Pelican Bay is the coastal setting for Benedict, the Fern sisters’ long-kept summer place and the site of Fern Grammar School’s annual picnic. The bay’s inviting landscape—beach, oaks, and a river flowing into its waters—stands in sharp contrast to the disused wharf on the Fern property, where Claude Daigle’s body is found after the picnic. In Christine Penmark’s later recollection, the June seventh outing becomes the last day on which she remembers feeling happiness and peace.

Setting and the Fern Property

Benedict lies at Pelican Bay, where the beach and oak-shaded grounds provide the setting for the school’s traditional summer gathering. Little Lost River bounds the property on the Gulf side and flows into the bay. The place is also tied to the Fern sisters’ family history: they were born there and spent their summers at the old property. Though they eventually turned their town house into a school for the children of their friends, they refused to sell Benedict and continued to maintain it as an expression of attachment to the place.

The Annual Picnic

The Fern Grammar School picnic was held at Benedict on the first Saturday of June, a custom associated especially with Octavia Fern’s conviction that the date would bring fine weather—even though rain sometimes forced the gathering indoors. The picnic was imagined as a reunion, recalling the Fern sisters’ earlier summers and the relatives and friends who gathered there. On the day Christine remembers as June seventh, pupils and families were due to leave from the school’s town house by chartered bus for a full day at the property. This established ritual gives Pelican Bay its first meaning in the story: it is a place of anticipated pleasure and inherited memory before it becomes the setting for loss.

The Wharf and the Discovery

A long-unused wharf stood on the Fern property, and the children had been explicitly told not to go there. During the picnic, Claude Daigle was reported missing after the routine lunchtime check. His body was found wedged among the old pilings; a guard brought him ashore and applied artificial respiration. The bruises on Claude’s forehead and hands were initially attributed to his body washing against the pilings, while how he reached the forbidden wharf remained a mystery in the broadcast report. The contrast between Benedict’s familiar picnic grounds and this neglected structure turns Pelican Bay from a setting of seasonal tradition into the scene of an unexplained death. For Christine, the outing’s remembered brightness is inseparable from the tragedy that followed.