Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this first sharp edge of fact.
“And both are dead?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know? My father said she had gone away—gone back to the West—”
“So we thought. But this morning we found her.”
“Found her?”
He motioned toward the window. “Out there—in the lake.”
“Both?”
“Both.”
She drooped before him shudderingly, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude the vision. “She had drowned herself?”