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Found

Judyta

udy stands outside, hands on hips, considering the cars in the parking areaJ next to the house. Stately Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles and Lincolns, mostly. She tries to picture a blue Trans Am among them. It would have stood out.

She turns in a full circle. Two dark angry ruts in the dirt driveway indicate a car backing out with vigor, then pulling off toward Route 29.

She knows that the information she now has on John Paul McLellan Jr. is important. His late reentry into the house; his battered face; his disappearance this morning: all together, they make him at minimum a person of interest.

But as a junior investigator, she isn’t authorized to do anything without her superior’s approval.

She checks her watch, wondering when Denny Hayes will return.

• • •

After a few minutes, she walks back into the house. While she waits for Hayes, she knows she should continue to isolate and interview everyone else she can find.

The lanky young people sprawled out on all the furniture in the great room are the people she is least eager to speak to. They look somehow like they should be feeding one another grapes; like young gods—in their own minds,

at least. Still, she approaches them, one after another, asks them politely if they’ll speak with her, and then brings them into an empty sunroom she found while walking the house.

There, she asks them her standard questions: name, age, occupation, primary place of residence—to which every one of them replies Manhattan or Los Angeles.

The last person she interviews is a thin, severe-looking twenty-three-year- old. The only one who tells Judy she has been staying in the main house

itself, as opposed to an outbuilding.

Her name, she says, is Marnie McLellan.

Upon hearing the girl’s last name, Judy pauses, goes still for a moment.

“Occupation?” she says.

“Gallerist.”

Judy doesn’t know the word. She writes it down; tells herself she’ll look it up later.

“Relationship to the Van Laars?” she says.

“Goddaughter.”

“Are you close?”

Marnie McLellan lifts her chin. “Extremely.”

Judy holds her pen over her notepad. She must, she knows, tread carefully here.

She asks the girl the same set of questions she’s asked everyone else, and gets similar answers—she was at the party, she stayed up late, there was a good deal of noise, a good deal of drinking. She went to bed at four in the morning. She knows Barbara well—the families have spent a good deal of time together, have vacationed together, too; but she has no theories about

where the girl might be now.

“How would you describe Barbara?”

“Oh, miserable,” says the girl. “Just a really unhappy person.”

Judy nods. In her notepad, she writes: Dislikes B.

“How so?” she says.

“Well, she’s always given her family a really hard time. I know she’s gotten into trouble at school. She’s supposed to be kind of fast for her age.

And she wears clothes and makeup that are—” Marnie pauses here, summoning up the words to describe them. “They’re terrible. All black everything. Dark rings around her eyes. Spikes in her earlobes. Really upsetting, if you ask me. The product of a disturbed mind.”

Judy hasn’t heard this before, about Barbara.

She writes: B. dressed oddly.

At last, Judy works around to the questions she’s been waiting to ask.

“Are the other members of your family staying on the grounds as well?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me their full names?”

“Why?”

“Just trying to put together a list of all the guests. To make sure I’ve covered all my bases before my boss gets back,” Judy adds. Smiling,

deferential.

Marnie is very still.

“My father,” she says, “is John Paul McLellan Sr. My mother is Nancy

McLellan.”

Judy looks at her. “Occupations?”

“My mother’s a homemaker,” says Marnie. “My father is a business

partner of the Van Laars.”

“A banker?” says Judy.

“An attorney. He represents the family, and the bank.”

Judy nods, writing. Then asks, with forced calm: “Do you have any

siblings?”

“My brother is John Paul McLellan Jr.”

“Occupation?”

Marnie scoffs, then recovers herself.

“Not much,” she says. “He graduated from college last year. He’ll take over the bank one day. If he ever gets his act together.”

Judy considers this. “What makes you think that?”

Marnie looks at her as if she’s dumb. “The Van Laars don’t have a boy.

Not anymore, anyway. But we do.”

“I see,” says Judy. Writing this down. “And do you know where I might

find them?”

“Who?”

“The other members of your family. Your parents and brother.”

“I have no idea,” says Marnie, after a pause.

“Have you seen them this morning?”

Marnie hesitates for a moment. “I’ve only seen my father,” she says. “But I don’t know where he is now.”

• • •

Five minutes later, Judy walks back out through the main entrance to the house, the one with the blackfly knocker. She looks down the hill toward the camp. The mounting evidence against John Paul McLellan Jr. has become too much to ignore.

A lone state trooper stands on the lawn.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Has Captain LaRochelle arrived yet?”

He looks at her blankly.

“I’m Investigator Luptack,” she says. “I was told the captain would be arriving soon? To speak to the family?”

He shakes his head. “Nope. There’s a couple more BCI guys down there, but no captain yet.”

Judy thanks him. Then, with purpose, she walks back into the kitchen of Self-Reliance, where she has seen a telephone on the wall. Glancing over each shoulder, she lifts the receiver, dials into the station, and requests a BOLO: all officers in the region will be informed, over their radios, that they should be on the lookout for a blue Trans Am.

This is too important to wait for Denny Hayes’s return. If she’s made a wrong assessment, she’ll deal with the consequences later.

• • •

Having interviewed everyone she can find at the house, Judy walks back out to the front and perches for a moment on the edge of an Adirondack chair, scribbling frantically in her notebook. She wants to capture all the exact words and phrases she can remember.

From some distance away, she hears someone calling: “Ma’am?”

She doesn’t look up.

“Ma’am?” the voice says again, closer this time. She hears footsteps.

Turns.

Approaching her is an EnCon ranger, fiftysomething, bearded; a few steps behind him, a giant girl, wearing a towel around her shoulders. She looks taller than Judy by a head. Taller even than the EnCon ranger, who himself is not a small man.

Behind the two of them, a couple follows: a man in his fifties and a woman who looks about Judy’s age. Is she the girl’s sister?

“I’m looking for someone from the BCI,” the ranger asks.

Judy looks down at herself. At her suit, which clearly separates her from the troopers, the rangers, the guests.

“That’s me,” says Judy, finally. “Investigator Luptack.”

The girl with him looks shaky. Reaching the line of Adirondack chairs at the front of the house, she sits down hard in one. Puts her elbows on her knees.

“This is Tracy Jewell,” he says. “She was Barbara Van Laar’s bunkmate.

She’s got a few things she’d like to share with you.”

Tracy

racy sits in a chair on the lawn, drinking a glass of water, eating aT sandwich someone has brought to her. Next to her is a woman police officer—the first one Tracy has ever met, or even seen.

At least, she thinks this woman is a police officer. She wears no uniform, only a suit. She looks young, but her notepad and pen give her an air of authority.

She’s waiting silently for Tracy to speak.

“What did you say?” Tracy asks.

“The person you met in the woods. Can you give us any details?”

“Oh,” says Tracy. “Not really.”

“Do you know if it was a man or a woman?”

“I think it was a man,” says Tracy. “But I’m not sure. I should wear glasses, but I don’t.”

She thinks. “It had gray hair,” she adds.

“Did the person say anything to you?”

Tracy shakes her head. “It didn’t talk. It just waved at me. Led me out of the woods.”

The woman nods. Scribbles quickly on her notepad.

“Are they trying to find the person now?” says Tracy. “The rangers?”

“I think they probably are,” says the woman.

“It was trying to help me,” says Tracy. “Whoever it was.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” says the woman. “We’ll just want to have a conversation with the person. See if they’ve seen anything we should know about.”

She pauses. “Tracy,” she says. “Why did you go into the woods to begin

with?”

Tracy is silent.

“Would you like to share that with me?”

Tracy takes a bite. Chews. Drinks water. She pulls the towel she’s wearing more tightly around herself.

Then—breaking a promise to Barbara, keeping a promise to herself—she tells Investigator Luptack why it was that Barbara went into the woods.

“Every night?” Investigator Luptack says, holding her gaze. “Barbara left every night?”

“Almost,” says Tracy. “Except once, when she was injured.”

“And always to the observer’s cabin?”

“That’s what she said.”

“But she never said who her boyfriend was.”

Tracy shakes her head. “No.”

Investigator Luptack nods. “Thank you, Tracy,” she says. “That’s very helpful. Is there anything else you think might be helpful? Did she ever mention anything about her relationship with her family?”

Tracy hesitates.

“Did she get along with her parents?”

Tracy shakes her head. “No,” she says softly.

“Any idea why?”

“I guess—they were strict with her. Her father was, anyway. Her mother wasn’t very involved.”

Investigator Luptack nods. “And do you know if anything happened recently that might have frightened Barbara, or made her upset, or made her angry?”

Tracy thinks. She’s about to say no—Barbara has never been specific in her complaints about her family—but then she remembers something.

“Yes,” she says. “They painted her walls.”

Investigator Luptack’s expression changes.

“Here at this house?”

“Yes. Her mother had them painted pink.”

“And why did that upset her?”

“I don’t know,” says Tracy. “Maybe she didn’t like the color.”

Judyta

wenty minutes later—after the girl has been released into the care of theT couple Judy has determined to be her father and his girlfriend—Judy stands in the main house, in the hallway outside the pink room, considering its door. She could open it, she thinks. No one’s inside. But she isn’t certain what the consequences of this action would be, and so she hovers there for a while, waiting.

She hears footsteps at the end of the hallway.

A side door opens, and through it walk a man and a woman. The man is tall, elegant, his dark hair streaked with silver. The woman, who comes second, is so incredibly thin that she looks ill.

The man pauses, stares at Judy for a moment. He is ten yards away. Then he shakes his head a bit, inscrutably, and ushers the woman into one of the bedrooms off the hall.

Are these the parents? Mr. and Mrs. Van Laar?

When the man comes out, he is alone, and he leaves through the same door

without glancing in her direction.

“Judy,” someone says, and she jumps.

It’s Denny Hayes.

“C’mon,” says Hayes. “I’ve been looking for you. Captain just got here.

He’s about to start a briefing down at the camp. You can fill me in on your

morning while we walk.”

He takes off. Judy follows, trotting slightly to keep up.

She leads with the most important facts: that Barbara’s bunkmate said she had a boyfriend; that she was sneaking out each night to see him at the observer’s cabin at the top of Hunt Mountain.

She tells him about the painted bedroom walls—and that Barbara was upset over them.

Next, she tells him what she’s learned about John Paul McLellan: the bloody face, the late return, the disappearance of him and his blue Trans Am.

She saves for last the fact that she’s already put out a BOLO for the car.

For a moment, Denny stops and turns toward her, and Judy is afraid that he’ll chastise her for not seeking permission from a higher-up. But instead he says, “Judy. You’re actually doing really good work here.”

Judy frowns. The actually, she thinks, was unnecessary—but she’ll take it.

“Speak up in the captain’s briefing, okay?” says Denny Hayes. Then, without waiting for a response, he keeps walking.

• • •

The Command Post, Judy learns, has been moved from the backstage area of the Great Hall to the Director’s Cabin, on LaRochelle’s orders: they’ll need near-constant access to a telephone.

This means that T.J. Hewitt—the director, who lives there—has been displaced to an empty room in the Staff Quarters.

• • •

At five in the evening, inside the Director’s Cabin, Captain LaRochelle now stands at attention in front of the longest wall. He is an imposing man.

Military haircut, very upright posture.

Around him, a dozen investigators sit or stand. Half are from B-tour, staying late; the other are C-tour investigators, just arriving for their shift.

Judy and Hayes arrive last, as LaRochelle, consulting his notes, begins to speak.

“Persons of interest so far,” he says. And with his fingers he ticks them off.

“John Paul McLellan Jr. Godson of the Van Laar family. Came home last night with a bloody face, nowhere to be found this morning. Still at large.

BOLO’s been issued.”

Judy is startled. She is still figuring out how information gets transmitted from person to person in the BCI. She isn’t sure how Captain LaRochelle knows this already.

He continues. “Louise Donnadieu. Barbara’s counselor. Currently in custody on an unrelated charge, but not sure how long we can keep her there.

I’ve got”—he checks his notes—“Investigator Lowry working that lead.”

He pauses.

“Unknown person seems to be roaming the woods near the estate,” he says, “according to a girl named Tracy Jewell, Barbara’s bunkmate. We have no description on this person other than that he’s tall, because Tracy wasn’t wearing her glasses. But we haven’t spotted anybody yet. Nor have we spotted any sign of Barbara herself in the nearby woods. The hounds did pick up a scent on her, but it seems they may have been trailing a path she took on a different organized outing, several days ago.”

He looks up. “So basically, we’ve gotten nowhere near where we need to be, nine hours into this search.”

Another investigator speaks up. “Sir, have the parents said anything notable?”

“Not really,” says LaRochelle. “I spoke to Mr. Van Laar at length just now. He described Barbara as unhappy and troubled. His suspicion is that she’s a runaway. But he didn’t have any idea where she might have gone.”

“Any reason to suspect him?”

“Not that I’m aware of at this juncture,” says LaRochelle. “But obviously we’ll be watching him closely.”

He points to one of the investigators who’s just arrived for C-tour. “That means you,” he says. “You’re in charge of keeping an eye on the parents

overnight.”

A beat of silence. Then the same investigator who asked about the parents speaks again. “Sir,” he says. “Do you find it suspicious at all that the father wouldn’t speak to any of us? That he wanted to wait for you?”

LaRochelle considers this. “I wouldn’t say suspicious, necessarily,” he says. “I worked with them closely on their son’s case. Could just be there’s a level of trust there.”

To Judy, this sounds dubious. But as the newest investigator in the room, she has no intention of saying so.

“What else do you have for me?” says LaRochelle, and Hayes elbows her gently.

Judy clears her throat. Raises her hand.

Then she tells LaRochelle about what Tracy Jewell said: the boyfriend, the overnight meetings at the observer’s cabin, the painted walls.

LaRochelle raises his eyebrows. “Anyone else heard anything about a

boyfriend?”

Around the room, heads shake.

He points to one investigator. “You. Find a ranger. Ask them if they’ve been to the observer’s cabin yet. If not, get them moving.”

He pauses. “Do we know where Barbara Van Laar was in school?”

An investigator raises his hand. “Emily Grange. Down near Latham.”

“You,” says LaRochelle to the investigator. “Head there. Get numbers from them for Barbara’s friends. Ask about a boyfriend.”

“You,” says LaRochelle, pointing to an investigator coming onto C-tour who has half a sandwich hanging from his mouth. “Head for the Van Laars’ house in Albany. Check Barbara’s room there for anything relevant. Bring

back Polaroids, if you can.”

He pauses.

“Questions?”

A moment of stillness, and then one hand goes up, from the edge of the room. It’s an investigator Judy hadn’t noticed, until now, perhaps the oldest person in the room.

“Is it worth considering Jacob Sluiter?”

A general shift in the atmosphere of the room. For a moment there is a standoff; LaRochelle seems to be waiting for the investigator to explain himself, to offer excuses or some rationale.

He doesn’t.

LaRochelle folds his arms. “It’s possible, I guess,” he says. “Him being on the loose. But to me that seems less likely than other explanations,” says LaRochelle.

The investigator nods, though his expression signifies that he is not completely satisfied.

“Could he have been the unknown person in the woods? The one who led the Jewell girl toward the house?”

LaRochelle frowns. “Now let’s think about that,” he says. “Convicted sexual offender and murderer sees a girl, alone and lost, in the woods. Is he going to lead her to safety? Or is he going to seize upon the opportunity to do what he’s done in the past?”

The old investigator says nothing. The two men regard each other, as if sending silent messages to one another that the rest of the room can’t read.

“I’m not saying it’s out of the question,” says LaRochelle. “I’m just saying —when you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for a zebra.”

Judyta

t’s almost six o’clock at the end of their first day on the Preserve. To Judy,I this math doesn’t compute. She feels as if she’s been there for a year.

Hayes is driving north to BCI headquarters at Ray Brook. After that, she’ll start the long drive to Schenectady. The thought makes her want to cry.

“Tired?” says Hayes.

“A little.”

“Get ready,” says Hayes. “Case like this, you’ll be working around the clock.”

He rolls down the window. Shakes a pack of cigarettes in his hand,

offering one to Judy, who declines.

“Don’t smoke?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” says Hayes. “My old man died from it, I think. He didn’t call it cancer, but he sure died coughing.”

He pulls from it. Blows a plume of smoke sideways out the open window.

“I only smoke in the car. That’s my compromise with myself.”

Judy gives a weak laugh. Just enough to demonstrate that she’s been listening.

“Can I ask you something?” says Hayes, and Judy tenses, expecting something personal. It will be a very long time before Judy feels at ease

enough around her colleagues to divulge anything at all about her family or her history. But when Hayes continues, it’s benign: “Why’d you get into police work?”

She considers her options. I wanted to help people sounds trite. I thought it sounded interesting—too vague.

At last, surprising herself, she tells the truth.

“The Mod Squad,” says Judy.

“The—” says Hayes, as if he hasn’t heard.

“The Mod Squad,” says Judy. “It was my favorite show.”

Hayes starts laughing. Keeps laughing until he coughs, flicks his cigarette out the window. “I’ll be damned,” he says. “First time I ever heard that one.”

Judy grins.

“The Mod Squad,” says Hayes, laughing and laughing until at last easy silence descends on the car.

Which is when the radio crackles to life.

• • •

John Paul McLellan, in his blue Trans Am, has been spotted and detained.

He’s on the side of the thruway, ten miles south.

Denny Hayes glances at her. Glances at his watch. “Six o’clock,” he says.

“We’re off. We could go home.”

He looks at her. “Do you want to?”

Judy shakes her head.

Hayes radios back, pops his magnetic light onto the roof, careens over the grassy median, and reverses direction.

• • •

When they arrive, the state trooper who pulled him over has John Paul McLellan handcuffed. He’s sitting on the grass near his car. He’s been punched. Several times, from the look of his swollen lips, his black eye.

The trooper fills them in: McLellan is obviously drunk, he says. In fact, that was the first thing he noticed. He would have pulled him over anyway, even without the BOLO. He failed his field sobriety test resoundingly.

“He’s all yours,” says the trooper.

• • •

“I’ve been at a restaurant,” says McLellan, from the ground.

Presumably, “restaurant” means bar. The smell of the liquor on his breath is evident from several feet away. As is the smell of marijuana.

Hayes opens the passenger door. Begins a search.

“You can’t do that,” says McLellan. “I haven’t authorized a search.”

“Unfortunately for you,” says Hayes—voice strained and muffled as he bends low into the car—“by virtue of the fact that the scent of an illegal substance is discernible from within your vehicle, I do have the right to search it.”

In quick succession, Hayes finds a roach clip, two crushed cans of Genesee, and what appears to be residue from cocaine on the center console.

And he hasn’t even gotten to the trunk.

Based on this evidence, along with McLellan’s clear intoxication, he has placed McLellan under arrest.

Judy, meanwhile, takes his license and registration back to the unmarked car, and radios both over to Ray Brook.

From the driver’s seat, while waiting for the operator to come through, she watches McLellan steadily. He’s sniffing, his mouth and face moving in strange ways. At first she attributes this to the coke; she’s never done it herself, but she saw people in high school do it, boys mainly, other jocks. But as McLellan turns his face upward, toward the sun, she realizes he is crying.

Hayes has moved to the trunk now. He’s opening it.

Hayes’s back is to her. With gloved hands, he’s removing an improbable number of objects from the small trunk, placing each one carefully on the ground. Golf club. Golf club. Duffel bag. Satchel. Book. Shoe. Book. Shoe.

Last, Hayes removes a paper bag.

McLellan isn’t looking up, Judy sees. He’s staring hard at the ground.

The color of the bag, which Hayes is handling carefully, looks strange. Not like most paper bags Judy has seen before.

And then she realizes: the bottom of it is darker than it should be.

Judy, keeping a close eye on McLellan to ensure he’s still sitting, gets out of the car and walks toward Hayes, who’s now squatting on the ground, looking inside the bag. As she approaches, he begins lifting each object out in turn, using two gloved fingers to do so.

Underwear, shorts, a T-shirt. Small, white, blue.

It’s a uniform. Covered, by the looks of it, in blood.

Judy looks at McLellan. His head is still lowered.

She looks at Denny Hayes, who’s saying something Judy can’t hear. Shit.

Shit.

His face looks drained of color. For all his bravado, he seems unprepared for this. He’s a father, Judy remembers: all other things aside, he has his own children.

• • •

All three of them are silent on the ride to the station, until Denny talks.

“Did you kill her?” he says, and the noise of the question is like a gun going off. Judy can hear the air moving around the car in its wake.

She glances at McLellan in the rearview. He’s looking out the window, his expression inscrutable. For a time, she thinks he won’t speak at all—until he does.

“I invoke my right against self-incrimination,” he says.

Spoken, she thinks, like the son of a lawyer.

• • •

At Ray Brook, they process him quickly and put him in a holding cell. He’s given one phone call. Judy has no doubt who’ll be on the other end.

Sure enough: from his mouth comes a quavering “Dad?”

And then the hand goes up, over the brow, hiding what Judy knows will be self-pitying tears.

Nothing he says is surprising: he got in trouble, he needs help. He needs his father to come to him.

Hayes enters the room. Says, “Judy, go home.”

It’s eight o’clock now. She won’t reach Schenectady until after ten.

Louise

t’s nearly midnight. Louise has been in a holding cell for ten hours. She’sI been given water, but nothing to eat.

She feels light-headed, ill. She wishes for outside air.

She eyes a cup of now-cold coffee—which she normally doesn’t drink— and takes a sip.

Finally there is a brusque knock at the door. Someone opens it without waiting for a response.

It’s a man, fifty, wearing thick glasses and a sweater vest over his brown tie. He looks like an English professor, thinks Louise. He’s carrying a Coke in his hand. The only sign that he works in law enforcement comes in the form of a badge. He sits down opposite Louise, crosses one leg over the other.

She braces herself. She will simply tell him the truth, she’s decided: she was out overnight last night. But so was Annabel. The drugs in the bag are Annabel’s, not hers.

The man does not introduce himself, but takes a sip of his Coke and begins.

Something about his aspect and outfit makes her expect kindness from him, but his tone is stern.

“What’s your relation to John Paul McLellan?” he says. He looks directly at her. He has no notepad in which to record her answers.

The question throws her off: this wasn’t what she was expecting to discuss.

“I’m his fiancée,” says Louise, automatically. “We’re engaged. We’ve

been together four years.”

“Huh,” says the man.

She waits, guarded, for more. Willing herself into silence.

“That’s not what he said about you,” the man says.

Louise moves a little in her chair. Don’t ask, she tells herself; Louise,

don’t ask. But she can’t help herself.

“What do you mean?”

The man excavates a speck of dirt from beneath a thumbnail. He sniffs, and his thick-rimmed glasses slide slightly down his nose.

“He said you two used to sleep together,” the man says. “You know, a while ago. It’s over now, he says, but you’re still hung up on him.”

“That’s horseshit,” says Louise, without thinking.

“Where’s your ring?”

Louise flushes. This has always been a point of contention between her and John Paul. He says he wants to get her a nice one, something beautiful— and that he can’t until he has a real job.

“I’m not wearing it today,” says Louise. “I don’t wear it at camp. It’s too nice.”

“Look, I don’t know what’s true,” says the man. “That’s just what he said.

Just telling you.”

Louise looks at him sideways. “What’s your name,” she says.

The investigator blinks.

“You know mine,” she says. “What’s yours?”

“Lowry.”

“I’m not supposed to be talking to you, Lowry,” she says.

“Who gave you that advice?”

Silent, Louise reminds herself. Say nothing.

For a minute, the two of them sit without speaking. The man leans back in his chair, hands behind his head. Comfortable. He looks up and out the one high window in the room.

The professorial attire, thinks Louise, is a ruse. A trick designed to disarm suspects. This man is like every other cop she’s ever met.

Suddenly Louise’s stomach grumbles so loudly that the sound fills the room.

“Hungry,” says the man. A statement, not a question.

He stands, walks into the other room. Returns with an apple and a little knife. He pares the apple from its skin, and then slices it, and then hands her pieces one at a time, which she doesn’t decline.

“Why are you asking me about John Paul?” she says, after the apple is

nearly gone.

“You can’t figure it out?”

Louise says nothing.

“You know why you’re here, right?” the man says. Trying again. But again, Louise says nothing.

“You’re being held right now for a minor crime. We’re getting a bail hearing scheduled as we speak. That’ll happen tomorrow, probably, at the earliest. But you’re here for another reason, too.”

Silence. She waits. The man watches her, measured. She does not like his expression: he believes her to be impressionable, credulous, a local who never left home. If he only knew, she thinks; if he only knew the restaurants she’s gone to with John Paul, the movies she’s seen. The books she’s read, on John Paul’s recommendation and on account of her own curiosity. I’m different from what you think, she wants to tell him. But Denny’s warning— don’t talk without a lawyer—remains at the front of her mind.

The man leans forward.

“We know,” he says, “that you know what happened to Barbara Van

Laar.”

It catches her off guard.

“I don’t,” says Louise, before she can stop herself. But for some reason, even to her, the words sound false: high-pitched, a note of complaint in their

intonation.

“That’s different too,” says the man.

“Than what?”

“Than what your boyfriend said.”

Alice

his, thought Alice, was what Self-Reliance had been built for. At ten inT the morning, she stood in the center of the great room and turned in a slow circle as, all around her, the house was resurrected. They had not held a party—the Blackfly Good-by, or any other—since Bear’s disappearance. But the house’s one hundredth anniversary seemed to Peter to be an auspicious occasion to restart the tradition. “Good for business,” he said. He had several potential clients he wanted to invite.

The obstacle was the amount of work that had to be done. Most of Self- Reliance’s bedrooms had been closed for longer than Barbara had been alive.

Now they were being unsealed, the dust coverings pulled from the furniture, the windows opened. Cut flowers were driven up from the florist they used in Albany. Wildflowers, at Peter’s command: bunches of wood sorrel and dewdrops and jack-in-the-pulpits, in vases all over the house, on nightstands in every bedroom. Peter had had the sofa and chairs in the great room reupholstered, and had bought new furniture, too: three dozen Adirondack chairs, locally made, now stood at attention in a neat semicircle on the lawn leading down to Lake Joan. The old ones, splintered and ancient, had been scrapped for firewood by someone on staff.

• • •

It wasn’t only the house that had been remade. For the past weeks, ever since Barbara’s departure for camp, Alice had been attending to herself, her physical person, for the first time in years. It was a welcome turn. This party and its planning had reignited some fundamental part of herself, her character. Certainly she had never let herself go, not all the way—but she had also not been quite as careful with her clothing, her skin, her nails. She used to wear her hair in a sort of voluminous bob that ended at the nape of her neck. Very chic, she had always been told. But after Bear’s disappearance she had stopped going to her normal hairdresser, not wanting to answer questions again and again. Her hair had grown long, shamefully so. To hide its length, she pinned it into a low twist.

A week after Barbara’s departure for Camp Emerson, she had asked one of the staff to drive her down to Albany for a hair appointment. She returned with her hair in a long straight sheet down her back, freshly dyed to conceal the gray at her temples. In her hand was a bag from Whitney’s, and inside it were seven new outfits, including two miniskirts and a bikini. The salesgirl, impossibly young, had egged her on: “You’ve got the figure, after all,” she said.

• • •

Now it was Saturday morning—the day the party was set to begin—and Alice stood before her closet, deciding which new outfit to choose.

“Mrs. Van Laar,” someone said.

She turned. It was a young man she did not, at first, recognize. One of the temporary staff Peter had hired, she guessed. He was wearing a uniform,

anyway.

“What is it?”

“Someone’s at the front door,” the boy said.

“A guest?” Alice asked—horrified. Surely not yet, she thought. It was only eleven in the morning. The guests were not due until late afternoon.

“I’m not sure,” said the boy. “It’s a couple. They’re—” he hedged.

And just then, Alice heard her mother’s voice, familiar and terrifying at once, impatient and out of sorts.

Alice blinked, frozen. She was in no way ready for their arrival.

“Thank you,” she said to the boy, who retreated. And then, with reluctance, Alice pulled from her closet a mock turtleneck and a corduroy miniskirt, and put them both on.

• • •

“Good heavens, Alice,” said her mother, in the great room. She took Alice in with a sweep of her eyes, from top to bottom: her flat-ironed hair, her short skirt, her bare legs and feet. And then she pronounced: “You’re gaunt.”

It was and was not an insult.

“Mother,” said Alice. “You’re early.”

“Well, I thought you’d need the help,” said her mother, casting her gaze around the room, her implication clear.

At times, Alice was impressed by the creativity of her mother’s criticisms, the poetry of the language she used to describe all that she found lacking in the world around her. A different sort of daughter would have distanced herself from her mother long ago, or at least made the decision to laugh about it all. But at more than forty years old, Alice still—embarrassingly, she realized—strove to successfully anticipate and ward off the complaints that emanated from her, a deluge of observations designed to sound neutral, each more cutting than the last.

“You go off and get ready,” said Mrs. Ward. “I’ll direct the others.”

Alice froze. Ordered herself to say it: I am ready.

“Thank you, Mother,” she said instead. She avoided meeting her father’s gaze. If she did, she might have cried, for she knew he would be looking at her with something like pity. Why did she let it all bother her? At this point in life? Peter had been telling her for years—well, never mind what he said. He was part of the problem.

Alice retreated down the hallway, self-conscious now about her body, her bare legs. She could feel her mother’s gaze, still, burning into her.

• • •

In the bedroom, she opened her closet door and stood there for too long, staring at but not processing the visual field before her. Colors were there, and textures, and garments of various lengths.

And then, above the clothing rack, another swath of fabric drew her attention, and she reached for it.

During Alice’s time away—the only term that was ever used to describe her stay at the Dunwitty Institute—Dr. Lewis had urged the rest of the Van Laars to remove all hints of Bear from their Albany house and from Self- Reliance, too. And so his two rooms had been stripped to the studs. The walls —once covered, to Bear’s delight, in wallpaper designed to look like maps of the world—had been painted white. His clothing, gone. His toys and books.

This, Dr. Lewis said, was the way to let Alice heal; and in the Van Laar household, the advice of Dr. Lewis—a friend of Peter II’s from his Yale days —was taken.

But there was one possession of Bear’s that they had not seen.

When Bear was born, someone had given her a blanket for him, blue with a silk ribbon trim in a moon-and-star pattern. As he grew, he was rarely without it. But when, at four, he was still trailing it about the house, Peter had issued a command that it be taken from him. And Alice had complied, had kept it hidden from him here on this shelf of her closet, though the boy had wept pitifully for it each bedtime for a week.

When Alice returned from her time away to find all of Bear’s artifacts removed from the house, she had known enough to mask her dismay. (She would rather be there, in a Bear-less home, than in that other place again.) As soon as she was unmonitored, she had retired to her room and thrown open the door to the closet. And there it was: the blanket she had hidden from him so long ago.

Now, Alice held the blanket to her face, trailed over her cheek its frayed edges, which Bear had a habit of tapping lightly with his fingers.

She wouldn’t change her outfit, she decided. She would say nothing to her mother. She simply wouldn’t change.

• • •

She draped the blanket over her face. She lay on her bed like that for a time.

She had had none of Dr. Lewis’s pills since her trip to Albany. She had been distracted by preparations for the festivities. Something to do for once, thought Alice. It had not occurred to her, during all of that planning, to have a very bad day.

Someplace else in the house, she heard her mother issuing commands.

There, she was saying. There. No. Yes. No.

Mechanically, Alice’s right hand went to her bedside table, and pulled open its drawer, and she felt the comforting curve of the bottle inside, and heard the comforting rattle of the pills, and into her mouth she took one of them, and then two of them, and then three, and then four. She bit down on them and chewed. Then she put Bear’s blanket back over her face. A shroud, she thought, a pall, and then laughed a bit to herself.

• • •

When she opened her eyes, she heard voices on the lawn. Many of them. She tried to sit up but could not. There was darkness above and around her. As a child, she had avoided naps: for waking from them caused in her a sort of supernatural despair. Bear, too, had been like this: the only time he was bleary was after his afternoon rest.

She felt it now. Despite the heat of the afternoon, she pulled the covers

around herself.

After a minute, or an hour, she rose.

Then the nightstand, then the drawer, then the pills. Two more. Three.

She walked with a hand on the wall. She felt her way down the hallway and into the kitchen, where she fumbled in the cabinet for a glass, and then ran water from the sink. It came from a well, and tasted sweetly of the earth.

A small trickle of liquid escaped the side of her mouth, and she ran a hand below her chin to catch it. And then she noticed movement: in her peripheral

vision, a hesitant human form. She turned. The new cook. The girl from

town. The nameless one.

“What,” said Alice.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, ma’am,” said Alice, but the girl only blinked at her.

The cabinets. The wall. The two steps up into the great room. Careful, careful. The back of the sofa. The side of the central fireplace, pleasingly rough.

She stopped short at the glass door that led to the lawn. There before her were her guests—hers too, she thought—not just Peter’s.

Now they had begun without her. No one had thought to rouse her—not even her own husband. Outside, in the sun, all of them were tipping their glasses back, tipping their heads back in merriment.

She scanned the crowd for Peter and spotted him speaking with the McLellans: husband, wife, daughter, son, each one, thought Alice, terrible in a different way.

She moved as if to place a hand on the sliding glass door, but found it was open instead. And so she tipped forward through it, which caused a woman ten feet in front of her to shriek her name gladly—“Alice!”—and then pause.

The crowd, having heard this greeting, turned—and then hushed.

Alice was realizing something: there were too many pills inside her. After a week of not taking any, especially. After a day of not eating. She put a hand to her hair and found it out of order, great strands of it hanging down in front of her ears. She put a hand to her outfit, her short skirt, and found it up too high around her waist.

Her eyes swam toward Peter’s. He was too far from her. He was saying something to the McLellans, something about her: she could see him moving his mouth. The McLellan boy, John Paul Jr., had become a man. He’d take over the business, it was said, and she could see it: he already had the air that all these men had. The feeling he was owed something. Everything.

• • •

Through the haze of her intoxication, she had a sense of déjà vu: a feeling of living a particular series of scenes for the second time in her life.

She put a hand to her face to make certain she was intact.

Then she retreated.

Back into the house, into its shade, back down the hallway toward Bear’s room, unstoppably, where she lay on the bed that was no longer her son’s, where she curled into another tight arrangement of bones and flesh, where, several hours later, two guests would find her deeply asleep.

Outside, she heard again the voices of her guests, rising slowly into mirth

once more.

The party would go on without her.

Louise

ouise feels ill.L “I don’t believe you,” she says, over and over.

“That’s up to you,” says the detective. Lowry. She has the feeling she has already said things to him that she shouldn’t have said. But if there’s one thing that sets her off, it’s being lied on. All her life, people have been telling lies about her. Today it’s happened twice already: first Annabel, now this.

Her face is hot with fury, with the injustice of it all. She’s rankled. She can’t shut up.

“You’re lying,” she says, her heart racing.

“Nope,” says Lowry, with a sort of calm assurance that makes her want to

reach across the table and—

“When did it start?” says Lowry.

“Fuck you,” says Louise.

“All right,” says Lowry. “You can sit a while longer. I got no other place to be.”

• • •

John Paul, said Lowry, has been found with a bag of Barbara’s clothing.

Bloody, he added—holding Louise’s gaze as he said the word.

He had no idea what was in the bag, said the detective.

But he said Louise had asked him to get rid of it for her.

“You know what that reminds me of?” said the detective. “The other bag you asked someone to get rid of for you, earlier today.”

• • •

Now, Louise looks back at him steadily, her face flushed with anger. She tries and fails to keep her voice level.

“Listen to me,” she says. “I had nothing to do with either one of those bags. I knew about Annabel’s. But that was her stuff in it. Not mine.”

Lowry assesses her.

“I get it,” he says. “Barbara looked a lot older than thirteen.”

Louise’s stomach turns. She used to hear this sentiment expressed a lot: about herself.

“No she does not,” she says. Careful to use the present tense, to dodge what she assumes is the grammatical trap the detective has laid for her. “She looks like a thirteen-year-old who wears black eyeliner. She looks like a kid.”

Lowry nods. “I guess I could see that too,” he says. “That makes sense,

actually.”

She doesn’t take the bait.

He tries again. “How long have you known Lee Towson?”

She’s silent. She pictures Lee in his apron, grinning at her from the commissary kitchen. Wonders where he is right now.

“It was his idea, right?” says Lowry. “He asked you to bring her to him?”

The absurdity of the accusation riles her, but she understands, in a new way, that Denny Hayes was correct when he told her to ask for a lawyer. That nothing she says now will serve her.

“What do you have me here for,” says Louise, finally. Her hunger has

become nausea.

Lowry looks at her, surprised.

“You can’t keep me here, can you?” says Louise. “Can’t I leave?”

“Nope,” says Lowry, shaking his head. “Technically, you’re being charged with possession of a controlled substance,” he says.

“That’s a lie too,” says Louise.

“Well, we don’t know that yet. All we know is that’s the charge that’s been laid on you. So until bail is set for that charge and you pay it, you’re with us.”

“But that’s not really why you’re keeping me here,” says Louise. “You

already told me that.”

Lowry smiles. “Did I?” he says.

Louise says nothing.

“Louise,” says Lowry. “If you’re done talking to us, that’s fine. That’s your right. But hear me out. I’m gonna tell you something that I think might help you.”

He pauses, sips his Coke. From the inner pocket of his jacket he produces a plastic-wrapped oatmeal raisin cookie, softened in the heat, which he slowly removes from its packaging, dips into his coffee, and begins to eat.

“Maximum sentence for possession of a controlled substance is five years,” he says, chewing.

Louise blanches. In five years, her brother Jesse will be sixteen. Practically grown. In five years, it will be too late.

“But if you have information on the whereabouts of Barbara Van Laar— anything that will help us—we’ll be in a better position to help you too.”

Louise is looking at the table. If she looks up, she’s afraid the tears she’s been fighting off will be loosed. She’d rather be dead or jailed than let this man see her cry.

“Anyway, I can put a call in now,” says Lowry. “See about setting a bail

hearing. But.”

He checks his wristwatch theatrically.

“It’s late in the day now. Magistrate might not be available till tomorrow.”

He walks out of the room.

• • •

Louise is alone.

For a time, she’s quiet, letting this disaster descend onto her shoulders. Her first emotion is horror: that John Paul could have done something as evil as this. Her second is fear. That they’ll believe him over her.

One thing that’s true: he’s always had a mean, vindictive streak. She has seen this side of him, mainly with others, mainly with other boys at parties, when all of them were drunk and high.

Only once has he ever turned that side on her.

Louise

t was her second winter at Garnet Hill Lodge. It was a Monday, a slow dayI anyway, and terrifically cold, which frightened off so many reservations that Louise’s boss let her off early. So Louise, bored and lonely, took the opportunity to borrow a staff car and drive down to Union College.

John Paul lived that year in a group house with several other boys—one of whom opened the door at the sound of Louise’s knock.

“John Paul’s out,” he said, after taking a few beats to register her face.

“Oh,” said Louise. From behind the boy, she heard the noise of what sounded like a party. A low droning note was sounding over and over—a record skipping. A girl laughed merrily. The record was fixed. A boy roared.

She recognized the roar.

“Steven,” she said. “I think he’s home.”

• • •

Inside, a dozen people stood or sat in small groups while Zeppelin played in the background.

Most of them were girls she didn’t know. Young: freshmen, probably.

They were dressed up, wearing going-out clothes, their hair washed and blow-dried. Where are they going on such a cold night? thought Louise—and then realized that this house was their destination, its residents their motive

for taking such care with their appearance. Louise, in her parka and hat, felt like a friendly snowman.

Across the room, John Paul swayed slightly, a sort of drunk that made Louise’s chest tighten. He had a beer in one hand and wore no shirt, despite the cold. The skin of his shoulders and chest was flushed pink. He had a beautiful thin build and a nice head of hair and very white teeth, and normally Louise thought him handsome. But the quickest way to make an attractive man ugly was to give him too much to drink. Drunk men frightened her. She had learned young how to coddle them, how to laugh just enough at their bad jokes to prevent them from feeling insulted, but not so much that her laughter egged them on. Coiled just below a surface of good humor lay their strength and their meanness, two guns waiting to go off.

“Louiiiiiiise,” said John Paul, when he spotted her. He lurched across the room, put his arms around her shoulders, leaned so heavily on her that the

two of them almost toppled.

“Who are these people?” she whispered.

“New friends,” he said. Slurring. “You’ll like ’em. C’mon.”

But still there was no introduction, and so for a long time Louise sat on a sofa with no drink in her hand, wearing a polo shirt with a Garnet Hill Lodge insignia, her goddamn work-issued uniform, and watched as the people around her grew drunker, as the music got louder, as the atmosphere of potential sex got thicker and more obvious.

The girls reminded her of something, or someone, many someones, and with a jolt she realized finally that it was her campers at Camp Emerson. Not just in their richness and carriage, but also in their youth; the youngest looked sixteen or seventeen years old. Two of them began dancing with one another in a wobbly slither, and she watched John Paul watching them, and it was at that point that she took herself up to his bedroom, without saying goodnight.

She rarely smoked cigarettes, but she saw John Paul’s on the bedside table and a silver lighter beside the pack, JPM monographed on its side, and she lit one and smoked it. She liked the warmth of it in her lungs.

She put the lighter into her pocket. She wanted to take something of his.

She put out the cigarette and lay there for a long time. There was a window next to the bed, and she looked out and saw that the moon was almost full. From below she heard the music quiet, change to something calm. She didn’t know what time it was.

• • •

Louise woke up to the sound of the door slamming open. She sat straight up, clutching her heart. There was John Paul, a shadow in the doorway.

Downstairs, people were still talking.

“Where’d you go,” he said. His voice was low. She couldn’t tell if he was more sober or more drunk than he’d been when she left.

“To bed,” she said.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m dumb,” he said—one of his go-to phrases in any fight. He wasn’t dumb. He needed everyone to know this. “Why didn’t you say you were going?”

Louise felt her anger rise up in her throat. Normally she thought carefully about everything she said to John Paul before she said it, but tonight she dropped her guard.

“Didn’t want to get in your way,” she said.

“What did you say?”

“Thought you’d have more fun without me.”

John Paul closed the door behind him, throwing the room back into darkness. Suddenly she couldn’t see him. Something in Louise woke up enough to be scared.

“John Paul,” she said, and then his hands were on her, feeling for her roughly, pulling her up out of the bed by her clothing.

“Who’d you fuck,” he said. His voice was too loud. She cringed. The voices downstairs stopped—they were listening.

“Shhhh,” she said—remembering too late that being shushed was one of John Paul’s triggers, that telling him to lower his voice was worse than slapping him in the face. He had told her this in these words.

“Don’t shush me,” he said. He shouted. “I asked you a question. Who.

Did. You. Fuck.”

A tiny giggle from downstairs.

“No one, no one,” whispered Louise, urgently. John Paul’s grip on her collar was tightening.

“You sure?” he said. “Because I know you’ve got that in you. I’ve seen it.”

Once, thought Louise. One time. The first week they were together. Her second month at Union. So drunk that she barely remembered. So drunk that it wasn’t right.

“John Paul,” Louise said. “I went to bed. I was tired.”

He held her there a few more seconds, breathing into her face. Then, slowly, he loosened his grip. He let his arms drop and took one stumbling step backward.

Louise’s eyes were adjusting. John Paul’s glasses glinted in the streetlight coming in from outside. He put his hands on his waist, hung his head briefly.

Then he pushed past her and collapsed into his bed, diagonally, taking up too much space. There was no room for her.

Louise looked at him. She didn’t want to wake him. Didn’t want to raise his ire a second time. She could sleep on the floor. Or she could go back out into the cold, get into her staff car, hope it started, hope a gas station was open at that time of night. She could make the drive back to the Garnet Hill Lodge. She could leave him behind forever.

A small flame of rage was burning in her belly.

“I hope you die,” she said to John Paul, before she could stop herself.

• • •

He was on her. His left hand grabbed her shirt. His right hand punched her, twice, while she flailed with her arms, trying to protect her face. She kicked at him. She fell to the ground. Curled into a ball there, protecting her head, trying to protect her stomach. He kicked her once, hard, in the back.

Don’t cry out, she told herself. Don’t cry.

It was a sick instinct, one designed to sacrifice her body in the service of her pride. She could not bear the thought of those girls downstairs, in their

going-out clothes, hearing her beaten.

John Paul, above her, was panting.

“Say it again,” he said.

She was silent.

She waited just long enough. In her mind, she went through a checklist: her car keys were on the table just inside the front door. Her purse was on the floor next to the bed, but she’d leave it. It was too hard to find in the dark.

“Say I hope you die, John Paul,” said John Paul. “Say it.”

She let a few more moments of silence go by and then tackled him around the knees with all her strength. She was smaller than he was but she had the dual advantages of sobriety and gravity. She tackled him and he hit the ground, hard, and she jumped up—the pain in her face and her back unabating—and ran down the stairs. As she grabbed the keys on the table she heard him thundering after her, down the stairs.

She sensed faces watching her from the living room. She did not turn. She flung open the front door and almost died slipping on the icy stairs, but she righted herself. She got into the staff car and tried to start it, once, twice, three times. It was very bad at starting in the cold.

John Paul came out of the house and launched himself down the stairs and it was the ice that saved her. Unlike Louise, he went down, hard, and stayed there. That’s when the car started; that’s when she backed out fast into the dark and empty street and then threw the car into first, second, third, fourth.

• • •

Her heart was still pounding. The gas gauge was at a quarter tank, maybe a little less. It would not be enough to get her back to the Garnet Hill Lodge; this much she knew. And her purse was back beside John Paul’s bed.

Both eyes were swelling, but the left one was worse. She rolled down her window and broke free from the top of the side mirror a small piece of the ice that had formed there. She held it against one eye, then the other.

She had an eighth of a tank as she approached the exit for Shattuck. The Garnet Hill Lodge was another half hour up the thruway from there, and forty-five minutes of local roads after that. She could go home, could sneak into her house and sneak out again in the early morning and hope that Jesse and her mother would not see her and her mangled face. But if they did, she

thought: if Jesse did.

She took the exit. She had no choice.

And then, waiting at the light at the bottom of the off-ramp, she had an idea.

• • •

She’d never been to the Van Laar Preserve in winter. She had no idea how plowed it would be. In the Adirondacks, snow accumulated fast and rarely melted, so that by March you could find yourself hip-deep in places that weren’t plowed by private service. But the family spent Christmas there, she had heard, and there had been no big snowfall since then.

Sure enough, when she arrived at two in the morning, the entrance was clear. At the end of the driveway, the huge dark house sat dormant. She cut her headlights, waited until her eyes adjusted. No sign of anyone on the grounds. The moon was bright that night and the snow reflected it broadly. It was easy to see, even at that hour. She got out of the car.

• • •

She could not feel her feet by the time she entered Balsam.

She felt, just inside the door, for the flashlight that sat on a ledge there all summer, and was glad when her fingers touched it.

On her way past the commissary, she’d taken from the woodpile on its porch as many split logs as she could carry, as much kindling. Now she moved to the disused fireplace along one of Balsam’s walls—one of the few remainders of its history as a hunting cabin.

She shone the flashlight up into the flue, which looked clean enough; and so she built a roaring fire, using the lighter she had stolen from John Paul, praying that the kindling would catch.

She dragged one of the cots as close to the fire as she could get without singeing herself. She took off her boots, her sodden socks, and placed them in front of it, and then put her feet there too, allowing them to roast. She lifted another thin and floppy mattress off another cot and put it on top of herself.

She fell asleep there.

• • •

For the second time that night, she was roused from sleep.

“Get up,” said a voice.

Louise was disoriented. In the warmth of the fire, her eyes had swollen closed almost completely, and she could make out only a figure holding one object in each hand. One of them looked pistol-shaped; an outstretched arm was raising it in her direction.

“Get up,” said the voice, a second time.

The pain in her back and ribs made Louise move slowly, but at last she

stood.

The figure lowered its arm.

“Louise Donnadieu?” it said, after a pause.

Then, with the object in its other hand—a fire extinguisher, it turned out— it leveled a spray of foam at the flames for what felt like a very long time, until cold and dark had seeped back into the cabin, and Louise began shivering again.

At some point during that minute spent in silence, Louise understood that this was T.J. Hewitt.

“Thought you’d be smarter than to put a fire up a chimney this old,” said T.J. “Could have burned the cabin down.”

“I didn’t know you lived here all year,” said Louise.

“Where else would I live?” said T.J.

“I guess I thought you lived in town,” she said.

“What town would that be?”

Louise was silent. Shame was beginning to creep in, and regret. Already, this was her favorite of all the jobs she’d ever had, and now she’d surely lose

it.

“Who did that to your face,” said T.J.

Louise said nothing. She stood up, turned to face her boss, barely visible

now in the absence of the fire.

“Do you have any gasoline?” she said.

• • •

In the Director’s Cabin—T.J.’s actual house, Louise now understood—T.J. lit a proper fire. Its light and shadows flickered against the walls around it. T.J. had applied a cold steak to half her face, saying it would help the swelling.

With her other eye, the open one, Louise now saw the cabin’s history: the books on the bookshelves, novels and how-to guides; the pictures on the wood-paneled walls, fading prints of bears and birds and tranquil mornings on still lakes. On one wall, a map of the entire Adirondack Park. On another, a poster of animal tracks.

T.J. went to the small kitchen off the main room and stood before the stove, stirring a pot. Louise watched the back of her. She had a long braid that year that hung straight down her back. The rest of her was barely wider than the braid, but she was strong: no doubt about that. The muscles of her legs and arms were sharply on view all summer, above her socks, below her T-shirt sleeves. Louise had seen her casually carrying a long wooden canoe above her head: a feat of strength that would have been difficult even for a man.

She did have gasoline, T.J. had said; but it was way up past the main house, and frankly she was tired. She’d give Louise a place to sleep that night. They’d fix the car in the morning.

Now she returned holding a bowl of soup in one hand and a glass of water in the other. She placed both on a low table in front of Louise. Reached for

the steak on Louise’s face. She held it absent-mindedly in two hands, the juice of it dripping, and regarded Louise as she began to eat and drink.

“What,” said Louise, who didn’t ever like to be looked at closely, and certainly not with her face in this state.

“Just thinking about whether you need to see a doctor.”

“I don’t,” said Louise.

“Are your insides busted up? Did he kick you?”

Louise paused, recognizing the trap. She could dodge it. Did who kick me?

But, certain that she was out of a job anyway, that she’d never see T.J. again after this, she nodded.

“He did,” she said. “But I don’t think anything’s busted inside me. My face hurts worse.”

T.J. nodded. Returned to the kitchen to put the steak away. She approved of honesty, Louise knew. It was one of the subjects on which she expounded each summer, at the start of session: Honesty. Integrity. Vigilance.

“Was it your boyfriend?” T.J. called over her shoulder.

“It was,” said Louise.

“Want me to kill him?” said T.J., and Louise grinned, and then flinched in pain.

Abruptly, T.J. walked down the hallway, and Louise wondered whether she was going to bed. But a moment later she returned, holding something out to her. A large photograph, unframed.

Louise had to hold her eye open with two fingers to inspect it. It was a photo of a group of people, standing on the lake side of Self-Reliance, organized in three rows. In the front row, sitting, were children of various ages; behind them were adults. Their expressions were joyful. The photographer had captured them in various stages of talking and laughing and turning. Only some of them were grinning at the camera.

Louise turned the photograph over. On the back, written in black ink:

Blackfly Good-by. 1961.

She looked up at T.J., uncertain.

T.J. sat down next to her on the couch. Regarded the photo alongside her.

She pointed to a tall slim girl, twelve or thirteen, standing at the edge of the

second row.

“That’s me,” said T.J. “I was about the age your campers are now.”

She pointed to the tall man next to her, who had a hand on her shoulder.

“That’s my dad,” she said.

“He looks nice,” said Louise.

“Nice isn’t the right word,” said T.J. “But he’s good.”

Then she moved her finger down on the photograph, to a boy of ten or so, sitting cross-legged on the ground in the front row. He was blond, and grinning impishly, one shoulder angled lower than the other.

“Recognize him?” she said.

Louise did, vaguely, but she didn’t know why.

“That’s your boyfriend,” said T.J.

Louise inclined her head. Spread open the swollen eyelid. Her eye was tearing now. She was trying to find an angle that would let her see more clearly.

Sure enough: that was John Paul. She’d seen a picture of him at that age, on the desk of his room at Union College. In the picture he’d been standing with another boy. She had only asked him about it once, and he’d brushed it off. “An old friend,” he’d said.

“John Paul McLellan,” said T.J. now. Pondering something, it sounded like. Remembering something—unpleasant.

“How did you know he was my boyfriend?” Louise asked.

“How do you think you got this job?” T.J. said.

That quieted her for a bit. She didn’t like to think of herself as someone with connections. Everything she’d ever gotten, she’d earned for herself— until she met John Paul.

“I always hated him,” said T.J. “Wasn’t my choice to hire you. It was the family’s.”

Then she stood up abruptly and walked again down the hallway. Only this time she did not return.

• • •

Louise set the picture on the low table in front of her. Thought for a bit.

A moment later she picked it up again.

1961, said the writing on the back: that would have been the year the Van Laars’ son went missing.

She inspected the picture more carefully. There were twelve people in the back row; fourteen in the middle row, including T.J. and her father standing off to one side; and ten in the front row of children seated on the ground. On one side of John Paul was a girl who was most likely his sister, Marnie, a frown on her face, annoyed by something—the same expression she’d worn when Louise came to dinner.

But on the other side of John Paul was something more interesting: a little boy was there, just a bit younger than John Paul. Eight or so. He was smiling broadly, had both arms in the air. A woman in the row behind him—his mother, Louise assumed—was clutching his hands and smiling down at him, her head lowered in his direction.

She recognized him, suddenly, in two separate ways.

This was the boy in the picture on John Paul’s desk. An old friend, he had said. He wouldn’t tell her more.

This was Bear Van Laar, the family’s missing son, the subject of so many whispered stories at Camp Emerson. She had never seen a picture of him.

The fire behind her cracked loudly, and she jumped.

• • •

In the morning, she woke to find the photo gone, and her host holding out the

telephone to her.

“What time is it?” Louise asked.

“Ten thirty. You slept well.”

“Shit,” said Louise. “Shit.”

She was due back at the Garnet Hill Lodge by noon. She still had the staff car—which had no gas in it.

Louise jumped up, wincing. She began feeling for her boots.

“Louise,” said T.J., calmly. “Think a minute.”

“I gotta go,” said Louise. “I gotta work.”

“What are you gonna tell them when they see your face looking like that?”

Louise paused. “I was night skiing. And I ran into a tree.”

“Well, they’re not gonna let you work like that,” said T.J. “And you shouldn’t be driving with your eye swollen shut. So you might as well call in with that excuse instead of delivering it live.”

Louise had never called out of work in her life. It was a point of pride to her. It was one of the things T.J. sensed about her, she thought; one of the reasons T.J. liked her.

“Go on,” said T.J. “I give you permission.”

They were interrupted by a sudden coughing from down the hallway: loud enough to make Louise jump.

“Oh,” said T.J. “That’s Dad. I should have told you he was here.”

“He lives with you?” said Louise. Last summer, she had learned that the former director was still living, if deposed; but she had never once spotted

him on the grounds.

“He does,” says T.J.

Louise considered. “If I stay here, and you go out,” she said, “will he need anything from me?”

“No,” said T.J. “We’ve got a pretty good system. I come back in once or twice a day to tend to him. He’s fine on his own, otherwise. Doesn’t need

much.”

Louise said nothing.

“You look scared,” said T.J., grinning. “He’s shy, but he doesn’t bite.”

• • •

Louise stayed at T.J.’s for a week. Because T.J. tended to her father only in his room—bringing him soft food on a tea tray, and then returning twenty minutes later with an empty bowl—Louise intersected with Vic Hewitt only twice: the first time, she came out of the bathroom after a shower to find T.J. emerging with her father from his room. Walking behind the old man, she

supported him carefully: arms beneath armpits, hands clasped tightly at his front.

Louise gasped, before she could stop herself, and then said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

There was something so intimate about the moment that Louise felt guilty for even seeing it. She put her head down.

“You’re all right,” said T.J., “but get out of the way so I can bring him in there.”

And Louise backed into the other bedroom, allowing them to pass.

She had barely seen his face.

The first time had been accidental; the second time was intentional. After T.J. went out one morning, Louise watched at the window until she was a hundred yards away, a dark figure in the snow. And then she went still: from down the hallway, she thought she could hear low voices coming from Vic Hewitt’s room.

She walked down the hallway, holding her breath, making each footfall lighter than the last. Mr. Hewitt’s door was closed, but not latched; she could see the tiniest crack in it, and she put her face to it, and then nudged the door open, little by little, until she could see inside.

Vic Hewitt lay on top of all the blankets, clad in corduroy pants and a sweater, his long feet bare. He was thin to the point of pain—very different from the tall, broad figure T.J. had pointed to in the black-and-white photograph from early in the last decade. He looked up at the ceiling, blinking.

The voices she had heard, Louise realized, were emanating from a large radio just to the right of his head. An announcer gave a call sign she recognized immediately: WNBZ, out of Saranac Lake. It was the only radio station that reached the town of Shattuck.

She nudged the door open an inch further, straining to hear the news, when suddenly Mr. Hewitt spoke.

“Hello,” he said to her, though he didn’t turn his head.

Louise had not thought he’d heard her.

“Hello,” she said.

“Who are you?”

“Louise,” she said.

Silence.

“Do you need anything?” Louise asked. But he said nothing more, and at last Louise retreated.

• • •

While T.J. was out each day, Louise read the books on her shelves, many of which were how-to manuals and guides, but a number of which were classics of American and British literature, the kinds of books Louise had been assigned during her only year in college. She read Walden out of sheer boredom and found herself annoyed by Thoreau: his self-regard, his tone of superiority, the way he doled out advice so obvious as to be insulting. Here was a rich person playing, thought Louise. There were poor people far more resourceful and self-sufficient than he was; they just had the grace and self- awareness not to brag about it.

“Have you read this?” she asked T.J., upon her return, and when T.J. nodded, she shared these feelings aloud.

T.J. was opening cabinets in the kitchen, reaching for pots and pans.

“Oh,” said T.J. “He wasn’t as bad as all that, was he?” But she was smiling, and Louise was convinced that she agreed.

In the evenings, they played cards—Rummy 500, mainly—almost always in silence, until Louise got comfortable and restless enough to begin asking questions about T.J.’s life. Some of these T.J. answered readily; others she dodged. Things T.J. would not talk about included: the Van Laars, the Van Laars’ children, the guests who came to visit the Van Laars. Things T.J. was happy to talk about included: the operation of Camp Emerson, her passion for hunting and fishing, building repair and maintenance, planting schedules, and —most of all—her father. About Vic Hewitt, T.J. was happy to speak at length. She regaled Louise with stories of his smarts, his skillfulness, his quiet humor.

Of all the stories she told, the ones about her father brushed closest to revelations about the Van Laars themselves, because they often involved Vic correcting or preventing some act of mismanagement of the estate itself. But she never used their names, Louise noticed; in fact, T.J. seemed to prefer to pretend that they did not exist.

Every evening, T.J. had exactly one quarter-tumbler of rye whiskey. She always offered some to Louise. The first three nights, she declined, still feeling too raw. But the fourth night, she accepted.

One thing she admired about T.J. was her moderation, when it came to drinking. Always the one small glass, and no more.

She made a note to adopt this habit of T.J.’s. In the future, when she had her own home, when and if she became a mother: if she drank at all, this is how she would drink.

The night Louise took a glass of whiskey into her hands, it loosened her tongue, and she spoke freely, veering into territory she had so far avoided.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked T.J., who laughed into her glass as she said no.

“You’re smart,” said Louise. “Don’t ever get one.”

“I won’t,” said T.J. “Promise.” With one finger, she drew a little X across her chest. Louise could tell T.J. thought she was funny—intentionally or not.

It brought out in Louise the desire to clown a little, to be egged on—a part of her that was close to extinguished. With John Paul, she always had to be the straight man.

“Where do you want to be,” said Louise, “ten years from now?”

“Are you interviewing me?” T.J. leaned back in her chair, knees wide, chin lowered, cards pointing at the floor.

“Yeah,” said Louise. And repeated the question, this time holding an invisible microphone in her hands, which she then swung in T.J.’s direction.

“Aright,” said T.J. She put her hand of cards facedown on the table. “I’d like to be up north. I’d like to be living off the land. I think I’d like to try that for a while.”

“By yourself?” said Louise, into her invisible microphone.

T.J. nodded.

“In a house? A tent? A cave?”

T.J. was laughing now. “Put your microphone away,” she said.

Louise shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t, ma’am,” she said. “My

producers won’t allow it.”

“Who are your producers?”

“Mike and—Chuck.” Louise picked up the nearly empty glass of whiskey in her unoccupied hand and finished it off. She wanted more. Something was happening in her belly that she recognized as desire. It startled her. She had never wanted a woman before, not really, but T.J. was registering to her as something different from a man or a woman, something altogether separate from those terms. She had an interesting face, high cheekbones, and full lips and a strong jaw. She had broad shoulders and a thin, tall build. How old was she? Based on the picture she’d produced, and some math—late twenties, most likely. Maybe five or six years older than she was. Older, too, than John Paul.

“Aright,” said T.J. “I’ll talk. But this is off the record.”

She stood abruptly and walked toward the kitchen, speaking as she went.

“I’ve got a cabin on a lake up north. Inside the park,” said T.J.

She opened and closed a cabinet. Returned to the living room with the bottle of whiskey, which she poured for herself. It was the first night she had had any more to drink than her quarter-glass, but it did not alarm Louise: instead it enlivened her, sent a little shiver of energy up her spine. She held her own glass out for more.

“My people built it a long time ago. Been in the family since,” said T.J.

She walked to the wall, where the map of the Adirondack Park had been hung. She pointed to a little lake fifty miles to the north; a tack marked the spot. Then she returned and sat down in her place across from Louise. Left the whiskey on the table between them.

“We used to go up there twice a year for hunting. Me and my dad. It’s not much to speak of, but it’s got four walls and a roof and a stove for winter.

You can only get to it by canoe, and first you’ve got to portage the canoe through a mile-long trail that’s gotten pretty overgrown by now.”

“It’s on an island?” said Louise.

T.J. nodded.

“Why’d they build it on an island?”

“Good fishing,” said T.J. “And a good vantage point.”

“Against the Indians?” Louise had heard stories most of her life about the Algonquins and Iroquois who came through the region for hunting. None of them had permanently settled and farmed the Adirondacks; Europeans had been the fools who were first to do so, lured there by overcrowding in New England and a government lie about plentiful arable land.

“No,” said T.J., looking at her strangely. “For hunting.”

Louise tried to imagine what edible animals there would be on an island.

“There’s a deer population that goes back and forth,” said T.J.—reading her mind. “They’re strong swimmers. And there’s waterfowl. Squirrels, if we get hungry enough. But mostly we just fish.”

“Who’s we?” asked Louise, and—seeing T.J.’s expression shift— immediately regretted it. She’d been thinking of her dad. Remembering the trips she once took with him, before his stroke.

T.J. sipped her whiskey. She never grimaced, Louise noticed; she held the liquid in her mouth awhile before quietly swallowing it down.

“Well,” T.J. said. “I guess I better get to bed.”

“No,” said Louise.

T.J. raised her eyebrows.

“Will you stay up a little longer?” said Louise. “I’ve still got a full glass.”

T.J. nodded. Her eyes stayed on Louise’s for a moment until she stood up, breaking their gaze. She strode to the kitchen, ran the tap. Added water to her whiskey. Then she turned and leaned against the kitchen counter, far from Louise but in sight of her.

On the rare occasions that Louise got drunk, or even tipsy, she became aware of her own appearance in a way that was exciting or unsettling, depending on her company. Her body and face were sometimes assets and sometimes liabilities. That night, she was glad for them, despite the black eye. Or because of it. She liked the feeling of T.J.’s gaze on her, over the rim of her cup. Louise was behaving irresponsibly, she knew. But that night she had an urge to do what she was not supposed to do.

Louise stood and stretched, allowing her shirt to rise up on her waist, and walked into the kitchen.

T.J. was right next to the sink and she did not move when Louise approached.

“I should get some too,” said Louise. She let cool water run into her cup, then let it run over. Her side was next to T.J.’s side. She turned and leaned against the counter also, too close to T.J. to pretend their proximity was accidental. Their flanks and arms were touching.

“Louise,” said T.J. She shook her head, looking down at the floor.

“What?”

Between them was an electrical current, a buzzing sensation making its way back and forth between their bodies. Louise could feel it. She was certain without knowing why that T.J. could feel it too. They were animals, Louise thought—and it almost made her laugh. Humans were animals. They had the same instincts, the same ability to communicate beneath and apart from language.

Louise turned her body so she was looking at T.J.’s profile. She put one hand very gently on the small of her back. It was the first gesture she made that left no room for doubt.

“I employ you,” said T.J. “I am your employer.”

Louise said nothing.

Abruptly, T.J. moved away from the counter and walked down the hallway. She poked her head into her father’s room, checking on him, and then she continued, and closed the door to her own bedroom. The lights went off.

• • •

Louise lay on the sofa, watching the last flames of the fire die out. She closed her eyes tightly. She was trying not to cry. If she was lucky, T.J. would let her forget how foolish she had been.

There were only embers left behind the grate now.

Soon the room would be full dark. Then it would be morning.

Louise

J. never spoke of that night again.T.

They spent the rest of the week together, letting Louise’s face heal, and then Louise returned to the Garnet Hill Lodge. In midspring she would get a phone call from T.J., requesting confirmation of her participation in that summer’s camp session, which she was happy to provide. The only difference from then on would be that T.J. would invite her in for talks in the Director’s Cabin, from time to time.

Whatever crush Louise had on her diminished in some ways and in others grew stronger. In T.J., she sensed two dueling forces: anger, and the power to control it. Against her better judgment, she found them equally attractive.

When she was not vigilant, her mind drifted at times toward the thought of a life with T.J. Running the camp alongside her. Caring, when asked to, for her dad. There were two women in Shattuck like this, Louise thought: two former professors from downstate who’d set up a home just outside the town.

One wore her hair in two long gray braids; Louise saw her sometimes at the grocery store. No one asked them many questions. No one talked about them either.

But any fantasies Louise had about this life were short-lived.

Because coming in from dinner one day at the lodge, two weeks after the incident with John Paul, Louise was handed an envelope by the man who

staffed the reception desk.

She waited until she was back in her little room to open it. There, she sat on her hard twin bed and read through a letter she’d known was from John

Paul the moment she’d seen it.

In it, he begged her forgiveness.

I haven’t had a drink since that night, he said. I can’t believe what I did.

My mother would be so ashamed of me. I want to do better.

He ended by asking if he could see her to apologize in person. He understood if she never wanted to speak to him again. But he had to ask the question, at least, he said.

At the bottom of the page, he’d drawn an arrow. She turned the letter over.

P.S., he wrote. Don’t worry—I didn’t tell anyone anything.

Louise put the letter down on the bed.

She wouldn’t respond. Hopefully that would be the end of it.

• • •

One evening later that week, someone knocked at her door. She found one of the ski instructors on the other side. A little smirk was on her face.

“You’ve got a visitor,” she said. “He’s waiting in the staff lounge for you.”

John Paul was alone when she entered. He was sitting at the round table next to the coffee percolator. He was bent forward, elbows on knees, one leg vibrating with nerves. When Louise entered, he sat straight up.

He looked terrible. Worse than she did. Two weeks after the incident, her face had mostly healed. Her ribs and back no longer hurt, though one large bruise still lingered on her flank, light purple now. John Paul, on the other hand, had dark circles under his eyes. His hair was a mess.

“Oh, God,” he said, upon seeing her. He put his face in his hands. The action reminded her of her brother Jesse, when he was trying not to cry. And sure enough: when John Paul removed his hands, tears were running openly down his cheeks. He took his glasses off. Wiped his face.

He stood up and Louise flinched, positioned herself behind a chair. She had left the door open intentionally. She glanced back over her shoulder,

wondering how loud she’d have to yell to get anyone to come running.

But John Paul, perhaps sensing her fear, sat back down slowly.

“Can we go somewhere private?” he asked.

“No,” said Louise.

“Can we sit down, at least?”

Reluctantly, she pulled out the opposite chair.

• • •

Mainly, he said what he’d already said in the letter. He added that he’d gone to a meeting—a program called Alcoholics Anonymous, something she’d vaguely heard of, though she couldn’t remember where.

He went on: She was the best part of his life. He respected her more than anyone else he knew. More than his own family. He liked her self- sufficiency, her enterprising nature. He thought she was smarter than any girl he knew.

He wanted her to give him another chance. He was begging for it. They’d start slow, he said; but he was serious about her. His plan was to marry her.

Together, he said, they could have the sort of life that would have meaning and value. They could have children together. A nice house.

Her brother Jesse, he said, could come live with them.

She wondered for the first time if he’d ever read her journals. His articulation of her secret hopes was so precise that it startled her.

“You don’t have to answer me now,” said John Paul. “All I’m asking is

that you think it over.”

Louise was silent.

“We could have a good life together,” he said, at last.

Then he stood, shoulders and head low, and lifted two paper bags from their place on the floor beside him. “Here,” he said. “I brought you groceries.”

He closed the door gently behind him on the way out.

Goddammit, thought Louise.

• • •

The problem was: the groceries were too complicated. They were beautiful and expensive, the sorts of things that John Paul’s mother had probably bought for her family when he was small. There was a T-bone steak in there, and broccoli, and shrimp, and three beautiful oranges. There was a loaf of bread, and butter packaged in a way she’d never seen before, and a tall container of milk. And there was a cake—a whole Bundt cake—in a white box.

She was hungry. She pulled off a piece of the Bundt cake and sat there chewing it.

She looked sideways at the sink and two hot plates that constituted their shared kitchen. She could make a feast for the other staffers at the lodge. But she was off that night, and she had a better idea.

• • •

Her mother’s house was a white rectangle: small upstairs, small downstairs, stacked one on top of the other around a steep central staircase. It was quiet and dark when she arrived at half past six. Through one first-floor window she saw the blue flicker of the TV. Through one second-floor window she saw a small lamp turned on. Jesse’s room.

Inside, she put the groceries on the kitchen table. Ten minutes prior, she’d had to stop short at an intersection and in doing so had sent the shrimp scattering out of their wax paper and onto the salty floorboard of her car.

She’d thrown it into park and scooped them up, knowing she’d still cook

them.

Jesse had never had shrimp in his life.

Now, she ran water into a large bowl and put the shrimp in there to soak.

As she worked, she realized that she smelled something.

She followed the scent around the central stairs—passing her mother on the way, asleep in her recliner—and then ascended.

Please not that, she thought.

She opened Jesse’s door without knocking.

He had heard the front door. He had opened a window and hastily put away whatever he’d been smoking, but he was looking at her, guilty, his eyes stripped of their usual curiosity, narrowed instead by the chemicals now

swimming in his bloodstream.

“Where is it,” said Louise.

“What?” said Jesse.

“Don’t lie to me,” said Louise. “Don’t ever lie to me. I’m not Mom. I’m on your side.”

He said nothing. He was sitting on his bed, his arms hugging his knees.

Louise looked in the little trash bin next to his desk and found it immediately: a poorly rolled joint, hastily extinguished, still warm to the touch. Still capable of setting the contents of the bin on fire.

“Idiot,” said Louise—a word she regretted immediately—because when she looked back at her brother he was crying.

“Oh God, Jesse,” said Louise, and she rushed to him, sat down next to him, clasped him to her. “Jesse, where’d you get that?”

He shrugged. She pushed him away from her, held him by the shoulders.

His face was red. He held out one hand and placed the back of two fingers to her left eye, the hurt one, still faintly bruised and swollen. It was only then that she remembered that she, too, had something to explain.

“Come on,” said Louise. “She’s sleeping.”

• • •

Downstairs, she sat him at the table and gave him a tall glass of water.

“Drink that,” she said.

Then she began to cook. She put a pot of water on to boil the broccoli. She salted and peppered the steak and put it in one pan to sear in a pat of butter.

She put the cleaned shrimp in another.

“You ever had shrimp, Jesse?” she said, proudly, and he said, “Yeah.”

“Who gave you shrimp?”

“Howie’s mom.”

Howie: a friend from school whose parents no longer let him play with Jesse.

“Won’t be as good as mine,” said Louise—though even as she said it she knew it wasn’t true.

She turned and saw Jesse’s glass was empty, and she filled it again.

• • •

The only good thing about a nine-year-old boy being stoned was the pleasure he took in eating the food she’d made for him. Jesse closed his eyes and tipped his head back as he chewed, making small satisfied noises in between bites. He’d gotten even skinnier since the last time she saw him, and the quick inventory she’d taken of the kitchen told her why.

“How long have you been smoking dope?” said Louise.

“Not long,” said Jesse. “Month or two.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Kid at school.”

“Do I know him?”

“No.”

“How old is he?”

“Not sure. Eighth grader.”

“Do I know his parents?”

“No. He’s from Minerva.”

Louise chewed. The steak was delicious. She was glad not to have ruined it.

“Jesse,” she said. “How did you afford it?”

He was silent.

“You’re not selling, are you?” she asked.

“No,” said Jesse. “No, Louise. I swear.”

She believed him, for now. Jesse was shy to the point of incapacitation.

She couldn’t imagine him in sales of any kind. But the thought of an eighth- grade boy giving him anything for free—that didn’t sit right with her either.

There was a noise in the hallway then and they both looked up. Their mother: one hand on each wall, supporting herself. Her hair was unwashed, her eyes blinking against the light that hung on a chain over the kitchen table.

Face pallid, mouth downturned. She came toward them slowly, propping herself up with the countertops now, and then veered toward the cabinets, which she opened one after another, looking for something to eat.

She pulled down a box of old crackers and put a few in her mouth. She went to the sink and ran the tap, bringing a cupped hand to her mouth for water.

Then, without a word to either of her children, she moved slowly back in the direction of the recliner in the living room, her home for most of each day.

Louise looked at Jesse. He was coming back to himself now. The food had helped, the water. His face was less flushed. His eyes were opening. He wouldn’t meet her gaze; he looked to the wall, and then down at the table.

“Jesse,” she said. “Stop talking to that boy. Stop smoking the grass he gives you, too.”

“Why,” he said. He picked at something on the tablecloth.

“Because I’m gonna bring you to live with me,” she said. “And I can’t do

that if you’re incarcerated.”

“When?” said Jesse.

“Pretty soon.”

“How,” said Jesse. Incredulous.

There was a long pause while Louise considered saying it. She couldn’t take it back, if she did. She had always tried her best to never give her brother false hope. To keep every promise she made, unlike the rest of the adults in his life.

She lifted a shrimp from her plate. She took its tail off, prodded at its translucent skin, deveining it. John Paul, at a restaurant, had been the one to

tell her what the vein really was.

She chewed.

“I’m engaged,” she said.

Jesse looked at her.

“To John Paul?” he said.

“Who else would I be engaged to?”

Jesse would not meet her eye.

“Jesse?” said Louise.

Jesse stood. Brought his plate to the sink.

“Well, aren’t you going to say congratulations?”

“Congratulations,” said Jesse. And then he walked out of the kitchen, leaving Louise alone.

“Promise me, Jesse,” said Louise, calling after him. “No more pot.” But she could tell that any authority she had once had with him was diminished, or lost entirely.

Book Renzo

The God of the Woods — V. Found

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