The God of the Woods — I. Barbara

I

Barbara

Louise

August 1975

he bed is empty.T Louise, the counselor—twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly —stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin called Balsam and processes the absence of a body in the lower bunk by the door. Later on, the ten seconds that pass between sight and inference will serve to her as evidence that time is a human construct, that it can slow or accelerate in the presence of emotion, of chemicals in the blood.

The bed is empty.

The cabin’s single flashlight—the absence of which is used, even in daylight, to indicate that campers have gone to the latrines—is in its home on a shelf by the door.

Louise turns slowly in a circle, naming the girls she can see.

Melissa. Melissa. Jennifer. Michelle. Amy. Caroline. Tracy. Kim.

Eight campers. Nine beds. She counts and counts again.

At last, when she can no longer defer it, she lets one name bob to the

surface of her mind: Barbara.

The empty bed is Barbara’s.

She closes her eyes. She imagines herself returning, for the rest of her life, to this place and this moment: a lonely time traveler, a ghost, haunting the cabin called Balsam, willing a body to appear where there is none. Willing

the girl herself, Barbara, to walk through the door. To say she has been in the washroom, to say she forgot the rule about taking the flashlight, to apologize disarmingly, as she has done before.

But Louise knows that Barbara won’t do any of these things. She senses, for reasons she can’t quite articulate, that Barbara is gone.

Of all the campers, Louise thinks. Of all the campers to go missing.

• • •

At 6:25 a.m., Louise walks back through a curtain into the space she shares with Annabel, the counselor-in-training. She’s seventeen, a ballet dancer from Chevy Chase, Maryland. Annabel Southworth is closer in age to the campers than she is to Louise, but she stands upright and infuses her words with irony and in general works to ensure that everyone recognizes the firm line between thirteen and seventeen—a line made manifest by the plywood partition that separates the main part of the cabin from the counselors’ corner.

Now, Louise shakes her awake. Now, Annabel squints. Crooks an elbow over her eyes dramatically. Sinks back into sleep.

Louise is becoming aware of something: the smell of metabolized beer.

She had assumed it was coming from her own body—from her own skin and mouth. She certainly drank enough last night to feel the effects this morning.

But standing over Annabel, she wonders whether the smell, in fact, has been

coming from Annabel’s side of the room.

Which concerns her.

“Annabel,” Louise whispers. In her tone, she suddenly recognizes the sound of her own mother. And in some ways she feels like her mother—her bad mother, her irresponsible mother—in relation to this girl.

Annabel opens her eyes. She sits up and winces immediately. She meets Louise’s gaze and her eyes widen, her face becomes pale.

“I’m gonna be sick,” she says—too loudly. Louise shushes her, grabs at the first vessel she can reach—an empty bag of potato chips on the floor.

Annabel lunges for the bag. Retches. Then raises her head, panting, groaning lowly.

“Annabel,” Louise says. “Are you hungover?”

Annabel shakes her head. Scared.

“I think I,” she says—and again Louise shushes her, sitting down on the girl’s bed this time, counting to five in her mind, the way she has done since she was a small child. Training herself not to react.

Annabel’s chin is trembling. “I think I ate something bad,” she whispers.

“Did you go out last night?” says Louise. “Annabel?”

Annabel watches her. Calculating.

“This is important,” says Louise.

Normally she has patience for her CITs. She is practiced in guiding them through their first hangovers. Doesn’t mind when they indulge a little on a night off. As head counselor this year, she generally turns a blind eye to behavior she deems harmless. Partakes in it herself, when the moment feels right. But she otherwise runs a tight ship; earlier this summer, the first counselor to fail to wake up on time after a night of carousing was banned from the next several parties, and that seemed to set enough of an example that no one has repeated the mistake.

Until now. Because last night, while Louise went out, it was Annabel’s turn to be on duty. And Annabel, apparently, wasn’t.

• • •

Louise closes her eyes. Runs through the events of last evening.

There was a dance in the community room: the end-of-session dance, which all campers, counselors, and CITs were required to attend. She recalls noticing, at a certain point, that Annabel seemed to be absent—she couldn’t set eyes on her, anyway—but Louise is certain that she was back by the end of the dance.

Because at eleven p.m., when Louise did a quick head count, Annabel was there, along with nine campers—yes, nine—who waved to Louise sweetly as they said good night. She can still see the back of them, walking in little clusters toward Balsam.

This was the last time she saw them. Louise, assured that Annabel was in charge, went off on her own.

Next, she tries to picture the campers’ beds as she tiptoed into the cabin at the end of the night, well after curfew. This would have been at—what—two in the morning? Three? Images return to her in fragments: Melissa R’s open mouth, Amy’s arm hanging down toward the floor. But Barbara herself is nowhere among these memories. Nor is the absence of Barbara.

A different memory asserts itself instead: John Paul, in the Clearing, as he windmilled his arms, first in her direction and then in Lee Towson’s. John Paul with his rich-kid approach to the fight, brandishing his fists as if he were entering a ring. Lee wild and scrappy, still in his apron from dinner service.

He made short work of John Paul, left him on the ground, blinking absently up toward the branches overhead.

There will be trouble today. There always is when John Paul gets the notion that she’s fooling around on him.

For the record: she isn’t, this time.

• • •

Annabel comes up for air. Puts a hand over her eyes.

“Do you know where Barbara is?” asks Louise. Cutting to the chase.

There’s not much time: soon the girls in the other room will be waking.

Annabel looks confused.

“Van Laar,” says Louise, and then she says it again, more quietly. “Our camper.”

“No,” says Annabel, and collapses backward on her bed.

It is then, of course, that reveille sounds over the speakers mounted on trees throughout the campground—meaning that on the other side of the plywood partition, eight twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are reluctantly waking up, making their small noises, exhalations and sighs, propping

themselves up on elbows.

Louise begins pacing.

Annabel, still horizontal, now watches her—beginning to understand the problem.

“Annabel,” says Louise. “You need to be honest here. Did you go back out last night? After the campers were in bed?”

Annabel appears to hold her breath. Then she exhales. Nods. Her eyes, Louise notices, are filling with tears.

“Yes, I did,” she says. There’s a childish tremor in her voice. She has very rarely been in trouble in her life: of this Louise is certain. She is a person who has been told, since birth, about her value in this world. The ways she makes others happy. She is crying openly now, and Louise struggles not to roll her eyes. What does Annabel have to be afraid of? There’s nothing at stake for her. She’s seventeen years old. The worst thing that could happen to Annabel is that she might be dismissed, sent up the hill to her rich parents—who are friends, in fact, with the owners of the camp. Who are, at this very moment, guests at their house on the grounds. Meanwhile, the worst thing that might happen to Louise—an adult, thinks Louise, castigating herself—the worst thing that might happen is—well. Don’t make too many leaps, she tells herself. Just stay in the present.

Louise walks to the curtain. Pulls it back ever so slightly. In doing so, she catches the eye of Tracy, Barbara’s bunkmate, a quiet girl who stands paused on the bunk’s ladder in mid-descent, having noticed, apparently, the issue.

Louise drops the curtain.

“Is she missing?” Annabel says. Again, Louise shushes her.

“Don’t say missing,” says Louise. “Say she’s not in her bunk.”

Louise scans their little room, looking for evidence of their behavior last night. She gathers what she finds into a brown paper garbage bag: an empty bottle of beer that she drank on the walk back from the Clearing; the end of a joint that she smoked at some point; the vomit-filled potato chip bag, which she handles with two stiff fingers.

“Is there anything else you wouldn’t want someone finding?” she asks Annabel, who shakes her head.

Louise closes the garbage bag, folds it, makes it compact.

“Listen to me,” she says. “You might have to be in charge of the campers this morning. I’m not sure yet. If that happens, you need to get rid of this.

Just put it in the garbage enclosure on the walk to breakfast. It needs to be

gotten rid of. Can you do that?”

Annabel nods, still green.

“Right now,” she says to Annabel, “just stay here. Don’t come out for a while. And don’t—” She hesitates, searching for words that sound serious but not self-incriminating. She’s talking, after all, to a child. “Just don’t say anything about last night to anyone, yet. Let me think a few things over.”

Annabel goes quiet.

“Okay?” says Louise.

“Okay.”

She’ll fold immediately, Louise thinks. She will unswervingly tell every authority figure everything that happened and everything she knows. She’ll cry on the shoulders of her mother and father, who probably didn’t even understand the poem they named their daughter for, and she’ll be comforted by them, and resume her ballet lessons, and next year she’ll be pipelined into Vassar or Radcliffe or Wellesley by her prep school, and she’ll marry the boy her parents have chosen for her—already, she has confessed to Louise, they have one in mind—and she will never, ever think of Louise Donnadieu again, or the fate that will befall Louise, or the trouble Louise will have, for the rest of her life, getting a job, getting housing, supporting her mother, who for seven years now has been unable or unwilling to work. Supporting her little brother, who at eleven has done nothing at all to deserve the life he has been given.

In front of her, Annabel gags. Recovers.

Louise puts her hands on her hips. Breathes. Slow down, she reminds herself.

She squares her shoulders. Pulls back the curtain. Begins the work of feigning ignorance and surprise for this small group of girls who—she swallows her shame like a pill—who look up to her, admire her, frequently come to her for advice and protection.

She steps into their room. Pantomimes scanning the beds. Furrows her brow in a show of confusion.

“Where’s Barbara?” she says to them, brightly.

Tracy

Two Months Earlier June 1975

hree rules were given to the campers upon their arrival.T The first concerned food in the cabins, and the way it was to be consumed and stored (neatly; tightly).

The second pertained to swimming: an activity that was not, under any circumstances, to be undertaken solo.

The third—the most important, as evidenced by its display, in capital letters, in several communal locations—was WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL.

At the time, this admonition struck Tracy as almost funny. It would be repeated later that night, at the opening campfire; its logic would be explained. But presented as it was in that moment, forthrightly, succinctly, by a tall male counselor who spoke the words without punctuation or emotion— the phrase made her look away, swallow a nervous laugh. WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL. She tried to imagine it: Sitting down right where she was. Opening her mouth. Yelling. What noise, she wondered, would escape her? What word, or words? Help? Help me? God forbid—Please find me? It was too embarrassing to consider.

• • •

Her father had paid her to attend.

This was what it took, after a week of negotiations that had concluded with a weekend-long standoff in her room: cold hard cash, a hundred dollars of it —fifty percent of which would be waiting for her upon her return.

What she had wanted to do with her summer was simple: she wanted to spend all day in the living room of the Victorian in Saratoga Springs that her family had rented each racing season for a decade. She had wanted to lower the blinds halfway and open the windows halfway and point all the fans in the house in her direction and lie on the sofa, only rising to prepare herself elaborate snacks. And she wanted to read: reading was the main thing.

This had been her routine for five summers in a row. She had hoped that the summer of 1975 would be no different.

Instead, her father—divorced from her mother for less than a year—had, in quick succession, gotten a girlfriend, a fancier rental house, and the notion that Tracy shouldn’t lie around all summer with nothing to do. This was what he said to her, anyway, on their ride up from Tracy’s mother’s house on Long Island in mid-June. (She couldn’t help but notice that he’d waited to reveal the plan until they were more than halfway to Saratoga.) The real reason, she thought, was so that she would be out of his hair for two months. So that he and the aforementioned girlfriend could have the run of the place without a sulking twelve-year-old underfoot. Why had he fought to have custody of her all summer, Tracy asked herself, if he was only going to turn around and send her away?

• • •

He hadn’t even bothered to drop her off at Camp Emerson himself. Instead he’d outsourced that task to Donna Romano, the girlfriend, still a first and last name to Tracy.

“It’s a race day,” her father said, when Tracy cornered him in the hallway, begged him to come. “Gotta drive down to Belmont. Second Thought’s running at two.”

Her father was a jockey’s son who’d grown up too tall to follow in his footsteps. He’d become an exercise rider instead, and then a trainer, and then an owner, the circumstances of their lives changing with each job. When Tracy was born, the three of them lived in an RV in her mother’s mother’s driveway. Now they lived in a new large house with a silver front gate in Hempstead, New York. Well, Tracy and her mother did, anyway.

“What will we even talk about,” she demanded, but he only shook his head, put two imploring hands on her shoulders. She noticed suddenly that she was eye level with him: her own father. She’d recently gone through a growth spurt that put her in the vicinity of five-eleven and made her slouch vigorously whenever she wasn’t in motion.

“This place is supposed to be top-notch. I mean really hoity-toity,” said her father—the same two embarrassing descriptors he’d used when first breaking the news. “I bet you’ll end up loving it.”

She turned toward a window. Through it, she could see Donna Romano adjusting her bra, inspecting her reflection in the window of the car. It was a new Stutz Blackhawk with shag carpeting on the floor and an engine whose roar reminded Tracy of her father’s voice. “Top of the line,” he had said, when he picked her up in Hempstead. It seemed to Tracy that everything in her father’s life was new. Rental house, girlfriend, Pekingese puppy, car.

Tracy was the only old thing in his orbit; and even she was being cast out.

• • •

As it turned out, Donna Romano was a chain-smoker. In between drags she asked Tracy questions about her life that she’d clearly been stockpiling for the very purpose of this trip. When she was not busy answering them, Tracy snuck glances at Donna Romano. She was extremely pretty. Normally, this would have gone far with Tracy. She loved pretty women. She loved the most popular girls at her middle school—though revered might have been a better word, since a large part of her actually despised them. Still, she was fascinated by them, perhaps due to the fact that, physically, they were her opposite, and thus seemed somehow like specimens she wished to examine,

at length, under a microscope. Where most of her classmates had long straight hair, parted in the middle, Tracy’s hair was large, red, and indefatigable. Where some of her classmates’ freckles were delicate, Tracy’s were so pronounced that she had been nicknamed Connect the Dots, or CTD for short, by a group of sixth-grade boys. She was supposed to wear glasses; she owned a pair that she never wore, which resulted in her squinting frequently. Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

• • •

The roads turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt. Ramshackle homes appeared every few minutes, their front lawns repurposed as graveyards for rusted-out vehicles. It was eerie, this contrast between natural beauty and man-made decay, and Tracy began to wonder if they were going the right way.

And then, at last, a sign came into view. Van Laar Preserve, it said. Their mailed instructions had indicated this was the sign to follow.

“I wonder why they don’t put the name of the camp on the sign,” mused Donna Romano.

Maybe it was so perverts couldn’t find it, thought Tracy. This, she knew, was what her father would have said. Against her will, she often heard his voice as a sort of narrative presence that underscored her life. That year—the first of the divorce—was the longest they had ever been apart.

The truth was that as a younger child she had been his shadow, had loved him unreservedly, following him everywhere, raising carrots, flat-handed, to the velvety muzzles of his favorite horses. Although she would have died before admitting it, Tracy missed him profoundly, and had spent the better part of her last school year anticipating a summer of being at his side.

• • •

The dirt driveway forked. An arrow to the right directed them to Camp Emerson: Where Lifelong Friendships Are Made. And then the trees broke open onto a lawn with several rustic wooden buildings in a row. In front of them was a lone counselor standing behind a folding table, from which hung a damp posterboard sign that said, unconvincingly, Welcome.

The counselor approached the Blackhawk with a folder, handed it to Donna through a window. Then he formally dispensed the Three Rules of Camp Emerson like a dutiful town crier—including the final one, the most important, a phrase that would echo in Tracy’s head for days, for weeks. For

the rest of her life.

When lost sit down and yell.

Tracy had difficulty imagining how lost she would have to be before the option felt correct. Her voice, it seemed, had been continuously decrescendoing since birth, so that by age twelve, she could scarcely be heard.

Very, she decided, at last. Profoundly, irreversibly, lost.

“You’ll be in Balsam,” said the boy, interrupting Tracy’s thoughts. He extended a long arm to his right. Donna Romano tapped the gas, and the Blackhawk rolled forward.

Alice

June 1975

he last of the parents were leaving.T From the sunroom in the house at the top of the hill, Alice watched as their cars rolled by, wipers on, a slow parade.

Camp Emerson was a half mile away, but the Preserve’s main house— Self-Reliance, they’d named it—had been built on a high ridge in the land, and from it she could see all around her: Lake Joan to the east; to the west, the long driveway that led to the main road into town; to the south, Camp Emerson; to the north, the wilderness. Hunt Mountain and its foothills.

She’d been standing there for two hours. Ninety-one cars had gone by so far. Inside all of them was a parent or parents, leaving a child or children behind.

This had been Alice’s ritual for the twenty-three years she’d been married to Peter Van Laar. Each first-day-of-camp since she was eighteen she’d stood at this window at the front of Self-Reliance, watching, sometimes with a child in her arms, sometimes alone. She liked to imagine the families inside the cars. Liked to invent names for them, and problems.

The final car disappeared from sight. Alice straightened. She checked the clock behind her: 4:45. Her daily countdown was underway: at five o’clock, she was allowed one of the pills Dr. Lewis had prescribed her for her nerves.

One was the recommendation—though two wouldn’t hurt her “on very bad

days.” By this Dr. Lewis meant days when she was thinking too much about

Bear.

Two, then.

A thud down the hall: the drop of the iron knocker against the front door.

That would be T.J.

That morning, Alice had sent word down to the director’s office, requesting a meeting.

Now, from her pocket, Alice fished out the little glass bottle. Chewed her two pills, fifteen minutes early.

Then she closed her eyes, rehearsing in her mind the words she would use.

It’s Barbara, she’d say. She’d like to join in on camp.

• • •

It had been five years since T.J. Hewitt stepped in as director of Camp Emerson. She hadn’t wanted to; her father Vic, she insisted, was perfectly capable of continuing in the role he had performed beautifully for decades.

But Vic’s infirmity—first physical, then mental—became impossible to ignore during the summer of 1970, when he had frightened several campers by shouting at them nonsensically on the very first day of the session. In front of their parents, no less. The parents, incensed, stalked up to the main house to complain. And Peter had deposed Vic, then and there, assuring the parents that he would personally oversee that session, until a suitable replacement had been found.

They searched for one only briefly before Peter suggested T.J. take on her father’s former roles. Alice had been against it. She was so young, and a woman. Who had ever heard of a woman groundskeeper? But Peter had insisted. They’d find a replacement eventually, he said.

So far, they hadn’t. Not one who met with Peter’s approval, anyway. And so, like her father before her, T.J. now occupied both roles: Preserve groundskeeper in the fall, winter, and spring; camp director in the summer.

She still lived in the cottage she’d grown up in, which also served as the

camp director’s office, and now as Vic Hewitt’s convalescent home, as well, for most of the year.

• • •

In the threshold of the sunroom, now, T.J. cleared her throat. She looked uncomfortable, unhappy—though to be fair, this was her expression anytime she was inside of a building. The woods were her domain.

“Hello, T.J.,” said Alice, and T.J. nodded, avoiding a direct address. For as long as Alice had known her, T.J. had never once called her by name. There was a haughtiness about her that Alice had always found irritating. She wasn’t like this with Peter, thought Alice—no, with Peter she was deferent.

“Have a seat,” said Alice, and then watched as T.J. turned in a full circle, searching for whatever perch would convey the least commitment, the greatest sense of haste. She settled at last on an ottoman. Sat at its very edge.

Elbows on knees. Head down.

Her hair was newly short, lopped into a bowl shape, so crooked and wrong-looking that Alice imagined T.J. must have done it herself. It was difficult to reconcile the woman sitting before her with the girl Alice met twenty-three years ago, when she’d first set foot on the grounds: three years old, always in motion, following her father from place to place. She’d been Tessie Jo at the time, a frilly name, a name for a doll or a cow or some sort of entertainer, all wrong for such a stoic child. By sixteen she’d adopted the more androgynous T.J. as her name, but she’d worn her hair in a thick braid for a decade longer. Until now.

“How are you?” Alice asked. She took a mint from the bowl beside her, which the staff kept well stocked. The pink ones were the best.

“Arigh’,” said T.J., in that accent. That accent. Alice had been in the region more than two decades and still found it hard on the ears.

“Is your father well?”

“Well enough.”

“Any problems with the facilities this year?”

“Naugh,” said T.J. She swatted at something invisible at the back of her neck. Examined her hand.

“I’ll get down to it,” said Alice. “I imagine Mr. V has already spoken to you?” She paused, waiting for T.J.’s response—because in fact she had no idea whether Peter had talked to the girl. She’d had no word from him since Thursday, when he left for Albany. What she did know was that Barbara was

still at home.

T.J. shook her head. No.

Alice exhaled. Of course, she thought—of course he hadn’t. If nothing else, she could bank on the promise that he would shirk every one of his duties, that he would fail her—fail Barbara—time and time again, that he would be absent from their lives when their lives became difficult. Which meant that, these days—the way Barbara was acting—he was mainly gone, usually without announcing his departure. His returns were similarly quiet.

T.J. shifted, straightened her back.

“Well,” Alice said to T.J., forcing herself to speak brightly, lightly. “Then this will be news to you. We’ve decided—Barbara has decided—that she’d like to join in on camp this year.”

She smiled a little, as if she were delivering good news.

She had known that T.J. wouldn’t like it. It was one of the reasons she’d been putting it off. For generations, there’d been a strict divide between the Van Laar family—Albany bankers, outdoorsy but staid—and the camp they owned, which was always the province of the Hewitts. First Vic. Now his daughter. And, too, there was the fact that T.J. liked things done in a particular way, in a particular order. She’d be annoyed, Alice guessed, by the lateness of the request.

But for an instant, something passed over T.J.’s countenance that Alice couldn’t categorize. Consternation? Anger? She wouldn’t meet Alice’s eyes.

Since she’d entered the room, she’d been gazing steadfastly to the right of

Alice’s head.

T.J. shook her head a second time.

“Sorry,” said T.J. “Can’t do it.”

Alice stared.

There was such confidence, such finality, in T.J. Hewitt’s voice. As if she had a say over any of this, thought Alice. As if she were the employer of Alice, and not the other way around.

Alice breathed in. The mint in her mouth had dissolved completely. She took another from the dish and bit down before responding.

“It would mean a great deal to us,” she said. “I know you’re close with Barbara. I’m sure you’ve noticed that she’s been having—difficulty. Acting out. We think it would benefit her to be around some new friends.”

Well, Alice did, at least. Peter wasn’t certain. But there were so many reasons it made sense to let her go—not least of them that she would be out of the house for the party. The first one they’d thrown in fourteen years. They were having a hundredth-anniversary celebration for the Preserve, bringing two dozen friends and relatives to the grounds for a week in August. The last time they had had dinner guests in Albany, Barbara had emerged only once from her room. She’d been wearing a sort of—costume, really—her hair dyed some terrible color, her eyes lined heavily in black. Peter’s cousin Garland had burst out laughing, and Barbara had retreated, slammed the door. She’d kept the hair color and the eyeliner ever since, despite Alice’s exhortations.

They would have no such worries this time—if only Barbara could go.

T.J. looked down at the floor.

“Have you told her yet?” she said.

“About camp?” Alice said. “She’s the one who asked to go.”

“No,” said T.J. “About what’s happening in the fall.”

Alice paused. Shook her head.

“I’ll tell her at the end of the summer.”

Then, in a moment of inspiration: “I’ll tell her after the end of her session at camp.”

“Session’s underway,” T.J. said, in that way of hers.

“Just barely.”

“Cabins’re full.”

A slow incredulity was rising in Alice’s chest, and yet she also felt muted by something, unable to access her deepest reserves of rage, the ones she relied on with Peter when she really needed to be heard.

The pills, she remembered. The pills had their hooks in her, were loosening the tight knots in her shoulders, sending a flood of relief down her front and back, a waterfall of warmth and calm. Focus, she instructed herself.

She took in the objects in the room around her: a trick Dr. Lewis had taught her. Grandfather clock. Plants growing lushly. Stone-tiled sunroom floor.

She spoke again, careful to articulate. Her tongue was a fat slug in her mouth.

“You know Barbara as well as anyone does,” said Alice. Better than I do, she thought, against her will. “You know it will do her good.”

But T.J. was standing now, preparing to walk out of the room. If she’d had a hat she would have placed it on her head.

A whole summer, thought Alice. A whole summer without Barbara, her rages, her storms, the hours she spent weeping aloud, disturbing the staff. All of them pretending politely not to hear. But they did, every one of them, and Alice did too. How pleasant it would be to have these months all to herself, while just down the hill her daughter was removed, but safe. Occupied.

Content.

“I’d better head back,” said T.J.

Alice smiled. The pills were dissolving her guard. There were words in the back of her mouth that she’d normally trap with her teeth. She had been doing that for most of her life, with Peter, with everyone. Usually, she was

gifted in the art of shutting up.

Not today.

“It’s not really your choice,” said Alice. “It’s got to happen.”

“Or what,” said T.J., abruptly. Too loud, Alice thought. Why did everyone have to speak so loudly, all of the time.

Quiet: it was all that she wanted.

Alice opened her mouth. No words came out.

A minute passed, or maybe five. She felt sleep coming on. She knew she should have been embarrassed by her posture, the way her head was tilting to one side now—but that emotion, too, was inaccessible to her, abstract, something she understood conceptually but couldn’t feel.

“It’s Mr. Van Laar’s idea,” said Alice, at last. “It’s what he wants.”

It was a last resort. Embarrassing to have to use it. Embarrassing, she thought, that her own words were meaningless in this household.

T.J. looked at her. Deciding whether or not Alice could be believed. And then her expression changed into something resigned.

“Fine,” said T.J. “We’ll put a bunk in Balsam. She’ll start tomorrow.”

With no further questions, T.J. walked out of the room. Out of the house.

If Bear were here— Alice stopped. She was not supposed to indulge these fantasies, said Dr.

Lewis. Each time her mind drifted toward one, she was supposed to bring herself back to reality. And yet the vision came to her forcefully: if Bear were here, he would follow T.J. out the door. She closed her eyes, allowing herself —just for a moment—to remember her son, vibrant, delightful, trailing T.J.

Hewitt all over the grounds. Tessie, Tessie. His high sweet voice, just on the other side of a thin curtain between her world and his. She could hear it easily.

• • •

On the chaise, Alice turned her head to watch through the windowed wall of the sunroom. T.J., departing, paused on the lawn, removed something from her pocket, put a hand to her mouth. Spat. Chaw, the men called it. A disgusting habit.

Alice watched the back of T.J. Hewitt until she was out of sight. Her form was tall and thin and graceful, and Alice reflected, not for the first time, that she could have been pretty.

That was the real sin of it, thought Alice. The way she had ruined her looks.

The sound of footsteps caught her ear. Heavy, plodding ones: Barbara.

She’d be heading to the kitchen. Her favorite place, of late. Alice grimaced.

Yesterday, Alice had asked the new cook—whose name she couldn’t remember—to stop feeding Barbara so often. To make excuses if she had to.

But Barbara could be very manipulative, Alice knew, and she had little faith in the cook’s ability to handle her.

She made her way to the threshold of the kitchen, and paused there, trying to be quiet.

There was Barbara, of course, regarding the contents of the pantry, her back to the room. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and Alice noticed with a sort of disgust that her once-insubstantial bottom was round now, and her legs were the legs of a woman. Behind Barbara, the cook caught Alice’s eye. Raised her hands, as if helpless.

Alice didn’t enjoy assessing her daughter’s body in this way. She understood conceptually that it was uncharitable; and yet she also believed that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction. This was the method her own mother had used upon her. She hadn’t liked it at the time, but now she understood it.

“Barbara,” said Alice, and her daughter jumped, and then turned, a loaf of bread tucked under her arm. Just for a moment, Alice felt tender toward her.

She had always been skittish, ever since she was a toddler—the only baby on earth who didn’t like playing peekaboo or hide-and-seek, who cried when she was startled, even in fun.

“Dinner’s at half past seven,” said Alice.

Levelly, Barbara put the loaf down on the countertop and began sawing.

“Did you hear me?” said Alice.

Barbara nodded. Reached for the butter. Spread it over the bread. Kept her head lowered. A half inch of blond was visible now at her part; the rest of her hair was still that terrible dull black. Her face, at least, was pretty. No bad dye job could change that.

The cook looked on uselessly. She was a tiny little thing, perhaps twenty- five, married, judging by the plain ring on her finger.

Alice sighed. There was no point in saying anything—not today. Not when Barbara would be away for the whole rest of the summer. What harm, after all, in letting her indulge in one more helping of bread and butter and jam.

“I spoke to T.J. just now,” said Alice, and finally the girl looked up. There was the version of Barbara she loved, at last. Some sign of animation in her

face and eyes.

“And?” said Barbara.

“She says you can start camp tomorrow.”

Triumph. Barbara looked down quickly, but Alice could see that she was working to keep her mouth straight, stopping a smile.

“I’ll have someone pack for you,” said Alice.

It was good, thought Alice. This would be good. To have a break from each other. Things would get better this way.

Tracy

June 1975

his, Tracy learned, was Camp Emerson:T Three buildings formed its northernmost edge, closest to the main house up the hill. One was the commissary, where they ate their meals; the next a building called the Great Hall, which contained a nurse’s office, two small rooms that could be used for activities on rainy days, and a large community room that was mainly used for dances and performances that required a stage. The third building in this small cluster was the Director’s Cabin. The only campers who had ever seen inside it were those who had gotten into trouble of one kind or another.

South of these buildings lay the rest of the campground. Near the lake at the eastern edge were a small beach and a boathouse. A long building called Staff Quarters sat at the southern border of the grounds—this was where kitchen workers and other seasonal staff resided. To the north of it were fourteen cabins—seven for boys, seven for girls—in two lines on opposite sides of a creek that could be crossed by small bridges here and there. Every one of these cabins was named after an Adirondack tree or flower.

Tracy’s cabin, Balsam, was lit inside by warm yellow bulbs that hung, uncovered, from the ceiling. At night, these same lightbulbs summoned an army of insects through the tattered screens in the cabin’s windows.

The cabin was furnished with eight twin beds, four and four against opposite sides. Small wooden trunks sat at the foot of each bed. The cabin’s walls were made of unfinished wood, and so too was its ceiling, inscribed with names and dates and inscrutable references by generation after generation of campers.

Most surprisingly, against one wall of the cabin was a fireplace. Tracy was told, later that summer, that the cabins originally had been used year-round by friends of earlier generations of Van Laars on short hunting trips; but since the founding of Camp Emerson, the fireplaces had gone unused, except by bats that occasionally colonized the chimneys and then had to be relocated.

• • •

That first day, after the mothers—and Donna Romano—had disappeared, the counselor and counselor-in-training sat the campers in a circle to begin icebreaking exercises.

It was during these exercises that it became clear to Tracy that all the other girls in her cabin had known each other for years. They tossed catchphrases and gestures back and forth as if playing ball, buckling with laughter from time to time for reasons she couldn’t discern. Inside jokes, Tracy thought—a term that terrorized her with its implication that anyone who didn’t understand them was, by definition, an outsider.

The other revelation that came out of these exercises was that there was a definite hierarchy among Tracy’s cabinmates.

At the top, of course, were Louise and Annabel, the counselor and the CIT.

Both were beautiful in different ways: Louise, at twenty-three, seemed to be a woman already. She was short, much shorter than Tracy, with long dark hair and dark eyebrows and the bearing of an athlete. She was also—a word Tracy had learned earlier that year—stacked. Annabel was seventeen, tall, willowy, fair, a ballet dancer who moved with all the assurance of someone whose family had never had to worry about paying a bill. Tracy loved them both immediately. She had the weird desire to miniaturize them, to take them out and play with them like dolls.

Next came Balsam’s campers, who ranged in status from the two Melissas —the clear rulers, wiry blond gymnasts from Manhattan’s Upper East Side— to a girl named Kim, who had the habit of speaking, at length, on topics no one else seemed to care about.

Last in the line came Tracy, whose size, she believed, was already drawing stares from the others. Upon being asked to introduce herself, she found that her voice had been completely taken from her. A slow resignation settled in: this was what her summer would be like. She’d keep to herself. She’d speak to no one. She’d go unnoticed, hiding behind books whenever possible.

Staying out of it. Blending in.

She unpacked the last of her belongings. From her toiletry kit she removed the new glasses she had been prescribed that year; these she placed at the back of the single drawer she’d been assigned. It would be better, she thought, not to see anything too clearly this summer.

Suddenly she was blinking hard. To cry now would be catastrophic—and yet the disappointment of it all weighed heavily on her shoulders. Because there was always a part of her—despite her understanding, cultivated over years of such disappointments, of where she would fall in any social hierarchy—there was always a part of her that hoped that this time would be different. That some graceful, lissome boy or girl would have the patience and acuity to pick Tracy out of a crowd, take notice of one of the positive qualities that she infrequently allowed herself to number: her sense of humor, or her drawing ability, or her singing voice, or her loyalty, her devotion to anyone who showed her even a modicum of interest.

Tugging her ill-fitting uniform shirt down over her ill-fitting uniform shorts, Tracy exhaled, releasing entirely the hope she had had for the summer.

• • •

At the opening campfire that night, Tracy looked on as a series of strange songs and rituals were performed at the bottom of a natural amphitheater, a little hill that led down to a patch of grassless land. On the hill, large split

logs had been set up as rough benches, with an aisle down the center. The dark lake was just visible beyond.

A certain energy was appreciable in the air: it was the energy of teenage hormones, of sidelong glances, a taking note of who had changed over the past year, and in what ways. It wasn’t just the campers, but the counselors, too. All over, they were sidling toward one another, whispering in each other’s ears, making gestures Tracy could not understand. Each one of them, she would learn, was a celebrity in his or her way; campers strove earnestly to learn facts about them, about their home lives and romantic prospects and heartbreaks; these facts were then traded eagerly as whispers in the dark.

In front of them, the presentations continued. Several counselors performed a ritual that involved the chopping of a log; announcements were made about new policies, facilities, events.

Then came skits. One—a dramatic enactment of the rule that had made such an impression on Tracy earlier—involved a large male counselor affecting the voice and gait of a small child and walking around and around the campfire to illustrate his confusion.

“I thought I knew where I was going,” said the counselor, projecting his voice with aplomb—“but it turns out I did not!”

And a female counselor strode forward to goad the crowd.

“What should Calvin do?” she asked, mock-seriously. She placed her hands on her cheeks.

When lost, yelled the crowd, in chorus, sit down and yell.

“Help!” said Calvin. “I need help!” He checked an invisible watch. “One minute has gone by,” he exclaimed, “so I guess I should yell again!”

The reason for this was provided: an attempt to extract oneself from the woods could lead to disorientation, could pull even an experienced woodsman irretrievably into the Adirondack forest. The terrain was dense, with thick underbrush; when the trail was no longer in sight, it all looked the same.

“Sixty-five percent of people,” said Calvin, “are less than twenty feet from a trail when they first begin to feel disoriented.”

Tracy listened, fascinated. She imagined the pull of the woods, the cool, shadowy smell of them, the velvet of moss on rock—and then the gradual realization that she’d lost her bearings. The slow horror of accepting her predicament.

In between skits, the male counselors roughhoused with one another, with their charges. Called out to girls across the semicircle. Kevin thinks you’re a fox!

Then a tall, thin woman strode right into the center of things. She stood in front of the fire, silhouetted by the flames, looking something like the way Tracy had always pictured Ichabod Crane.

Everyone fell silent.

“Welcome,” said the woman. She introduced herself to newcomers: she was the camp director, T.J., and everyone was invited to call her that.

Her age was difficult to discern. At some angles, she looked very young— in her twenties, maybe—but her voice bore a gravelly authority, something Tracy wasn’t used to hearing in women her age. Everyone stopped and listened, even the loud male counselors, who otherwise hadn’t shut up.

The woman—T.J.—took out a piece of paper that seemed to have

reminders on it.

She went through them, one by one.

She emphasized and elaborated upon the same rules from earlier.

Dispensed a few others, as well: any camper caught outside his or her cabin after curfew would be given one warning and commissary duty for two nights. A second infraction would lead to dismissal from camp.

She paused then, looking up.

Above her, the pine branches were lit orange by the fire. Beyond them, the sky was as black as Tracy had ever seen it, and as full of stars.

“Another thing,” said T.J. “Due to the concern of certain parents, this year’s Survival Trip will look a little different.”

A collective groan.

T.J. held up a hand. “Now listen,” she said. “You’ll still be on your own, in groups. You’ll all be responsible for your own well-being. The only difference is, you’ll have a counselor nearby for those three nights. But

they’ll stay about a hundred yards away, unless there’s an emergency you can’t resolve yourselves.”

Silence. And then a solitary voice—male—booed loudly. The rest of the group laughed.

Tracy waited, breath held, to see what T.J. would do. She didn’t look like someone who suffered fools gladly. But she grinned.

“I don’t like it either,” she said. “Trust me.”

• • •

That night, after lights-out, Tracy lay in her bed, looking up into darkness, listening first to silence and then to the low sound of stories told in whispers and laughs.

She was alone. She would remain so. Her only job, she told herself, was to make it through the summer.

Louise

June 1975

n the dark, Louise held her breath, listening. On the other side of theI partition: small wet sniffles. Somebody crying and trying to hide it. This happened every session, on night one.

Louise sat up in bed. Tiptoed past Annabel. Drew aside the curtain.

Scanned the room, looking at every camper in turn.

Tracy.

There were Tracy’s eyeballs, glinting in the moonlight, returning her gaze.

• • •

Outside, on the steps leading down from the porch, Tracy now sat next to Louise, trying to make herself small. She tucked the nightgown down over her knees. Wrapped her elbows around them, too. She looked, Louise

thought, like a large six-year-old.

Again, she sniffed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Louise. Her standard opening—one she’d devised over all four summers—one that left no room for insistence

that everything was fine.

The girl shrugged. Embarrassed.

Earlier, at dinner, and then at the campfire that followed, Tracy had seated herself at the end of everything, and then hadn’t said a word. She kept her gaze down. Upon returning to the cabin, she had read a book while the other girls talked, shrieked, ran chaotically about the room, bouncing off every surface like electrons. There was a particular brand of humor employed by twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, especially when they weren’t in the presence of boys: it was at once disgusting and innocent, bawdy and naive.

When it wasn’t being used for ill—when no one was its target—this type of humor delighted Louise. From the wall, she watched them quietly, fondly, recalling what it was like to be in this moment of life that was like a breath before speech, a last sweet pause before some great unveiling.

“Did someone say something to you?” Louise asked the girl, gently. “Are you upset?”

The girl shook her head. “I got scared,” she said. Almost imperceptibly, she inched closer to Louise, who put her arm out, encircling the girl as well

as she could.

“What about?” said Louise.

“We were telling stories,” said the girl. There was pathos in the phrasing.

We, thought Louise. Not they. A wistful bid for inclusion.

“What about?”

She paused. In the moonlight, Louise could make out only the outline of the girl’s face.

She said something then, so quietly that Louise couldn’t make it out. She angled her head sideways.

“Slitter,” the girl whispered, and then looked around quickly. Afraid of who else might have heard.

• • •

Of course it was Slitter.

Louise almost smiled in relief. This was one of a half-dozen stories that passed down from one generation of campers to another, sometimes as a prank, sometimes as a warning. The extent to which each camper believed in

their veracity was often unclear. Some told them with a smirk, happy to instill fear in others; some told them tremulously, wanting to unburden themselves of the horrible knowledge they had acquired. T.J. had actually addressed the issue at training that year: the little ones, she said, get so scared. Let’s head off the ghost stories, please.

There were several that fit the description: Old Jones, the ghost of an Adirondack guide who rattled the cabin windows at night; Scary Mary, purportedly the jilted wife of a Van Laar ancestor from several generations back.

But Slitter—or Jacob Sluiter, the actual spelling of his name—was no ghost. He was a man, still alive, as far as Louise knew. Still haunting the imaginations of her campers, year after year. The rumors about him—and his rumored connection to the Van Laar Preserve—were the most persistent of all of the stories she’d heard.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” said Louise. “He’s in a jail cell.

About two hundred miles away.”

But Tracy shook her head quickly.

“He’s not,” she said. “He escaped.”

“I don’t think so,” said Louise.

“He did,” said Tracy. “T.J. said so. She said it to one of the counselors from Spruce. And the counselor told the CIT, and the CIT told Caroline.”

Louise paused, unconvinced. For one thing, T.J. would have told her, Louise, first, if this was true. Wouldn’t she have? Unless she hadn’t had a chance to.

Louise smiled at the girl. “Even if that’s true,” she said, “he’d have a pretty long way to travel before he reached this area. And I don’t see why he’d want to.”

“I heard them telling stories,” Tracy said. She pulled her knees in closer.

“The other girls.”

“Those old stories have been around a long time,” Louise said. “Doesn’t mean they’re true.”

Tracy wouldn’t hear it. She was shaking her head now, imploring Louise to listen. “They were talking about the boy,” she whispered.

Louise paused.

She knew what boy. There was no need to say his name.

Louise

Two Months Later August 1975

ouise is running.L On most days, this motion—legs pumping, arms pumping, head and neck erect—feels correct to her: her natural state. Her daily runs on the grounds of the Preserve constitute the only times in her life when she is fully at ease, when her worries are, just for a moment, stayed. She was a sprinter in high school, but she likes running distances better. On long runs she thinks of her body as somehow the mother of her brain—or the way a mother should be, anyway. The way other people’s mothers are.

Today’s run is different.

Today Louise runs frantically, unseeingly. She trips over the ground.

Rights herself. She ignores a counselor who calls out to her from across the lawn. “Fine, forget you!” says the counselor—good-natured, oblivious.

Louise doesn’t look back.

Already, she has searched in the following places for Barbara: the latrines, the commissary, the community room, the beach. Already, she has checked the nurse’s office and the boathouse. She has gone up to the main house, where a sympathetic maid prowled the corridors for ten minutes while Louise waited outside. But Barbara has not been in any of these places, and no one Louise has spoken with has seen her this morning.

When she reaches the Director’s Cabin, she pounds on the door. Waits thirty seconds. Pounds again.

She’s home, Louise knows. T.J. is a woman who strictly adheres to her routine, whose mornings are always the same. At 6:30, she plays reveille over the public address system, signaling to campers that the moment has come to wake up and get to the showers. And at 8:05 she emerges and walks to the commissary, catching the end of breakfast, inspecting the ranks.

Louise checks her watch: 6:40 a.m. In twenty minutes, the campers will be walking to the commissary for breakfast.

Still no answer. She places her palm on the door handle. Depresses the latch. Except for the bathroom stalls, there are no locks at Camp Emerson.

Still, it feels wrong to enter the Director’s Cabin (in which T.J. lives year- round—in which she grew up, no less) without an invitation to do so, despite the fact that Louise knows T.J. in a way that feels different from the other counselors. Shares a history with her that she keeps hidden from everyone else on the grounds.

At last, Louise swings open the door. She has to.

“Hello?” she calls. Steps into the wood-paneled living room, which doubles as the camp’s main office. A desk faces a window in the front wall; two small chairs opposite hold a permanent place for campers in need of a talking-to.

Louise has spent hours and hours in this room. On one occasion, a whole cold January week.

Louise listens. The house smells like T.J.: the camphor and tar of her homemade blackfly repellent; beneath it, the iron and musk of her sweat.

From the back of the house, she can hear the shower running.

She puts a hand to her face, wiping sweat from her brow, from her upper lip. She doesn’t know what to do next. To wait for T.J. to finish her shower feels incorrect. To pick up the phone and call anyone without T.J.’s guidance feels similarly wrong. Who would she call, anyway? The police? The volunteer fire department? God forbid—the Van Laars themselves? She can see the telephone across the room on T.J.’s desk—the only one on the camp’s premises. The other one in the vicinity is in the main house. Self-Reliance.

Louise tiptoes down the hall toward the bathroom. The door is open. T.J.’s clothes are in a pile on the floor.

She pauses outside it. Should she call out more loudly?

Too late: one high metal squeak, the turning of a knob. The shower goes off. Abruptly, the curtain flies open—and there is T.J., and her short wet hair, and her lean torso, and her small breasts, and the farmer’s tan she sports all summer.

Louise whirls on her heel, but it’s too late. They’ve already locked eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” says Louise, at the same time that T.J. lets out a holler.

“What’n the hell, Louise,” says T.J., after she catches her breath.

“I’m so sorry,” Louise says, again and again. She walks back down the hall, still saying it.

Behind her, she hears T.J. opening drawers.

“What are you doing in here?” calls T.J.

Louise clears her throat. “It’s about Barbara Van Laar,” she says.

“What about her?”

“She wasn’t in her bunk this morning.”

For what feels like a minute: silence.

Then T.J.’s footsteps in the hallway. She enters the office, clothed.

“She’s got a bunkmate, right? Did she notice Barbara leaving?”

“She says she didn’t hear anything. Slept through it.”

There is a good chance, Louise knows, that T.J. will hold Louise accountable. Because a counselor’s job is to hear things: the cruel words spoken by one camper to another. A clap of thunder in the distance: everyone out of the lake.

The screen door—most important. The screen door as it swings open in the night.

Louise waits for T.J. to say something. Anything. At last, she speaks.

“But you were in the cabin last night,” says T.J. “You and Annabel.

Right?”

If Louise hesitates, it is only to breathe in. She’s been expecting this

question. She’s prepared.

“Yes,” she says, swiftly.

“You’re sure,” says T.J. “You and Annabel both.”

“Both of us,” says Louise.

She is not a habitual liar, but she is a practical one. It has been necessary for Louise to lie periodically throughout her life. A matter of survival. Still, it never feels good: especially when she’s lying to someone she respects.

Someone like T.J. Hewitt—to whom she has confessed, on several occasions, certain things that she has never told another soul. To lie to her now gives Louise a sick feeling in her stomach.

But if T.J. is onto her, she doesn’t reveal that now. Instead, she shifts her attention away from Louise, and to the public address system that sits on and under her desk.

She strides across the room. Lifts the microphone. Turns on the system.

“All cabins,” she says. “Please send one counselor to the Director’s Office.

CITs, you’re in charge for the morning.”

She switches the system off, turns her back to Louise for a moment.

Without pivoting, she asks: “Have you seen him this week?”

John Paul, she means. Louise knows this without asking.

For a second time this morning, she lies to T.J.

“No.”

Tracy

June 1975

he arrival of Barbara Van Laar at Camp Emerson was met mainly withT silence. There was silence as the Van Laars’ black town car rolled slowly up the driveway and then across the lawn, conducted by a driver; silence as the girl herself, Barbara, traveled the half mile from the main house on foot, apparently having refused to ride alongside her own possessions.

She came into view at 8:05 a.m., just as breakfast in the commissary was letting out. She saluted unsmilingly as she passed the exiting campers, who bumped into one another as they strained to get a look. She was wearing clothing the likes of which many of them had never seen: cutoff jean shorts that barely covered her bottom, and beneath them black stockings with intentional-looking runs in them, and black army boots, and a T-shirt with a word on it that none of them could quite make out, but presumed to be something rude. Her hair was artificially black, and cut into a stringy bob that ended just below her jaw, and her lips were painted red, and her eyes were rimmed in charcoal. Most surprising were the silver spikes—more than one— that adorned each earlobe, along with what appeared to be a dog collar encircling her neck, and two black leather cuffs on her wrists.

Barbara’s inaugural walk across the lawn would be discussed for months afterward: it was the first time any of the campers had seen her in the flesh, though she’d been talked about for years. Most of the conversation centered

on her appearance and attire, which was, to most of Camp Emerson, a shock.

The only campers who knew what to call her were the Manhattanites, who used a word that the rest of them had never heard.

Punk.

Any other camper who arrived in Barbara’s clothing would have been immediately shuttled to the bottom of the social heap, met with incredulity or ignored entirely. But Barbara Van Laar was too interesting to ignore, her personal history too intriguing and complex. Though no one said it aloud, the goal of every camper on the grounds was to befriend her.

• • •

The next time they caught sight of Barbara, she was being led by Louise toward the little beach that bordered Lake Joan, where the residents of several cabins, including Tracy’s, were waiting to take their swim tests. Out of the clothes she’d arrived in, Barbara looked younger.

A long metal dock, T-shaped and warmed by the sun, jutted out from the beach. The swimming instructor, a tall blond Atlas named Mitchell, led the first cabin out to the end of it.

“On my count,” said Mitchell. And then, on three, the younger campers from Spruce plunged into the water, shrieking when they surfaced.

“Rule number one,” said Mitchell. “No screaming unless you’re in danger.”

• • •

Tracy stood at the edge of the group, uncomfortable in her bathing suit, a towel wrapped tightly around her waist. She had been at camp less than twenty-four hours, but it had not escaped her that the other campers in Balsam—consciously or not—habitually placed some physical distance between themselves and her.

Barbara and Louise, by that point, had reached the end of the dock.

“Mitch,” said Louise, and then she said it again, louder. “Can I interrupt

for a second?”

Everyone turned to look.

“This is Barbara,” said Louise. “She’ll be with us in Balsam this session.”

Louise gestured in the direction of Tracy’s group. “Those girls over there are your cabinmates. Wave, Balsam.”

Dutifully, they did. Barbara held up a hand, and then wove her way through the campers, inserting herself precisely into the gap next to Tracy.

She gazed straight ahead, then, toward the lake—pretending, apparently, that she was not the focal point of everyone nearby.

In her peripheral vision, Tracy could see Barbara wasn’t—pretty, exactly —but there was something appealing about her, something confident and mature. She stood with her hands on her hips, feet slightly apart, very still, her posture upright. She didn’t fidget or slouch. It made Tracy straighten.

Before she could look away, Barbara turned her head sharply in Tracy’s direction, meeting her gaze. But it wasn’t annoyance that registered on her face, or disgust. No: in the split second they locked eyes, Barbara looked

unmistakably amused.

“Balsam,” said Mitchell. “You ready?”

Tracy removed the towel around her waist with reluctance.

On Mitchell’s count, the group of them plunged in.

Their task was to swim to a buoy fifty yards away and then turn back. As they swam, Mitchell watched them, assessing their form and speed, making notes.

Tracy was a decent swimmer: years of lessons at the Y made her so. Had she pushed herself to her limit, she might have been toward the front. But she would not have been first. That title belonged to Barbara, who swam so gracefully and fast that she was out, and toweling off, before the second- place finisher touched the dock.

“Hey, speed racer,” said Mitchell, impressed.

Barbara said nothing in response. She dried herself, all business. Slicked back the hair and bangs that clung to the sides of her face.

• • •

At lunch, Tracy placed herself at the end of the table, as she had done for each of the meals she had taken at Camp Emerson so far. And as usual, the rest of the girls clustered together, away from her. But a moment later, to Tracy’s surprise, Barbara Van Laar deposited her tray directly across from her, and sat down. Immediately, the table’s attention shifted.

Barbara was wearing her red lipstick again—either she’d smuggled it in, or special exceptions were being made for her already—and her bright mouth as she bit into and chewed her food functioned, to Tracy’s eyes, something like a fishing lure.

“What?” asked Barbara—the first word Tracy had heard her speak. Her voice was low, quiet; behind it there was the same note of amusement Tracy had noticed in her earlier gaze.

“I like your—” Tracy said, and then she closed her mouth. Don’t be weird,

she instructed herself.

“My what?” asked Barbara.

Tracy hesitated.

“My lipstick? Borrow it,” said Barbara.

“Are we allowed?”

“Are we not allowed?” said Barbara.

Tracy considered this. “I think we’re only allowed to put it on for dances,” she said. “That’s what they told us at orientation.”

Barbara shrugged. “I wasn’t at orientation,” she said. “If someone wants to

say something to me, they can.”

“Why did you miss it?” Tracy asked her.

“My parents,” said Barbara. “They forgot to sign me up for camp.”

Tracy nodded. This she could relate to: the feeling of being forgotten. To her right, she could sense the rest of Balsam leaning toward them, straining to catch what they were saying.

• • •

That—their second full day of camp—marked the start of what would become their normal routine.

Each day, they woke at 6:30, to the reveille played over the speakers.

They showered.

At seven, they made their way to the commissary for breakfast; at 8:30 they gathered by the flagpole for flag-raising and opening assembly.

After that they had swim lessons, and first elective, and lunch, and second elective, and free period, and dinner, and, usually, some scheduled evening program.

Twice a week, in place of one of their electives, they had Survival Classes, led by T.J. Hewitt herself. In them they learned to build shelters, forage for food, and build spears with which to fish. They learned how to find or make potable water, and how to build traps for small animals, which they also learned to skin and cook.

These classes were the heart of Camp Emerson: the reason it had been founded in the first place, the campers were told. They were also important training for a tradition that occurred toward the end of each summer—the one for which Camp Emerson was most famous.

The original name of the tradition was the Solo Trip. In the earliest years of Camp Emerson, when Peter Van Laar I still reigned from the house at the top of the hill, all campers were sent into the woods alone for three nights with nothing but their wits to keep them alive. No camper had ever died, but stories of parched and emaciated children staggering out of the woods had been passed down through the decades. By the time of Tracy’s tenure at Camp Emerson, the Solo Trip had become the Survival Trip. Thanks to the intervention of a new generation of concerned parents, campers were now sent off in small groups. And this year, as T.J. had explained, those small groups would be chaperoned by a counselor.

For these classes, campers were divided not by cabin but by Survival Group—each of which consisted of approximately twelve campers. Groups were carefully constructed to include no more than two campers from any cabin or age group, designed to allow older campers to mentor younger ones.

• • •

Tracy’s Survival Group met, for the first time, on her fourth day at camp.

They’d been told to meet at the flagpole, where T.J. Hewitt would be waiting for them. And there she was, when they arrived: silent and fierce-looking, uninclined to make small talk of any kind.

Tracy was pleasantly surprised to find that her group included Barbara Van Laar, who nodded to her when their eyes met, but otherwise stood as silently as their instructor.

The last person to arrive was a boy—fourteen, perhaps. One of the oldest campers on the grounds. Immediately, Tracy reddened. This, she thought, was the most beautiful person she had ever seen in her life.

He was tall, and wore a shell necklace around his neck, and his skin had, in early summer, already acquired the kind of tan that wouldn’t ever be possible for Tracy to achieve. His hair was long—to his shoulders, almost— and on his feet he wore huaraches, though they’d gone out of fashion several summers before. Like the rest of the campers, he wore a uniform; but his accessories convinced Tracy that his regular attire was most likely bohemian, a style Tracy associated with the previous decade.

“Tracy?” someone was saying. T.J. Hewitt was looking down at her clipboard, taking attendance. “Is Tracy not here?” said T.J., her pencil poised to strike out Tracy’s name.

“Here,” said Tracy, quickly—forcing her gaze away from the boy in question, who stood across from her in the little group around the flagpole.

In doing so, she caught the eye of Barbara Van Laar—who wiggled her eyebrows up and down. She burned.

“All right,” said T.J. “That’s everyone.”

Then she set off abruptly in the direction of the woods, where they spent the next hour learning how to orient themselves. By the end of the hour, all of them understood the basics of navigation with a compass, or with the sun.

If both of those techniques failed, concluded T.J., the most important thing was not to panic.

For a bonus, she asked them: Who knew the origins of the word?

“Which word?” someone said.

“Panic,” said T.J. But no one raised a hand.

She explained. It came from the Greek god Pan: the god of the woods. He liked to trick people, to confuse and disorient them until they lost their bearings, and their minds.

To panic, said T.J., was to make an enemy of the forest. To stay calm was to be its friend.

• • •

When the day’s lesson was over, Tracy set off on a slow walk back to her cabin. She was moving in a languorous daze, bewitched by T.J.’s words, and also by Lowell Cargill—the name of the boy, she had learned. She was so distracted, in fact, that she didn’t notice who was at her side until they were halfway to Balsam.

When she finally looked to her left, she saw that Barbara Van Laar was keeping pace with her, watching her, a sort of half smile playing on her face.

“What,” said Tracy—ready to be teased.

Barbara shook her head. “Nothing.”

Tracy looked straight ahead. She was interested in Barbara in the same way that everyone at Camp Emerson seemed to be. But she was certain she had nothing to offer her: no stories in her past, no social cachet. She had divorced parents, yes, but loads of the other girls did too. She couldn’t imagine that Barbara would want to talk to her. And yet there she was, Barbara Van Laar, walking right alongside her, bouncing on her toes, clapping her hands every so often as she swung her arms ahead of her, as if keeping time to a song in her head.

“He’s cute,” said Barbara, after they had walked in silence for a while.

“Don’t you think?”

“Who is?” said Tracy.

Barbara laughed. Rolled her eyes. Tucked her hair behind her ears.

“Pretty sure you know,” said Barbara. “But if you don’t want to talk, that’s fine.”

I do, Tracy thought. But her words, as usual, failed her.

• • •

On her second night at Camp Emerson, she had heard—overheard— something she didn’t quite understand. It was, she believed, about Barbara.

She’d been trailing two of her bunkmates back from the latrines.

“Isn’t it awful,” Caroline had whispered. “To be a—replacement for your older brother.”

Tracy widened her eyes in the dark. What a truly terrible thing to say, she thought. And Amy must have agreed with her, because she replied, “Caroline,” in a tone that bordered on shock.

“What?” said Caroline, growing bolder. “I’m only saying what I think.”

• • •

“Do you think he’s cute?” Tracy said now. It was the best question she could come up with. And Barbara shrugged.

“I guess so,” she said. “If you like the artsy type.”

“What type do you like?” Tracy asked.

“I don’t know,” said Barbara. “I don’t really think about that stuff anymore.”

Tracy nodded. She wasn’t certain what Barbara meant, and she was too embarrassed to ask.

“I’ve got a boyfriend now,” said Barbara. An explanation. Then there was no time to say anything further, for the two of them had reached the porch.

Louise

Two Months Later August 1975

t seven a.m., the search for Barbara begins.A While they wait for the counselors to arrive, following T.J.’s request over the intercom, T.J. sits in her living room, on a brown love seat so old that it’s swaybacked in the middle. She keeps her head down. Imagining, no doubt, a particular scene: revealing to the Van Laars that their daughter has gone missing while in her care.

Louise stands awkwardly nearby—feeling somehow that it wouldn’t be right to sit. That she doesn’t deserve to.

“What’s she been like this session?” T.J. asks. “Happy?”

“Oh,” says Louise. “Yeah, I guess she was. Is. Everyone likes her.

Admires her, I think.”

“She never said anything that made you think she might run off?”

Louise shakes her head.

The truth is—and she doesn’t know how to say it—Barbara has never actually seemed to need her, or to look up to her in the way the other girls have. She has always struck Louise almost as a peer. They like each other, but they are not close; over the last two months, Barbara has never made a confession to her, or sought her advice on a friendship or a crush—something

that happens at least once a session, usually more, with all the other campers she’s ever had.

“Who’s she close with?” T.J. asks. Reading her mind.

“Her bunkmate. Tracy.”

T.J. pauses for a moment, thinking. “They were paired for the Survival

Trip. They shared a tent.”

Louise nods.

“We should find Tracy. We need to talk to her too.”

A knock at the door. The first counselors, arriving.

Through the front window, Louise can see groups of CITs and campers moving slowly past T.J.’s office toward the commissary for breakfast, dragging their feet as they strain to catch a glimpse of what’s going on inside.

Everyone must know that something’s wrong.

• • •

There are fourteen cabins, fourteen counselors, fourteen CITs, meaning the room is crowded once everyone has arrived. T.J. stands up on the seat of the small sofa she’s been sitting on to get a better view. She begins.

“Barbara Van Laar was not in her cabin this morning,” says T.J. There is no need to say A camper from Balsam or Louise’s camper. Everyone here knows who she is.

“In a moment,” she continues, “I’m going to give each of you an assigned location. We’ll spread out over the grounds and do a high-speed search for her. See if we can find her ourselves. No need to frighten the family unnecessarily. But first,” says T.J., “is there anything I need to know?”

The counselors are silent. They shift a little, looking around to see if any

of them will speak.

“Anything happen overnight?” says T.J.

This is the moment, Louise knows, when any of them might snitch—might say something about seeing Annabel in the woods last night, drunk; say something about Louise’s nightly outings to be with other counselors. But no

one does. Everyone, Louise knows, is hoping that this is all a misunderstanding with an easy fix.

T.J. tries a different tack. “Anyone aware of any—relationships Barbara might have formed while she was here?”

“One of my kids had a crush on her,” says a counselor named Davey. He’s a nice boy with glasses who once, embarrassingly, wrote a song called “Louise” and played it in front of a group at the Clearing when everyone was wasted. No one has mentioned it since.

“You think they were together?” said T.J.

Davey shakes his head. “No, I think he just liked her. He got ribbed for it.

But I know he asked her to last night’s dance. And she said no.”

T.J. nods.

“I’ll go talk to him after this,” she says. “Anyone else?”

Silence.

“All right,” she says. And gives them the plan.

• • •

T.J. herself, after speaking with Davey’s camper, will walk up to the main house, Self-Reliance, to give it a thorough search—beyond what Louise did earlier. The rest of them are given assignments that cover the camp and its environs. Seven of the counselors have been given cabins and buildings; the other seven the nearby woods. All of them have been instructed to blow the whistles they keep around their necks all summer in a pattern of two threes— T.J. demonstrates on her whistle, quietly—if Barbara is located.

And if they learn something else, or see something else—a clue, or anything suspicious—they are to blow their whistles in four twos. And T.J.

alone will come to them.

“Any questions?” T.J. asks.

A counselor called Sam raises his hand. He’s new this summer. He’s just finished high school and is heading off to college in the fall, making him one of the youngest counselors on the grounds.

“Was her brother a camper?” he asks. “The Van Laar boy?”

A shocked silence. Louise isn’t entirely certain why, but there is a universal understanding at Camp Emerson that Bear Van Laar should be spoken of only in whispers. And certainly never mentioned to T.J., who knew him, who was said to be close with him.

Louise is probably the only counselor who remembers his disappearance well. She was nine, just a year older than Bear, when it happened. She’d never met him, but she remembers every single resident of Shattuck—her hometown, five miles from the Van Laar Preserve, and the source of all of its staff—participating in the search.

T.J.’s expression changes for a moment. Something passes over her face that Louise can’t identify. She fears it’s anger. Braces for impact. T.J. rarely raises her voice, but when she does she is frightening to behold.

Instead, she speaks gently. “No,” she says. “No, Bear was never a camper here.”

Some of the counselors are glaring openly at Sam, who looks confused.

Uncertain what he’s done.

“All right,” says T.J. “Get going.”

• • •

Louise has been assigned to the Staff Quarters.

On the way she passes the trail toward the lake. Decides, instinctively, to turn down it.

Here is Lake Joan: named, she has been told, for the wife of an English settler. She scans the opposite shore, watching for movement; and while she looks, she ranks her worries.

The most pressing one is Barbara Van Laar, and where she has gone, and whether she is safe.

Next comes the worry of John Paul, and his whereabouts at this moment, and how likely he is to come to her—Louise. To punish her in some way, as he has done in the past.

Then there is the worry of being let go from this job. The worry of where she will live, if that happens.

Back to Shattuck, she thinks. To the house she grew up in. Back with her mother—whose behavior has become, in recent years, something untenable —and her younger brother Jesse, eleven years old, whom Louise loves like her own child, whose sweet disposition cannot possibly withstand for much longer the constant parries of their mother at her worst. Lately, Jesse has shown worrying signs of an inability to learn anything at all in school, and this is her fourth worry. Louise dreams often of rescuing him, bringing him to live with her, raising him on her own: a goal she hopes to realize before another year goes by.

If she were to be let go from her job, she would have no option but to move home to Shattuck—despite the fact that her entire life, to this point, has consisted of one attempt after another to escape.

Growing up there, she tried to sideline herself, simply sit out the teenage politics that dominated life at the central high school. But she continually found herself entangled in tricky situations without meaning to be, and at last she resigned herself to the idea that in a place as small as Shattuck, no one was permitted to be invisible. Like everyone else in the township, she had certain marks in her favor and certain liabilities. She had the advantage of athleticism, and the disadvantage of extreme poorness. She had the advantage of intelligence, and the disadvantage of a mother who was constantly, notoriously drunk. But it was her unusual prettiness that set her apart, that shuttled her to a place of social notoriety without her consent, that caused a sort of unrest all around her that she generally wanted no part of.

If anyone bothered to ask her, back then, what she did want, she would have said: to listen to music, Zeppelin and the Dead most importantly, but also Procol Harum, and Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell; to see George McGovern elected someday (now that Bobby Kennedy was dead and gone); to go into a line of work that would make a difference in the world; to meet a good man who took her seriously; to travel the country and the world. But nobody asked her, and so she kept these wishes quiet, writing them only in journals, summoning them to the forefront of her mind whenever a birthday or a well or a star presented her with a formal opportunity to make them known to the universe.

While she waited for these wishes to be realized, she focused on her studies. She was prized and uplifted by the central school, where she was the salutatorian of her graduating class. She got a full ride to Union College, with some help from a guidance counselor whose brother worked in admissions.

But at Union she had struggled. Couldn’t afford even her books. By the end of her first year, she’d dropped out.

The one lasting thing that came out of her education was a boyfriend— John Paul McLellan—one year above her, a philosophy major who’d grown up in Manhattan. He was different from any of the boys she’d grown up with, and although a lot of girls liked him, he was infatuated only with Louise, a fact he made known to others two weeks into her time on campus, as if staking a claim. His friends told her at a party, pointing across the room: He’s in love with you. And there was John Paul, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, laughing appreciatively at something someone was saying.

Handsome in an understated way. He wore glasses, which Louise took as an outsized sign of responsibility and intelligence.

When she dropped out, he suggested that she take a job at the summer camp owned by his godparents.

“Camp Emerson,” he had told her. “A couple hours up the Northway, on the Van Laar Preserve.”

Louise had looked at him, startled. “I know it,” she said.

• • •

That John Paul had never before mentioned his connection to the Preserve— despite the fact that Louise had spoken with some frequency about where she grew up—should not have surprised her. He never spoke much of his family; what she knew of them she had gleaned from casual remarks John Paul had made and from gossip she’d heard. She knew he had a very Catholic father who came from money and had founded a law firm in Manhattan; she knew the McLellans were said to be close friends of the Bouvier family. Still, the fact that John Paul himself had not made the connection between Shattuck—

just a few miles from the Preserve—and the summer home of his godparents was evidence to Louise that he listened very little to anything she said.

Because to Louise—to all the residents of Shattuck—the Van Laar Preserve occupied a place of importance in their lives that was simultaneously acknowledged and resented. Following the closure of Shattuck’s paper mill, which had been for three generations the main employer in the town, the Preserve with its summer camp functioned as a sort of industry unto itself. It provided decent full- or part-time work to two dozen of the townspeople of Shattuck year-round; in the summer months, with the camp open, that number tripled.

It did not escape Louise that of this number none were counselors, a position seemingly reserved for wealthy alums of the camp, college students who wanted summer work that might also be a good time. All the Preserve employees Louise knew from Shattuck, meanwhile, occupied roles that required their hands, their bodies.

When John Paul suggested, therefore, that she apply for this particular job, Louise tried to express her concern in a way that made sense to him, that didn’t provoke the annoyance he often displayed when she questioned his ideas, but—in typical fashion—he waved her off. He was practically related to the Van Laars, he reminded her. Mr. Van Laar was his godfather. Their fathers worked together: the Van Laars as the founders of the bank that had financed all of Albany and much of New York City, too; the McLellans as their legal representation. One day, John Paul said, he would take over the bank for both families. John Paul could easily get Louise a job at the camp, he said. All he had to do was ask.

That was four years ago. She has worked at Camp Emerson every summer since. She has never once met the Van Laars in person, despite John Paul’s connection to them. They function as a distant presence on a hill to the north, frequently sighted local celebrities about whom the children and counselors of Camp Emerson speculate and gossip. The other three seasons of the year, she works at the Garnet Hill Lodge, a resort at the base of Gore Mountain, running programs for the children of guests who spend each day skiing or hiking, and most nights drinking in a smoky, upscale lounge. Throughout this

period, she has somehow maintained a relationship with John Paul—who has finally finished his degree at Union, though it took him six years and two forgiving deans to do so. When they have seen each other, it has been in Schenectady during John Paul’s semesters at college, or at the Garnet Hill Lodge, or—in summers—at the Van Laar Preserve, where he stays with his parents for a couple of weekends each season. During the first of these weekends she made the mistake of suggesting that he try to sneak her, Louise, inside of Self-Reliance, to sleep in a real bed for a night. In response, he looked at her as if she were stupid. “They’re my hosts,” he said. “I would never do something so rude.” Instead, they had, and still have, uncomfortable sex in his car, in the parking area adjacent to Self-Reliance; or sometimes pressed up against a tree in the woods, or sometimes on a bed of pine needles on the forest floor. Louise is the one who remembers to bring the towel.

Sometimes, with a certain self-reproach, Louise asks herself why she has stayed with him all these years. What, after all, do they even have in common anymore? She feels more and more distant each year from the person she was when they met. Indeed, sometimes it shocks Louise to remember that she was ever a college student at all. Today, she thinks of her year at Union almost with embarrassment: another life, a youthful folly, a waste of time.

When she allows herself to be honest, the answer is queasily obvious: Louise has stayed with John Paul because he represents to her the possibility of a better life. For herself, yes; and also for her brother Jesse.

They’re engaged, Louise reminds herself. They’re getting a ring, even, as soon as John Paul gets a job. Someday, she tells herself, they’ll have a house together. They’ll have a comfortable bed. A big one, with too many pillows.

They’ll have two children. They’ll have four bedrooms, and the extra one will be for Jesse, whom she will bring to live with them while he’s still young enough for it to meaningfully alter the trajectory of his life, to prevent him from becoming angry, or depressed, or submerged in the beery haze that permanently afflicts most of the boys she grew up with.

For this future, she is prepared to wait. Because in the wake of John Paul’s graduation from Union, and before he joins the family business, the work he’ll do “for the rest of his life”—a phrase he says with a sigh—John Paul

has decided to take a year to travel, to visit friends in places as far-flung as Los Angeles and Vienna, and as close to Louise as the Van Laars’ house at the top of the hill.

Indeed: for the past week John Paul has been staying with his family at Self-Reliance, for a long-planned celebration of the Preserve’s one hundredth birthday. Embarrassingly, Louise allowed herself to look forward to his visit.

Perhaps, she thought, the special occasion—and the length of his stay— meant that she’d at last be invited up to Self-Reliance, introduced to the elusive Van Laars, whom she’d otherwise only glimpsed in passing, as they drove by in their dark cars. Perhaps, on her one day off, she’d be asked up to the main house for cocktails, or dinner. Presented formally to the Van Laars and their guests as John Paul’s fiancée.

But none of this has come to pass. As usual, Louise has seen him only twice: once on his first day on the premises, when he wandered down from a cocktail hour on the lawn, tipsy, and kissed Louise in front of her campers; and then once more last night, in the Clearing with Lee Towson, after she’d almost given up on seeing him at all.

She certainly hasn’t seen John Paul’s family, his mother and father and sister—who have introduced themselves anew, with polite detachment, each of the three times they have met Louise, and who seem to be operating under the assumption that John Paul will find someone more suitable to marry when the time is right. In the past, Louise has been able to reassure herself that John Paul has his own mind about things, almost to a fault; he has said to her repeatedly that one of the things he likes about her is that she’s not like other girls he dated in the past. Girls his family has approved of.

But after last night, she sees the McLellans’ assumption might prove to be correct. And a feeling of humiliation descends upon her. Four whole years sunk into a wish for a future that isn’t meant to be.

On the bank of Lake Joan, a loon calls, sending chills down her spine.

Louise, roused from her thoughts, sets off again.

• • •

According to her watch, it’s 7:10 a.m. This, to Louise, is a relief: it means the Staff Quarters will be largely empty, since almost everyone who lives inside is a kitchen worker or a member of the grounds crew, and all of them are up and out before reveille every day. Louise is friends with many of them; she knows some of them from Shattuck.

But among them there is one person she doesn’t want to see.

• • •

Lee Towson arrived at the start of the summer and immediately caused a stir.

He was hired to work in the commissary as a prep chef and dishwasher.

Traditionally, staff members don’t mingle much with the counselors, but Lee was noticed straightaway. He is fine-looking and tall, with thickly lashed eyes and shoulder-length hair that he keeps tied in a low ponytail. He gives an impression of speed and lightness. Once, while waiting in line for her tray, Louise caught a glimpse of him juggling utensils at the rear of the kitchen.

When he noticed her watching, he fumbled them. Pulled a face. Laughed at himself, with her.

She hasn’t been the only one to take note of him, of course; all the counselors have, male and female alike. Early in the summer, he was issued an invitation—a command—to join the counselors at the Clearing, and ever since then he has been a regular presence. He is said to have grown up in Queensbury, not too far from the camp; another boy she knows from Shattuck has claimed him as a cousin. He is said to deal a little here and there. Other rumors about him include a stint as a roustabout for a traveling circus, a stint in jail for possession of controlled substances, and a habit of sleeping around. But Louise mistrusts gossip implicitly, having been the subject of many false rumors herself.

For the past two months, Lee and Louise have engaged in low-level flirtation at every turn. At the Clearing, jokes between them turn into hilarity quickly, Louise doubled over, unable to breathe. Small touches straddle the line between friendly and more. The warmth of his hand on her back, on her shoulder; once, briefly—after several beers—in a straight line downward,

from where it had been on her shoulder to where it stopped, on her ribs, just beneath her right breast: a memory that sparks the kind of desire she has rarely felt in her life. She imagines his body beneath his clothes. She imagines him gazing upon her unclothed body, then reaching for it.

This desire, in truth, was what drove her out of her cabin last night.

Over and over again, Louise replays the events of the night in her mind: first her campers, all nine of them, heading in a line toward their cabin as Louise waved goodbye from the Great Hall. This would have been at eleven o’clock, or thereabouts. Annabel, too, turned and waved as she walked behind them.

Annabel, who was supposed to be in charge.

Next in Louise’s memory: the warm night air, damp from an earlier storm; the walk to the Clearing, a small treeless patch just past the edge of the woods, a place that generations of counselors have outfitted with a stack of split logs and a firepit and turned into an after-curfew outdoor club; the pine branches, fat from rain, that doused her when she brushed against them; faint music from Lee Towson’s guitar; faint smoke from a bonfire. Then the back of Lee’s neck as he bent over the instrument, then the front of him as she rounded the fire, as he looked eagerly up at her, barefoot, his hair tucked behind his ears.

Where is everyone, said Louise, or Where’d everyone go, or something

equally silly.

They both knew why they were there.

Louise settled onto a stump by the fire, several feet from where Lee was sitting. As she did so, she felt aware of where John Paul was in relation to them both: only a few hundred yards away, in one of the many guest rooms she had never seen at Self-Reliance. It was his last night on the property.

After his first-day stroll down the hill to greet her, he had never returned.

Each night, after her charges had gone to sleep, she had waited for him on the porch of Balsam. By the fourth night, she had grown angry. By the fifth, resigned. By last night—the sixth night that John Paul had been on the premises, the fifth he had not come to her—she had grown indifferent.

This was the night she had walked to the Clearing, where Lee Towson was waiting—apparently for her. And this was the night that John Paul had decided, at last, to go looking for Louise.

How he found the two of them in the Clearing, Louise still isn’t certain.

Perhaps he had heard Lee’s guitar, or seen the small fire he’d built in the pit.

Either way, at a certain moment Louise had spotted him standing between two trees, an apparition that startled her so much that she had yelped and clutched her chest, breathing hard.

“John Paul,” said Louise. “You scared me.”

She was prepared to make light of it, arranging her face in a smile, when Lee turned and John Paul lurched out of the woods in his direction. He was, Louise saw, drunk again. His face was arranged in an angry grin, and he swayed first to one side and then the other. Lee, light on his feet, rose quickly

to face him.

For a moment, no one spoke.

And then they were on one another, John Paul the aggressor, but also the first to fall. In two quick swings Lee had him on the ground. He looked at Louise, almost in apology, as John Paul lay still beneath him. His glasses had been thrown from his face and now lay beside him on the ground. His eyes were open and unfocused. He blinked slowly.

“Boyfriend?” Lee said.

“Fiancé,” said Louise, and immediately regretted it.

She had never once spoken of him to Lee, though she imagined he might

have heard that she was dating someone.

“You need any help with him?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“I’ll wait here,” said Lee. “Make sure he’s okay. You should go.”

John Paul was making small hurt noises now, turning his head from side to side. He seemed at first to be laughing, and then Louise understood the sound was a cough. He sat up slowly, shook his head like a dog, sending blood from his nose in all directions. He felt for and then found his glasses, which looked bent. His right eye, too, was damaged in some way.

When he was fully upright, he pointed one finger in her direction.

“Whore,” he said. The word was quiet, direct. She’d been called it before in her life. Once or twice by her own mother. Generally it did not faze her.

But in front of Lee Towson, it stung.

“Yeah, sure,” she said, or something like that. “Okay. Whatever you say.”

A half laugh, dismissive, a mutter, a roll of the eyes. The same things she’s always said, and done, when called a hurtful name. She doesn’t remember.

Anything to show she doesn’t care.

Last night, it worked. John Paul stared and then retreated, first walking then trotting. Back to Self-Reliance. Back to his mother and father and sister, who do not know Louise’s name.

Next to her, Lee Towson shifted in place.

“Well,” he said. “Guess I’d better get going.”

She wanted to stop him, but her shame prevented her from speaking.

Then she was alone.

• • •

The Staff Quarters are inside the only two-story building at Camp Emerson.

It sits on the banks of Lake Joan, just south of the creek and the boys’ cabins.

Louise has never once been inside.

Now she ascends the steps to the interior. To her right, she’s greeted with a long hallway and a line of doors, some standing open, others closed.

“Hello?” she calls.

Silence.

She begins to walk down the hallway. She stops at each open doorway, leaning in. She knocks at the closed doors; opens these too. Some rooms are neat, others chaotic. In all of them she detects the scent of men: their deodorant, their aftershave; beneath these trappings their sweat and shit and semen.

• • •

She’s almost finished checking the second floor when she hears the creak of someone coming up the stairs.

She tenses. She feels fearful without knowing exactly why. She trusts everyone who works at this camp. Likes most of them, too, with the exception of a couple of counselors who seem more interested in partying than doing their jobs.

“Hello?” Louise says again, and at last the word is returned to her.

“Hello,” says Lee Towson, emerging from the stairwell. “Hi.”

He’s bare-torsoed and tan. His golden hair is one-quarter damp. As always, she takes a moment to appreciate his physical form. He is the only man she’s ever looked at in this way—the way she imagines she herself is appraised by others.

“What are you doing here?” says Louise. “Isn’t it breakfast?”

“What are you doing here?”

“My camper’s gone missing,” says Louise. “We’re searching the grounds.”

“Which one? Not,” says Lee, but he doesn’t finish his sentence.

“Barbara.”

“Shit.”

Louise nods. And then, suddenly, without notice, her face crumples, her shoulders heave. She lets out a shuddering gasp.

“Oh no,” says Lee, in genuine alarm. He comes to her, puts his arms around her. She turns her cheek, presses it into his bare chest. He is much taller than she is—most men are—and she feels engulfed by him in a way that normally makes her nervous. But this feels different: she feels safe here.

Even through her tears she is aware of her body lighting up, pressing itself into him.

This is one of the few sheer pleasures Louise knows in life: the near- otherworldly feeling of touching another human’s body with your own body in a way that, for the first time, transcends mere friendliness. These are the times in her life that Louise has felt most acutely the animal nature of her humanity, and therefore they have been the most comforting. To be a human

is complex, and often painful; to be an animal is comfortingly simple and

good.

After a moment they each step back.

“Where’s your shirt?” says Louise, and he grins. “Maple syrup accident,” he says. He extends an arm, showing her the balled-up cotton T-shirt he’s been holding. Then he starts down the hallway, stops before a door.

“I have to keep searching,” says Louise.

“I just need a new shirt,” he says. “Then I’ll help you.”

“Don’t they need you in the kitchen?”

“Breakfast is made,” he says. “They’ll be fine.”

He opens the door to what must be his room. She follows. Lee nods toward the bed on the right—neatly made, Louise notices—and tells her to have a seat. He tosses his old shirt into a hamper. Pulls on a new one.

“How’s your fiancé today?” says Lee, without looking in her direction.

She can hear a certain emphasis on the word. Laughter underneath it.

“I don’t know,” says Louise. “Haven’t talked to him.”

Lee raises an eyebrow.

“Embarrassed, I guess,” says Louise. “Probably has a shiner.”

At this, Lee grins. Looks down at the ground, mock-penitent. “Sorry about

that,” he says.

“You shouldn’t be. He had it coming.”

Lee hesitates, deciding whether to say something. And then: “You know we know each other. Him and me, I mean.”

Louise did not. Lee reads this on her face. Shrugs apologetically.

“How?” says Louise.

Lee clears his throat. Looks away. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that I am unable to answer that question directly. On the grounds of client confidentiality.”

She can read him. She wants to ask: What was he buying from you? A little grass would be fine. Psychedelics are out of the question—John Paul has no interest in those. It’s cocaine she’s afraid of. This is the drug John Paul likes best, and also—after a particularly bad episode between them—one he swore to her he would never use again.

But she won’t ask Lee. It’s too humiliating.

“You been together a long time?” he says.

“Four years,” says Louise.

“You really gonna get married?”

This catches Louise off guard. “Maybe,” she says.

“You know,” says Lee, “you oughta mess around a little before you do.

My advice.”

He looks up at her slyly, his implication bare. She feels a low thud of want in her stomach.

“I have to go,” she says—ashamed, suddenly, to be so distractible.

“You sure you don’t want help? Finding Barbara?”

She hesitates. She does.

“I don’t think T.J. would like it,” says Louise. And somehow she knows that this is true.

He nods. “It’ll be okay, Louise. She prob’ly just ran away,” he says.

“They’ll find her soon. Or she’ll come back. Don’t you think?”

She considers this. It’s what she wants to believe.

“You’re probably right,” says Louise.

Alice

August 1975

phone is sounding someplace in the house.A Alice opens an eye. Closes it. The sun is up; already, the house is growing warm.

“Someone get that,” she says, unconvincingly. Her throat is dry. Her skin, too. In her temples, a familiar throb begins.

Where is everyone? It’s eight in the morning, according to the clock on the wall. Surely someone on staff should be here to answer. Alice closes her eyes.

• • •

A banging now—the door.

If their behavior last night was any indication, every guest on the grounds will be just as bad off as she is. Even Peter, who prides himself on his abstemiousness—who judges her, keeps a running count of every glass she has—even Peter was feeling his oats last night, telling long-winded stories in his odd formal way, tripping at one point over an upturned corner of carpet,

cursing it in his wake.

The pounding on the door stops.

She turns her head to the window. And sees, striding down the lawn in the direction of the camp, T.J. Hewitt—the source of the urgent knocking, she imagines.

Barbara, she thinks. Barbara has no doubt done something wrong, something so egregious that even T.J.—her greatest ally—can no longer ignore it. From the time of Barbara’s birth, T.J. has watched over the girl each summer like a guard dog, a faithful companion, always on duty, just out of sight. She should have been like family.

She wasn’t.

Through the window, Alice watches until T.J. is out of sight, then closes her eyes again.

For a while, she falls into and out of a dream, feeling trapped inside her body on the bed. T.J., in the dream, is wearing a carrier she’d made one year out of rope and a curtain, something that she had fashioned to take then-baby Barbara on hikes. The two of them were a sight: teenage T.J., all sinew and frown; Barbara’s round baby face beneath her chin, peering out at the world.

Where are you going? asks Alice, in the dream. To find Bear, says T.J.

Alice’s eyes open abruptly.

Awake for the day, then. She rises.

• • •

Alice’s bedroom is across the hall from the largest bedroom, which Peter, of course, sleeps in. She slept there too, at one time. Now she doesn’t.

She shuffles past his door. It’s standing slightly open, and she averts her eyes.

Down the hallway now, past the room presently occupied by Marnie McLellan, John Paul Sr. and Nancy’s daughter. Past—think it—past Bear’s room, once decorated in the trappings of young boyhood, everything blue, everything messy, wet bathing suits and towels forever in a pile on the floor.

It’s long since been done over. This week, it’s occupied by the Southworths.

A short, windowed corridor connects the southern wing of the house, where the bedrooms are, with the great room at its center. As Alice passes

through it, something outside catches her eye.

Two vehicles are approaching, moving slowly up the driveway, making a turn toward Camp Emerson. One is Shattuck Township’s single fire truck, the property of the only volunteer fire department in a twenty-mile radius. The other is a yellow-and-blue Dodge: a statie.

Alice pauses, entranced, reminded of another day.

In the great room, the telephone begins again.

• • •

“Mrs. Van Laar?” the man says, on the phone. “Mrs. Van Laar?”

He is, he tells Alice, a sergeant from the state police.

“I’ve got some hard news to relay,” he says.

Alice, receiver in hand, takes in her surroundings.

What do you see, Dr. Lewis would ask her, in moments like this one.

There’s glass on the floor, she thinks. Damage from the party last night.

There’s a painting askew on the wall. There’s glass on the floor, and a painting askew on the wall, and a bottle of wine on its side, and a large wine

stain on the rug.

Alice breathes.

What else, Dr. Lewis would say. She can almost hear him saying it.

She looks out the window. It’s sunny outside, she thinks. It’s sunny outside, and there’s light on the water, and a worker, in the garden, is pulling weeds.

“Mrs. Van Laar,” says the man on the phone. In his voice is a note of fear.

“Mrs. Van Laar, I regret to inform you that your daughter seems to be missing.”

What do you smell, Dr. Lewis would ask her.

“Are you there,” says the man on the phone. “Mrs. Van Laar, a squad is on its way. Are you there?”

I smell day-old alcohol, she thinks. I smell stale smoke from cigars and cigarettes. Underneath it all, a lemony smell—the wood polish used on the furniture.

“Are you there, Mrs. Van Laar?”

And hear? Dr. Lewis would ask her.

“Mrs. Van Laar?”

I hear a dial tone, Alice thinks. She places the receiver in its cradle. The

sound goes away.

And now? Dr. Lewis would say.

Alice closes her eyes. If she tries very hard—if the wind blows right—she can sometimes hear the voices of children from Camp Emerson.

Sometimes, she can even hear Bear’s.

What do you taste, Dr. Lewis would ask her.

I taste nothing.

Focus on your senses. Anchor yourself to the world. What do you taste?

Nothing, thinks Alice. I taste nothing.

• • •

Through the sliding glass doors that lead to the lakeside lawn, someone enters the great room. It’s one of the two young cleaning girls they’ve hired from town, just for the week of the party. She pauses on the threshold, holding her mop and bucket in her hands, surveying the damage: the worst to date. She has not noticed Alice yet, and for this reason she allows herself to register on her face the disdain she clearly feels, to mutter something under her breath.

Disgusting, perhaps, or fucking. Fucking unbelievable.

“Good morning,” says Alice, and the girl snaps to attention, looking guilty.

“Morning, ma’am,” she says, and sets her mop and bucket down, and begins a retreat to the north wing, presumably for more supplies.

“Did you not hear the phone, earlier?” Alice says. “Or the knocking?”

“No, ma’am,” says the girl. “I was out the back, putting the laundry on the line.”

• • •

Reluctantly, Alice jerks herself into action. She strides down the hallway, toward the bedroom where Peter is sleeping. She throws open the door, telling herself that she is unafraid of what—or whom—she’ll see inside.

But it’s only Peter in the bed, sleeping hard, one elbow crooked over his forehead, as if to block the light. She has not seen him in this way—asleep, or in a bed, or even supine—in a year. More.

She says his name aloud. Once, twice.

“What is it?” he mumbles, at last.

“It’s Barbara,” she says. “She’s gone missing.”

Alice

Two Months Earlier June 1975

ollowing Barbara’s departure for Camp Emerson, it had taken AliceF nearly a week to notice the padlock on her daughter’s bedroom door.

Barbara’s room was on the other wing of the house; Alice had no reason to pass it.

But after six days of sitting in the sunroom, or lying in her bed, she had begun at last to feel lonely. Peter was gone, too; to Manhattan, most likely, though she could never keep track. And in the absence of her daughter and husband, the house had gone quiet.

And so, that morning, propelled from her chair by sheer boredom, Alice had decided to take a walk.

• • •

Now she stood outside her daughter’s room, holding the padlock in her hand, marveling at Barbara’s boldness. Surely she must have understood how angry Peter would be when he returned from his trip to find the doorframe damaged by the screws that held the lock in place. More than the doorframe, he would be angered by the implication of the act: that Barbara had any right to privacy, after the way she had recently behaved.

The lock, Alice knew, would have to be removed. The doorframe would have to be carefully repaired: that much was certain. Peter noticed everything about the house.

One of the gardeners made quick work of the lock. Promised to relay a message to a skillful carpenter he knew who could probably fix or replace the damaged wood.

“Thank you,” said Alice, absently. But she was already willing him away.

She didn’t want anyone watching her as she opened the door.

• • •

She smelled it before she saw it: fresh paint.

There, across one whole wall—the largest in the room—was some sort of —mural, Alice supposed, though she wouldn’t have used such a dignified word to describe the terrible pictures that loomed over Barbara’s bed.

The main motif was flags. A British one. An upside-down American. Then safety pins, axes, handcuffs, knives.

In one upper corner, a sun and a moon bearing human faces smiled and frowned at Alice.

So this, she thought, was what Barbara had been doing behind the door she’d kept closed for the better part of June. Blasting her terrible records and painting this terrible mural.

She had done this in Albany, too. She had painted her walls as a ten-year- old girl, but at least in that instance she had had the decency, the common sense, to ask Peter for permission. That mural was innocuous: a sun and clouds and mountains and what seemed to be Lake Joan.

This one was disturbing.

A surge of competing emotions rose inside Alice. One was fear: there would be hell to pay when Peter saw this. But some other emotion was present, too. And at last she realized, with a pang, that it was jealousy. Never once in Alice’s life had she ever felt the freedom to do something like this.

To simply decide—I’m going to paint a mural today—and then undertake the project.

• • •

In a little room off the wine cellar were all the supplies used to maintain the house. There, Alice searched through racks of paint for the color she had chosen, when Barbara was born, for the room that would be hers at Self-

Reliance.

There it was: Fawn Pink.

A beautiful shade of light rose.

• • •

Returning to the scene of Barbara’s crime with a roller and bucket in hand, Alice set to work.

By the time Peter returned from wherever he was, there would be no trace of the mural, or the lock.

Tracy

June 1975

heir first week of Survival Classes had centered on orienting oneself inT the woods. Their second week would center on keeping warm and sheltered.

T.J. Hewitt had led them to a quiet place in the forest. Now she stood still,

hands on hips, one foot up on a root.

“What do you see?” she said.

Silence.

Then a younger girl raised her hand. “Trees?” she said.

Quiet laughter from the group; the girl reddened. She had not meant the answer to be funny.

But T.J. pressed on. “Very good,” she said. “What else?”

Rocks, they said. A boulder. Leaves. Pine needles. Dirt. Branches.

T.J. nodded. “All of these can be used in an emergency to keep you warm.

The woods can be dangerous, but the woods are also generous in that way.”

She turned abruptly and walked ten feet in the direction of one of the shorter trees in her vicinity.

“This,” said T.J., “is a balsam fir. It’s one of the denser trees nearby, with nice thick foliage, and also one of the younger ones. See how it’s shorter than its neighbors? This means that its lower branches will form a nice shelter for you in the rain or snow, or even the cold.”

T.J. demonstrated: she angled her long body beneath the lowest branches of the tree, lying in a C shape around the trunk.

“I could stay here for the length of a passing storm,” said T.J. “But if I wanted to stay for longer than that, I’d have to get creative.”

And she continued, discussing how to build makeshift walls, sending the campers off in different directions to locate fallen conifer branches.

• • •

Tracy was paying only partial attention. The blackflies were at their peak, and all the people nearby were waving at their faces with increasing desperation.

Aside from that, two extremely distracting figures were tugging at her gaze: Barbara Van Laar, on her left; and Lowell Cargill, standing opposite her.

Lowell was swaying to his right and left, arms crossed around his middle, listening intently and respectfully to T.J.’s every word, seemingly impervious

to flies and heat and boredom.

It made him even more attractive.

• • •

That evening, Tracy sat on her bed with her journal in her hands, writing.

This was how she spent her time on nights when they had no other scheduled activity.

Most of her cabinmates had chosen a different pursuit. Until lights-out at ten o’clock, they were permitted to roam from cabin to cabin, so long as they remained on the porches. Usually, they found their way to the porch of Pine, the cabin on the other side of the stream, where the oldest boys were housed.

The only other camper who had also stayed behind was Barbara—who, on several occasions over the past week, had tried to strike up conversations with Tracy. But each time, Tracy had stumbled, tongue-tied, unable to produce appropriate responses.

Now—the night after their first lesson on finding shelter in the woods— Tracy was writing sentences and questions in her journal. Something she

could read aloud to Barbara: this felt more possible than unscripted speech.

“Barbara,” said Tracy.

From the bunk above, a stirring.

“Yes?” said Barbara.

“I was wondering how you’re liking camp.”

A pause. “Oh,” said Barbara. “It’s all right, I guess.”

“What’s your favorite part about it?” Tracy asked.

“The food,” said Barbara, unswervingly. “I like being able to eat as much as I want.”

The next line in her script read: That’s interesting. Mine is being in nature.

But Barbara’s reply was so heartfelt, and mirrored her own emotions so precisely, that Tracy said, “Me too.”

Before she could continue, Barbara’s head popped down from the upper bunk and into the space between. Tracy slammed her journal shut—too late.

“Are you interviewing me?” asked Barbara, grinning.

“No,” said Tracy. She shook her head vigorously. “I was just writing something else.”

Barbara looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “Can I come down?”

Tracy nodded, shifted to her right, while Barbara lowered herself from the top bunk with agility, rejecting the ladder in favor of a reverse pull-up. She managed to do this while holding in her hand a magazine that Tracy didn’t recognize. After Barbara had settled herself on the bed next to her, Tracy snuck a glance at its cover: Creem, it said, in red balloon letters. And below the word was a picture of a woman dressed something like Barbara had been dressed when she first arrived at camp.

Now, with all the swimming they daily undertook, the black of Barbara’s hair had faded. In the absence of hair dye and red lipstick, she looked younger.

“What’s that about?” Tracy asked. She gestured to the magazine.

Barbara looked down at it. “Music,” she said, speaking the word with real

reverence.

Then she looked up at Tracy.

“You know,” said Barbara, “I’ve been here a week, and I think this is the

first time you’ve talked.”

“That’s not true.”

“No, I mean, you talk,” said Barbara. “But only when someone else talks to you first. You’re really shy, aren’t you?”

Tracy considered this. She wasn’t always, in every context; with her mother and her mother’s friends, she could be reckless and loud. Aside from that, she had a secret talent: she could sing. She was a showy alto belter, a shower singer; in the car she harmonized with her mother, who complimented Tracy frequently on the timbre of her voice.

“A young Patsy Cline,” said her mom, whose taste—cultivated in a former life as a barrel-horse rider at third-tier New England rodeos—ran toward country music.

But this facet of Tracy’s personality—the way she was with the grown women she loved and trusted—was too difficult to explain, and so instead she said nothing.

“You shouldn’t be,” continued Barbara. “You’re more interesting than everyone at this camp. I can tell that about you. I bet you’ve got secrets.”

Did she? Not really. But once again, this misapprehension seemed to be working in her favor, and so she said, “Maybe I do.”

“See, I knew that about you,” said Barbara. “I could tell it right off the bat.”

The two of them fell silent. And then, from outside: the sound of distant guitar chords. Barbara looked up, enchanted.

“Come on,” she said.

“Where?”

“Let’s go. We’re always the only ones in here. Let’s go outside.”

• • •

A moment later, she was trotting to keep up as Barbara walked swiftly in the direction of the music, growing louder now.

Rounding a corner, they came face-to-face with a little crowd that had assembled on the porch of Pine. All of their cabinmates were there, alongside two dozen other campers. And in the middle of the crowd—the guitar player himself—was Lowell Cargill.

Tracy took a step backward, her face reddening. He was singing a song she knew—one her mother liked. “You Were on My Mind,” by Ian & Sylvia. She knew all the words. She froze her face, so that she did not mouth them.

And through the crowd—was she imagining it?—she caught the gaze of Lowell Cargill, and forced herself to hold it, hold it, to not look away until he did.

• • •

They stayed for the whole concert. Past sunset and into darkness. When, finally, the announcement was made that all campers should return to their cabins, Barbara and Tracy walked side by side, silent, both under the spell of the music, the cool night air, the fireflies.

“I missed that,” said Barbara.

“What?”

“Music.”

Barbara paused in her walking then, and Tracy stopped beside her.

“I have a favor to ask,” said Barbara.

“Okay,” said Tracy.

“I’m going to leave the cabin some nights,” said Barbara. “After everyone’s asleep.”

Tracy waited. She was confused. The natural question to ask would have been Why, and yet the tone of Barbara’s voice told her the inquiry would not have been welcome.

“Just sometimes. Not always,” she said. “Anyway. Do you think you could

keep it between us?”

Tracy nodded, slowly.

“Also,” said Barbara. “Would you mind if I took the bottom bunk? It’ll be easier if I don’t have to use the ladder every time.”

This gave Tracy pause. Would the upper bunk support her weight? But she couldn’t bring herself to raise the issue, and so she said it would be fine.

“I’ll just say I’m afraid of heights or something,” said Barbara, smiling. “If anyone asks why we switched.”

• • •

For the next two weeks, it became clear that Barbara had been lying about one thing: her nocturnal excursions did, in fact, take place every single night.

At ten p.m., all the girls in the cabin would climb into bed, and Louise or Annabel would turn off the overhead lights. For thirty seconds afterward, Tracy could see nothing at all; and then the dimmest shapes would begin to appear—furniture and windows and the bodies of her fellow campers— illuminated, she realized, only by the bright stars above the cleared land of Camp Emerson.

At a certain point, when no movement could be heard throughout the cabin, she’d feel the bed shift, ever so slightly, and Barbara’s breathing would change, and then she would hear her footsteps, soft as a cat’s, and then she would open the screen door, holding her breath, and close it behind her, equally quietly. The faintest creak of the hinge, and she was gone.

Tracy was never once awake for her return, so she didn’t know how long she was gone on those nights. She remarked aloud, once, that Barbara must be very tired. In response Barbara insisted that she was a person who needed almost no sleep, and her energetic demeanor each day proved to Tracy that she was telling the truth.

If anyone else in the cabin knew about this routine, they didn’t say. No one asked questions, and Barbara volunteered nothing—at first.

Jacob

June 1975

he idea had come to him in a dream. Limp Jacob, a voice had said, andT he’d woken up in his cell with the phrase repeating itself over and over.

Limp Jacob. Limp Jacob. Was it taunting him? It bore a passing resemblance to his father’s voice, and it sounded like something he might have said.

It wasn’t until lunchtime that—watching a man he didn’t know drag the dead weight of his leg across the prison’s cafeteria floor—Jacob understood

with a jolt the meaning of the phrase.

“Comma,” he said aloud. “Comma.”

And Harold Debicki, next to him, had asked what he was on about.

Limp, Jacob, he thought. But he didn’t say it aloud.

• • •

The next morning, when the guard came to do his morning rounds, Jacob lay in his bed, unmoving. He’d go one step further than limping. He’d be

paralyzed.

“Get up, Sluiter,” said the guard.

“Can’t,” said Jacob. “Can’t move my legs.”

He said this calmly; to overact, he thought, would raise suspicion. Instead he said the same phrase in the same calm voice to everyone he met that day,

and every day thereafter: Can’t move my legs.

It took some practice, but after a time he really began to believe it. To move from place to place, he dragged himself across floors, even when he did not believe himself to be watched.

He’d never been liked at Dannemora, but after several weeks of this even his cruelest tormentors were advocating for him to the guards.

It isn’t right, was the general consensus. He needed to be seen by a doctor.

The only time he allowed himself to move his legs was in his bed, at night.

There, careful to wait until he heard the soft snores of his bunkmate, he cycled his legs, lifted them one after another, conditioning them back to strength.

Within several weeks he’d been transferred to Fishkill, the lower-security

prison four hours south.

Within several months, he’d escaped.

• • •

Since that time he’d been moving north, following the Hudson in a straight line.

In terms of destination, he had only one idea: his ancestral land, the Sluiter tract, the place his grandfather used to take him camping. A little series of natural caves formed an easy shelter; inside one, the two of them slept side by side, and his grandfather, a natural storyteller, the only adult who had ever been kind to him, gave Jacob the history of their people.

The caves were close to a populated area, and therefore Jacob knew they would be dangerous to visit. But he couldn’t predict how much longer he’d be loose, or alive—and so sentiment or folly drove him forward.

• • •

He traveled by moonlight or streetlight, along back roads. Most nights, he found one house to enter in a gentle way: a window open, a door easily picked. Most of them were the homes of the wealthy, summer cottages with

water views. Inside, he took only what he needed, very quietly, trying not to rouse anyone at home. Only once had he come close to having a problem, and that was when the mistress of a particular house went walking past the kitchen in her bathrobe, moving so quietly he had not heard her approach.

For one whole minute he held his breath while she did her business. He did not hide; he stood still in the middle of the linoleum floor, arms straight, legs at ease. He was holding a knife he’d purloined from an earlier house. If she came out and saw him there in the dark, he would hold up a finger to his lips.

He would tell her that to scream would put the rest of her family in danger.

He’d have to kill her, that much was certain, a matter of necessity; but the rest of them, assuming there were others, would be spared.

The woman flushed. She washed her hands. She opened the bathroom door, and turned the light off. She walked out of the bathroom, and went down the hallway, most likely to her room.

She never looked his way.

• • •

During the day, behind the tree line, Jacob slept on the softest ground he could find.

It was summertime. There’d been little rain. The one night it poured, he had stayed inside the house he’d entered, sitting at the kitchen table, listening with all his senses for any motion in the house. When the rain stopped, he walked out into the fresh new air.

His father, who was not proud of him for anything, might have been proud of him for this one thing: his resourcefulness, his ability to make do with what nature and the rich provided.

He came from a long line of resourceful men. His great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-uncles had been loggers whose work was first threatened by Verplanck Colvin’s grumblings about logging in the Adirondack Mountains. Sensing danger, they sold their land—and they were wise to do so. Within two decades, Governor Roswell Flower had founded the Adirondack Preserve. Forever wild was the sentimental term that

prevented any further logging on the land—even their own property. In an instant, the Sluiter tract—those acres and acres that Jacob’s ancestors had purchased at a bargain, dreaming of good fortune and financial security for generations to come—was stripped by the government of its profitability.

So his ancestors had pivoted to other work: tourism for some, guiding wealthy visitors from the city; factory work for others, manufacturing shirts and paper in towns like Corinth and Troy. A few—including his grandfather and his father—became builders and handymen. And the funny thing was that they always had work. The state was all right with it when the wealthy decided to clear the land for their colossal homes. It was only regular people —people like the Sluiters—who were barred from their former work, who were tasked only with keeping the land pristine for the enjoyment of the Roosevelts and Rockefellers of the world.

Therefore, when Jacob entered these homes each night—purloined food from their stocked pantries and refrigerators, purloined clothing—it was with a certain amount of enjoyment. Once or twice, in truly empty homes, he had even taken a shower.

He wasn’t sure how many days it had been since his escape. He did know, from a front-page story on a newspaper on a kitchen table, that he was being tracked.

He also knew that the northern territory he was moving into was more remote.

This meant two things: that he’d be harder to find.

That he’d have to be more resourceful.