there, leading camp activities by day and partying at night with the rest of the staff. Olivia and the next generation of cousins had done the same, right up until the camp had closed nine years ago. It was a summer that had begun with great promise but ended in disaster. She was surprised by how vividly she recalled the sounds and smells, the quality of the light and the stillness of the lake, the dizzying joy and nauseating disappointment she’d experienced that summer. I’m crazy for going back there, she thought.
She stuffed a few key items of memorabilia into the duffel bags—the striped Hudson’s Bay blanket, the sweatshirt, an old tennis racquet that needed to be restrung. There were wooden pins with campers’ names burnt in, canoe paddles that had been painted with surprising skill, the shafts autographed by other campers. Songbooks, friendship bracelets, dipped candles and birch-bark craft projects—it was a treasure trove.
The key to staging a property was in the details—the more authentic, the better. Things like this would bring the camp back to life, and she was counting on her aunts and uncles to contribute to the collection. In the bottom of the footlocker, she found a tennis cup, tarnished and battered. It had a pedestal, a domed lid and double handles. The piece would look handsome in the glass trophy case in the dining hall of the camp, assuming the display case was still there.
When she picked up the tennis cup, something rolled around inside it. She pried off the lid, and an object fell out. A button? A cuff link. It, too, was wrought of tarnished silver, with a fish design—maybe a zodiac sign? She looked around for its mate, but there was only the one. She put the cuff link in her pocket and rubbed the trophy, trying to make out the engraving: Counselors Classic. First Place. Philip Bellamy. 1977. Apparently her father had won the cup at the annual staff games while working as a counselor at Camp Kioga that year. He would have been twenty-one, getting ready to go off for his senior year at college.
She found an old photograph stuck down inside the cup. The edges of the picture were curled, the colors fading, but the image made her catch her breath. She saw her father as she had never seen him before, holding the sparkling new trophy aloft. He appeared to be laughing with joy, his head thrown back and his arm around a girl. No, a young woman.
Olivia wiped the dusty photograph on her sleeve and angled it toward the light. On the back, the photo bore the date—August 1977—and nothing else. She studied the woman more closely. Long dark hair, cut in feathery layers, spilled loosely over the shoulders of her camp shirt. The abundant waves of hair framed an attractive face and a smile that might be tinged with a hint of mystery. With her full lips, high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes, the stranger was an exotic beauty whose looks contrasted with the ordinary shorts and shirt she wore.
There was something in the way the man and woman in the photograph seemed bonded together that sent a chill of curiosity through Olivia. A certain familiarity—no, intimacy—was evident in their posture. Or maybe she was reading too much into it.
Olivia knew she could ask her father who the stranger was. She was quite sure he’d remember a woman who could make him laugh the way he was laughing in the photograph. But she didn’t want to upset him, asking about an old girlfriend. There was probably a very good reason she was a stranger.
Something about the old photograph bothered Olivia. She studied it a moment longer. Looked at the date again. August 1977. That was it. By August 1977, her father was engaged to her mother, and they married later that year, at Christmastime.
So what was he doing with the woman in the photograph?
CAMP KIOGA CODE OF CONDUCT
Display of overly affectionate attention between males and females is discouraged. This applies to campers, counselors and staff members alike.
Four
August 1977
“Philip, what are you doing?” asked Mariska Majesky, stepping into the bungalow.
He stopped pacing and turned, his heart lifting at the sight of her in a beautiful chiffon cocktail dress and platform shoes, her dark, wavy hair swept up off suntanned shoulders.
“Rehearsing,” he confessed, his chest filled with joy and dread, the intense emotions waging an undeclared war.
She tilted her head to one side in that adorable way she had of conveying curiosity. “Rehearsing what?”
“I’m practicing what I’m going to say to Pamela when she gets back from Europe,” he explained. “Trying to figure out how to end our engagement.” Since his fiancée had gone overseas, there had been only a few brief, unsatisfactory phone conversations, a hasty flurry of postcards and aerograms. The Italian telephone system was famously unreliable, and destroying her dreams over a crackling transatlantic wire or in a letter didn’t cut it.
Next week, she would return and then he’d tell her in person. It was going to turn him into the heel of the century.
The only thing worse was spending the rest of his life with someone who didn’t own his heart the way Mariska did.
Now Mariska grew serious, her full mouth forming a sad smile. Philip hugged her. She smelled fantastic, a heady mixture of flowers and fruit, and she fit just right in his arms, as though heaven itself had made her for him, exactly like the song said. Her nearness made him forget his worries about Pamela.
“I picked these up at the one-hour-photo place today.” Mariska took an envelope out of her purse. “There’s a shot of us. I ordered double prints, so you can keep a copy.” Flipping through the snapshots of the day’s sporting events at the camp, she pulled out one of her and Philip, laughing in triumph as he held a bright silver trophy cup aloft.
His heart constricted. He looked so damn happy. In that moment, he had been happy. Taking the tennis trophy down from the luggage rack, he put the snapshot inside it and replaced the lid. “Thank you,” he said.
She crossed the room and kissed him. “We should go. It’s the last dance of the summer, and you know how I love dancing.” Each summer, the season ended with a series of rituals. Yesterday, the campers had all gone home. Today was the staff’s farewell, a dinner dance that would end at midnight. By this time tomorrow, nearly everyone else would be gone, the college-age counselors all heading back to school.
“Let’s go,” she urged him, pulling back and taking his hand. “I don’t want to muss my hair.” She eyed him with a mischievous gleam in her eye. “Not yet, anyway.”
Even that oblique promise was enough to send him into overdrive. As they left the bungalow, he buttoned his sports coat and hoped his physical reaction to her nearness wasn’t too obvious. As he had since the beginning of summer, he cast a furtive glance around the area to make sure they hadn’t been spotted. Kioga had strict rules about fraternizing among counselors and other workers, and just because his parents owned the place didn’t mean he was exempt.
Mariska wasn’t a counselor, but she was supposed to be off-limits, too. She and her mother, Helen, supplied the baked goods to the camp. From the age of fourteen, Mariska had driven the white panel van up the mountain every morning at dawn, bringing bread, pastries, muffins and cookies to the dining hall. The local police looked the other way when the delivery truck lumbered past. Mariska’s mother, a Polish immigrant, had never learned to drive. Her father was on swing shift at the glassworks down in Kingston. They were a working-class family and the authorities were sympathetic to their plight. They weren’t about to ticket an underage girl for helping out with the family business.
As
