enthusiastically.
Shelley muttered to Jane, 'Handsome, but dim. Why would any sane adult
“I guess there are people like us who manage, sometimes with considerable effort, to love our own teenagers, and then there are those rare and misguided individuals who love all of them,' Jane said, shaking her head. 'He appears to be one of those. Just wait until all those little girls of his hit puberty about the same time.'
“People like him must have suffered either a great deal more or a lot less of the usual angst when they were teens, I suppose,' Shelley said. 'I can hardly think about those years without shuddering.'
“Ladies?' Liz said sharply.
They hurried along to catch up with the group. They exited from the back door of the staff wing, turned right, and walked down a long, winding incline at the bottom of which was a spectacularly beautiful lake. It was fronted by a beach of sorts — not sand, but shingle. A small dock had a single elderly rowboat tied up, and there was a large swimming dock farther out. A shed contained a great many neon orange life jackets, and an old-fashioned wooden lifeguard tower stood sentry. A list of commonsense rules was posted on the front of the tower.
It was cool enough that the thought of swimming made Jane shiver, but in the summer it would be a different matter.
“We're lucky that there's a very slow, gentle slope here,' Benson was saying. 'And over there, the roped-off area is only four feet deep. That's where we give beginner swimming lessons. Oh, I almost forgot to mention poison ivy.'
“There's poison ivy here?' Marge asked.
“There shouldn't be,' Benson said with a smile. 'I've conducted a war against it ever since we arrived. I don't think there's any left, but I have a handout with drawings and photos of it for you. If anybody sees so much as a leaf of it, please let me know.”
Jane glanced around at the group. Liz, naturally, had a clipboard and was taking notes like mad. She even had a tape measure and marked down the height of the lifeguard tower. Bob Rycraft had gone down to the shoreline and was smiling and nodding, no doubt picturing the lake full of happy kids who would go home and say no to drugs and study like mad, all because of two glorious weeks at camp. Al Flowers had wandered over to the tower and, hands in pockets, was looking up as if contemplating someone other than himself climbing it.
The Claypool brothers were standing together, talking quietly, probably about cars, not camp, Jane guessed. John, the big, blond, beefy younger brother, had his hands clasped behind his back and was looking down, nudging a rock around with his toe. It was a curiously subservient pose for the bigger, brasher man to take.
Meanwhile, Sam's wife, Marge Claypool, was glancing uneasily at the dense woods, looking very nervous, and John's wife, Eileen, had found a log to sit on. She'd taken off her shoe and was massaging her foot.
Benson, apparently realizing that he was being largely ignored, stopped explaining the lake and safety regulations and left them to their own thoughts for a few minutes before saying, 'Okay, let's go back up the hill and look at the Convention Center.”
Eileen Claypool grunted slightly as she laboriously leaned forward to put her shoe back on and gather up all her loose belongings. Even for this tour, she was loaded up with jewelry and tote bags.
The Convention Center turned out to be a large, plain building to the north of the main lodge. It was clearly newer than the rest of the camp: two stories, white clapboard and faintly naked-looking. Though neat and freshly painted, it had no shutters, no foundation plantings, almost no ornamentation at all.
“A bit of an abomination, isn't it?' Shelley said under her breath.
“It certainly doesn't fit in very well,' Jane responded. 'Sort of like a habited nun at a cocktail party.'
“Yes!' Shelley said. 'The kind of habit with the big white winged headgear.”
Either Benson or the architect had attempted to make the big building look friendlier by adding a porch outside the front door. But it was little, flimsy, out of proportion, and looked as if it had blown up against the building and was merely resting there for a moment before moving on about its business.
The inside of the Convention Center was much Like the outside: plain, clean, practical, and aggressively boring. The ground floor contained a dining area with a practical, spotlessly clean expanse of blue linoleum flooring, white Formica tables, and folding chairs with blue seats that just missed matching the floor and consequently made both look shabby. The rest of the area was for exhibits and meetings. There was sturdy carpet here and lots of room dividers.
Overall, Jane found it terribly bland and depressing, especially in contrast to the cozy cabin she and Shelley were sharing. But the kids wouldn't care. They'd be outdoors most of the time and more interested in each other than the building. If kids cared about their surroundings, she reasoned, their own bedrooms at home wouldn't look quite so much like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
Benson led them downstairs, where there were locked storage bins that looked like little jails and a very large room with a whole fleet of room dividers on wheels. Benson explained that the dividers were specially designed to provide soundproofing, so many small meeting rooms could be constructed by just sliding them around.
Next they went from a center staircase to the second-floor dormitory area. A long, single hallway stretched both ways. He opened a couple doors along it to let them look at the rooms, which were sparse but neat. Each had a single bathroom with a shower stall, a big window that looked out over the woods, either two or three single beds in various arrangements, a functional, indestructible desk, and several chairs. It looked like one of the dormitories of Jane's youth, and she found herself wondering how any adult could survive staying in someplace so essentially 'institutional' without going screaming mad.
Shelley was watching her reaction. 'Bad vibes?' she asked.
“Very bad,' Jane admitted. 'And I don't know why. I think I must have been in a mental institute that looked just like this in a previous life.”
Shelley nodded. 'Or a sanatorium where frail Victorian ladies went to die of tuberculosis. Still, I don't think
