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Bear

Alice

lice Ward, seventeen and a half years old, kept her eyes closed tightlyA on the way to Grand Central. It was a nervous habit: one she had had for as long as she could remember. It soothed her, allowed her to pretend, if just for an instant, that she was alone in the world. She did it only when she believed that no one was watching. In this case, she was wrong.

“Alice,” said her sister, Delphine, the elder of the two. “Are you

sleeping?”

Alice opened her eyes.

• • •

Three weeks earlier, in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, she had made her debut. Her military escort was a West Point junior whose name she had already forgotten. Her civilian escort was supposed to have been Stuart Parker, an unpleasant boy she had known since birth, until—miracle of miracles—he had come down with measles the day before the event.

Delphine had been the one to come up with a last-minute replacement: a college friend of her husband George. Someone who happened to be staying with the two of them while in Manhattan to meet with a client.

His name, said Delphine, was Peter Van Laar. And yes: he had a tuxedo.

Alice’s mother had been enthusiastic. Her father less so.

“Van Laar,” he had said. “Do we know the Van Laars?”

They did, her mother assured him. The Van Laars of Albany. (In her tone was a note of concession: Yes, Albany. Still.) Bankers, thought Mrs. Ward.

Conservationists. A Roosevelt had been very lié with the grandfather.

“How old is he?” Alice had asked.

“Oh, George’s age,” Delphine had said, waving a hand in the air, as if something so trivial as age did not matter at all in a man.

The answer, Alice learned later, was twenty-nine.

• • •

After a week, an envelope arrived in the mail. It was addressed to Miss Ward and Chaperone, and inside it was an invitation to Peter Van Laar’s summer home in the Adirondack Mountains—the one he had spoken of, with surprising tenderness, while seated next to Alice at dinner.

I very much hope that you’ll come, Peter had written, in a steady hand. I so enjoyed meeting you.

• • •

Now here they were, Alice and Delphine, awaiting a platform announcement at Grand Central. It was odd, actually, to be standing side by side like this; they had not spent so much time together since they were very small.

Delphine was five years older and five inches taller than Alice. She played the piano brilliantly. She never seemed shy. She had an intellectual air about her and an interest in politics, two traits that made her stand out from the rest of the Ward family, whose main topics of conversation at the dinner table tended toward gossip. At one point, Delphine had posed to her parents the question of applying to Barnard or Radcliffe, an idea at which her father had scoffed, even though, at Brearley, she had been first in her class.

Alice, meanwhile, had barely graduated.

Now Delphine was twenty-two and married to George Barlow. It was a love match, one that almost did not happen, due to their father’s belief that

George, despite his indisputable pedigree, was an eccentric. Soon she’d no doubt be expecting a baby. Alice could see Delphine’s future laid out ahead of them clearly; it was her own she couldn’t imagine. When she tried, she saw something hazy and indistinct. It gave her a knot in her stomach.

• • •

At North Creek they were met by an unusual car driven by a small ruddy man wearing corduroy clothes, Miss Ward on a card in an ungloved hand.

The driver, uncomfortably chatty, had asked questions of them that horrified Alice with their intimacy. Where had they come from, he wanted to know. Were they married? Did they work? She looked sideways at Delphine, waiting to see whether she would say anything, but Delphine was placid.

Amused, even. She answered all his questions; asked him some in return.

“Who’ll be hosting you at the Preserve?” asked the driver, and Alice waited for Delphine to respond, but instead she said: “Go on, Alice.”

“Peter Van Laar,” said Alice.

“Father or son?” asked the driver.

And without waiting for a reply, he expounded, at length, on the son’s reputation in the town—not terrific, as it turned out—coldness being the primary criticism, which didn’t bother Alice so much. She liked the cold. Got along best with people who were tempered in their movements and speech. In fact—though she had been nervous to meet him at the Junior Assembly, afraid that the difference in their ages would leave her with nothing to say— what she noticed and appreciated straightaway about Peter Van Laar was his stillness. His height and his steady blue eyes. The impression he gave of control.

They had danced together three times. Four, if you counted a half-finished turn about the floor at the end, just before she was pulled away by a relative saying good night.

With each rotation he had held her closer. He was very handsome. He had smelled, Alice recalled, like the woods.

“There’s a story about the house,” the driver was saying.

The roads were turning serpentine, and her stomach was beginning to churn. She leaned her head against a window.

“Are there ghosts in it?” said Delphine, gaily, but the driver shook his head.

“Nothing like that. It was brought over from Switzerland. The whole house, is what I’m saying. Chalet, they call it.” And he gave a little sound

that was something like a laugh.

“Fascinating,” said Delphine.

“Every part of it. The family shipped it over. Built it up again over here.

This was near eighty years ago. You can imagine the manpower that took.

Built a skid road just for the lumber. Dozen horses pulled every load. It’s still told about in the town. Every man and boy in Shattuck over nine years old was hired by the Van Laars to put it all back together.”

“Can you imagine, Alice?” said Delphine, and Alice pinched the back of one hand with the fingers of the other, willing the contents of her stomach to remain in place.

“Guess what they named the place,” said the driver.

He waited.

“The house, I mean. Guess what that old family named the house,” he said.

“Give me a minute. I’m thinking,” said Delphine, seriously. And then she said: “Manderley.”

“No,” said the driver. “Self-Reliance. Self-Reliance!” He slapped his knee once.

Neither of them responded; Alice because she didn’t know what was funny, and Delphine, presumably, because she was processing the joke.

“Wasn’t the Van Laars moved that lumber,” said the driver, helpfully.

“That is funny,” said Delphine, though Alice could discern that even she, at last, felt uncomfortable. They were, after all, guests of the Van Laars.

“You all right, miss?” the driver asked Alice—noticing in the rearview mirror, perhaps, the green hue of her face.

She was, she told him. Fine.

“Look straight ahead out the front window. Try rolling your window down some,” said the driver. But she hadn’t brought a headscarf, and her hair flew

wildly about her face the moment she did.

She rolled the window back up.

• • •

Alice kept her eyes closed until she felt the car slow, heard the road beneath them shift from pavement to dirt. She opened them to find they had reached a long private drive. To her left was a series of working farm buildings: a dairy barn, a granary, a slaughterhouse. A woman and child stood out front of them, staring, not waving.

And then, at last, the Preserve: stands of tall pines that threw the earth into shadow, sloping lawn where others had been felled. At the top of the lawn was, she surmised, the house the driver had described.

Self-Reliance, said a little sign that they passed as they approached. The building itself was colossal. Its central structure was three stories tall, built of rough logs. Delicate wooden carvings descended from its overhanging roof and garlanded the shutters that framed its large windows. Two wings sprouted from its sides; a portico covered the drive. Gardens abounded, brimming with cultivated flowers designed to look wild. Scattered around it were smaller outbuildings, one a sort of miniature version of the house itself.

“My word,” said Delphine.

The most shocking thing about it, thought Alice, was how far it was from anything else. How much work it would have taken to build such a compound in the middle of the woods. The Van Laars had placed the house atop a rise in the land, so that everything near Self-Reliance was also beneath it. Like Olympus, thought Alice, to whom such references did not normally occur.

The driver inched forward until the car met the grass and then rolled to a stop. It was only then that she noticed Peter, standing still as a buck in the shadow cast by the house. Waiting for them.

He stepped forward. He was even taller than she had remembered. Older- looking too. A hint of silver was in his hair, lit up brilliantly by sun as he strode across the lawn.

The driver hopped out. They waited a beat, until they realized he would not be opening their doors.

Peter was close now, and the knot inside Alice exploded into riotous pulsing nerves that threatened to chatter her teeth.

What would they say to one another, she wondered. What on earth was there to say to a grown man? Throughout her school years, she’d been surrounded only by girls. She reminded herself that dancing with Peter had been all right; the ballroom of the Waldorf had been dark and loud and there’d been little need for conversation. But here, in the broad light of day—

everything was different.

Delphine rescued her.

“What a journey,” she said to him, happily, stepping out of the car. “I thought we might never make it.”

All around them, the smell of sap in sun. Beyond that, fresh water: the lake.

Peter smiled, hands in pockets, his gaze at their shoes.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. And he held out two hands for their suitcases, which the driver gladly relinquished.

• • •

It was Delphine he walked alongside as they approached the house. Delphine he addressed when inquiring about the weather in the city, activities they liked. Alice trailed behind them, feeling more and more childish.

“Have you been to these mountains before?” he asked, and Delphine said that they had, once, when they were very small.

“Do you remember, Bunny?” she asked Alice—who reddened at the name.

Peter turned slightly, waiting for her reply. The truth was that she didn’t, but admitting this would make her seem even younger in comparison to her sister. And so she said she did.

“You’re familiar with the flies, then,” said Peter.

“What, these?” said Delphine, waving a hand in the air, parting the small swarm that had gathered around their heads.

“Yes,” said Peter. “Blackflies. They’re usually gone by now, but June was cold this year. I guess they wanted to make your acquaintance,” he said, and at last he looked right at Alice and smiled. His teeth were bright. A small thump of excitement descended from her throat to her abdomen.

She smiled back at him: an act of bravery.

It was then that an arrow sailed by, three inches from her nose, coming to a

halt in the bark of a nearby tree.

Alice froze.

Peter blanched.

Delphine, unaware of what had just transpired, turned back to them, smiling pleasantly.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then a small child came running toward them, shrieking his apologies, very close to tears.

“Oh no, oh no,” the boy was saying. “Is anyone gotten?”

It was a camper, Peter explained, after comforting the boy, admonishing

him, sending him on his way.

“A camper—at what camp?” said Delphine.

Peter inhaled, as if preparing to begin a very long story. And then, thinking better of it, he said he would tell them at dinner.

“Remind me if I forget,” said Peter.

• • •

All the windows in the house were open. Fans rotated slowly in each room.

The whole place smelled of cut lumber, like something newly built. They were shown to their rooms by a person named Hewitt, who seemed to serve as butler, but whose roughness and attire gave him the air of a cowboy. He wore his hat indoors. He was silent, wiry, forty or so. Every age above twenty-five seemed interchangeable to Alice at that time. She had wondered —was still wondering—who else would be at the house. She had speculated with Delphine on the train.

“Peter’s parents?” she said, and Delphine had shrugged. Maybe.

“Does he—live with them, do you think? In Albany?”

Delphine considered. “George had an apartment,” she said. “Before we got married, I mean. But it was really his father’s.”

“Did you ever see it?”

Delphine smiled. “Yes,” she said. Only afterward did Alice understand her implication.

• • •

Her room was large and lake-facing, with a four-poster bed and a patchwork bedspread. It had a full-length standing mirror in which she inspected herself, putting two hands on her cheeks and pressing them in (she believed, in those days, that her face was too full), imagining what she looked like to Peter. She was often told she was pretty—prettier than Delphine, in fact, her one triumph over her sister. But she thought of herself as stupid, and was fairly certain others did too. And unfunny, unwitty. Being humorless, she thought, was even worse than being dumb.

A knock at the door startled her so much that she yelped.

She opened it, still breathing hard.

It was Hewitt, the butler—the helper, Alice corrected herself. In those clothes, he was nothing like the Wards’ butler in the city. “Family’s having cocktails on the lawn,” he said. “You can join if you like.”

“Thank you,” said Alice—and only then did she notice, peering out from behind Hewitt’s leg, a tiny bright-eyed girl with a thin braid.

“Well, who’s this?” said Alice, and it was the first time Hewitt smiled.

“This is Tessie Jo,” he said.

The girl grinned. Buried her face into the fabric of Hewitt’s pant leg.

• • •

The front of the house was, in fact, the back of it: the lake side. The water looked cold and comfortable all at once, the sort of water that contained warm pockets, hidden springs.

Four adults in high-backed chairs sat on a small beach, facing away from her. Alice didn’t, at first, know who they were; and then she heard her sister’s laugh, charming and warm, a laugh that was often commented upon by others. Delphine had put on a hat that Alice had never seen before, and was sitting next to Peter. From the back the group looked like two couples; only the empty fifth chair said otherwise. In front of them, the little girl—Tessie Jo —ran back and forth across the beach, stopping from time to time to make piles of wet sand.

Peter caught sight of Alice before anyone else and rose from his chair with

formality.

“Miss Ward,” he said.

She approached, trying to look carefree. But again she felt ill with pretending.

One of the other members of the party stood, too, and Alice recognized him as Peter’s father. He had to be: he was a white-haired version of the son, similarly thin, groomed, similarly severe.

“Miss Ward,” said the elder. “We’re happy to make your acquaintance.”

Alice had reached the group by then, and she turned her back to the lake, facing the house and all of them, standing awkwardly in the middle of the little arc of chairs, as if she were about to break into song. What, she wondered, could Peter possibly have said about her? Peter, who had known her for all of one night?

Peter’s mother—she assumed—had remained sitting, as had Delphine. The mother looked younger than the father, but dowdier, carrying thirty extra pounds, wearing a dress that—Alice thought it before she could stop herself —did nothing for her figure. She smiled abstractedly in Alice’s direction.

Peter stepped forward. “Did you find your accommodations comfortable?” he said.

Alice was struck, suddenly, by the stiff way he spoke, as if he were from another time. Their friends in the city were loose-lipped, irreverent, delighted by scandal. Politeness, they believed, was only to be directed at those who ranked lower than you, who served you in some way.

“Very comfortable,” said Alice. “Thank you.”

• • •

Dinner went better. The wine was helping Alice, who had only been tipsy twice before in her life. She did not like the taste of alcohol or the way it made her body feel. But she did enjoy the way it gave the room a warm, comforting shine. Delphine carried the conversation, and for once she was grateful for her sister’s vivacity, even as it emphasized Alice’s lack thereof.

The talk moved from the history of the Adirondack Mountains to the daily operation of the farm down the road: a special passion of the elder Van Laars.

Then the flies—always the flies—and finally gentle inquiries into their life in the city, their education, their pursuits.

“And how is old George Barlow?” asked Mr. Van Laar Sr. in between bites. “Haven’t seen him since Peter’s college days. I always found him funny.”

In his voice was a certain dismissiveness, and Alice looked to Delphine to see if she would be offended. But instead, she smiled.

“He’s still funny,” she said.

“Liking his work?”

“His studies, you mean,” said Delphine, and Mr. Van Laar raised an

eyebrow.

“Surely not. At his age?”

“Oh yes,” said Delphine, conspiratorially. “He’s dropped out of the family business to pursue a degree in ornithology at Columbia.”

There was a twinkle in her eye as she delivered the news—which had been the gossip of last season in Manhattan, delivered over and over around the city as the punch line to a joke. Ornithology! If there was one thing Alice respected about her sister, it was that she had made a bold choice when selecting the man who would become her husband. George Barlow—though he came from wealth—was in no other way an obvious match for Delphine.

He was not even very handsome; he was thin and slight, with an overbite, with dark eyebrows that were constantly furrowed. And yet her sister loved him: this much was plain to Alice.

“I’m sure you knew that, Dad,” said Peter. “It caused quite a stir.” But in his voice, too, Alice detected humor.

“I should say so,” said Mr. Van Laar. He took a bite, and chewed it pensively. “You know, I thought Cornell was the place to study birds.”

“It is,” said Delphine. “But we couldn’t leave Manhattan, so Columbia had

to do.”

“Is he earning good marks?”

“Top of his class,” said Delphine.

This was when the conversation flagged. The sound of cutlery on plates could be heard throughout the room.

Delphine said: “May we hear about the summer camp?”

Peter and his father exchanged glances. Then Peter began.

• • •

In the 1870s, when the Adirondacks were still a nascent vacation destination for New Englanders, the original Peter Van Laar visited from Massachusetts and fell in love with the land.

He returned several times to conduct land surveys. At last—with the help of a skillful local guide—he selected the plot on which Self-Reliance would be built.

The Van Laars’ version of the story, Alice couldn’t help but notice, was different from the driver’s. The people of Shattuck weren’t mentioned much.

In their version, Peter I—pronounced, in the Van Laars’ lexicon, Peter One —carried lumber in bundles by hand, climbed tall ladders, personally oversaw the arrival of every part of the original structure from Switzerland, and made certain it was reassembled correctly. Just down the road from the house, a working farm was built to ensure that no guest would ever go without the comforts of home.

Peter I was known as unconventional. “The last Van Laar,” said Peter III, “who could possibly be described as such.” He smiled tightly. Continued: he was impish, playful, childishly exuberant until his dying day, beloved and

reviled in equal measure by business associates. The subject of gossip columns. The possessor of dozens of mistresses.

When Peter I announced his idea for a summer camp, therefore, it was met with no surprise—but with a great deal of amusement, even ridicule, from his social peers.

Still, Peter I persevered. He dedicated to this cause a group of buildings he had originally constructed as hunting cabins. In his eighties already, no longer able to participate in physical activity with as much vigor as he had previously done, he commissioned a group of locals from Shattuck to build the rest of the necessary structures on the grounds. His dream was to indoctrinate generations of children in the importance of conservation, of responsible stewardship of the land. He named the camp after his favorite writer and thinker, another great advocate for the outdoors. The man who, incidentally, had also written the essay after which the main house was named. Camp Emerson ran for one eight-week session each summer, said Peter III. At first, its charges were few in number. But after several successful seasons—operating at a loss—the camp’s reputation grew. Within a decade, Camp Emerson became a sought-after destination for the children of well-to- do New Englanders and Manhattanites. Today, most of the participants were the children of friends and acquaintances of the Van Laars.

Delphine clapped her hands together, delighted. “Oh, I love the sound of him,” she said. “The first Peter. I love the whole story. Don’t you, Alice?”

“Yes,” Alice said.

“Did you ever attend yourself?” asked Delphine, and Peter shook his head quickly.

“Camp Emerson? Heavens, no,” he said, as if she had asked something strange.

• • •

Across the table from Alice, Mrs. Van Laar had little to say. She sat pleasantly and quietly in her blousy, unfashionable dress, with her lipstick

slightly askew. She smiled every so often at Alice, and she ate her dinner with real pleasure, closing her eyes as she chewed.

At a certain point Alice realized neither she nor Mrs. Van Laar had said a word for the better part of an hour, and no one else seemed to notice or mind, and she had the sudden realization that she was a consumable good being evaluated for purchase by the two men at the table, with Delphine as auctioneer. That the less she said, the better. The notion that some decision had been made already on her behalf began to settle onto her shoulders

toward the end of the meal.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

It let her return, in fact, to her preferred state of being: dreamy unavailability, a cultivated air of mystery that she hoped might mask the lack of intellect that she accepted as a fact about herself.

Every so often she saw Peter Van Laar gazing at her. More and more she allowed herself to meet his eye. Her pulse increased. She was a child.

She asked herself three questions: Could she live away from the city?

Could she live here, in this wilderness, for part of every year? Could she marry a man like Peter?

Her mother had known her father since childhood, but not well; she’d been eighteen on her wedding day, which took place soon after their first date.

Her sister and George Barlow had known each other for two months before they got engaged.

She looked out the window, toward the lake. There was something hypnotizing about it—something charmed. It was eight in the evening now, but it was July, and the last light of day shone powerfully off the water. Tall eastward-facing windows let in the warm calm breeze. The pines outside them stood still, watching her, awaiting her response.

Yes, and yes, and yes, she thought. Every answer would be yes, if he were to ask her these questions.

• • •

He did. In September of that same year, after two more visits to the city—the second time with his parents—Peter Van Laar had sought her hand in marriage, with the approval of her father.

He had selected a ring from his ancestral cache.

He had gone with her mother to have it resized, and bought a second one as well, something new from Van Cleef & Arpels, and a tennis bracelet to match.

She had accepted, grateful to have something about her life decided, uncertain what else she would do.

Her wedding gown had been duchesse satin with a full skirt and a sweetheart neckline. She was married at Saint John the Divine, two days after her eighteenth birthday, with a reception at the Pierre.

She had no bridesmaids. She had never had close friends. And in those days, having a matron of honor—as Delphine would have been—wasn’t considered correct.

There was no honeymoon. Only a departure for Albany, to a home she had never before seen, an echoing city manse with cold marble floors and windows that rattled in winter.

• • •

Nine months later—and one month early—Peter IV was born. Bear, he was called, because his Christian name was in so much use among the Van Laars already, and because he was plump, and because of the down on his head that reminded everyone who touched it of the pelt of some baby animal.

• • •

How many hours did she spend watching him? The silk of his hair. The weight of him on her chest, as she dozed in the bedroom of the Albany house, or the sunroom of Self-Reliance. The warm fragile weight of her son. She pictured his bones inside him, suspending the rest of him with their careful architecture; the miniature lungs that lifted and lowered the back; the small

limbs that twitched as he settled into deep sleep; the whole infant body somehow an impossibility in its scale, in its smell, in its composition, in the way it induced a sort of calm in her that—the conviction landed on her one day like an anvil—she would never again feel in her life.

Alice

hen Alice tried to be objective, she could acknowledge that thereW were one or two very good years at the start.

Before and after Bear’s birth, she was treated by Peter as the child she was. This meant of course that he laughed at her; but his eyes were warm as he did, and he sometimes laid an affectionate hand on her head when she displayed what he termed her lack of common sense, and sighed, as if contemplating the magnitude of all that he would have to teach her. She didn’t mind; she felt protected, which—at that time—was what she believed she needed.

But at some point, Peter’s reaction to her mistakes began to morph from amusement to annoyance. When she was eighteen, and learning how to host a dinner party, Peter had smiled as he gently corrected misspellings on the place cards, or vetoed calla lilies on the table; five years later, he scowled, and sometimes yelled.

The one thing they agreed upon, always, was the value of their son, whom Alice loved immediately and intensely. Peter, she knew, loved him too—but his love sometimes felt to her like an investment, something to be given on the condition that there would be a return for him later.

They would have no more children, Peter said; one boy was enough. The implication, Alice understood, was that to have more than one boy would

complicate matters when it came to passing on the bank. For four generations in a row, there had been only one boy. Only one Peter Van Laar. Sometimes Alice had the feeling that her prompt production of a boy—and such a fine one, at that—was the only thing she had ever done that pleased her husband.

• • •

The summer months at Self-Reliance were when the three of them were most often together. There, Peter taught his son to sail and ride and play chess and shoot clay pigeons out of the sky. He was a good teacher—patient, even—a quality he altogether lacked in other areas of his life. From a distance, Alice watched, contented, feeling something like pure love for her husband for the first time in her marriage.

It helped that Bear was good at everything he put his hand or mind to. He was quick with numbers; he was early to read. He was a big tall boy like his father—a relief to Alice, who had feared he might inherit her short stature.

Despite these gifts, there was no arrogance about him; he had none of the contempt that his father showed from time to time. Instead, he greeted everyone he met with a smile, learned the names of everyone who worked the house and the grounds, no matter their station. In this way he reminded her of somebody she could not name, until she realized with a jolt one day that it was her own sister. Delphine.

Tessie Jo, the groundskeeper’s daughter, held him in a special thrall; four years older than he was, she treated him kindly, doted on him. In return he followed her everyplace she went, calling out for her, Tessie, Tessie. It was a joke between Peter and Alice: that Bear was in love with the girl. One of the few jokes they had together.

• • •

During the other three seasons of the year, Peter was hard at work, often staying at the office until eight or nine o’clock. Often in Manhattan for meetings with prospective clients.

In Albany, Alice would have been lonely, if not for her son. She had no friends to speak of. She was a bad conversationalist.

About this last point, Peter agreed. He said this frequently, matter-of- factly, the way he said everything, as if he were in possession of no opinions, only facts.

“The thing is, Alice,” he said, “you’re boring at parties. A drink or two will help you be more fun.”

She had been twenty the first time he said this. She had been holding two- year-old Bear in her arms. She opened her mouth to respond, but no words came out. Peter frequently offered her criticisms, always couched as advice.

And the thing was: usually she agreed with him. She was boring at parties.

She knew nothing of current affairs. She was not well traveled, and she had no hobbies. She was not brilliant and witty like her sister. She had unkind thoughts about others, at times, but she had never mastered the art of expressing them in a clever mischievous way: in other words, she was not skillful even when it came to gossip. What she thought about most in the world in those days was Bear, and her all-consuming love for him. She sometimes felt that becoming a parent had revealed to her the existence of another dimension or another sense.

“And put that boy down,” said Peter. “He’s becoming a barnacle.” He reached out for Bear, who refused him, burying his head in Alice’s shoulder, clinging ever more tightly to her.

• • •

Generally, when Peter gave her any sort of advice, she took it. And, she discovered, he had thoughts about most facets of her appearance and personality. She should wear dresses that covered her shoulders, because her shoulders weren’t her best feature. She should wear the highest heels she could, due to their difference in height. She should not shake hands with men when she met them, but incline her head in their direction. He felt to her as much like a coach as a husband: always seeking to teach her, better her, bring

her up to his level. She did not fault him for it; prior to Peter, she had had little direction. She told herself to think of him as a mentor, in a way.

And so, before client dinners, Alice began to drink a glass of brandy at home. She did so in sight of Peter, who did not partake. And for a time it worked: she felt instantly more mature, more sophisticated, better able to return the conversational serves produced by the wives across the table from her, who were generally a decade or two older than she was, and looked at her with an expression that hovered between pity and contempt.

• • •

For several years, drinking was like this: a task she undertook when required to. She did not drink when off duty, when there was nothing social on her program.

At a certain point—she wasn’t sure when, or how—it began to evolve.

And a new routine was established: one glass of wine at home in the evenings. Sometimes two. More than that when she went out. Martinis, Manhattans when they went out—or gimlets.

There, that was it, she thought; wine at home, cocktails out. Her favorite moment of each day was a glass of wine with her son close by: her love for him never felt more urgent.

This amount of drinking, she decided, she could live with. This felt reasonable and responsible. She’d rely on Peter to tell her when she had crossed a line.

• • •

She could have carried on with this amount of drinking, and everything would have been fine. It was George Barlow, in the end, who changed things.

Carl

t was seven in the evening already when the phone rang in the fire hall,I jolting Carl Stoddard awake. He had fallen asleep on a cot after a long day in the sun. On ring two, he rose and blinked. By the third ring, he was in action, lifting the receiver with the same trepidation he always felt when answering. He disliked speaking in general; speaking into a telephone was worse.

“Carl Stoddard?” said a voice on the other end. This was Marcy Thibault, the local operator, whose years of experience had given her the uncanny ability to recognize voices.

“What’s the bad news,” said Carl—his standard response. A scripted line.

“I’ve got someone on the line for you from the Van Laar Preserve,” said

Marcy.

“Oh?” said Carl.

This was strange. Never in his life had Carl—a gardener at the Preserve— been contacted directly by his employers.

Maybe he’d left something there. Or maybe he’d done something wrong.

Peter Van Laar was a man of strong opinions, and the landscaping was a special concern of his. Every year, the Van Laars threw a weeklong fling in July—the Blackfly Good-by, they called it, in celebration of the seasonal

change that saw the pest’s departure from the area—and Mr. V wanted everything just so.

“How’d they find me at the hall?” asked Carl. His heartbeat was quickening. He was a tall, blond-bearded, burly person, forty years old that summer, a football player in his youth—but he was timid, sensitive to changes in the weather and to the emotions of others, and he disliked conflict.

Always had. Gardening was a vocation that suited him well.

“They didn’t,” said Marcy. “They don’t know it’s you there.”

• • •

There were four of them that year in Shattuck Township’s volunteer fire brigade. Aside from Carl, there was Dick Shattuck, the grocer; Bob Alcott, a history teacher at the central school nearby; and Bob Lewis, largely unemployed.

Together, a decade prior, they’d built the team from scratch, learning their trade from firefighting enterprises in neighboring towns, raising money for equipment at donation stands they set up at Christmastime and the Fourth of July. Once they got fire boots, they collected money in those.

They rented out an old garage and converted it to a fire hall with a bed and kitchen on-site. They had Dick’s wife Georgette, whose artistic talent annually gilded the grocery store’s front windows, paint a sign.

It took them four years to get a proper vehicle—but by July of 1961, they had the whole operation up and running. A truck and hoses and, in town, four hydrants a stone’s throw from Shattuck’s only intersection with a stoplight.

The volunteers were well trained. Each one of them, except Bob Lewis, was considered to have a positive attitude.

• • •

The night of July 10, 1961, it was no coincidence that Carl was on duty: he liked it at the fire hall. Signed up for night shifts as frequently as he could. It was the only place, aside from his car, where Carl ever felt truly alone. Here

at the hall, he had nothing to do but read, or daydream, or sometimes fall asleep, and only very occasionally answer calls.

It took several seconds for Marcy Thibault to transfer him. And when a voice came through the wires, it wasn’t a member of the staff, but Peter Van Laar himself—to whom Carl nodded each time they crossed paths at the Preserve, but to whom he had actually spoken maybe twice in his life. Van Laar was known by his employees and business associates as a stern, intolerant man, quieter than his wife but more vicious. He seemed to have no interest in conversation with anyone who worked for him, except at the highest levels; even to those at the top of the staff’s hierarchy— groundskeeper, housekeeper—he spoke only briskly. He had a wolfish look about him, a leanness that signified hunger.

“Hello? Fire department?” said Van Laar, after being connected. The tone of his voice made Carl sit up straight, place his hand on the table.

“Yes,” said Carl, “this is Carl Stoddard of the Shattuck Volunteer Fire Brigade.” For a moment, he considered reminding Mr. V of the connection between the two of them. But the quiet urgency in the man’s voice dissuaded him.

There was silence on the line. Then came a clicking that Carl determined, after a moment, to be the sound of Van Laar swallowing repeatedly.

“Mr. Van Laar?” said Carl. “Is everything all right there?”

“It seems my son is missing,” said Van Laar, at last.

“Bear?” said Carl, reflexively. He closed his eyes. Raised a fist to his forehead. It was too complicated to explain how and why he knew the nickname of the Van Laar boy. But he did; they all did, everyone who worked on the grounds. They’d known him since he was a tiny thing. Each May he returned to the Preserve taller, more talkative. He was eight years old that summer: always smiling, always whistling, patrolling the grounds like a watchman, friendly with the staff: the opposite of his stormy father. A good little woodsman, interested in the same things Carl had been interested in as a boy. Bushcraft, survival, that sort of thing. That summer, especially, they had been close: it was only last week that Carl had taught the kid how to recognize which wood was good for a fire. Loose and light and dry, Carl had

said. Floppy, almost. And he demonstrated what he meant, slipping a small knife down the length of a cedar plank. Sticking his thumbnail into it.

Just before Carl had left for the day, in fact, he’d seen Bear: he was tying his shoes at the base of the front door to Self-Reliance. He’d stood up and waved as Carl passed him in his pickup, and Carl had returned the gesture.

If Van Laar was curious about how Carl knew his son, he didn’t ask.

Instead, to Carl’s dismay, he let out a wail, unguarded and wild, and in it Carl —a parent himself, a father of three who had once been a father of four— recognized a feeling he had the misfortune to know well.

“Don’t worry,” said Carl. “Don’t worry, Mr. V. We’ll find him.”

Within five minutes, he had the other three volunteers on the line.

Within twenty, they were in the truck, speeding through the gathering darkness, making their way to the Preserve.

Carl

t was nearly dark when the four volunteers arrived. Their vehicle—anI International Harvester brush fire truck that they’d gotten cheap, just before Schenectady retired it—was having an issue that month with its muffler, and it roared as they came up the drive.

Before they’d departed, Carl had filled the others in on what he knew— which was limited, actually. The conversation with Mr. Van Laar had been brief.

“The Van Laar boy’s missing,” Carl told them. “This afternoon he left for a hike up the mountain with his grandfather. Turned back around on the path to the trailhead, because he forgot his pocketknife in his room. Never rejoined the old man.”

“How far from the house was he when he turned around?” said Bob Lewis.

“Don’t know,” said Carl.

“How long did Van Laar wait there,” asked Bob Alcott, “before he went

looking?”

“Don’t know.”

“What’d the kid want with his pocketknife?” asked Dick Shattuck.

“Don’t know,” said Carl, limply. “I guess we’ll hear more when we get there.”

It was then that a memory sprang forcefully to the front of his mind: something the boy had said once about his grandfather, in passing, that Carl had brushed aside.

• • •

The truck came to a stop at the top of the drive. Dick Shattuck killed the engine.

Then there was silence. All over the Preserve: a great quiet.

Carl, who was riding in the back, didn’t know what he had expected to hear—footsteps, maybe, or hollers, or crying; the pet name of the boy, Bear, called over and over—but it wasn’t this.

He hoisted himself painfully onto his feet. Jumped down from the truck bed with a thud. He’d gained sixty pounds in the past several years, and it slowed him down. His wife was concerned.

Behind him, his three companions were descending from the cab.

Ahead of them, a shape on the lawn shifted. It was a human, Carl saw; he saw next that it was Vic Hewitt, the groundskeeper. Carl’s boss.

Vic was silhouetted by the low light cast out from the inside. He was tall and broad and had the odd habit of standing with his arms straight down at his sides, strangely formal, a soldier at attention.

He was waiting for them.

• • •

Carl had been inside the main house exactly once, upon his hiring five years earlier. That day, he had entered through the kitchen door; inside, the housekeeper had set out lemonade and cookies while he talked with his future boss.

“It’s hard work,” Hewitt had said. “I won’t lie to you. Lotta land, not much staff. Runs all year, too, not just in summer.”

Carl had nodded, but he couldn’t focus. It was his good luck that he’d even heard about the job from a cousin who knew the last gardener—and that the

last gardener had finally retired. Carl had only a small amount of experience with gardening, but he had a library card. He would have taken any job that was offered him. He had a sick kid, and no money. He’d worked at the paper mill in town until recently, when the plant closed down, releasing sixty-odd men from their longtime employment.

“I like to work,” said Carl. He was hungry: he thought about taking one of the cookies, a lacy brown thing that looked more decorative than nourishing.

At last, he decided against it. Hewitt hadn’t taken one.

“Do you know about flowers and that?” said Hewitt.

“Oh, yeah,” said Carl. “I grew up on a farm.”

“But flowers,” said Hewitt, doubtfully.

Again, Carl nodded. “My mother grew them. Won contests at the county fair.” The last was an embellishment: his mother, still alive, had entered contests annually, and annually complained about her failure to place.

“Taught me everything she knew,” said Carl. His tone, he understood, was bordering on desperate.

“You’re Joe Stoddard’s cousin, are you?” said Hewitt.

Carl nodded.

Hewitt rapped the tabletop with his knuckle, at last, and told him the job

was his if he wanted it.

He did.

He found out later that his cousin Joe had told Hewitt he had a kid in the hospital in Albany, a fact that neither he nor Vic Hewitt ever acknowledged.

By 1961 Carl had been working there half a decade, five years of fast learning that had only this year produced the desired results. It was a miracle, frankly, that he hadn’t been fired by Hewitt or by Mr. Van Laar himself— though he had the suspicion that the former had at times fallen on the sword when the latter complained.

• • •

It was Vic Hewitt, now, who greeted the four of them as they walked up the lawn in his direction.

He lifted one of his hands wordlessly into the air. Let it drop again at his side.

“You heard, I guess,” he said to them, when they were in earshot.

He nodded to Carl. Shook hands with the others.

Carl glanced sideways at Dick Shattuck, who normally spoke for them.

But Dick was only returning his gaze.

It occurred to Carl then that his employment here meant that he was expected to take the lead, and the realization unnerved him. He’d never liked leading anything or anyone. Not even back in high school: he’d rejected his coach’s offer to make him captain of the football team.

“What’s the latest?” said Carl, after a pause, because he could think of nothing else to say.

“No news,” said Hewitt. “Boy’s still gone. Been out looking in those woods going on five hours now.”

He hunched his shoulders. Looked down at the ground.

Vic was a stoic man, a skillful guide. By the outside world, he was perceived to be tough to the point of ferocity. Visual evidence of this came in the form of a missing right earlobe, rumored to have been the work of a black bear that Vic had subsequently wrestled to the ground. But he was a father too, Carl knew. Had a girl, Tessie Jo, twelve or thirteen, a tomboy who’d been raised by her dad and was now his near-twin, working side by side with him whenever she wasn’t at school. Carl could tell he was thinking of her— just as Carl was thinking of his own children. Imagining them lost, overnight, in the underbrush, now damp from an earlier storm. Remembering Scotty as he drew in breath after ragged breath on the white-sheeted hospital bed.

Vic Hewitt turned and looked over his own shoulder, past the house, toward the edge of the woods.

“Now, look,” he said. “It’s a sad scene in there. Mrs. V’s beside herself.

Whole family is, and all the guests. Tread carefully, is what I mean. No need to worry them further.”

With that, he led them wordlessly toward the house, toward the large front door—through which Carl had never once, in all his years of employment, passed.

Alice

n the Van Laar family, planning for the weeklong affair of the BlackflyI Good-by began in late May.

The first order of business was determining whom to invite. The main house, with its ten bedrooms, could comfortably accommodate sixteen. The outbuildings could house eighteen more. Some of the decisions were simple: the regular attendees included the McLellans, the Van Laar family’s closest friends and business associates across two generations; and the Barlows— Peter’s friend George and Alice’s sister Delphine. Alice’s parents, too, were invited—although Peter made it very clear that the Wards’ inclusion was a favor he was doing for his wife. Then there were more of Peter’s college friends, and then came the business owners Peter was seeking to woo as clients of the bank; these varied every year, and generally got dropped from the list as soon as a commitment had been made. Finally, there were the minor celebrities he had met somehow downstate, and invited mainly for entertainment. These “extra” guests were limited mainly to pretty and harmless women, or very funny men, all of whom came solo and slept in the outbuildings.

After the guests were selected, and the rooms assigned, the other business was attended to. Flowers were ordered. A local fiddle-and-dulcimer ensemble was booked, along with a caller for the square dance that happened midweek.

The Preserve, which had once contained its own working farm—before cars and trucks were quotidian—now relied on local producers to supply a week’s worth of food for the thirty or so guests who descended on the house.

• • •

In general, each of these weeklong parties went off without a hitch, buoyed by Peter’s careful planning, and by Alice’s adherence to his instructions.

But the year of Bear’s fifth birthday brought with it a challenge: George Barlow, Alice’s brother-in-law and Peter’s good friend, had died unexpectedly in June—a heart attack—leaving her sister Delphine bereft, and also leaving open the question of whether or not to invite Delphine.

Alice was conflicted. The truth was that she had not been as attentive to her sister as she could have been in the wake of her husband’s death. They lived four hours apart. Alice had a child; Delphine did not. For years, their only prolonged visits had taken place at the Blackfly Good-by itself; but now Alice panicked slightly at the thought that their first correspondence since the funeral would be an invitation to a cheerful weeklong fling.

Peter scoffed when she voiced this concern.

“Nonsense,” he said. “It will do Delphine good. Give her a bit of distraction. Besides,” he said, “she’s an intelligent person. I’m certain she’s capable of deciding for herself whether to accept.”

In his choice of words, Alice sensed a slight. Intelligence was a quality that Peter valued highly: one, she was certain, he would not ascribe to his own wife.

• • •

As it turned out, Delphine accepted the invitation. “With pleasure,” she wrote in her reply.

Alice was relieved. Perhaps, she thought, this would be a chance to reconnect with her sister. To apologize for her years of absence. To start anew with Delphine, whom she had looked up to so much as a child that she

might have been a celebrity. Now that they were both adult women, thought Alice, perhaps they could be friends.

• • •

On Friday, the day the first guests were due to arrive, Alice dressed carefully.

Then she walked down the hall to the sunroom, where she stood before the window, steeling herself for her duties as hostess.

She turned to a small bar table, ready to perform her ritual. She lifted a tumbler. Poured herself a glass of brandy—really a type of wine, she

reasoned.

She lifted it to her lips.

Behind her, a quick movement caught her eye, and she saw Vic Hewitt leaving the room.

“Vic?” she said, and he turned, embarrassed, his fisherman’s hat in his hands.

“I didn’t know you were in here,” said Alice.

He nodded. He was the only person on the grounds who spoke less than she did. Peter described him as simple, but unmatched when it came to caring for the land. He wore a beard. He was the last in a long line of Adirondack guides, the most famous of whom had been mentioned by name in the guidebook that had launched the tourism industry in the entire Adirondack Park. The original Peter Van Laar had hired Vic when he was only a kid, sixteen or so. At first it was to lead their summer hunting expeditions, and then to keep the grounds, and finally, when the idea of Camp Emerson arose in Peter I’s mind, to run that, too. Like everyone else who worked for the Van Laars, Vic Hewitt played many roles, and he did so without complaint.

Now, though, Vic looked nervous.

“Are you all right?” asked Alice—who was navigating the mild embarrassment of having been caught drinking alone.

Vic nodded. “Just going over all the plans, I guess,” he said. “Making sure I got everything all set.”

And Alice suddenly understood. The Blackfly Good-by was the week of each summer when he was brought away from directing the camp. For the party, he was tasked with leading multiple hunting and fishing expeditions, making conversation with groups of outsiders. Vic, she guessed, was like her.

Preferred to keep to himself, or to be with his child, Tessie Jo.

Alice turned back to the bar table. Poured a second glass.

“Here,” she said. “This will help.”

He smiled. Bowed his head. Took the drink into his hands.

From outside came the sudden sound of tires on gravel.

The Blackfly Good-by began.

• • •

Delphine came up on Saturday, one day after the rest of the guests. Her arrival, in the early afternoon, was met with a funereal hush. The other guests murmured their condolences a second and third time, asking after her well- being. Within an hour, though, the crowd had resumed the day’s activity: Vic Hewitt had set up targets on the beach, and the guests—men and women alike—were shooting arrows in the direction of the southern tree line.

The strange thing, the awkward thing, was what to do with a single woman who was not there to be beautiful or to entertain. The ballerinas and actresses were there for either their looks or their outrageousness, the frisson of sex they lent to the party. Strangely, Alice had never felt insecure in their presence. She did not believe that anyone ever slept with them; she believed that they slept with one another, the young men and women who came to Self-Reliance each year, and a secret part of her applauded them for it. She wondered, sometimes, what it would be like to experience someone other than her husband—the only man she’d ever known.

Delphine, it turned out, was mainly ignored, except by her own parents, next to whom she sat at meals.

When George Barlow had been alive, they had occupied one another. They were the happiest couple Alice had ever known; they had the same sense of humor, and the same eccentricities. After marrying George, Delphine had

stopped attending much to her appearance, preferring comfort to elegance.

She wore pants, most of the time—unflattering ones at that. But George lavished praise on her appearance—not only to Delphine, but to those around her. Alice often caught them exchanging glances over meals, either in tenderness or in amusement.

Now that George was gone, however, Delphine’s quirks quickly lost whatever charm they might have had. Furthermore, in George’s absence, she had lost the target toward which her observations and conversation had once been directed; and she had seemingly also lost the ability to filter her thoughts.

For example: when asked after her well-being in the wake of her husband’s death, Delphine was frank. “It’s been awful,” she said. “I don’t sleep.”

What, wondered Alice, could one do with this sort of candor? What reply could one possibly give?

Widowed so young—and without children—Delphine had somehow become like a child herself. This feeling was heightened by the fact that she could often be found spending time with the actual children on the property: with her nephew Bear, but also with the McLellan children, and with Tessie Jo Hewitt—nine that summer—whom Delphine seemed to especially enjoy.

She taught them cards; she taught them to gamble with toothpicks. She brought them on walks, and taught them the names of birds; she carried George’s binoculars around her neck, always, and passed them to the children to spy on a warbler or chickadee or hawk; and sometimes, when she thought no one was watching, she cradled the binoculars tenderly in her folded arms, as if they were her late husband himself.

Once or twice, Alice tried to approach her, to make small talk, but always Delphine demurred, waving Alice off.

“I know you’re busy,” said Delphine. “Go help Peter. It’s really all right, Bunny.”

And Alice complied, leaving her sister behind, experiencing as she did so a sense of guilty relief.

• • •

It was true, anyway, that their days were structured precisely: a fact about which Peter’s oldest friends teased him. Frank McLellan and Howie Southworth and Merrill Williams and—formerly—George Barlow. They, Alice knew, were the only people who were allowed to, and she relished this part of the annual gatherings, relished hearing others articulate in a cutting funny way what made her husband so difficult. “How do you manage, Alice,” she was often asked, and she laughed along with them, giddy and relieved, reassured that the parts of Peter that sometimes even scared her—well, they weren’t so bad after all.

The first meal of the day was at half past ten. Peter preferred to eat much earlier, priding himself on needing very little sleep, but years of experience had taught him that guests who had stayed up until three in the morning drinking had little hope of showing up for seven o’clock breakfast.

After breakfast, rain or shine, there was an organized outdoor activity, each one a competition of some kind. Hikes were races; fishing trips were derbies. At the end of the week the pair with the highest score between them would be awarded, with great pomp and circumstance, a trophy, which they were instructed to bring back with them the following year. The McLellans, sporty Catholic Manhattanites, were the toughest couple to beat, and they had won ten times, to Peter’s chagrin.

To Alice, the whole thing felt like one more way to let her husband down.

She was decently athletic, but in any competition the pressure made her flounder, and Peter’s frustrated gaze upon her caused her hands to fumble anything in her grasp.

It came as a relief to her, therefore, when the daily activity was over and a snack was brought out, after which people retired to their rooms for a rest and a change of clothes before cocktail hour on the lawn, which began—precisely —at five.

From there each evening grew increasingly raucous. Dinner at seven; then parlor games around a fire, either inside or out, depending on rain.

With the parlor games came further competition, more opportunity to earn points. And these games, thought Alice, were even worse than the outdoor ones. Once or twice—at charades, for example—she could feel herself on the verge of hot tears as Peter shouted guesses at her, and then commands: Christ, Alice, try something different!

The worst was a terrible game called Dictionary that involved a colossal 1930s edition of the OED. The premise was that the leader of a given round had to find a word so obscure that he discerned, via spoken poll, that nobody knew it. Wadmiltilt had been one. Absquatulate. Opsimath. The leader, on a scrap of paper, would write down the true definition; everyone else would write down an invented definition; and then every scrap of paper would be passed back to the leader of the round, who would shuffle the scraps and read the definitions aloud, and then everyone would vote on which one he thought was right, with the winner being the participant whose entry received the most guesses.

Alice was terrible at this game in every way.

She had, she thought, no creativity, and therefore her definitions were always the same: a bird of South America was one of her favorites, or to laugh merrily, if she suspected she had a verb on her hands. Worse than that: when it was her turn to be the leader, she could never find a word unknown to all. All around her she sensed disbelief when she proposed a word like melee, which she also mispronounced, and which—when she heard the correct pronunciation from an annoyed, embarrassed Peter—she realized that she knew.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Alice was Delphine, who— despite having been denied the chance even to apply to college—seemed to know both the meaning of every single word and its etymology, which she explained unselfconsciously to her unreceptive audience. Over and over again she vetoed words, confessing happily that she knew them. The fifth time this happened, there were grumbles. The tenth time, polite silence. And finally, Delphine’s expression changed: at last, she understood the social error she had been making.

They were in the middle of another round before anyone noticed she had quietly taken herself to bed.

“Where’s Delphine?” asked Katherine Southworth, and Howie Southworth said, “She absquatulated,” and everyone laughed loudly and for a long time.

“Good riddance,” said Merrill Williams, who was the drunkest of everyone, and then, upon being shushed, he said it louder, cupping his hands

about his mouth as he did so.

“Good! Riddance!” he shouted.

Some of the guests gasped. And then there was more laughter, hushed this time.

“Williams,” said Peter, lowly. “That’s enough.” Merrill rolled his eyes, stood from his chair, and tottered out the door, toward the lawn.

At last, the game broke up.

• • •

For a moment, Alice considered going after her sister. But this moment— when all the games were over and everyone did what they wanted, was always Alice’s favorite of the day. It was the only time when she felt herself to be out from under the weight of Peter’s judgment. Sufficiently inebriated, she felt charitable and warm, and she could look around at the beautiful house they owned, and through its windows at the beautiful land they owned, and she could sneak down the quiet hallway and into the quiet room where her beautiful son was sleeping, and give him a kiss, and she could feel, really feel, how lucky she was to have this lot in life. Her blessings were never more evident to her than they were in those small hours of the morning, when all the guests were free to do as they pleased.

Instead of going to her sister now, as she knew she should have done, she set off in the direction of her son’s room, tiptoeing past several guests who were sleeping, full-out, on the sofa; dodging others—the artists-in-residence was Peter’s silly name for them—who were running down to the beach in the dark to strip off and go for a swim.

But on her way down the hallway, she was stopped by the sound of someone crying quietly. She froze, listening. The noises, she realized, were coming from Delphine’s room.

She was drunk enough to feel brave, and so she lay down on the floor of the hallway and peered underneath the crack in the door, and there she saw her sister, sitting on the edge of her bed, head lowered. She was shuddering with sobs, trying to quiet them with her hands.

Alice stood, horrified. Delphine must have heard their laughter, surmised correctly who its target was. Delphine was ashamed, too, thought Alice; for the opposite reason that Alice was. For knowing too much, rather than too little. For a woman, neither was an acceptable way to be. In a moment of bravery, Alice knocked gently at the door, and when no answer came, she turned the knob.

Delphine looked up, startled. She was wearing a long white nightgown, and her dark hair was falling about her face; it gave her a ghostly aspect.

“Are you all right?” asked Alice.

Delphine stared at her a moment longer, and then wiped her face with her sleeve, and then patted the bed next to her.

“Come here,” she said, when Alice hesitated. And then she complied, walking slowly to the bed, sitting down next to her sister. She had not been so close to her, alone, since they were teenagers.

“I’m sorry, Delphine,” said Alice, and then—shamefully—she hiccuped.

“For what, dear?” said Delphine.

“They weren’t being very nice,” said Alice.

“Oh, that,” said Delphine. “I don’t care a groat about that.” She waved her hand as if shooing a fly. “People like them will seek a collective target almost automatically. People of our class, I mean. We were bred to do it. We’ve

been doing it since birth.”

She paused.

“Well, some of us have, anyway,” she said.

Delphine reached for a glass of water on her nightstand. Drank from it.

And then, as if reading Alice’s mind, she passed it to Alice, who took it into her hands and gratefully drained it.

“What were you crying about?” Alice said, when she’d finished.

“George,” said Delphine. “I’m always crying about George. He’s why I accepted this invitation. I thought being in this place would help me feel

close to him.”

Alice nodded. Again, she hiccuped.

“Give me that,” said Delphine, and Alice handed her the glass, and Delphine stood and disappeared from the room for a moment, and then returned with more water.

“Drink it,” she said. “You’ll thank yourself in the morning.”

Alice did as she was instructed. She sometimes felt that her entire life was either following orders from those above her in station, or giving them to those below her. Only with her son did she have a connection that existed outside any hierarchy of authority. She loved him plainly, without condition or complexity. And she believed he loved her the same way.

“Is it working?” she said to Delphine, when she’d finished.

“Is what working?”

“Does being here make you feel closer to George?”

“No,” said Delphine, and laughed once. “Not really.”

Then she looked at Alice more intently than she’d ever been looked at in

her life.

“Are you happy here, Bunny?”

Alice shifted. “Of course,” she said.

“I mean really happy. I know you love Bear, and he’s darling. Of course you would. But Peter? Does he treat you well?”

Alice nodded, silently. “Of course,” she said—more quietly this time.

Delphine sighed. “I’ve always felt guilty, you know,” she said. “In a way I feel I set you up with him. But I’ve worried since then that you’d be in over your head. George and I both thought he’d take care of you. Now, I’m not certain you’re a match.”

At this, Alice bristled. “What do you mean?”

“Only that he can be very inflexible, Bunny. And you’re such a dear. I hope you stand up to him, once in a while. I hope you’re getting what you want from this life, too.”

Don’t cry, Alice thought. To cry would be to fail some test her older sister was giving her. Don’t cry.

It was useless. Tears came to her eyes and spilled over.

“Oh, Alice,” said Delphine. She tried to take one of Alice’s hands in hers, but Alice snatched it away. She wanted to leave. She wanted to stand up and walk out of the room. She’d been wrong to feel sorry for Delphine—she remembered only now that her sister could be direct to the point of cruelty.

“Listen,” said Delphine. “The best part of being married to George Barlow for a decade was learning that it’s all right not to do everything that’s expected of you all of the time. This is a notion that has been positively liberating for me. The way we were raised—the way our parents raised us, I mean—it trained us to think it’s our job to be absolutely correct in everything that we do. But it isn’t, Bunny. Do you see? We can have our own thoughts, our own inner lives. We can do as we please, if we only learn not to care so much about what people think.”

Alice’s discomfort was increasing. A light had gone on in her sister’s eyes;

she looked, to Alice, a tiny bit mad.

Still, her sister continued.

“The interesting thing about George,” she said, “was that he woke up to this fact long ago—the idea that one is free to do what one wishes in life, expectations be damned—and yet he never let this rupture his friendship with his old group. The people in there, I mean.” She tilted her head in the direction of the main room. “Since he died,” she said, “I’ve been trying to be more like him in that one regard: to be open to all kinds. Even them.”

More distant peals of laughter. Alice drank from her glass.

“Sometimes,” Delphine continued, “I find myself sort of studying them, instead of engaging with them as a friend would. As George always did. It’s a terrible tendency I have. Do you know,” she said, “that I’ve enrolled in the anthropology program at Barnard in the fall? It’s the only thing that’s keeping me alive. Thinking about finally getting my degree.”

Then Delphine turned to her. “Alice, do you ever think about going to college?”

“Oh,” said Alice. “No. No, I have Bear to take care of.”

“How old is he, though? Five? Won’t he be going to school in the fall?”

“Yes,” said Alice, reluctantly. “But then I’ll have—the house to attend to.”

“You should think it over,” said Delphine. “You’re smarter than anyone gives you credit for. You were always good with sums, I remember.”

Alice sat with these words for a moment, uncertain what to do with them.

She tried to remember if she had ever been given a compliment in her life that was unrelated to her appearance or her attire.

“May I ask you something?” said Delphine. And before Alice could respond, she ventured forth: “Do you ever worry that being born into money

has stunted us?”

Alice blanched.

“I don’t mean anything by it,” said Delphine. “It’s just—lately I’ve been wondering whether having all of our material needs met from birth has been a positive aspect of our lives. It seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us. The quest, I like to call it. When one’s parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?”

She paused here, gazing off into some distance, thinking. “This,” she said, “is the expectation I most want to defy.”

Alice was frozen. She had no idea what she could possibly say. To talk about money ran contrary to every instruction she had ever been given in her life. It felt practically sinful. A long silence followed, until Delphine finally broke it.

“Think it over, anyway, Bunny,” she said. “The college question, I mean.

George has—had—a very good friend who teaches at Vassar. How far is Vassar from Albany?”

But Alice was shaking her head. “Peter wouldn’t like it,” she said. The truth was: she wouldn’t like it either. But she felt suddenly that she did not want to let Delphine down, to deflate the impression she had of Alice, in this moment.

Delphine paused. “Why not, do you think?”

“Well, he has a lot of ideas about what I should do each day,” said Alice.

“He probably wouldn’t believe I had time to do that too.”

Delphine nodded. “And if you insisted?” she said.

Alice almost laughed. The idea of insisting on anything, when it came to Peter, was unimaginable to her. She wasn’t—frightened of him, exactly, though there had been one or two incidents that caused alarm. It was more that she had come to see herself nearly exclusively through his eyes, and therefore being in his good graces was the easiest way to achieve a sense of

well-being.

“I wouldn’t insist,” she said, simply.

“You know,” said Delphine, “Peter has always struck me as someone with

more bark than bite.”

Delphine smiled.

“But you’re an adult,” said Delphine. “And you know him better than I do.”

• • •

When Alice emerged from Delphine’s room, it was close to three in the morning, and sounds of snoring were echoing throughout the house. She felt sober now. She walked on the balls of her feet, avoiding floorboards she knew to make noise. Passing Bear’s room, she opened the door to gaze, at last, upon his sleeping form; and then she continued to the room she shared

with Peter.

Inside, she found her husband awake.

He was lying on his back, his hands behind his head, his fine thin torso bare, and just visible in the moonlight.

He turned his head slowly in her direction, but said nothing.

Alice undressed, awkwardly, before him, feeling his appraising gaze, despite the dark. Already, she could feel the food and drink from the weeklong party making itself visible in her waistline, and she made a note to herself to eat nothing all day tomorrow—not until dinner, at least.

She pulled her nightgown over her head and lowered herself into bed next

to Peter.

“Where have you been?” he asked her.

“In Bear’s room,” she said, automatically. “He was restless.” She wasn’t certain why, but it felt dangerous to tell him the truth.

For a long moment, Peter was silent, and she thought perhaps he had gone back to sleep.

But then he turned over, and the expression on his face was cold.

“You’re lying,” said Peter. “I checked in Bear’s room. I looked all over the grounds for you.”

He raised himself up on one elbow, suddenly. Alice tensed.

“Where were you?” he asked again. In his voice she recognized danger.

“I did go to Bear’s room,” she said. “Twice. But I also went to Delphine’s room.”

Peter paused, seemingly caught off guard. She knew this wasn’t the answer he was anticipating. When they were first married, she had made a terrible mistake at one of these parties, when she was too drunk to understand what was happening. Her mistake, she understood, had been drinking so much. The rest was someone else’s fault. A former friend of Peter’s, who was no longer invited to their parties.

“Why on earth were you in Delphine’s room?” he said.

“To check on her,” said Alice. “I heard her crying. And Merrill had said that horrible thing.”

Peter was silent for a moment. And then came off his elbow and lay back down, the conversation finished.

Alice closed her eyes. She pictured Delphine’s kind face, her dark hair, her upright posture. The well-being and confidence that emanated from her

person, despite her recent loss.

Peter spoke again.

“I know she’s your sister, Alice,” he said. “And I’m sorry to say this. But I’d stay away from Delphine. She’s always seemed manipulative to me.”

The words landed heavily in the empty room.

“All of us worried that George would change when they married,” said Peter. “And do you know something? He did.”

After that, the two of them were silent.

Carl

n the large main room of Self-Reliance, Vic Hewitt was tending to a blazeI in the stone fireplace that centered the space. A dozen people stood or sat around it; nobody spoke. They ranged in age from twenty to eighty. Aside from the Van Laars themselves, the only two Carl recognized definitively were the younger Mrs. Van Laar’s parents, come up from the city. Their daughter—Bear’s mother—was absent. Taken to bed, perhaps. Crying in some other room. Carl’s wife had been that way for Scotty’s final weeks. For the whole year after.

Everyone in the room appeared to have recently returned from spending hours in the woods. Their faces were dazed and drawn and streaked with dirt; their clothing was stiff, newly dried by the fire after the rain that had fallen earlier.

A queasy stillness pervaded the room. Reality settling in. He could imagine them at the start of their search, early in the afternoon, in the daylight: nervous, tipsy laughter as they scoured the grounds, sure they’d find the child, shouting for him in the rain, hopeful that he was pulling a prank, hopeful that by cocktail hour they’d be recounting the tale of their search over drinks.

He could imagine their mood as it shifted.

They should have called earlier, Carl was thinking. This had been the truth unspoken by all four volunteers as they drove toward the Preserve. Vic Hewitt, at least, should have known better. All four of the volunteers had basic tracking skills, and Dick’s brother Ronald had a hound, Jennie, with a good nose on her. But Ronald had been unreachable, so they’d left without a dog. Between the rainstorm and the general trampling the ground had taken by then, both tracks and scents would be more difficult to pick up tomorrow.

Why hadn’t Hewitt called?

• • •

None of the central room’s dozen occupants had risen upon their arrival. It was only when Vic Hewitt spoke that anyone seemed to take notice of them at all.

“The folks from the local fire department are here,” he said—addressing the younger Mr. Van Laar. “In case you’d like a word.”

• • •

In the kitchen, away from the crowd, the elder and younger Mr. Van Laar faced the volunteers. It was then that Carl remembered his hat, a floppy felt thing his wife had given him several birthdays ago. He snatched it from his head, pawed at his hair and beard, smoothing them.

When no one else spoke, he did.

“Well,” said Carl. He looked down at the floor as he spoke, unable to meet anyone’s gaze. “So. When’s the last time you saw the boy?”

“Three o’clock,” said the elder Van Laar.

“And he was—hiking?”

“You know this already,” said the younger Van Laar. “We spoke on the telephone.” There was impatience in his voice as he said it. It occurred to Carl that he might believe they were going to set out into the woods this very night. They wouldn’t get far, doing that; they had one flashlight and one headlamp between them, and the latter was out of batteries, if Carl

remembered right. There might be more equipment lying around the estate, but still—the state police, with their taxpayer dollars, would have to be called to make any progress at all.

“Would you mind repeating the information for the others, sir?” Carl asked. “In case I missed anything when I told them.”

“The two of us were hiking, yes,” said the elder Van Laar. “Bear had been begging to go for a hike. We left the house around three o’clock. We walked through the woods—there’s a shortcut, about a quarter mile long, that connects our house to the trailhead at the base of Hunt. But as soon as we reached the trailhead, Bear said he’d forgotten his pocketknife. He wanted to turn back for it.”

“How come?” asked Dick Shattuck—unable to keep quiet any longer, it seemed. Carl was relieved.

“He said he wanted to show me something,” said the elder. “I don’t know what it was.”

For a moment, Carl felt dizzy. Firewood, he thought. Loose and light and floppy. He wanted to show you how to figure out what wood was good for starting a fire, thought Carl. And then he thought, I taught him that. He had, in fact, taught Bear many things: How to whistle with an acorn cap. How to whittle an owl and a bear and a fox’s head. How to tell when rain was coming. The same things he had taught his own Scotty.

“And you said all right,” said Shattuck, prompting Mr. Van Laar.

“Yes,” said Mr. Van Laar. “I was impatient. But I said yes.”

“You watched him head back toward the house,” said Shattuck.

“Yes.”

“When did you lose sight of him?”

The elder considered. “Almost immediately,” he said. “There’s a turn that the path takes”—here Van Laar demonstrated with his hand—“about a hundred feet from the trailhead, back in the direction of the house. I watched Bear until he reached that point, and then he turned left, and was gone.”

“What’s the trailhead like?” asked Shattuck.

Carl knew. He’d been there himself a handful of times with Bear, who’d been given permission from his parents to go as far as the base of the

mountain whenever he liked, but no farther than that. The trailhead was a turnaround at the end of a dirt road that led to Route 29, the main paved road into town. Hunt Mountain, by virtue of its small size, wasn’t among the most popular peaks in the Adirondacks, but when the weather was good there were usually a half-dozen cars parked here and there in the lot.

“What do you mean,” asked the elder.

“I mean—is it a busy place? Active?”

“Not usually,” said the elder.

“And today? Were there other people on the mountain, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said the elder. “There were no cars in the lot, but I never got as far as the mountain. I stood at the trailhead, waiting for

Bear, until it began to rain.”

There was silence then. Uncomfortable.

Carl watched Bob Lewis. Of the four of them, he was the cynic, the pessimist. He had a paranoid streak that sometimes caused him to leap to conclusions about bad actors and questionable motives. Twice, he had made the case for arson when a fire’s cause couldn’t easily be explained. (So far, there had been no actual cases of arson in Shattuck Township—not on their

watch, anyway.) On cue, Bob L. spoke up.

“Why were you going for a hike in a storm?” he asked the elder Van Laar.

The question was abrupt. Lewis tempered himself. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir.”

“The storm was sudden,” said Mr. Van Laar. “It came from nowhere. The sky was clear when we left the house. The sun was out. Not a hint of moisture in the air. And then,” he said. But he didn’t continue.

Dick Shattuck cleared his throat. “Mr. V,” he said, “how long would you say you waited for Bear at the trailhead, after he turned back?”

“Difficult to say,” said the elder Van Laar. “Fifteen minutes, maybe.

Twenty. I didn’t check my pocket watch when he left, but I did when the rain began. That was at three thirty-five. That’s when I lost patience and headed back myself. The path through the woods is short. As I said. It shouldn’t have taken him so long.”

• • •

The conversation continued, but Carl stayed silent. Calculating. Mr. Van Laar had said Bear had set off on a hike with his grandfather at three p.m. Carl had left work early that day, at half past three. That was when he saw the boy bent down in front of the house, tying a shoe, about to set off someplace.

If he was doing his math correctly, it was possible that he, Carl Stoddard, was the last person to see the boy before he disappeared.

He thought of speaking up about it. Decided against it, for now.

Both Van Laars simultaneously leaned their weight against the countertop behind them, suddenly exhausted. In general, they moved as a pair. Same height, same eyes, same steady fluid movements. There was an athleticism to them that Carl didn’t generally associate with rich people. He had once seen Peter III playing an impromptu game of baseball on the lawn during a different year’s Blackfly Good-by. He had knocked a ball completely out of sight and then run around the improvised bases in a casual lope that concealed what Carl, from his football days, immediately understood to be an impressive reserve of speed.

“Did anyone see him after that? Anyone aside from you, I mean,” said Shattuck.

“No one that I know of,” said the elder.

“Do you think he ever reached the house?”

“Unclear,” said the younger. Bear’s father. “No one saw him there, but many of the guests were resting at that time. Or outside, I suppose.”

Carl swallowed hard. He wanted to speak up. To say, I saw him. He was tying his shoes. It was half past three. But he understood what would change the moment he revealed it.

Shattuck continued, and the moment passed.

“Who do you believe was inside the house?”

The younger Van Laar nodded. “I was,” he said. “My wife was. Certain guests, as I said. Certain members of the staff.”

“And when did you start searching for Bear?”

The two Van Laars glanced at one another.

Then the younger spoke. “Dad found me at the house,” he said. “Around a quarter to four. I’d been resting in my bedroom. He told me he couldn’t find

Bear.”

On saying the name, his voice rose.

Carl looked away, afraid suddenly that he would cry.

“And then,” said Shattuck, more gently.

“We went out, the two of us, into the rain,” said the elder. “We didn’t want to alarm anyone just yet. We began—calling for him. For Bear. And I suppose people heard us. And slowly a group formed. We fanned out. We all wandered in the woods for a while. We split into smaller parties. One group went all the way up Hunt, all the way to the top of the mountain. Another went down to the beach to walk along the waterline. Another searched Camp Emerson, all the cabins, every building. There were twenty of us searching, or thereabouts. We spent about three hours searching, all told. Got thoroughly soaked in the process.”

The four volunteers nodded collectively.

“When did you let the boy’s mother know?” asked Bob Lewis. Again, the question felt wrong, too abrupt, the subject too tender.

It was the younger Van Laar who answered. “She heard us calling,” he said. “She came outside.” His voice was tight.

Carl had stopped looking in the Van Laars’ direction altogether. If he cried now— At last he allowed himself to bring forth, queasily, the memory that had been threatening to surface for hours. It was of Bear last summer, little and strong, sitting on a stump beside Carl as he planted flowers in the earth. The boy had been whittling contentedly, something of his own creation. Then, hearing a low male voice calling for him, he had paused in his efforts, and stiffened.

Carl had glanced up at him. Watched him for a moment, waiting for him to

respond.

He hadn’t.

“That your dad calling?” Carl prompted him, gently. Again came the voice: “Bear Van Laar! Peter Four!”

Bear shook his head. “That’s my grandfather,” he said. And then, so quietly that he almost couldn’t be heard: “I don’t like him much.”

At that he collapsed his little knife, sighed heavily, and put it into his pocket. He stood, shoulders hunched, and walked in the direction of Self- Reliance.

• • •

It was 8:45 now. The sun was down. They walked back through the somber main room, which had emptied a bit since they’d entered. Then out through the front door and onto the lawn, plump with groundwater, squelching with each step. There was a very full moon that night, so bright that it cast faint shadows in their wake. The four of them and Vic Hewitt walked north, in the direction of the path through the woods that the boy and his grandfather had taken together earlier in the day.

“Do you know what he was wearing?” Bob Alcott asked Hewitt.

“Short pants, as I recall,” said Hewitt. “And a red shirt, I think. Short- sleeved. Least that’s what he was wearing when I saw him this morning.”

“Long pants,” said Carl, reflexively. He remembered this well. The boy had cuffed them in order to tie his shoes.

A pause.

“Oh?” said Hewitt.

“I think so.”

“How come?”

“I think I—saw him. Out front of the main house. Right before I left.”

Vic Hewitt looked at him hard. “What time would that have been?”

“Three thirty or so.”

All of them looked off toward the woods.

“Carl,” said Vic. “Any reason you wouldn’t have told us that earlier?”

Carl thought. “It just came to me,” he said. “Just now.”

• • •

Shattuck, bearing the single flashlight they’d found in the truck, swung it back and forth across the tree line at the edge of the lawn. With every sweep of light, the forest’s density was underscored. Parts of it looked positively thicket-like. Impenetrable. The only clearing was the entrance to the path in question. The last place Bear was known to have been.

“Should we shout for him?” said Carl.

Hewitt hesitated. “Don’t think so,” he said, finally. “Got no response all day. Hate to agitate the family further. Let them rest awhile.”

Shattuck nodded. He aimed the flashlight in the direction of the path, again, and then shone it back toward the house before speaking. When he did, his voice was measured.

“Look,” he said. “The four of us could head into those woods and swing our one flashlight around awhile. See if we find any tracks. Or we could go back to the house, dig up some more flashlights, or some torches. Have everyone fan out again. But with the number of folks you already had out here tramping around, I think we’d be better off bringing a hound in before the boy’s scent is gone completely. Don’t you?”

Vic Hewitt nodded. He wasn’t meeting their eyes. He was looking in the direction of the woods.

“Ask me,” said Shattuck, “I think we’d be wise to call the staties in. Only if you’re asking.” It was what Carl had been thinking, too. What all of them were thinking, no doubt.

Hewitt gave no response. He was listening.

“Vic?” said Shattuck. “You all right?”

A sudden rush of movement in the woods. The frantic rustling of a trapped animal. From the cleared path toward the mountain emerged a small figure,

running flat-out.

For a moment, everyone was hopeful.

But it wasn’t Bear. It was a girl, Carl saw. Shattuck swung the light in her direction. Her face was white and panicked, her mouth open in a sort of silent wail. Her clothes were damp; her hair matted to her head, her long braid a sodden rope that hung heavily over one shoulder and down the front of her.

“What’n the hell,” said Hewitt, lowly, and only then did Carl realize who it was.

Hewitt strode quickly in the direction of his daughter, Tessie Jo.

The rest of them remained in place.

Carl

essie Jo was taken—mouth open, eyes closed—into her father’s arms,T and then into the great room, and then down the hall, where a bath was run for her by one of the maids while, in a nearby room, her father calmed her down.

The few remaining guests scattered. The volunteers—Carl in the lead— excused themselves, and returned to the front lawn, where they stood, hands in pockets, wondering what to do.

Bob L. spoke first. “You think she saw something?”

Dick Shattuck: “Let’s hope so.”

But Carl had a different idea. “They were friends,” he said. “Good friends.

Bear followed her everywhere. Looked up to her. Had a crush, maybe.”

The other three looked at him.

“Maybe she’s just upset he’s gone,” said Carl.

And this, indeed, was the word handed down by Vic Hewitt, when he came striding down the hallway again: the girl was in shock. She was tired and cold and starved, out in the woods with no food or drink since afternoon, when Bear was first reported missing. She was terrified of losing her friend— one of the only friends she had, said Vic—adding that she’d never gotten along well with the kids at her small school. For now, Tessie Jo had been fed

soup by Darla McCray and put to bed, still shivering. The hope was that she wouldn’t get sick.

All four men received this information, nodding. And then Vic told them that they should go home, get some sleep. He’d take it upon himself to keep watch overnight. Tomorrow, the five of them, and the state police, would start over. With hounds, this time.

As the truck pulled out of the driveway, they saw Vic in the dim light cast forth by Self-Reliance. He was walking toward the woodshed. He would build a campfire for his solitary watch, thought Carl; maybe the blaze, or the smoke, would draw the boy back toward the house.

To that point, Carl had resisted allowing entry to a feeling that had been hovering on the outskirts of his consciousness. But from the back of the pickup truck, he watched as the lights of Self-Reliance turned off one by one, and he at last allowed himself to think it: if that were his boy, lost in the cold woods overnight—down with an injury, perhaps—well, he would still be out there searching. Calling Bear’s name until his own body gave out.

• • •

At home, Maryanne was still awake. She was sitting up at the kitchen table, laying out a hand of solitaire. She’d played almost every night since Scotty died; said it helped to empty her mind before sleep.

“Any luck?” she asked Carl, without turning. She was straight-backed, tense.

“No,” said Carl. “Search’ll broaden tomorrow. We’ll bring Ron Shattuck’s hound.” And then he paused, considering.

He had told nobody, yet, what Bear had said about his grandfather. The way Bear’s posture had changed upon hearing his name called in that stern voice. For a moment he considered telling Maryanne. But he could never predict her reactions to what he said, these days. Any wrong thing might drive her to anger—the emotion she most readily expressed, lately, as if all of her sadness since Scotty’s passing required replacement with something. But she spoke first.

“I’ll come too,” said Maryanne, calmly.

“To the Preserve?” said Carl.

“Yes.”

Carl paused. His deference to the Van Laars was so ingrained that his first reaction was to wonder whether she would even be welcome on the grounds.

Then he came to his senses; surely the Van Laars would want as many hands as possible. “Are you certain?” he asked.

Maryanne nodded. Placed a seven atop an eight. “Mother will watch the girls. I’ve asked already.”

“All right,” said Carl. Still tentative. He settled at last on the one subject he generally knew to be safe: “How were they?”

Maryanne smiled, waved a hand. “Oh, all right. Jeannie’s upset about a grade. Margaret’s upset about a boy. Antonia’s upset about a friend.” She turned to him, at last, and for a moment he saw a glimpse of humor in her eyes. “I’d be more worried if everyone was fine.”

A surge of warmth arose in him. He had the instinct to go to her, his straight-backed, pretty wife, and place his hands on her arms, and stand there for a while. They so rarely touched one another these days. They had not made love in a year; the last time it happened Maryanne had wept so violently afterward that he promised himself he would not ever approach her again. Not until some invitation was issued, at least, and so far there had been none. So that night, also, he did not go to her, but cleared his throat instead, and walked up the stairs to the bathroom, where he washed before going to bed. One or two hours would pass, he knew, and then Maryanne would enter the room quietly, already dressed in her nightclothes, and she would lie down beside him, and no part of their bodies would meet.

In the early morning, he woke to the smell of breakfast.

His mother-in-law was seated at the table already, coffee in hand. But for her boots, Maryanne had dressed herself in her church clothes, her Sunday school teacher outfit—blue dress, cloche hat—which normally would have been odd for a day’s work in the woods. But these were the Van Laars’ woods, and these clothes, in Maryanne’s mind, were a sign of respect.

At six in the morning, Carl phoned the fire hall to let Bob L. know he’d be driving separately, due to Maryanne’s decision to come.

“Well, that’s fine,” said Bob L. “Turns out everyone else’s wife is coming too.” A note of complaint was in his voice.

The wives’ decision to come may have served as a harbinger, but the full scope of the volunteer effort only became apparent upon Carl’s arrival at the Preserve.

There on the lawn stood what appeared to be most of Shattuck’s adult citizens: several hundred bodies, waiting for instruction. Ron Shattuck was there with his hound, Jennie; another several dogs were on-site too, held by men Carl did not recognize.

Up near the house were four patrol cars with open windows.

And at the very top of the hill, standing before the front door of Self- Reliance, were the elder and younger Van Laar men. To their right was Vic Hewitt, conferring with the staties.

Carl, taking in this scene with Maryanne beside him, faltered momentarily.

Last night, the four members of the volunteer fire department had seemed to be in charge; today they had been deposed. He scanned the crowd until he saw Dick Shattuck, looking similarly uncertain, for once in his life. His wife, too, was beside him—a thin woman named Georgette whom Maryanne had been calling stuck-up since all of them were in grade school together.

Maryanne was making small throat-clearing noises now, and he took this to mean she wanted him, Carl, to take charge in some way.

So Carl strode, Maryanne on his heel, toward what he perceived to be the action. On the way he caught the eyes of the Bobs and Dick Shattuck; they followed behind.

When they reached the group of men standing out front of Self-Reliance,

no one turned.

With some trepidation, Carl spoke up.

“Morning,” said Carl, drawing raised eyebrows from several troopers, and a pause from Vic.

“Men, this is Carl Stoddard,” said Hewitt. “He’s a groundskeeper here and a volunteer firefighter nearby. Carl, these men are from the state police.

They’ll be helping us search.”

“Anything happen overnight?” said Carl, and Vic shook his head.

“I built a fire best I could,” said Hewitt. “Despite the damp. Sat up all night. I guess I dozed a little, on and off.”

“No sign,” said Carl, uselessly.

Hewitt shook his head. “I was saying,” he continued, “most important thing is not to disturb any tracks that might be left. Or scents. More than they’ve already been disturbed, I mean. We’ll let the men with dogs head out first, get a good head start. While they’re searching, I’ll divide the rest of the crowd up and teach them how to move. What to look for.”

The troopers nodded, listening. It was interesting, Carl thought, that none of them asserted any authority here; to a one, they all seemed to recognize their place, as subordinates to the family running the operation, and to Vic. It was true, too, that the Hewitts had been known for generations as the best guides in the region, and Vic was thought to have a special gift. A few of the troopers were local boys who no doubt knew his reputation.

Abruptly, then, Vic Hewitt turned and strode away, leaving Carl and the others alone with the troopers, who closed in on themselves to form a tight circle.

Bob L., never shy about complaining, was the first to say it. “It’s like we’re not here.”

• • •

The men with dogs went first, as planned.

Ten minutes after the hounds, the rest of the crowd departed, some in vehicles, to the locations assigned to them by Vic Hewitt. The four firefighters and their wives had been given the task of searching a square mile of woods on the opposite side of Route 29; they drove to the site in question and pulled over in a line at the edge of the woods.

The goal, Vic had said—raising his voice as well as he could to address the entire crowd—was to form a line of humans, evenly spaced, and march forward as a collective. Keep your eyes on the ground, said Vic. Sweep them

left to right. Watch for unusual colors, unusual depressions in the undergrowth. Every thirty seconds or so, call out for the boy.

This, it turned out, was the most difficult part for Carl. For all the men.

They were unaccustomed to raising their voices in this way, to calling out one person’s name repeatedly.

As it turned out, the women were more willing to do so; and so it was their voices that echoed throughout the woods. All of them were mothers. All of them regularly set aside their innate sense of propriety to holler with abandon for their children.

Around the Preserve, they could hear others doing the same, the boy’s name resounding like an echo.

An hour went by. Two, three. The day wasn’t hot, but Carl found himself sweating nonetheless. Something about Bear’s name being called tugged at his conscience, made his heartbeat increase, triggered the same memory that had been bobbing at the outside of his mind since yesterday afternoon.

“Bear Van Laar,” the boy’s grandfather had called out. And Bear had jumped, startled, unhappy to leave Carl’s side.

One foot in front of the other now. The crunch of the pine-needled forest floor. If Carl had been by himself, he would have taken off his shirt. He worked to focus on the ground, as he’d been told to do—as he knew to do.

But the landscape was beginning to blur before him. He took a sip from the canteen of water that hung from his neck.

Maryanne generally noticed such things, quickly observed when he or one of the children was ill or nervous or otherwise out of spirits. But today she was focused on the task at hand. Early on she had tied her dress up into a knot at her knees. Now she was stepping high with her booted feet, calling out for the boy.

Suddenly Carl stumbled, and fell to the ground. The whole chain stopped.

He was feeling a sort of pain in his stomach and chest, something viselike and twisting. He could say no words.

The name they had been calling changed now. Carl, they were saying.

Carl. Carl.

It was the last thing he heard before losing consciousness.

Book Renzo

The God of the Woods — II. Bear

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