absence would make it seem. Even Bobbie lying beside the bed, her slim hind legs spread backward like a frog’s, was scarcely a consolation. She could still hear the violin, but it only increased the silence of everything else. That wall of trees seemed now rather suffocating, as if it shut out the natural air and light. Thank heaven, at least, that Ralph was here! She gave a faint start as June came back into the room, just as she had started several hours ago (it seemed like an entirely different day) when Felix had knocked at her door back in town.
Then as June handed her a letter, her heart began to beat so violently that it was almost an agony to force herself to smile. Because she recognized that envelope, that printing.
‘It came in the mail just two days later’, June said. ‘That was five days ago.’
Kate felt that she could not trust her voice. She took out the paper, and there printed in the same red crayon – blood-red it looked to her now – she saw the following message:
IF YOU GO ON POKING YOUR NOSE INTO THINGS, YOU’LL BE SORRY. AND I MEAN SORRY!
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