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VII

Self-Reliance

Alice

lice, still looking for Bear, took a breath before turning the doorknob toA her husband’s room.

• • •

It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been anybody else.

If it had been one of the girls on the grounds that week—an actress or a singer or a model. Somebody young and frivolous, somebody difficult to take seriously.

Or, thought Alice, one of the staff: if it had been one of the temporary staff, she would know with certainty that Peter was simply blowing off steam. He’d never pursue anything further with someone in his employ.

• • •

But it wasn’t an actress or a singer or a member of the staff in Peter’s bed.

Inside Peter’s bed was her own sister. Delphine.

Someone she believed Peter reviled. A woman he considered intelligent— which was, according to Peter’s stated system of beliefs, a waste.

She’d been wrong about all of it.

• • •

She could tell, from their position, that their closeness was not new.

Connections and inferences began to form in her mind. Delphine’s familiarity with the staff—her insolent question to Warren, yesterday, about whether he was prepared to accommodate the guests. As if she were the mistress of the house.

Peter’s trips to Manhattan—two or three times a month, always on business, he said. Always to meet with the bank attorney, McLellan.

Her mind reeled. How long had Peter and Delphine been doing this? For years? Since Delphine’s first visit to Self-Reliance, as Alice’s chaperone?

Before that?

Delphine had always, always been afforded more respect than Alice had.

Even as Peter complained about her, there was a certain admiration in his

voice.

Perhaps it had all been a ruse.

Perhaps they had always known: Peter’s mother and father. All of their friends.

Perhaps Peter and Delphine and McLellan and his wife all went to dinner together, in Manhattan. Perhaps it was excused. Perhaps they came here together, to Self-Reliance, in moments when Alice was in Albany—and perhaps this was the reason she knew the staff so well.

Could it be that Peter and his father had chosen Alice not in spite of her youth and inexperience—two qualities they often lamented aloud as deficits that Alice had to work to overcome—but because of them? Because she would do whatever they commanded her to do, all of the time. Because she wouldn’t be difficult.

Because it would not occur to her that a woman like Delphine was the type of person Peter really wanted.

• • •

The two of them were asleep, unclothed. Delphine had her head on Peter’s chest. His arm was curled around her shoulders. Her hair fanned out behind her on the bed.

Peter and Alice had never slept like that.

When she was eighteen years old, when she was newly married to a man more than a decade her senior, living away from her childhood home for the first time in her life, pregnant and uncomfortable and frightened: never once had Peter held her so tenderly. Instead, citing insomnia, he had rolled to the opposite side of the bed and lay straight as a pencil while she, Alice, curled onto her side and held a pillow for comfort and missed her friends back in New York City and her sister and her father and even her mother.

Alice stood there watching them a while longer. She thought for a moment of waking them—slamming the door, shouting, making certain that they knew she knew—but then it would change, all of it. Her whole life would change.

Alice personally knew only one couple who had ever gotten divorced: people her parents had been friends with.

These days the man was still in their group, with a much younger wife.

The woman had all but disappeared. It was said that she no longer lived in New York; she had moved to Connecticut. From the way she was spoken about, it felt as if she had died.

Alice asked herself: Could she live this way, always pretending? Could she walk out of the room, into the hallway; could she close the door gently, and face Peter and Delphine at dinner, and pretend to have seen nothing, for

the rest of her life?

Yes, and yes, and yes, she thought.

As long as she had Bear—the answer would be yes.

• • •

She closed the door as gently as she could.

She walked to the sunroom, where she found the tumbler of gin. She poured a tall glass of it and drank it in several swigs. She deserved this, she

reasoned. She poured another. Drank from that.

As she drank, she let herself cry.

By the time she finished, she wasn’t standing up well.

She had had nothing at all to eat that day.

She walked out of the sunroom, the hallway spinning, the ground coming up to meet her. She walked into the great room, where the rest of the party was gathered—the senior Van Laars, and the McLellans, and the actresses, and the clients. And there, by the fireplace, Tessie Jo and Bear. All of them had been drawn to the great room by boredom; all of them were deciding what to do next.

They stopped when she entered. She swayed slightly; she caught herself with her back foot.

They looked at her, their faces masks of judgment.

None of them mattered to her. She spoke only to Bear.

“Come here,” she said, trying to smile, holding both hands in his direction.

An uncomfortable silence.

“Where are you going, Alice?” asked Peter’s father. He furrowed his brow.

“Bear’s been asking to go out in the rowboat,” she told him. Her father-in- law frowned, as if he hadn’t understood her. Surely, she thought, she hadn’t

been slurring that badly.

She tried again.

This time, Bear stood up, unsteadily; his grandfather gestured for him to sit back down.

“I’m afraid Bear and I already have plans,” he said. “We’re about to set out on a walk.” He turned to his grandson. “Bear,” he said. “Are your boots on?”

Bear, tense, looked back and forth between his grandfather and his mother.

Alice loved this about him: loved the care with which he handled others. The concern he had for their well-being. He thought frequently of how to make people happier; he picked her flowers from the garden. Drew love notes for her in school.

A generous impulse in Alice told her to free her son from his predicament.

“It’s all right, Bear,” she said. “We’ll go boating another time.” Too late, she realized that her voice had cracked with emotion as she spoke. She turned on her heel and tottered out of the great room, then walked down the hallway and through the southern door.

• • •

Outside, the sky was darkening. A few drops of rain pattered onto her face, rousing her briefly from her stupor. Giving her permission to cry outright.

She’d go out in a boat by herself, she thought. She’d escape from the party, from her sister and husband. She pictured it: she’d row out into the middle of the lake, and lie in the belly of the boat, and simply float like that awhile, letting herself be rocked by the water in perfect solitude until she had

gathered herself.

Then she’d return to the party.

Fifty feet before the boathouse, she tripped badly, falling to her knees, skinning the palms of her hands. She stood. Brushed them off. Continued.

She opened the door.

The boathouse was shadowy, darker even than it normally was. Spectral watercraft stood on stands in three neat rows. She moved to the aluminum rowboat. She’d never before tried to lower it from its stand on her own, but she thought she could do it.

Several tugs. A clatter. One oar skittered over the ground.

She dragged it, with effort, to the ramp that led down to the lake. She was sweating, despite the cold wind that was blowing up from the water. Her movements were clumsy, disjointed.

From behind her, suddenly, the sound of the boathouse door.

Alice

he didn’t know where she was. She opened her eyes. Her mouth was soS dry that she couldn’t swallow. Above her, the room rotated slowly, the overhead light making slow arcs in the air.

She had the sensation of being unable to form words. Even her thoughts were wordless. Water, she thought—but it was an image, not a noun. She looked around the room for a sink, turning her whole torso in one direction and then another. Her neck was stiff, as if she had not moved her head for days.

There were windows in this room, but they were darkened by closed shutters with tight slats and exterior latches. She couldn’t tell if it was day or night outside.

The bed she was on was so firm that it felt like a plank of wood.

She stood up from it unsteadily. She was wearing a dress, she saw. Its material was stiff, as if soaked and then hung out to dry.

Toilet, she thought. The image of one. The urge to urinate was suddenly so powerful that she doubled over.

Where was she? She had the sensation that the answer would come to her shortly, and with it some terrible knowledge that perhaps she did not want.

Slowly, she straightened again.

There was no toilet. Only a few meager trappings that indicated she was in someone’s bedroom, long disused. A sturdy dresser. A bowl for water. A mirror: this she avoided completely.

She saw a door. She moved to it, pushed against it: locked. She knew somehow that it would be.

She lay down on the floor, barring entry to the thought. Something terrible had happened, she knew. If she went back to sleep, she wouldn’t have to

learn it.

She closed her eyes.

The door opened.

Through it came Peter’s father.

Judyta

t’s nearing the end of her shift. She has to find Hayes; she can’t riskI talking to anyone else about what Mrs. Van Laar told her. She can’t afford to be wrong in front of LaRochelle again; not after yesterday.

Perhaps you should interview him. He’s such an interesting man.

• • •

When she reaches the Director’s Cabin, two investigators, smoking outside, tell her that Hayes is gone for the day.

“Shit,” she says, and the investigators straighten.

“You got a mouth on you,” one says.

She doesn’t reply.

“Anyway,” says the other, “he left this for you.” Begrudgingly, he holds out a piece of paper with a phone number on it. Denny. Home, the paper says.

“You two got something goin’ on?” the first investigator says. His buddy smothers a grin.

Judy ignores them. Pushes into the house.

• • •

Alone, she feels better.

There’s a long hallway that runs to the back of the house from the main room. At the end of it is a bathroom—practically destroyed, now, by its constant use over the past few days.

But there are other rooms, too. And according to Mrs. Van Laar—one of them is, or has been, Vic Hewitt’s.

Judy walks down the hallway, toe to heel, making as little noise as possible.

She tries the first door. Inside is a neatly made bed, a stack of reading material on the nightstand, a magazine called Camp Life. She opens the closet door; inside she finds several articles of androgynous clothing and a neat row of fishing hats.

At this point, Judy has no guess as to whether she’s in Vic’s room or T.J.’s. She walks to a dark wooden dresser and pulls open one of the two small top drawers.

Here, at last, is her answer. The undergarments are distinctly female: high- cut briefs, one brassiere with tags still on it. One pair of woolen stockings that look similarly unworn.

She moves across the hallway. Opens another bedroom door. There is no doubt, this time, as to whose room she’s in: a metal cane leans against a wall.

A straight row of men’s walking shoes is lined up against another. Most curiously, a pair of dentures swims in a tall glass of liquid on a bedside table.

Which raises the question: If Vic Hewitt’s dentures are here—then where is Vic Hewitt?

Judy moves toward Vic’s dresser. But instead of clothing, she finds what looks like a trove of black-and-white photographs. Most are of children: T.J. when she was young. Barbara, too. And Bear: so many of them are of Bear Van Laar, in various poses, fishing, swimming, standing sturdy on cross- country skis.

The one that intrigues her most is a group shot. She squints, trying to recognize anyone she can in the photograph. She knows for certain that two are Barbara’s grandparents, the elder Mr. and Mrs. Van Laar. They stand in the back row. She smiles; he doesn’t.

The youngest boy in the picture, she guesses, is Bear.

The woman looking down at him, lovingly, is his mother, Alice; the man standing to her right is his father.

And standing off to one side, a part of and apart from the rest of the group, are T.J. and her father, Vic.

Judy turns the picture over. On the back is written, in light pencil: Blackfly

Good-by. 1961.

The year of Bear’s disappearance.

Judy shudders. Puts the photos back in the drawer. Walks out into the main room again.

• • •

It’s time, she knows, to tell someone about the tip Mrs. Van Laar gave her.

She fishes a piece of paper out from her pocket, goes to the phone in the Command Post, and dials Denny Hayes’s home phone number, as instructed.

A woman answers. His wife, no doubt. In the background, Judy can hear children’s voices.

“Hi,” says Judy. “Is Investigator Hayes there, please?”

A hitch in the woman’s voice. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is Investigator Luptack,” she says. “I’m—I work with him.”

“I didn’t know he had a lady—coworker,” says Mrs. Hayes. “I didn’t

know they let ladies be investigators.”

“Well,” says Judy, “they do.”

“Anyway, he’s not home yet,” says Mrs. Hayes. “You can leave me a number if you want.”

“Will you tell him I’m staying at the Alcott Family Inn in Shattuck, New York?” says Judy. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes or so. He can call the front

desk and they’ll find me.”

A long, skeptical pause.

“Sure,” says Mrs. Hayes. “I’ll do that.”

But Judy can tell, already, that she won’t.

• • •

It’s full dark when she pulls into the inn. It’s mid-August, the time of year when high summer becomes late summer. She sits still in her Beetle for a moment, listening to the pings of the cooling engine, then gets out and locks it. Walks to her room. Pulls out her key.

Then, from behind, she hears her own name said aloud.

She knows who it is before turning.

“Daddy,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

He strides toward her, looking as angry as she’s ever seen him. “What are you doing here, Judy?” he asks. “You think this is safe for a single girl? Place like this? Coming home late at night, when it’s dark out? I don’t think so.”

“How’d you find me?” says Judy.

“Your mother was worried sick,” says her father. “She couldn’t sleep last night. She couldn’t eat today. She told me the name of the place.”

Judy sighs heavily.

“Don’t you blame her,” says her father. “She’s looking out for you. She did the right thing by telling me. Seedy place like this? You’re lucky nothing happened to you already.”

He walks back to his car. Opens the passenger door.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll drive you home. I’ll bring you back tomorrow to get your car.”

He’s not looking at her. He expects her to get in, no questions asked. As a child, Judy and her siblings had obeyed him religiously. He never hit them— but he was a big man, and he yelled.

For a moment, Judy imagines going to him. Getting in. Keeping the peace

with her family. Doing what’s expected.

Instead, she says, “It’s not seedy.”

“What isn’t?”

“This hotel.”

“Motel.”

“This motel. It’s run by a very nice family. The Alcotts. The husband is a

history teacher. The wife reads books.”

Her father is looking at her.

“I’m going to stay here tonight,” says Judy. “Because I have to be at work very early in the morning. And I’m tired.”

“Judy,” says her father. “Get in the car.”

“I’m going to keep staying here as long as I work this case,” says Judy.

“After that, I’m going to find an apartment closer to BCI headquarters in Ray Brook. I can afford it, because I got a raise.”

“Judy.”

“When I was promoted,” she adds, for emphasis.

Slowly, her father closes the passenger door. For an instant, she feels almost bad for him. She pictures him on the drive home, alone, his face a mask of sadness and anger. This will be the first time in her life that she’s gone directly against his wishes.

“Your mother’s been crying,” says her father. “Because of you, she’s been crying.”

“I’m twenty-six years old,” says Judy. “I’m a woman now, Dad. I can take care of myself.”

He says nothing. He gets into his car—his ancient car, a Fairlane Skyliner from the late 1950s that Judy still remembers him buying and proudly bringing home—and pulls backward into the night, one thick arm thrown over the passenger’s seat, where her mother would normally be.

Then Judy is alone.

Judyta

n her room at the Alcott Family Inn, Judy turns the boxy television on asI she gets ready. The anchor is telling her about the weather: sunnier today, cool for August. She likes this new routine: waking up alone, at a reasonable hour, with no brother shouting at her from the other room.

She turns on the shower as hot as she can take it. Stands in it for far longer than her mother would allow.

• • •

At last, reluctantly, she steps out. Turns off the water in time to hear the news anchor say, in the other room: in custody at this time.

Towel clutched to her front, she runs quickly into the bedroom, where she sees an image of Jacob Sluiter on the screen.

From there, the newscast cuts to an interview with the superintendent of the New York State Police, who confirms, from state police headquarters in Albany, that Sluiter was captured at a private home near North Creek.

• • •

At work, Denny Hayes has been tasked with leading the morning briefing; LaRochelle, he says, is up at the house, speaking again with Barbara’s father.

“Well, if you haven’t heard already,” says Hayes, “you’re about to.”

After filling everyone in on the events of last night—a distant neighbor who spied Sluiter as he walked past his home; a police stakeout while Sluiter slept—he makes a few things clear: the first is that Sluiter is in custody, is uninjured, and is in good health.

The second is that he seems willing to talk.

The third is that—yes—there is one possible timeline that would have enabled him to reach the Van Laar Preserve four days ago, just in time to capture Barbara Van Laar, and then double back to North Creek, heading south. But that seems unlikely; and they have no evidence of it, yet.

The last is that it’s up to Hayes to decide who’ll get the first crack at interviewing him.

For a moment, Judy thinks Hayes is going to call on her. He even looks right at her—but then he looks away.

“Goldman,” he says. “Did you have contact with him when you worked

the Bear Van Laar case?”

Goldman shakes his head. No.

“Would you be up for it now?” says Hayes.

This makes sense. Judy tries not to let herself feel disappointed. Goldman is steady, fatherly, unthreatening. A good detective, everyone says; the rumor about him is that he’s never accepted the promotions he’s been offered because he likes the legwork that an investigator undertakes.

Judy holds her breath. Wonders if Goldman will say no.

“Yes,” says Goldman.

Hayes nods. Then, one by one, he assigns the rest of them their work for the day—including Judy, who’s given the names of some parents to track down.

Then he dismisses everyone, sending them out of the cabin.

Judy stalls. Waits until everyone else has gone before approaching Hayes.

“I called your house last night,” she says. “I left a message with your

wife.”

Hayes frowns. Then sighs.

“She didn’t tell you,” says Judy.

He shakes his head.

“Did you talk to the grandfather yesterday?” Judy asks.

“Couldn’t find him anyplace,” says Hayes. “Everyone gave me a different story about where he was.” He pauses. “You?”

“Not him, exactly,” says Judy. “But I’ve got a new lead for you.” And without waiting for him to respond, she describes her afternoon: the tip Mrs.

Van Laar Sr. gave her. Her search for Vic Hewitt. The cane, the dentures.

The empty bedroom.

“You can see for yourself,” says Judy, nodding in the direction of the hallway. “It’s right there.”

“What did T.J. say when you interviewed her? About where her father was?”

“That’s the funny thing,” says Judy. “She didn’t mention him at all, in the present tense. Just said he had been camp director until his memory began to fail. I had no idea he was still living in the Director’s Cabin.”

“Until he wasn’t anymore,” says Hayes.

“Right.”

Hayes thinks. “All right,” he says. “Forget what I said before. Your task for the day is to set eyes on Vic Hewitt.”

Judyta

amp Emerson, these days, is deserted of everyone except troopers andC rangers and investigators. The counselors and campers and staff are all gone. The only employee who should, in theory, still be on the grounds is T.J.

Hewitt.

But when Judy returns to Staff Quarters, to the place she last saw T.J., she finds the door to the room she was in not only closed, but locked with a hasp and padlock. Newly installed, by the looks of the wood shavings on the floor.

Despite the external lock, Judy still knocks at the door, gently and then

firmly.

No response.

She spends the next several hours asking anyone she encounters if they’ve seen T.J., but no one seems to have—not since yesterday. Her truck, too, is nowhere on the grounds.

She is not a person of interest in this case—not officially, anyway. She has the right to come and go as she pleases. Still, the absence of both T.J. and her father feels suspicious—especially in the wake of yesterday’s conversations —and Judy has an unsettled feeling in her stomach.

At noon, she returns to the Director’s Cabin to find lunch. When she enters, Denny Hayes is hanging up the phone.

“Investigator Luptack,” he says. “You’re just the person I was looking

for.”

“Me?” says Judy, and Hayes nods.

“I’ve got a favor to ask you,” he says—but he stops himself. “Any progress on Vic Hewitt?”

“No,” says Judy. “And now it seems like T.J.’s gone, too.”

A pause.

“I’ll get someone else on that,” says Hayes.

“Who?” Judy asks. And then, realizing: “What’s the favor?”

Hayes sighs.

“He wants to talk to a lady,” says Hayes.

“Who does?” Judy asks.

“Sluiter. Goldman did his best, but he got nothing. Sluiter wants to talk to

a lady.”

“Okay,” says Judy.

“There’s one female investigator in the BCI,” says Hayes, delicately.

“Right.”

“I argued against it,” says Hayes. “I don’t know that it’s right to give him what he wants. And I have no idea what he might say to you. Could be all kinds of perverted garbage, for all I know. But it’s out of my hands.

LaRochelle’s given the okay.”

“It’s all right,” says Judy. “I’m not scared.”

• • •

She’s scared. Two hours later, Judy stands outside one of Ray Brook’s interrogation rooms, gazing through a one-way mirror at Jacob Sluiter himself.

He’s tall and thin. Receding hairline. At fifty, now, his arms are ropy and his body looks spry; she can imagine that Sluiter in his thirties—the age he was when his original string of homicides took place—would have been even more difficult to overpower. A sparse beard looks as if it’s been growing in the whole time he’s been on the lam.

She’s been prepped over the phone by a forensic psychologist who’s familiar with the case from Sluiter’s initial spree in the early 1960s.

“He hates his father,” said the psychologist. “The father abused him badly.

Don’t mention anything about his father, or parents in general.”

“All right,” Judy said.

“He’s sexually violent,” said the psychologist. “He might say certain things, looking to get a rise out of you. Try not to give him the satisfaction.”

“All right.”

Now, Judy clenches her jaw to prevent her teeth from chattering. She hopes this will give her an appearance of toughness. From her solar plexus outward, she vibrates with nerves and cold. The window-unit air conditioners at Ray Brook are set so high that she’s been bringing a jacket to work, in August. But to mention anything about it would feel like an announcement: I am weak.

A small crowd has gathered behind her. Hayes is there, of course, and Goldman. So are Captain LaRochelle and two of his lieutenants.

She tries not to look back at them. As usual, she feels both her age and her gender acutely. Hayes stands beside her, glancing at her.

“You sure this is all right with you?” he asks.

“I’m sure.”

• • •

Judy walks in alone. There are microphones in this room, she knows. They feed both a speaker and a recording apparatus on the other side of the one- way mirror. The idea of being listened to in real time makes her self- conscious. She wishes for more privacy.

Jacob Sluiter, who has been leaning back in his chair, sits up straighter when she walks in.

“Mr. Sluiter,” says Judy. “I’m Investigator Luptack.” She’s trying to keep her voice light.

For a moment, Sluiter says nothing. Then he says: “Are you cold?”

She hesitates only for a second. The psychologist has told her to show no sign of weakness; this, he says, is what Sluiter gets off on. With a woman, his goal will be to intimidate. Only one person escaped Sluiter in the early 1960s; that woman relayed that he had asked her to beg him for mercy, and that she

had declined.

“No,” says Judy. “I’m fine.”

Sluiter looks almost disappointed.

“How old are you?” he says.

“How old are you?”

“Almost fifty-one. My birthday is next week.”

“Well,” she says. “Happy birthday in advance.”

She smiles at him.

Sluiter regards her, reading something.

“You look very young,” he says. “Do you live at home with your parents?”

Judy blinks. Willing every part of her body and face to be still. “No.”

“Are you married?”

Judy is silent.

“I don’t see a ring on your finger,” says Sluiter. “That’s why I asked.”

He smiles, crosses one leg over the other. “Didn’t mean to offend you, or anything.”

“Mr. Sluiter,” says Judy. “Can you tell me a little about your whereabouts since you left Fishkill?”

“Oh,” says Sluiter. “I have no idea where I’ve been. I was just walking north.”

“I see,” says Judy. “Did you have a particular destination in mind?”

“No.”

“Did you encounter anyone? While you were moving north?”

“No.”

For the first time since she entered the room, he looks bored. He turns his face away from hers, toward the one-way mirror, as if he knows he has an audience.

“Would you tell me a little bit about your—habits? Where you slept, what you ate?”

“I don’t really remember,” he says.

For a time, they continue in this way: Judy asking questions, Sluiter dodging them, until she begins to grow worried. She thinks of the men standing outside the room, listening. Imagines them glancing sideways at one another, as doubtful as she is about her ability to extract any information whatsoever from this man. Why did he ask for a woman investigator if he’d give her no more than he gave Goldman?

She hears the psychologist’s voice in her head. No sign of weakness.

She ignores it.

“You know,” she says. “I am cold. This building is the coldest building I’ve ever been in.”

She puts her arms around herself. Shivers a little.

He turns his face toward her again. His eyes, on the other side of his glasses, narrow a bit, as if bringing her more clearly into focus.

“Investigator Luptack,” he says. “May I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a virgin?”

Judy feels a rush of humiliation. The blood comes to her face, as if she’s been slapped. At twenty-six, she is, in fact, a virgin. She wants to deny it, but thinks of the microphone in the room, the speaker just outside it. She thinks of the four men, her colleagues, standing there and listening to every word.

She says nothing.

“I’m sorry,” says Sluiter. “Have I embarrassed you?”

“Yes,” says Judy. “I feel embarrassed.”

He smiles. Shifts in his chair.

“You won’t tell me?”

“I’ll trade with you,” says Judy. “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me a few things first.”

“What’s that game called?” asks Sluiter.

“Truth or dare,” says Judy.

He grins. Adjusts his glasses, as if readying himself for some fun.

• • •

Judy does not recognize anything about this version of herself. She’s playing a part. She has no experience with men, or women. When she was twelve years old—already aware of her place in the middle of things, as someone not too pretty, but pretty enough—her father had given her one piece of advice about dating: Don’t write boys checks that you don’t want to cash.

She had found the phrase grotesque. But it stuck with her. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons she now dresses as she does, in garments designed to obscure.

Perhaps it’s why she hunches her shoulders, lowers her head around men she doesn’t know or trust. Which is most of them.

Today, for the first time in her life, she sees her sexuality as something useful. She wants a confession. Wants it as badly as anything she’s ever

wanted in her life.

“Truth or dare?” Sluiter says.

“Truth.”

“Are you a virgin?”

“Yes,” says Judy. “I am.”

In her mind, she blocks out the image of those men, her superiors, in the other room. Her hope is that they’ll let her work awhile, that they won’t come barging in too early, mistaking her acting skills for genuine distress.

He clears his throat. “I could tell that about you,” he says.

“My turn,” says Judy. “Truth or dare?”

“Dare.”

“I dare you to tell me about everyone you ever killed or kidnapped.”

A heavy silence fills the room, and she wonders immediately if she’s gone too fast. Quickly, she contorts her mouth into a small smile—something meant to convey insouciance.

After a long beat, Sluiter matches her smile, wags a finger in the air. “No,

ma’am,” he says. “That’s cheating.”

“Why?”

“The word dare implies action,” he says. “Not confession.”

“I can dare you anything I want,” says Judy. “There’s no rule against it.”

He clears his throat again. “Didn’t you do your research?” he says. “I’ve never killed or kidnapped anyone.” He grins. Flirting. Her stomach clenches:

nausea, or nerves, or both.

“You never confessed to it,” says Judy.

“That’s right. I never.”

“But now,” says Judy. “With all the evidence. The second time you’ve been caught. Isn’t there anything you’d like to get off your chest?”

She can feel, for the second time during this interview, that she’s boring him.

She tries again. “Mr. Sluiter, are you a religious man?”

He scoffs. “Hardly. My father was that sort, though.”

“So you’re rational,” says Judy. “So you believe in the power of deduction

and evidence.”

“Depends,” says Sluiter.

“On?”

“On who’s gathering the evidence. On whether they can be trusted.”

Judy is surprised to find that some part of her understands what he’s saying. Agrees with it, even.

“What about me?” she asks him. “Would you trust someone like me?”

“I would,” he says. “Now, if that was your question—it’s my turn now.”

“It’s not your turn,” says Judy. “We’re still negotiating our terms here. On

the meaning of the word dare.”

Sluiter frowns.

“Fine,” he says. “One more question. Then I’ve got a good dare for you, if you’ll take it.” He grins.

Judy pauses, giving herself time to think. One more question, before she can escape the room. She isn’t certain she has permission to mention Barbara Van Laar by name, but she senses she’s on the verge of something. She wants to prove something to the men in the other room, but mostly she wants to prove something to herself.

“We’re looking for information on a girl,” Judy begins. “A missing girl.”

“Barbara Van Laar,” says Sluiter.

A chill goes down her back.

“You know her name,” she says—careful not to phrase anything as a question.

He nods. Looks down at the table. Is it remorse she senses in his posture?

She tries to slow her breathing.

“Mr. Sluiter, have you been in the vicinity of her home in recent days?

Have you—did you have anything to do with her disappearance?”

He looks at her, calculating.

“That was two questions,” he says. “You have to choose one.”

“Fine,” says Judy. “The first.”

Slowly, he nods.

“I have been,” he says.

“In the vicinity of her home,” says Judy.

“Yes.”

Judy opens her mouth to speak, but Sluiter holds up a finger. “My turn to

ask you a question,” he says.

She says nothing. Watches.

“Are you a virgin by choice? Or because no one wanted to fuck you?”

Before he finishes the sentence, the door behind her opens. She turns: Hayes and Goldman and Captain LaRochelle.

“Wait,” says Judy, but already they’re speaking over her.

“Thank you, Investigator Luptack,” says Captain LaRochelle.

Sluiter glares at them, his face darkening.

“We weren’t finished,” he says.

We weren’t finished. Judy wants to say it too—to yell it out—but she understands that her job, now, is to comply with the order being given silently to her by LaRochelle’s firm gaze.

Reluctantly, she stands up from her chair.

Goldman gestures to the door; he accompanies her out.

Behind her, she hears Sluiter’s voice, his tone unreadable, hovering between mocking and earnest.

“Investigator Luptack,” he says. “You did a good job.”

• • •

Outside the interrogation room, Judy’s whole body goes limp. It takes all of her strength not to let herself sink to the floor.

“All right there?” asks Goldman, concerned.

“I could have gotten him to say it,” says Judy. “I could have done it.”

“I know,” says Goldman, consoling her. “I do. They just—weren’t certain if what he was saying was useful anymore.”

“I could have gotten there,” says Judy.

He raises a hand as if to pat her back, and then thinks better of it. Clears his throat.

On the other side of the two-way mirror, now, Judy watches as Jacob Sluiter angles himself away from Hayes and LaRochelle. As he folds his arms, like a petulant child, over his torso, even as the investigators begin to speak.

Louise

ince Louise returned home yesterday, her brother Jesse has beenS nowhere to be found.

Louise’s mother doesn’t have a clue where he might be.

“How long has he been gone?” Louise asks, increasingly panicky.

“Oh,” her mother says, “no more than a day. I think I seen him in the kitchen yesterday.”

He’s eleven, Louise wants to say. But if she has to live with her mother for a time, she’s going to do everything she can to keep the peace, to keep herself calm by simply not engaging.

• • •

At noon, just as Louise is finally about to walk to the center of town to inquire there, Jesse walks through the front door, stopping short when he sees her in the kitchen.

“Where were you?” Louise asks him—willing herself to speak calmly.

“At my friend’s house.”

“What friend?”

“Neil. You don’t know him.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“I did!” says Jesse, indignant. “I told Mom. I told her Neil’s mom’d pick me up and drop me off, too.”

Louise stares at him. Without shifting her gaze, she calls into the other room: “Mom, did you know Jesse was at his friend Neil’s last night?”

A pause.

“I guess I did know that,” says her mother.

Louise drops her head. Jesse grins in satisfaction.

“I’m sorry,” says Louise. “I worry about you.”

“I know you do,” says Jesse.

She opens her arms, and he walks uncertainly toward her.

When she was fourteen and he was three, she held him just like this: his face, turned sideways, on her shoulder. The weight of him draped over her.

Today he is taller than she is, for the first time, but still he finds a way to relax his bones and muscles onto her bones and muscles, and for a moment— before he comes back to himself—the two of them breathe like that, unselfconsciously.

“Jesse,” she says. “Don’t get anyone pregnant.”

“Stop,” he says.

Then he stands up straight.

“You’re home?” Jesse asks her.

“For now.”

• • •

The two of them watch TV with their mother. Kojak: a show that Jesse loves.

At a certain point, both Jesse and her mother fall asleep, and Louise makes her way back into the kitchen, where she opens a cabinet. Yesterday, she noted with some satisfaction that Jesse had done what she asked him to do on the phone. He got some provisions. He’s growing up.

She’s dipping a spoon into a jar of Cheese Whiz when a knock comes at the door.

Outside is a person she doesn’t, at first, recognize.

All she sees is that it’s a woman, and that the woman has gray hair.

Judyta

hen Denny Hayes finds Judy, she’s pacing in circles around her deskW

like a defeated boxer.

Hayes watches her sympathetically.

“Goldman said you were upset,” he says.

With effort, she sits in her chair. “What’d you get from him?”

Hayes pauses. “Nothing,” he admits. “He clammed up when you left.

Didn’t say another word.”

Then—looking over his shoulder, lowering his voice—“LaRochelle was the one made us go in. Outside the room, he was telling us he was concerned that Sluiter was playing with you. That he wasn’t giving you the truth. But what I think it really was,” he says, “was LaRochelle wanted to be able to say

he finished the job himself.”

Judy’s shoulders sink.

“I would have let you keep going,” says Hayes.

Judy nods. “I know.”

“If it makes you feel better,” says Hayes, “conservator from the Hyde Collection is on her way to the Preserve right now to see about removing that paint from Barbara’s room.”

Judy has been so focused on Sluiter that it takes her a moment to remember.

When she does, a question comes to mind: “How did the parents react?”

Judy asks. “Are they okay with it?”

“Good thought,” says Hayes. “I was wondering the same thing. But I heard from the captain that they’re fine with it. The father is, at least. Didn’t hesitate.”

This, in Judy’s mind, could mean one of two things: it could be a mark in favor of the innocence of the Van Laar parents. Or it could be that there was never anything interesting on those walls to begin with.

Before she leaves for the Preserve, Judy makes a request of Hayes: “Will you tell me what happens today with Sluiter? Will you call me, even if you’re

not at the Preserve?”

Hayes nods.

• • •

The conservator is a tall young woman, maybe as young as Judy. She wears large glasses and white coveralls. In her right hand is a bucket; in her left is a drop cloth.

Her name is Anna, she says. She’s here to look at the paint.

Judy, being the one to come up with the idea, is also the one to oversee it.

She leads Anna into the main house, and then down the hallway to the pink room.

Anna the conservator enters the room first, puts her bucket down. Takes in the very pink walls, the neatly made bed, the surprising square footage of the room.

“Any idea which wall I should start with?” she asks.

“I think it’s the one behind the bed,” says Judy, thinking of the picture Barbara drew. The plan for the mural.

Anna moves with confidence. Spreads her drop cloth on the floor. Kneels to the ground and reaches into her bucket, removing from it a metal container of acetone and something that looks like a large Q-tip.

She dips the Q-tip into the acetone, applies it to a tiny spot in a corner.

When she takes it away, a tiny patch of green blooms through the pink.

“Well,” says Anna. “That’s a good sign. Looks like oil paint underneath.

Which means I might be able to remove the latex paint on top without damaging the underlayer.”

She returns to her work, making her tiny circle a tiny bit larger. Yes: there’s green, and some black next to it.

Anna glances back over her shoulder at Judy.

“You know this is going to take me a really long time, right?” she asks. “I mean days.”

• • •

Toward the end of the afternoon, a young investigator comes up the hill to find them in the main house. He looks flustered.

“Are you Luptack?” he says to Judy. She nods.

“Captain LaRochelle is on the phone for you. He says it’s urgent.”

When Judy reaches the phone in the Director’s Cabin, she finds Denny Hayes has reached the grounds as well. He’s the one holding the phone.

Around him, a little crowd of curious onlookers has formed. She takes the receiver into her hands, angles her back to them.

“I’m here in the room with Mr. Sluiter,” says the captain, someplace between serious and chagrined. “He says he’d like to speak with you. He’s agreed to allow me to remain in the room with him as he does so.”

She glances at Hayes, who has no idea what’s going on. As a courtesy, she covers the mouth of the phone with her hand. Mouths to him: Sluiter’s asking to talk to me.

He raises his eyebrows. The call will be recorded, he mouths back to her.

“I know,” says Judy.

“What do you know?” asks Sluiter, on the other end of the line.

• • •

Jacob Sluiter makes no small talk, this time. Speaks clearly and directly.

“I don’t know anything about Barbara Van Laar,” he says. “I’m telling you the truth.”

“How did you know her name?” Judy asks. “When I asked you about her, you said her name before I did.”

“I seen it in the papers,” says Sluiter. “Same as anybody else.” He’s grinning, triumphant. She can hear it through the line.

Judy waits. There’s more, she thinks; there must be more.

She can hear Sluiter breathing: a wet sound that turns her stomach.

At last, he continues.

“I do know where her brother is, though.”

Judy closes her eyes briefly. “Will you tell me?” she asks. She can almost

taste the answer. She wants it badly.

“No, I won’t.”

Be quiet, Judy tells herself. Wait. Through the telephone line, she silently

wills LaRochelle to shut up, too.

It works.

“But I’ll show you,” Sluiter says, at last.

Louise

ouise opens the door.L She knows this woman. She can’t remember how.

The woman wears her gray hair in a long low ponytail, one that nearly reaches her waist. She wears a long cotton dress. Socks inside walking shoes.

For a while, they look at each other, unmoving.

Then the woman says, “Louise?” and it’s only upon hearing her voice— distinctive, low-pitched—that Louise puts together who she is.

“Mrs. Stoddard,” says Louise. “Are you all right?”

• • •

Mrs. Stoddard—once a Sunday school teacher, a fixture in the town, the mother of Antonia Stoddard, one of Louise’s classmates from kindergarten through the end of school—has, since her husband died, rarely been seen.

For more than a decade, there have been more rumors about her than facts.

Like Louise’s mother, Mrs. Stoddard is said to be a shut-in. To have had a “nervous breakdown.”

But unlike Louise’s mother, Mrs. Stoddard has a clear reason for her rumored break with reality: she lost her son and then her husband in cruelly quick succession. And her husband was so disgraced in death that she couldn’t even mourn him properly—in public, at least.

• • •

“May I come in, Louise?” asks Mrs. Stoddard.

Louise steps back, making way. She gestures to a chair; Mrs. Stoddard accepts the offer, placing her purse in her lap, clutching its handle tightly, as if afraid someone will take it.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asks Mrs. Stoddard. “Tea?” She has no idea if there’s tea in the house.

“I’m all right,” says Mrs. Stoddard.

“How’s Antonia?” asks Louise.

“Oh, fine,” says Mrs. Stoddard. “All the girls are fine. I’m a grandmother five times over.”

She sits up straight in her chair, proud. But something tells Louise she should not pry further into Mrs. Stoddard’s family—that, perhaps, they are

not much in touch.

“You must be very proud,” says Louise.

“I am.”

“I remember Antonia played piano really well. Sang well, too.”

“She did, didn’t she?” asks Mrs. Stoddard.

A long and awkward silence ensues.

Suddenly, the woman leans forward in her chair.

“I know what they’re trying to do to you,” she says.

Louise blinks. “You do?”

Mrs. Stoddard nods. Her eyes fill sharply with tears. She reaches one thin hand across the kitchen table, palm upward, and Louise has no choice but to place her hand there, on top of Mrs. Stoddard’s.

“But don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t let them do it again.”

She opens the purse in her lap, then rummages inside it, searching for something.

She pulls out a wrinkled document, places it on the table between them, and smooths it with a fist.

“There,” she says. “Take it. It’s for you.”

With some hesitation, Louise pulls a set of stapled pages toward her.

She doesn’t know what she’s looking at, at first. It’s a carbon copy of something, the text so faint she has to squint in places. At the top of the document are words she does not understand: Collateral Receipt and Informational Notice.

At the bottom is a signature: Maryanne Stoddard.

“Did they tell you it was me?” asks Mrs. Stoddard.

“Did who?”

“At the magistrate’s office. Did they tell you it was me who bailed you out? I put my house up,” says Mrs. Stoddard, excited now, her hands trembling slightly. “Look,” she says. “Look at the next page.”

On the next page is a promissory note, the address of the Stoddard house listed at the top. On the third page is a xeroxed copy of the deed.

“Mrs. Stoddard,” says Louise. “You shouldn’t have done this.”

“Why not?”

“It’s so kind of you,” she says. “But it’s too much.”

“Nonsense,” says Mrs. Stoddard, forceful now. “I’ve spent the past fourteen years of my life trying to clear my husband’s name for a crime he didn’t commit. I’ll be damned if I let the bastards do the same thing to someone else.”

Louise is still looking at the paperwork. Scrutinizing the signature at the bottom of the page.

“Do you know,” Mrs. Stoddard continues, “how many hours of my life I’ve spent in the woods around Hunt Mountain? It’s practically all I’ve done.

My children think I’m crazy. But I always think—if I could just find something—some of the boy’s clothing, or—” She goes quiet for a moment, weighing how honest she should be. “Or the boy himself,” she says, finally.

“Poor soul.”

Louise is listening intently. Everything that Mrs. Stoddard is saying is confirming a theory that she’s formed over the past few minutes. She squints at the signature, parsing it.

“Mrs. Stoddard, I don’t mean to be rude. But your first name is Maryanne?” she says.

“It is.”

“And you’ve spent the years since Bear Van Laar’s disappearance searching in the nearby woods?”

She nods. “Since my husband’s death, while he was in the custody of the police,” she says. “To be precise. But yes.”

Louise waits. Afraid to ask.

“Scary Mary,” says Maryanne Stoddard. “You can say it. I’ve heard they call me that.”

Judyta

udy sits in the belly of a canoe, being rowed across Lake Joan by twoJ EnCon rangers who paddle in long unified strokes, silent and calm, barely disturbing the water.

Two more canoes flank the one that Judy is in. One contains Hayes and a medical examiner from Schenectady.

The other contains Sluiter and an armed guard.

It took several rounds of negotiations with Sluiter’s state-assigned attorney for this plan to be permitted by a county judge. The concern, said Denny Hayes, was Sluiter’s history of bolting. His ability to manipulate those around him.

An escape risk like Sluiter would have to be shackled at the ankles, his hands cuffed to a waist belt. This, therefore, is his situation as he and his guard are propelled by rangers sitting fore and aft.

Judy wills herself to keep her gaze straight ahead. If she turns it, she fears she’ll see Jacob Sluiter looking back at her.

• • •

They’re heading for the opposite bank of Lake Joan, to the small stretch of rocky land at the center of a bay that appears inaccessible by foot. Steep

rocky outcroppings come up from the water and frame the inlet on either side.

On approach, it becomes clear that they’ll have to wade. There is no beach here, only boulders that impede entrance to the forest beyond. One by one, they disembark, holding each canoe steady as they go. Sluiter—hands bound together at his front, as if in supplication—must be helped out of the canoe by the burly guard assigned to him. As he walks toward the bow, body low, the canoe wobbles, threatens to tip. The guard opens his arms and Sluiter falls into them.

The forest beyond the rocks is brutally dense. Away from the shoreline, not much sunlight reaches the earth.

Walking in a line behind Jacob Sluiter, the terror of the North Woods, Judy scans the ground beyond his figure.

Earlier, on the phone, Sluiter had described what they’d be looking for: a cairn. A little stack of rocks, one atop the other, meant to mark a spot.

Now, Judy wants to be the one to see it first—if Sluiter’s telling the truth, that is, which remains to be seen. Part of her believes that he simply wanted a field trip: one last chance to see the outdoors before being remanded to a federal prison for the rest of his life.

After several minutes of bushwhacking, the quiet of their march is interrupted, at last, by the sound of Sluiter’s voice.

“Look up,” he says. They do.

They’ve reached the steep rock face they could see from shore. Ten feet above their heads, there looks to be a cavern, an open mouth of unclear depth.

“Look down,” Sluiter says, and bows his head. “There he is.”

At his feet, on the bare earth: a little tower of rocks.

A cairn.

Beneath that marker, says Jacob Sluiter, they will find the boy.

Louise

ouise stands in her childhood bedroom.L She’s been avoiding it. Last night, she slept on the couch. She doesn’t like to go in there, full as it is of the artifacts of her promise, of Louise Donnadieu at seventeen, the salutatorian of Central High, off on a full scholarship to Union.

Now, though, she’ll have to come to some sort of truce with the space: she may be here for weeks or months until her hearing.

She turns in a full circle and then begins to clear the walls of their adornments. Down come the National Honor Society certificate, the photograph of Louise in her cap and gown, shaking hands with her high school principal; down comes the last report card she ever received, filled with A’s and A-pluses.

She was the one who put them up. At fourteen, sixteen years old. No adult in her life ever cared enough to do so. Embarrassing, she thinks. Pathetic.

Her graduation photograph is the last to go. The girl in it is smiling, but her brows are furrowed, as if she’s seeing into the future.

Louise makes a pile on the floor of all the documents, then gathers them into her arms. She’s walking to the kitchen door to take them to the garbage when she hears Jesse speaking to someone outside it.

She picks up her pace.

“Who’s asking?” Jesse says, but Louise can’t hear the response.

Jesse turns to her, scowling: an expression that means it’s most likely a

man.

He closes the door before asking.

“You know someone named Lee Towson?”

• • •

Three minutes later, Louise stands out front of her mother’s house, facing Lee Towson in the flesh. She’s made Jesse swear to stay inside; she’ll be damned if she has this conversation in front of an audience.

It’s only been four days since she stood opposite Lee in the hallway of Staff Quarters at the camp. It feels like a month. She can still hear Denny’s phrase in her ear: statutory rape. She looks down at the ground when she

speaks.

“How’d you find me?”

“Phone book,” he says. “Not too many Donnadieus in Shattuck, New

York.”

“But how’d you know I was here?”

“I’ve got friends in the area.”

She considers the implication of this. She has always disliked being gossiped about. But in a town as small as Shattuck, she guesses it’s inevitable.

“You know they’re looking for you?” Louise asks him.

“I heard that.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Here and there.”

“You hiding?”

“Kind of, I guess. I’ve got a plan to leave, anyway.”

Louise looks up at him, finally. Then past him. There are only two other houses on this cul-de-sac, both of them seemingly shuttered for the night.

There are no streetlights on the side streets of Shattuck; she can see his form only by the glow cast forth from her mother’s house.

“Louise?”

“What?”

“I’ve got something weighing on my mind,” he says. “Had to tell you before I go.”

Louise’s heart skips several beats. In her mind, she makes guesses, all of

them far-fetched.

“Oh?” she says—trying to sound casual.

“Your boyfriend,” says Lee Towson. “Your fiancé. Excuse me.”

“What about him?”

“He was sleeping around.”

Louise closes her eyes.

“How do you know?” she says.

“I supplied him. And I saw him a couple times with another girl. Same

one.”

“Not,” says Louise.

“Not Barbara. No. He was up at the main house. On the beach behind Self- Reliance. He was with a girl he called Annabel,” says Lee.

• • •

Louise closes her eyes. The world around her fades; her understanding with it. Other things come into focus now: Annabel’s declaration, early on, that her parents had someone in mind for her to marry. The Southworths and the McLellans, longtime friends, staying together at Self-Reliance. John Paul’s staunch refusal to bring Louise anyplace in its vicinity. His absence throughout the week. And—last, most brutal—Annabel’s departure in the middle of the camp dance. The same night as Barbara’s disappearance.

“Annabel’s seventeen,” says Louise.

Lee says: “Normally I’d mind my own business. But I thought you needed

to know that, in case.”

“In case what?” says Louise.

“In case it—proves anything. In case it’s helpful to you. I know what charges they laid on you. But I bet they’re interested in you for something

else. That’s how they work,” he adds.

“Why do you care what happens to me?” says Louise, abruptly. It sounds more bitter than she meant it to. Everyone, she believes, has an agenda.

“Well,” says Lee, “because I like you.”

She says nothing. She closes her eyes.

A long pause. Then: “Louise. Why don’t you come with me?”

“What?” says Louise—distracted now. “Where?”

“I’m going to Colorado tomorrow. To a town called Crested Butte. Buddy of mine lives out there, says it’s heaven.”

“I’m not allowed to leave my house,” says Louise, stiffly. “My mother’s house. I’m out on bail. They got me on possession charges. For some drugs that weren’t even mine.”

“Ah,” says Lee. “Well, there goes that idea. Unless you feel like pulling a Bonnie and Clyde. Hide out awhile, till things cool off.”

Louise shakes her head. “Anyway,” she says, “that’s where they think you’re going. So you should prob’ly choose a different place.”

“Who does?”

“The police.”

Lee pauses, considering.

In the silence, Louise says: “I heard about you. I heard about why you went to jail.”

Lee inhales and exhales. Then, as if suddenly tired, he seats himself on the ground. “Who told you that?”

“My mom’s friend.” She doesn’t feel like telling the whole truth.

Lee gives a long sigh.

“I was nineteen,” says Lee. “She was sixteen. She was the daughter of the family I cooked for. Rich family. Had a place in the Catskills, okay? Not quite as nice as the Van Laar place, but something like it.”

Louise listens, considering.

“Her dad caught us. Freaked. He called the cops. Said I forced her. She’s screaming in the background that it isn’t true. It wasn’t true.”

Louise, still standing, sits down now, next to Lee.

“Louise? Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” she says. And she doesn’t: feels her instincts are all wrong. Always have been. How, she wonders, can she fix her instincts about people? About men?

“I’m done working for rich people,” Lee says. He’s talking to himself now, more than to her. “I can’t believe I ever did it again. That’s why I hid.

Minute I heard what was happening with the Van Laar girl, I split. With my record . . .” He trails off. Continues. “Anyway, there’s a new thing happening out there,” says Lee. “It’s 1975. You gotta go west, is what I hear.”

In her left hand, Louise is still holding the papers and photographs she took down from the walls of her room. She looks down at them. She listens to the voice of another man, making her another promise that won’t come true.

How many times in her life has she said yes to a boy or a man just because it was the easiest thing to do? How many times has she let a man take what he wanted, instead of taking something for herself?

She places the papers delicately on the ground. Glances back over at Lee, whose forearms and hands she has dreamed for a whole summer about touching.

She does so now. Places her left hand on the inside of his elbow. He looks up at her, curious.

“You want to mess around a little?” says Louise.

He says nothing. Sits very still as Louise brings her body around to face him, kneeling before him on the ground. She glances up toward the lit house; knows she won’t be seen outside in the dark. She lifts her shirt over her head.

“Jesus,” he says. He reaches forward, puts his hands around her waist.

“No,” she says. “Yours.” She lifts his shirt off, too, and then leans into him, her skin on his skin, on top of him as he lies back onto the ground.

She’ll take what she wants from him, a moment of pleasure in the middle of all this dark, a washing-away of John Paul and the McLellans and the Van Laars and the grand house she was never going to be invited into, ever, no matter what she did.

Tomorrow, Lee Towson will leave for Colorado. She won’t follow.

Alice

he’s been shipped back to Albany. Her parents—who have, during thisS ordeal, largely kept to their room—were the ones assigned to oversee her transport. From Albany, they decamped to Manhattan, with mumbled

assurances that Barbara would be found.

Now she is alone.

She’s out of everyone’s hair this way, she thinks, and her shoulders shake a little with laughter. Today, like every day, is a very bad one, and so with Dr. Lewis’s blessing she has been advised that she can take three pills when needed.

She takes them now, her brain ahead of her body, sighing with relief when the pills come out of their home in the glass bottle, anticipating the chemical surge. She chews them up to get there faster.

She closes her eyes. Her mind relaxes, bringing her, unexpectedly, back to the Dunwitty Institute.

To her sister Delphine, her only visitor the entire time she was there.

I’m sorry, she’d said. And then she said more: that she’d been in free fall since George died. That it had not been the first time, with her and Peter; that they’d been intimate, too, when they were young. All the way back when she first introduced Alice to Peter, for her coming-out party.

Was introducing Alice to Peter simply a way for Delphine to stay close to him? Setting him up with her guileless, stupid little sister? Making Alice the brood mare while Delphine and Peter—intellectual matches—carried on together every time Peter went down to New York?

“It’s nothing like what you’re imagining,” said Delphine. Reading her mind. “George and I loved each other very, very much. But we were never interested in a traditional marriage. He was free to do as he pleased. As was I.

I’m not sure if you’ll recall this, but I tried to warn you of it, once,” said Delphine. She leaned back. “About how you should—have some fun, I think I

said. Did you ever try it?”

Alice said nothing.

“It was wrong of us, Alice. All of us,” said Delphine. “We’ve treated you

abominably.”

Silence.

“Will you leave him, Alice?” said Delphine. “You could, you know.”

Silence.

“Alice,” said Delphine. “Alice, are you sleeping?”

At last, Alice smiled. In a way, she thought, she was. She was having a waking dream—the same one she always had.

In this dream, she was locked in a room she didn’t recognize while the search for her missing son went on without her. And someone—she didn’t know who—was standing just outside the door.

• • •

In Albany, Alice opens her eyes. She doesn’t like being here by herself. The house is cold in summer, and all of Albany seems desolate, abandoned. The government workers are taking vacations in places farther north or south. In this city, Alice feels somehow like the only survivor of a plague.

Three pills in her blood now. Her body goes slack.

This, this is how she hears him best: on the other side of the veil, in the other world. The one where Bear lives.

Once, while playing a game of Dictionary, Alice came across the word nonsecular, and this is the word that comes to mind when she thinks of the liminal space between life and death in which she encounters her son.

The space in which she lets herself acknowledge what she did is nonsecular. The space in which she doesn’t work so hard to stop the slivers of light and memory that come at her from time to time, in unexpected moments, so sharply that she feels as if she’s been stabbed: is nonsecular. In this world, when those memories come, she accepts them, examines them impassively, opens herself to them instead of willing them away.

• • •

Alice blinks now. Coming back to life.

Outside a window, the sun is going down now. How long has she been sitting in one chair? She isn’t certain.

She stands up, goes to the toilet, relieves herself. And then she drifts, in a dream, toward the room that used to be a nursery. Another nonsecular space.

I’m here now, she says. I’m here.

She listens, awaiting his reply.

Judyta

he has seen dead bodies before. She has seen her own grandparents,S three of them, in open caskets. She has seen the freshly deceased, victims of vehicle accidents, during her tenure as a state trooper on highway patrol.

She has never before seen skeletal remains.

The medical examiner issues directives as the forest rangers, with gloved hands, gently lift a small intact skeleton from where it has rested for more than a decade onto a plank for observation.

Out of respect for the dead, Jacob Sluiter has already been led away by the armed guard.

Now: a sort of impassive interest in the medical examiner’s voice as he begins. “I wondered,” he says, “whether the skeleton itself would have deteriorated. But it looks like the soil here isn’t highly acidic, probably due to its proximity to water.”

He kneels down next to the plank, produces a measuring tape, holds it to various points on each bone.

“I’d say this was a child,” he says. “Probably between seven and eleven years of age.

“Do you know if it’s male or female?” asks Hayes.

“In immature skeletons there’s room for error,” says the examiner. “But right now, I’d say male.”

• • •

Back at the Command Post, Denny Hayes holds his finger over a magnetic tape player, ready to listen to the recording of the phone call between Jacob Sluiter and Judy. The one in which he directed them to the body of Bear Van Laar. A copy of the call has been made and transported from headquarters at Ray Brook, where Sluiter is being held, to the Van Laar Preserve.

“You believed him?” Hayes says, before listening. “You believed his

story?”

Judy nods. She did. She does.

“Why?” Hayes asks. “He’s a known liar. He’s never admitted to anything before.”

“Just my instinct,” says Judy. “He had no reason to help us out with this.

But he did.”

Hayes presses play. Jacob Sluiter begins to talk, his voice crackling.

I know where Bear Van Laar is, says Sluiter, on the tape.

But I didn’t kill him.

Judyta

t morning briefing, LaRochelle confirms it: the dental records are aA perfect match. The skeleton was definitively Bear Van Laar’s.

Then he asks Hayes to give a summary of Jacob Sluiter’s story.

“Shouldn’t Investigator Luptack do that?” says Hayes. “Being that she’s

the one he told?”

LaRochelle frowns.

“Whatever,” he says. “Somebody. Go.”

Reluctantly, Judy turns and trades places with Captain LaRochelle, walking to the front of the room while he walks to the back. There, he holds his gaze steady on Judy as she speaks.

• • •

According to Jacob Sluiter, the Van Laar Preserve is his ancestral land.

The Sluiter family—Dutch immigrants to Albany as far back as 1700— first settled in the North Country during the logging boom in the 1820s. A Sluiter ancestor purchased the tract of land on which the Van Laar Preserve was later built. He and his sons logged the first-growth forest clean, making a good living in the process. But in the 1870s, when politicians began to grow wary of what logging might do to the water supply downstate—threatening to

ban it altogether within the future Adirondack Park—the Sluiters sold their land.

The man who bought it was—Judy allows herself, only briefly, to pause for dramatic effect—Peter Van Laar the First.

Bear and Barbara’s great-grandfather.

It is no coincidence, therefore, that each time Sluiter is on the lam, he finds himself in this area. He says he’s pulled to it; his own grandfather used to take him here when he was a boy, sneaking him onto property that was no longer theirs, pointing with resignation toward the grand house and camp as evidence that fortune favors some over others. That they, the Sluiters, had always been cursed with bad timing and bad luck.

The land had a secret, though, that even the Van Laars seemed not to know about.

On Lake Joan’s opposite shore—deemed impassable by most due to its steepness and rockiness, by the density of its trees—was a series of natural caverns. The Sluiters had discovered them the first time the land had been logged, and the knowledge had been passed down through the generations; it was a place that Sluiter’s grandfather still took him to, a marvel one had to see to believe.

According to Sluiter, during his time on the run from the authorities in 1961, he sought refuge in these caverns for the length of that summer, when the homes he relied on in winter were occupied by their owners.

It was a perfect spot: approachable only by water, hidden by thick trees, sheltered from the rain. He swam back and forth across the lake to reach his makeshift shelter; he fished and trapped and scavenged for food.

One afternoon, said Sluiter, he woke in his cavern to the sound of what he recognized as human footsteps.

At first he feared capture. The police, he knew, were on his trail. But to his ears, it sounded as if only one man was approaching. And so, curious, he moved to the front of his cave, keeping close to the shadows to avoid being seen.

Eventually, a man came into view. He was carrying something that Sluiter couldn’t see, at first.

Eventually, it became clear: it was a child. A boy. Lifeless in the man’s arms.

The man knelt to the ground. Weeping, he laid the child before him, and began to dig.

Sluiter, silent, ten feet above them in his cavern, watched it all.

• • •

Judy stops. For a moment, the room is quiet, until someone asks the question she knows will be next.

“What did the man look like?” someone asks, finally, and all the heads in the room swivel in the direction of Goldman, the oldest investigator, who has called out from the back.

“Most of the description Sluiter gave was generic,” says Judy. “Tall, brown hair, middle-aged.”

She pauses. Considers her next words carefully. “But he did say that the man looked like a local, as opposed to someone in the family.”

Someone in the back speaks up. “What’d he mean by that? Something the

man was wearing?”

“He didn’t explain,” says Judy.

Another hand goes up. “Why didn’t Sluiter tell anyone? After he was apprehended the first time?”

“He thought no one would believe him,” says Judy. “That he wasn’t the one who killed the boy in the first place. Later, when he heard about Bear’s disappearance in the news, he put two and two together, figured out who the boy was. But he had no incentive to talk.”

A pause.

“Well, do we?” asks Hayes. “Believe him?”

Judy does. But she won’t say it aloud—not yet.

“Why did he tell us now?” someone asks.

Hayes turns his gaze to Judy. “Investigator Luptack,” he says. “Any thoughts?”

Judy clears her throat. Is she actually expected to answer?

“Go ahead,” says Hayes.

“Well,” says Judy. “He said he trusted me.”

Someone in the room snorts. Someone coughs.

“All right, all right,” Hayes says. “The whole story sounds implausible.

Correct. But there’s one thing to acknowledge: the boy would be an outlier for Jacob Sluiter. He’s different from any of Sluiter’s other known victims.

He’s a sex predator, but his targets are women. Grown women. Young boys have never been his interest, that we know of. So let’s work this theory for a little bit. Say Sluiter didn’t kill Bear Van Laar. Say he’s telling the truth.

Then who did? How did his body end up buried where it’s buried?”

LaRochelle, in the back, says: “Why not Carl Stoddard? He was a local. If what Sluiter’s saying is true, he’d fit the profile.”

Hayes pauses, diplomatic. “Maybe. Yes,” he says. “But I think it’s worth looking into other ideas, at this point, sir.”

“Such as?” says LaRochelle. Testy.

For a moment, everyone is silent.

Then Hayes says: “Has the family been notified, sir? Of Bear’s

discovery?”

LaRochelle looks away. “They have.”

“May I ask how they reacted?”

LaRochelle frowns. “I spoke only to Bear’s father. He received the news— stoically, I would say. He’s gone back to Albany for the present, to relay the information to his wife in person.”

He looks distracted. Then abruptly, he straightens.

“Excuse me,” he says, and walks out of the cabin, tapping a pack of

cigarettes into his palm as he goes.

Hayes catches Judy’s eye.

The case will be reopened. Everyone knows it, including LaRochelle.

• • •

After LaRochelle’s departure, Hayes turns to face the investigators left in the room.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” he says. “Why didn’t any of the searchers see it? A new patch of disturbed earth, just across the lake? Marked with a cairn, no less. Huge crew of people on-site for weeks. You’d think they would have searched the periphery of the lake first thing.”

“Maybe they were misdirected,” says Judy.

Hayes looks at her. “By?”

“The family, I guess,” says Judy. Then she turns to Investigator Goldman.

“Was that the sense you got? When you were working the case?”

Goldman hesitates. Looks down.

“I did always have the strange sense that they didn’t want to find him.

Yes.”

“You think someone in the family killed him?” Hayes asks.

But this, apparently, isn’t a claim Goldman is prepared to make. He goes silent.

“What if it was an accident?” Judy says.

“Then why let Carl Stoddard take the fall? More than that—why actively indict him?” Hayes says.

Judy looks around, pausing to see if anyone else will chime in. But for a moment, there is silence.

“How did Carl Stoddard die?” someone asks.

“Heart attack,” Goldman says. “He had a heart attack and died while in

police custody, awaiting questioning.”

Judy is forming a theory.

“What if it was convenience?” says Judy. “What if it was just easier for the family to let everyone think it was Stoddard who did it? He was dead, after all,” she said. “They probably thought they weren’t hurting anyone.”

“All right,” says Hayes. “Maybe. But that would still mean they had

something to cover up.”

Silence.

“Which was?” says Goldman.

Judy is looking at something on the wall.

“Judy?” says Hayes.

“Investigator Goldman,” says Judy. “Who was the person running the

search for Bear?”

“Well, the family was,” says Goldman.

“No,” says Judy. “The person providing direction. The person actually overseeing the search.”

Goldman looks down at the floor, thinking. Then he looks up. “I think it was the former camp director, actually,” he says. “The father of the current

one. Vic Hewitt was his name.”

For a moment, Judy goes silent.

Then she walks down the hallway, toward the bedroom she now knows to be Vic’s.

When she returns, she proffers the group photo she found to Denny Hayes.

“Look,” she says, pointing to the pencil on the back. Blackfly Good-by.

1961. She flips it again to its front side. “Look again.”

A small group of investigators gathers around, looking at the photo.

Everyone in the picture is formally attired, children and adults alike, in dresses and suits. The women wear small hats. Even in black-and-white, she can see their lipstick and mascara.

Only two people stand off to one side, dressed differently: T.J., a young teenager; and her father Vic. Middle-aged. Bearded. Wearing a fishing hat with a floppy brim, and a plaid shirt rolled at the elbows, and corduroys patched at the knee.

Judy puts a finger to the girl. “That’s T.J. Hewitt,” she says. “Right?

Doesn’t it look like her?”

Hayes nods.

“Which makes him,” says Judy, and Hayes says: “Vic Hewitt.”

She moves her finger back toward the larger group. “I’d describe them as summer people,” she said. “Based on their clothes. But how would you

describe Vic?”

Hayes looks at her. “A local,” he says.

He turns to an investigator. Hands him the photograph. “Take this to Jacob Sluiter,” he says. “Ask him if he recognizes anyone in this photograph as the man who buried Bear Van Laar.”

• • •

A knock at the door interrupts them.

Anna, the conservator, stands blinking in the bright sunlight, exhausted.

LaRochelle, taking the last few drags on his cigarette, stands behind her.

“Anna, did you ever go home?” Judy asks her.

“No. I got excited.”

She turns and walks in the direction of the main house. Judy glances over her shoulder at Hayes, who glances at LaRochelle. Then the three of them follow her, trotting to keep up with Anna’s long strides.

• • •

With both Van Laar parents back in Albany, and most of the guests now gone, the house is almost empty.

Together, Judy and Anna walk to the pink room. Inside, the exposed mural is in plain sight.

Judy’s first reaction is to be surprised at the quality of the artistry. Barbara Van Laar could paint; that’s certain. The wall is covered with a set of icons Judy doesn’t understand: safety pins and flags and odd-looking faces with odder-looking haircuts. Music notes abound, as well.

A river makes its way from the upper left-hand corner of the wall to the lower right-hand corner.

Judy takes the whole thing in, scanning it rapidly to see if anything catches

her eye.

“Do you see it yet?” says Anna.

Judy’s heartbeat quickens.

“See what?” says Captain LaRochelle, his head moving in quick circles as he takes the whole wall in.

“I don’t blame you,” says Anna. “The whole thing is overwhelming. But come closer.”

She walks to the river. Its waves, she realizes, are not just waves. They’re letters.

BVL + JPM, they spell.

The way that children, for decades or centuries, have memorialized their love.

• • •

“Barbara Van Laar plus John Paul McLellan,” Hayes says.

He’s asked for the Director’s Cabin to be cleared. As senior investigator, he has that authority. Now Judy sits opposite him in a folding chair, elbows on knees, gaze on ground.

“I think that’ll hold up as solid evidence,” says Hayes. “With any judge.

We’ll start the process of getting a warrant for his arrest. The only question now is—where’d he stow the girl?”

“That’s not the only question,” says Judy.

“Oh?”

“The other one is: Did Vic Hewitt kill her brother Bear?”

Hayes looks at her. Then he slaps his knees and stands up.

“That’s your assignment, Judy,” he says. “Forget the grandfather, for now.

Forget Jacob Sluiter. I’m on the lead desk, and that’s the lead I assign you. In the meantime, I’m driving down to the hotel McLellan’s staying in myself. I don’t trust these troopers to keep good tabs on him.”

Judyta

he spends hours looking for any sign of either Hewitt. She goes back toS Staff Quarters; she searches the commissary, where T.J. must be eating, to see if she can find her there. She asks the staff up at the main house; no one has seen her, and no one seems to know her well enough to speculate about where she might have gone.

Either that, thinks Judy, or they’re not talking.

• • •

At four p.m., just before the end of her shift, Judy is seated outside the Director’s Cabin, gazing at the lake, when the sound of a vehicle draws her attention.

It’s T.J. Hewitt, in her truck. She drives by without turning her head in Judy’s direction. Pulls to a stop out front of Staff Quarters, a hundred yards away.

Judy watches as T.J. brings a bag out of the vehicle. Then lets herself into

the building.

Judy follows.

• • •

Inside, she finds the padlock on the door unlocked, and the door standing

open. She knocks anyway.

T.J., inside, jumps.

“Sorry to startle you,” says Judy.

“You didn’t,” says T.J.

“Have a minute?”

“For you?” says T.J. “Sure.” She smiles, and Judy is momentarily disarmed. Then she gathers herself, and walks over the threshold of the room.

“What’s going on?” says T.J.

“How come you didn’t tell me your father was alive?” says Judy.

“Didn’t I?”

“No. You talked about him as if he was dead.”

T.J. sits down on the edge of her small bed. “Well,” she says, “I guess that’s what it feels like. He’s not himself these days.”

Judy nods. Remains standing. “Where is he now?” she says.

“With family.”

T.J. nods.

“Why?”

“You needed to use our house as your headquarters,” says T.J. “I didn’t have a better place for him to go. He needs to be looked after, all the time.”

Judy glances back into the hallway. “Lotta empty rooms in this building,” she says, but T.J. is shaking her head.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “He’s not familiar with this place. He’d

wander off. He needs to be—watched.”

T.J. looks out the window.

“What family is he staying with?”

“What? Oh,” says T.J. “With his brother.”

“His brother?”

“Yes,” says T.J.

For a moment, silence. Then Judy takes out her card. Hands it over.

“Miss Hewitt—T.J.,” she says. “I don’t know why, but I have the feeling that you’re not telling me the whole truth. If you want to, you can call me

anytime.”

Judyta

udy can’t sleep. She lies in her room at the inn, turning one way and thenJ the other. She turns on the television, and then she turns it off. She ruminates on the facts of the day: Vic Hewitt. T.J. Hewitt. The results from the analysis of the blood on the uniform in McLellan’s car: Type A positive.

A match for Barbara Van Laar, though not definitive proof.

An hour goes by. Another.

It takes her until midnight to realize she never had dinner.

Defeated, she rises from her bed, pulls a wrinkled suit back on, and extracts several quarters from her wallet. Then walks under the portico toward the main building of the inn, where she’ll get something from the vending machines.

• • •

The front door is unlocked, but the desk is empty. Under the fluorescent lights of the lobby, Judy inspects her choices. She’ll get a Milky Way bar, she decides—her mother’s favorite. But when she makes her selection, the bar gets stuck against the glass on its way down.

Judy curses. Kicks the machine once, twice.

Three times.

With her hand, she pounds on the glass.

“Miss?” someone says, and Judy spins, panting.

It’s Bob Alcott—the owner of the inn.

“I’m sorry,” says Judy, twice. “Did I wake you?”

“No, no,” says Mr. Alcott. “I was up anyway.” He’s fumbling for something in his pocket, and she sees that it’s a set of keys. He takes the smallest one out, inserts it into the vending machine, and opens the door.

Immediately, the Milky Way falls to the ground. Judy stoops to retrieve it, feeling foolish.

“Take another,” says Mr. Alcott. “Take whatever you want.”

“That’s all right,” says Judy, but already Mr. Alcott is silently collecting a small assortment of candy and snacks from the machine.

“Here,” he says. “Least I can do.”

Then he closes it, and locks the door.

Judy regards him. “Mr. Alcott,” she says. “You’re a history teacher,

right?”

He nods.

“How much do you know about the history of the Van Laar Preserve?”

“Oh,” says Mr. Alcott. “Just about everything there is to know.”

He straightens as he says it. This, Judy understands, is his life’s work.

“Miss Luptack, would you like to come in for a cup of tea?” says Bob Alcott. “To go with your Milky Way bar.”

“Won’t it disturb your wife?” Judy asks, and the man shakes his head.

“Oh, no. She’s up too. We’re both night owls, now that the kids are grown.”

“That’s very kind of you,” says Judy.

Then she excuses herself briefly to retrieve her notepad from her room.

• • •

In the Alcotts’ apartment, just off the lobby, the couple sits across from Judy at a table.

Judy lets her pen hover for a moment over the paper before her. Then she dives in.

“Mr. and Mrs. Alcott,” she says. “Here’s my first question. Do you know when the Hewitts came to live on the Preserve?”

“Oh,” says Mr. Alcott, “that’s easy. Same time as the Van Laars. In fact, it was the Hewitts who guided them to the land. Dan Hewitt was Vic’s father.

He was born into a guiding family about an hour north, up near Saranac Lake. The first Peter Van Laar made his acquaintance when he was scouting land for his estate. It was Dan who knew about a piece of land a bit farther south that a family of loggers was looking to sell. He pointed Peter the First

in that direction.”

“What family was that?” asks Judy.

“The ones who sold it to the Van Laars, you mean?”

She nods.

“Funny you ask,” says Mr. Alcott. “It was a family called Sluiter. You

might have heard of their son.”

“Yes,” says Judy. “I have.”

“Anyway. Peter Van Laar—the first one, I mean—took such a shine to the land that he felt indebted to Dan Hewitt. Brought him along to what became the Van Laar Preserve to serve as the family’s personal guide.”

Alcott stops. Sips his tea.

“A decade went by. The first Peter Van Laar met and married his wife, and together they had a son—the second Peter, still alive today. Dan Hewitt, too, met a woman named Clara, who gave him twin boys. But Clara didn’t live long after that, according to my research. So the boys were raised by their father until they were about fifteen—which is when he died too. They became orphans, living on the land of the Van Laar Preserve. Mr. Van Laar, the First, was the one to take them in. He brought them from the cabin they’d been living in, right into the Van Laar house. They even lived in Albany with

the Van Laars during the year.”

Judy considers this.

“What was the age difference,” she asks, “between Peter II and the Hewitt boys? Were they older than him, or younger?”

“Only a handful of years younger,” says Mr. Alcott.

“Six, I think,” says his wife.

“Six years. And the rumor in the town was that Peter II never liked the Hewitt boys. His father favored them. Took them on daily walks. Gave them the run of the place. He was kind to Charlie Hewitt—always spoke well of him. But it was Vic he really loved. Treated him like another son. Adopted him, basically, though that was never made official.

“In theory,” Mr. Alcott continues, “the Hewitt boys should have been like brothers to Peter II. But he was jealous, I think. Still is, maybe.”

Judy is writing as fast as she can. Still, it’s not fast enough. Mr. Alcott notices, and pauses.

“Camp Emerson was Vic’s idea,” says Mr. Alcott, when Judy looks up again. “He was the one did all the work for it. But Peter I supported it from the start. By the end of his life, he described it as his greatest accomplishment. He saw it as a way to teach generations of children about the importance of the land. The beauty of it. He never gave a damn about the money he made banking—always seemed surprised by how much he had, in my opinion. He used to come into Shattuck and greet everyone by name. He was different from his offspring. More like a Hewitt than a Van Laar, if you ask me. Because the rest of his family always saw Camp Emerson as a folly.

They wanted nothing to do with it. Still don’t.”

Mrs. Alcott stands. Puts the kettle on again.

“The problems between the Hewitts and the Van Laars began when Peter I died. I hate to gossip, and I’m telling you honestly that I have no way to know, but the rumor is that Peter I left Camp Emerson and its operations entirely to Vic Hewitt. Divided the Preserve in half. The main house and the farm would go to the Van Laars; the camp to the Hewitts. In theory, it was a plan that might have worked. But,” he says.

“But?”

“He made a mistake. He made his own son, Peter II, the trustee of his will —thus granting him the power to distribute funds for the camp as he saw fit,

until his death.”

“And after he dies?” says Judy.

“Then the camp’ll go to Vic,” says Mr. Alcott. “Or more likely to his daughter, Tessie Jo.”

The kettle whistles. Judy looks up.

“But as I said,” says Mr. Alcott. “This is all rumor. Speculation. Which— as a history teacher—I should know better than to propagate.”

“I understand,” says Judy. “I’ll look into it myself.”

She stands. Thanks Mrs. Alcott for the tea. At the door, she turns back.

“I do have another question,” she says.

“Go ahead.”

“Vic Hewitt’s brother,” she says. “Charlie. What happened to him?”

“Oh, he died a decade ago, at least,” says Mr. Alcott.

“Two decades ago,” says Mrs. Alcott.

“Two decades ago. Before Bear disappeared. That’s right.”

“How did he die?”

“Natural causes,” says Mr. Alcott. “Nothing suspicious.”

“What did he do on the Preserve?”

Mr. Alcott frowns. “Now, I have to think about that,” he says. He puts his head down, as if trying hard to remember. “I guess—if I’m remembering right, I think he ran the farm. I think he oversaw the farm that supplied the main house with all its provisions, back in the day.”

“And he lived,” says Judy—though she already knows how he will answer. Where is he staying? she’d asked T.J., and T.J. had said: With his brother.

“He lived above the slaughterhouse,” says Mr. Alcott. “In a little apartment up there. That’s if I’m remembering right,” says Mr. Alcott, again.

Judy thanks him. Walks back toward her room, to get her car keys. And her gun.

Within five minutes she’s driving, headlights pointed north toward the Preserve.

Judyta

he’s never been on these grounds except in daylight. Now, the moonS lends the long dirt driveway a different aspect. The pines on either side of it stretch like giants toward the sky. The farm buildings, in the glow cast by her headlights, look even more decrepit and decayed.

Judy pulls to the side of the driveway. Cuts her engine. Cuts her headlights, too.

She sits for a moment in the vast dark of the Preserve, letting her eyes adjust. This is the month of the Perseid meteor shower in the Adirondacks, and the sky is bright with stars.

• • •

She opens and closes the door to her Beetle as gently as she can. Opens the trunk to retrieve the flashlight from her emergency kit.

Then, holding her flashlight forward, she walks toward the slaughterhouse.

She approaches it the way she used to dive into cold water as a child.

Quickly, confidently, without thinking too much.

If she stops and considers her actions, she knows she might falter.

Inside, she walks straight to the back, where a staircase rises toward the second floor. She ascends. The beam of the flashlight trembles slightly in her hand.

Halfway up, she pauses.

She hears something.

Voices, maybe: a man’s voice. And then, suddenly, music. She can’t make out the lyrics, but the music itself is old-fashioned, something she believes her grandparents might have listened to.

She continues up the stairs. At the top, in the beam of her flashlight, she sees a closed door. It’s held shut by a hasp and a padlock—the same kind she noticed on T.J. Hewitt’s room in the Staff Quarters building.

She hesitates for a moment. And then, carefully, she draws her gun.

With her other hand, she raps at the door.

“Mr. Hewitt?” she says. “Are you in there?”

The radio goes off.

“Mr. Hewitt,” she calls. “My name is Investigator Judyta Luptack. I’d like

to ask you a few questions.”

Silence.

“Mr. Hewitt?” says Judy.

She feels so close to the truth. Her heartbeat quickens.

“Mr.—” she begins, and then at last she hears him.

“Barbara?” he says.

Judy shivers a little. “No, Mr. Hewitt,” she says. “My name is Judyta—” she begins, but Vic Hewitt cuts her off.

“Barbara,” he says. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Mr. Hewitt,” calls Judy, “I’m not Barbara. Is Barbara inside with you?”

Silence.

“Mr. Hewitt?”

She feels the weight of the gun in her hands. Considers her options. She could retreat; could walk or drive up to the Command Post; could bring yet another fleet of troopers to this structure. Could risk being seen as a fool yet again.

Instead, she says, “Mr. Hewitt, stand back from the door.”

She aims her pistol sideways at the padlock, ensuring that the bullet won’t make its way through the door. She braces her arm. Fires.

The padlock falls with a clunk to the floor, and Judy opens the door.

• • •

Inside a sparsely furnished room, an old man lies in a twin bed. A blanket covers him from his chin to his feet. His body is small; his expression

confused.

“Who,” he says, over and over again.

Instantly, Judy feels guilty.

“I’m not here to harm you,” she says. “I just need to ask you some questions.”

But Vic Hewitt only lets out a series of sounds that Judy can’t comprehend, and at last, she recognizes that she’s in a situation she can’t get out of: with the padlock broken, she has no way to lock the door again; with the state this man is in, she has no way to bring him outside. And she has no way to bring others to him either, without leaving him alone.

Judy looks straight down at the ground, between her feet. Maybe, she thinks, this wasn’t the right line of work for her after all. Maybe she would have been better off remaining a trooper.

Then, from the bed, there is movement.

“Oh,” says Vic Hewitt. “Oh. Oh. I guess you’re here about Bear.”

His voice is remorseful—but also younger, more energetic, as if he is returning in his mind to another time in his life.

Judy hesitates. She isn’t certain whether statements from those with infirm minds—the term she learned at the academy—are admissible in court. But her own personal curiosity, in this situation, wins.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m here about Bear.”

Vic Hewitt is struggling, now, to sit up in bed. Judy bends down, places a hand on his back. Helps him. Then sits on the edge of his bed. Upright now, Hewitt gazes directly at her, and she sees his eyes are filled with tears.

“I only helped,” he says. “I only helped.”

“You didn’t kill him?” Judy asks.

“Kill him? God no,” says Vic Hewitt.

“Who did?” Judy says.

And then, from outside the door, the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Judy goes quiet. Draws her gun. Walks swiftly toward the wall next to the

threshold, and puts her back to it.

“Oh no,” says Hewitt. “Oh no.”

The person stops outside the door. Judy can hear breathing. She will fire this gun, she tells herself, only if necessary.

At last, T.J. Hewitt takes one step into the room, looking in Judy’s direction already, as if she knows who will be there.

She looks Judy up and down. Looks directly at her gun.

“I’ve got one of those too,” she says, mildly. “But I don’t draw it on people.”

“Lie down,” Judy says. And then she adds: “Please.”

T.J. sighs. Takes her time. She gets down on her knees, looking up at Judy all the while as if demonstrating the ridiculousness of the exercise. Then lowers herself, in a slow push-up, to the ground.

Judy, gun still drawn, pats her down.

“All right, listen,” she says. “You and I are going to walk toward the

Command Post together.”

“Toward my house, you mean,” says T.J.

“Sure.”

“Well, that won’t work.”

“Why?”

“I can’t leave my dad here. He wanders. That door has to be locked.”

Judy sighs, exasperated. “Can he come with us?”

T.J. gives a half laugh. “Hardly. Look at him. I had to carry him up the stairs to get him here.”

For a moment, Judy and T.J. look at each other. Then T.J. says: “Tie us

up.”

Judy blinks. “With what?”

“There’s rope downstairs. All kinds of stuff. Tie us up. I’ll help you.”

She hesitates. It feels like a trap; and yet there is no other option, in Judy’s mind, that doesn’t involve leaving at least one of the Hewitts alone.

And so she does it: she follows T.J. down into the slaughterhouse, and then around the side of it toward another building T.J. calls the granary, and from here they extract the rope, and back upstairs, in the little apartment above the slaughterhouse, Judy ties the Hewitts together, back to back on Vic Hewitt’s bed. Then she ties the rope itself to the bed frame.

• • •

Fifteen minutes later, she returns, with four investigators and five state troopers.

• • •

Thirty minutes later, she’s sitting in the passenger’s seat of a patrol car. The Hewitts are in the back.

Victor

n the Director’s Cabin, Vic was speaking with a recalcitrant twelve-year-I old boy, a child who had been shunned by his peers and had recently converted his embarrassment at this development into physical aggression.

In the middle of their conversation, the boy had stopped suddenly to point

through a nearby window.

“What is it?” said Vic, turning.

“Something’s in the lake,” said the boy—his tone changing from bitter to unsettled.

Sure enough: in the middle of Lake Joan was a white-bellied object that

looked at first like a surfacing whale.

Vic stood and walked to the window.

It was a rowboat, capsized.

“Stay here,” said Victor. “Don’t get up out of that chair.”

• • •

Outside, Vic broke into a run. A bad thunderstorm had just come through, sending counselors and campers inside, and the grass was slick with new rain. He stumbled, once. Fell to his knees. Then stood again.

The grounds felt empty. He swung his head around, but saw no human forms.

Even up the hill, at Self-Reliance, it was quiet—for the first time in a week, it seemed. The Van Laars had been having their annual party on the grounds—to which Victor, who used to be included when Peter I was alive, had not been invited in years.

Upon reaching the beach, Vic stood with his hands on his hips, observing the upside-down boat. One of the guests up at the main house, he thought; someone had capsized it and then left it to sink. They were always pulling stunts like this, drunken antics that resulted in more work for everyone else on the grounds. He scanned the shores, looking for movement, seeing none.

Then, sighing, he turned and jogged up the hill, toward Self-Reliance.

• • •

The thought occurred to him that he had not set eyes on Tessie Jo since morning. Normally, this wouldn’t have concerned him overmuch. All summer, she was given free rein to run about the grounds—usually with Bear on her heels. Her relationship with the Van Laars was different from her father’s; they accepted her as a playmate for Bear, as someone who could keep an eye on their adventurous son. She went freely in and out of Self- Reliance with the boy; Victor, meanwhile, avoided the house entirely.

Now he steeled himself, and squared his shoulders, and knocked at the

front door of the Van Laars’ house.

It opened immediately.

On the other side was Peter II, Bear’s grandfather, who looked as if he’d been standing guard.

His face was stiff and pallid. His hair was wet.

“Everything all right?” said Victor. “I saw a boat—”

Peter II grabbed his shoulders swiftly. Manhandled him away from the threshold. The blackfly doorknocker clacked once in their wake as the door closed.

“Follow me,” Peter II commanded. His voice was low and urgent.

“I need to find my daughter,” said Victor. “I need to make sure she’s all right.”

“She’s fine,” said Peter II. “Bear’s not.”

Victor looked at the man: his nominal brother. His enemy. At that moment, Peter II’s entire face was trembling slightly, his mouth downturned, his eyes bulging in what looked like an effort not to shout, or faint, or cry.

He set off toward the boathouse. Wordlessly, Vic followed.

Halfway there, he heard a noise that stopped him in his tracks. He listened, alert, his whole body still.

A fox, he thought—he’d heard that sound in the night, an eerie throttled cry that raised the hair on his neck.

But foxes were nocturnal; this was no animal.

It was, he realized at last, the sound of a woman wailing.

Victor

ogether, the two men stood in the threshold of the boathouse, lookingT out toward the lake and the sinking, upturned rowboat.

Peter II had been the one to find Alice. After her embarrassing entrance into the great room—after his attempt to divert the boy from boating with his obviously incapacitated mother—Peter II had gone outside to where he’d told his grandson to meet him for a hike, and found him absent.

Thinking at first that he might have gone ahead toward Hunt Mountain, Peter II had walked in that direction awhile, until the rain began in earnest, at which point a terrible thought occurred to him.

The boy would not be at the trailhead. He would be at the lake, with his mother. He was devoted to her; he would have noticed her distress, when she stumbled into the crowded great room and issued him the invitation to go boating.

“At which point I ran,” said Peter II to Vic Hewitt. His face, as he looked toward the lake, was still. His formality would not waver, even in that moment.

When he reached the boathouse, the storm was receding. And there before him, climbing up the ramp, a terrible vision: Alice, waterlogged, hysterical, screaming incomprehensibly. In the far distance, the rowboat, overturned.

“Where’s Bear?” he said to her, urgently, but she made no noises he could understand. Only pointed in the direction of the water, doubled over as if in physical pain.

He had scanned the water, and the shore. Just as he was doing now. He hadn’t seen Bear.

“I sat Alice down,” said Peter II. “I commanded her to be still. Then I dove in.”

He was hoping, he said, to find the boy alive, under the hull of the boat.

He was praying for this.

But when he reached the rowboat, and dove under, he was met with a

terrible sight: his grandson, lifeless.

His clothing hooked to the oarlock.

“I pulled him to shore,” said Peter II. “He had no pulse.”

Did you breathe into his mouth? Vic wanted to ask. Did you pump his chest? It was a technique his father had taught him; that his grandfather had taught his father.

To ask these questions aloud felt cruel, and so Victor was silent.

Peter was too. For a while, neither spoke; Peter II cleared his throat several times in a row, and Victor turned to him: this man he had known since birth.

Peter I had told Vic, on his deathbed, that he hoped they would come to see one another as brothers. But for all those years of acquaintance, he had never once felt any sympathetic impulse for the man, until now.

Tentatively, Vic put one hand on his shoulder.

The look that Peter II cast in his direction—imperious, appalled—made him withdraw quickly.

“Alice can’t know,” said Peter II, after a short pause. “Peter’s with her now, trying to keep her calm. But we have both decided that she can’t know

what happened.”

Vic furrowed his brow.

“Where is she?”

“In one of the farm buildings, I think,” said Peter II. “In your brother’s old apartment. Far enough away that she won’t be heard.”

This didn’t seem right, or useful.

But it was not, he knew, Alice’s well-being that concerned them. It was theirs. And the bank’s.

To have their name in the papers for anything other than success was anathema to the Peters. And a scandal like this one—Bear’s mother, drunk, taking her son out boating in a storm—something that would affect their business, shake the confidence of their clients in the entire enterprise—well, they wouldn’t let it happen. That much was obvious.

A long silence ensued, until Peter II said, “Look.”

He pointed in the direction of the rowboat. Only the faintest trace of it was visible now, the seam of its white belly facing up toward the clearing sky.

Together, they watched as it sank beneath the water. Then it was gone.

• • •

Before Victor lay two clear paths. One was to disagree with the Peters. He could tell them that he would not lie; he could say to them that an untruth as large as this one would have consequences they couldn’t foresee. His own father had taught him this well, when he was learning to guide: in the woods, each decision you make is irreversible, and sometimes catastrophic. A forgotten compass. A wrong turn. A fire lit in defiance of a drought. He could tell them he would not stand for it, and leave.

But in the process, he would lose the trust of the overseer of his inheritance. Lose the camp. His livelihood.

If Victor were deciding for himself alone, this was the path he would go down, surely. He reassured himself of this. Nodding once, as if to seal the thought inside him.

But he wasn’t deciding only for himself: there was Tessie Jo to think of, too. His daughter, who loved the land as much as he did. Whose unusual demeanor and appearance and comportment had already drawn stares in town. With the camp, her future was secure: she would never be required to marry, not if she didn’t want to. She could live, without restriction, what he thought of as an unconventional life.

Every choice would be open to her. This was what he told himself, as he took one step down the other path that lay before him: to hide the truth, at the

command of the Van Laars.

“How can I help you?” said Victor.

He thought of his own father, holding a compass in his hand, watching its needle wobble, and then calm.

Victor

ogether, they lifted Bear’s body from its place on the floor of theT boathouse and into the bottom of a red canoe. Vic stood guard while Peter II walked up to the slaughterhouse to switch places with his son. Then Peter III came, white-faced, and asked for a moment alone.

Outside the boathouse, Vic froze. From inside came the muffled sounds of a grown man crying. Trying not to be overheard.

Five minutes passed. Ten. And then Peter III emerged, red-faced and red- eyed, looking straight ahead, away from Victor.

“Do what you must,” he said. And then he walked away.

• • •

Vic pushed the canoe into the lake. In its belly, beneath a blanket, was the body of Bear Van Laar. Next to it, a shovel.

He sat in the stern, keeping his eyes ahead, trying hard not to look down at the small figure he was ferrying across the water to a permanent repose.

When he did, it was not revulsion that he felt, or fear, but tenderness.

He, too, had loved the boy.

As gently as he could, he moored the boat on a rocky bank, on the opposite side of Lake Joan. He lifted Bear’s small strong body from the boat. It was so

strange to see it still: the boy had been in motion, always, from the time he could walk. Tessie Jo’s shadow, following her wherever she went.

Vic took the shovel from the boat. Cradled the boy in his arms. Thirty feet inland, he laid the boy down at the foot of a sheer face of rock, and began to dig.

At Self-Reliance, he knew, the Peters would be making the announcement to the guests, who would be rising lazily from an afternoon nap, or looking up from the books they had brought out when it became clear that the storm would keep everyone inside.

“We need your help,” they would say. “Earlier, Bear went for a walk with his grandfather. Now it seems as if he might be lost.”

This was the plan they’d created while, above the slaughterhouse, Alice Van Laar slept, stupefied by a dose of Valium that bordered on dangerous.

“Vic Hewitt is already scouting the area,” they’d say. In case anyone saw him out in the canoe.

“We’re calling the fire department now,” they’d say.

Victor’s face betrayed his doubt.

It would work, the Peters insisted.

• • •

Now, with Bear safely inside the ground, Vic bade him farewell and began the work of filling in the hole. When he was finished, he began to walk away

—and then thought better of it.

He gathered a cache of stones.

He built a cairn.

He’d visit the boy from time to time. He’d bring Tessie Jo, too, when she was old enough.

For now, she would not have to know the truth.

Victor

hat he didn’t count on was that Tessie Jo would have seen.W Her absence that day made him assume that she was busying herself someplace, finishing one of her projects elsewhere on the grounds.

And he was glad for it—glad that he would not have to explain things to her, while she was still so young. There would be time for that eventually, he thought.

• • •

But then—after the firefighters arrived, after he had persuaded them to wait until morning to begin their search in earnest—Tessie Jo had come tearing out of the forest, her mouth wide, her face white, her long braid damp.

He had managed to corral her, before she could speak. He had managed to hustle her down a hallway.

“Tessie Jo,” he said, when they were alone. “What is it?”

She’d seen the overturned rowboat. Her curiosity had brought her to the south side of the boathouse. From there, she overheard her father speaking with the Peters; had overheard what the Peters wanted to do.

From there, she saw her own father row the red canoe to the other side of the lake, and she saw him return from it, too.

She knew what they had done.

• • •

Now, as Vic made his request of her—to stay silent, forever, about what she had seen; to join him and the Peters in their great untruth—she looked back at him, her large eyes narrowed, her eyebrows furrowed.

Her doubt made him doubtful, too.

But a girl of her age couldn’t understand her own future the way he did.

She couldn’t understand how limited her opportunities would be, if they

defied the Peters, told the truth.

Their future rested upon this lie.

“Trust me,” said Victor.

Reluctantly, his daughter nodded.

Victor

is assignment, overnight, was to keep watch over Mrs. Van Laar, in herH temporary residence above the slaughterhouse. It was important to keep her apart from the other guests, said the Peters, until she could be calmed.

At two in the morning, Mrs. Van Laar was asleep again, finally. It had taken four pills—the most they had authorized him to dispense at one time.

On a little chair, he sat across from her, watching her. He didn’t dislike Mrs. Van Laar, though she had never been particularly kind to him. He found her to be pitiable. Someone the Peters had identified as useful.

This was also, no doubt, the way they thought of him. When they didn’t think of him as burdensome.

When Mrs. Van Laar was finally permitted to be conscious—whenever the Peters deemed it safe—she would be broken beyond repair to learn the truth

of what had transpired that afternoon.

What she had done.

• • •

Each time she woke—in between doses—Mrs. Van Laar asked the same question, increasingly desperate: “Where’s Bear?” Over and over she asked it, the words blurry at their edges.

For anyone else, it might have been difficult to understand what she was saying. But Victor knew: they were the same words she asked him, daily, whenever she ran into him on the grounds.

“Where’s Bear?” she asked him, anew, and again he spoke the line he was told to speak.

“He went for a walk with his grandfather. We’ll find him soon.”

“But the boat,” she said.

“There was no boat. That was a dream.”

Again and again, the same exchange. Then she would quiet, until: Where’s Bear?

This was the question she would ask for the rest of her life, seeking her son without end. In keeping the truth from her, Victor thought—the truth that they told him she could not abide, that they insisted would send her to an early grave—the Peters were simply taking away the grief of loss and replacing it with the grief of uncertainty.

This, he realized, was the very thing from which he was attempting to protect his own daughter. He believed, on most levels, that he had little to give her, without the Van Laars. And so he bent to their collective will, telling himself that at least, in doing so, he was giving his strange and wonderful daughter the certainty of meaningful work. An income. Freedom from the sort of life the Van Laar women had been assigned at birth.

• • •

Next to him, Mrs. Van Laar now moaned softly in her sleep. A thin film of sweat dotted her brow. He opened a dresser drawer. Took out a towel.

Gently, he placed it to her head.

In the morning, he would face a larger crowd of searchers.

He would tell them the same story he had told the firefighters, and his daughter, and himself.

Bear went for a walk with his grandfather.

He turned back for a pocketknife.

He was not seen again.

Alice

ach time she surfaced from sleep, she was greeted by the same set ofE

images:

Bear, opening the boathouse door.

And then:

The boat on the water.

The oncoming storm.

The darkening sky.

The face of her son as he sat in the bow of the boat, smiling tightly, his small brow furrowed, while she rowed. How he’d looked toward the shore, and then the sky, and then his mother, seeking her reassurance at the first clap of thunder.

The rain came on so quickly that she could see it moving toward them like a curtain, east to west across the lake. When it reached them, it had filled their boat.

She tried to bail with her hands. She clawed at the water.

The boat tipped, and the two of them spilled out.

The far gunnel came crashing down with a slap on something hard. A

human form.

She shouted the name of her son.

Judyta

he’ll sign a statement?” says Hayes.S “She will,” says Judy.

They’re standing outside an interrogation room at Ray Brook—the same one in which Judy first met Jacob Sluiter. On the other side of the mirrored window, they watch T.J. Hewitt, who sits as still as stone, both hands on the table before her.

“You know what she told me?” says Judy. “That time I heard noises up above the slaughterhouse? She said that was them. The Hewitts. That when I left, T.J. hustled the two of them off the property, knowing that I’d return with backup. So when the troopers climbed the stairs,” she says.

“It looked empty.”

“Right.”

“Thing I don’t get,” says Hayes, “is why choose this moment to confess?

Why keep the secret for fourteen years, only to give it up now?”

“I’ve got a theory about that.”

“I bet you do.”

They pause, watching T.J., who closes her eyes for such a long time that Judy wonders if she’s asleep. Then she opens them.

“I think she was afraid the Van Laars were right on the cusp of framing an innocent person again. Just like they did with Carl Stoddard.”

Hayes turns to her, frowning. “McLellan?” he says. “She thinks McLellan’s innocent?”

“No,” says Judy. “She thinks he did it. But McLellan, Junior, is the Van Laar’s godson. He’ll take over the bank someday, according to his sister— since the Van Laars have no son. And McLellan, Senior, has a lot of sway over the family, and the bank. T.J. was afraid the McLellans would convince the family that Louise Donnadieu was the culprit.”

Hayes pauses.

“So the Hewitts came forward to save Louise Donnadieu’s reputation?”

“And Carl Stoddard’s. All these years later.”

Hayes nods.

“Never too late, I guess,” he says.

• • •

Together, they watch as T.J. Hewitt turns her face toward the one window in the interrogation room. It’s too high to give any view of the buildings outside, or even of the trees; but still she searches it, her eyes moving rapidly. She breathes deeply, face turned toward the bright sky.

What will she do now, wonders Judy, if the Hewitts lose the camp? If the Van Laars cut them out entirely, as they’ll no doubt do, snapping the thin thread that has stretched for decades between the Hewitts and Peter the First?

And she answers her question herself: They’ll be fine. The Hewitts—like Judy, like Louise Donnadieu, like Denny Hayes, even—don’t need to rely on anyone but themselves.

It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.

Judyta

echnically, her shift is over. But now that she no longer has to answer toT her parents each night, Judy can stay as long as she likes. Until her work is done.

Hayes, on the other hand, has to get home to his family.

Before he leaves, he claps her on the shoulder. “Good work,” he says. “I mean it.”

• • •

In the wake of the Hewitts’ revelation about the Van Laars, Investigator Goldman is on his way to obtain arrest warrants for both Van Laar men— Peters II and III—and also for John Paul McLellan Sr., on charges of criminal conspiracy for their role in lying to the police in the 1961 drowning of Bear Van Laar. Vic Hewitt may be formally charged as well; but given the state of his health, it’s unlikely he’ll serve time.

Tonight, at a press conference, Captain LaRochelle will announce the discovery of Bear Van Laar’s body. He will also announce that the case has been reopened, with more information forthcoming to the public as soon as he can disclose it.

Within a week, she suspects, Carl Stoddard’s name will be publicly cleared; and his wife, Maryanne, can at long last retire from haunting the

grounds of the Van Laar Preserve, looking for any evidence that might restore her husband’s innocence.

The Van Laars, on the other hand, will finally suffer the consequences of their actions.

All of these developments should, in theory, give her a feeling of peace.

But instead, the feeling she has is that there’s more work to do—another whole case to solve.

Because Barbara Van Laar—or Barbara Van Laar’s body—still hasn’t been found.

• • •

In the parking lot at Ray Brook, she gets into her Beetle. Drives south on the thruway, toward Shattuck. These days, she does her best reasoning in her car.

The most logical conclusion, she thinks, is that Barbara was killed by John Paul McLellan. All of the evidence points in this direction: the bloody uniform, most damningly; but also the mural, the references Barbara made to an “older boyfriend,” her nightly excursions up Hunt Mountain, the fingerprints, pulled from beer bottles, that indicate that John Paul had been living there for some time.

Given all of this evidence, Judy feels as if she should be more certain of John Paul’s guilt.

But something isn’t sitting right with her.

More than that: without finding Barbara—alive or otherwise—they still can’t make an arrest. And this means that John Paul McLellan will go free.

Over and over again, she goes through the pieces of the puzzle, willing a

final piece to land in place.

But it doesn’t, and doesn’t.

For a while, Judy drives in silence, until her stomach rumbles so loudly that she laughs.

Last night, she ate dinner in Shattuck’s only restaurant, which was more like a bar.

At the bottom of the exit off the thruway, she squints into the darkness,

looking for the sign.

There it is: Driscoll’s.

Judy, still in her same wrinkled pantsuit from a long day of work, turns right, and then right again, into the driveway of Driscoll’s Pub.

Louise

ut on a shirt,” says Louise. “A real shirt.”P By this she means a shirt with a collar. Her little brother has been wearing the same Led Zeppelin T-shirt, thin from use, for a year.

“I don’t have one of those,” says Jesse. So she gives him her own: a white Camp Emerson polo, unisex enough to make him unashamed.

“I’m taking you out to dinner,” says Louise.

• • •

At Driscoll’s, the air is smoky, the atmosphere one of disuse.

Several men Louise vaguely recognizes play pool in the middle of a side room. The dining room, where Louise and Jesse sit, is empty but for a woman

sitting at the bar.

Louise hands Jesse a menu.

“Get anything you want,” she says.

Jesse regards her. “Louise, you know I’m okay?”

“What do you mean?”

He looks down. Touches each corner of the menu. Fumbling with it.

The waitress—Connie Driscoll, eighty years old if she’s a day—comes to take their order.

“Get a steak if you want,” says Louise, but Jesse orders a burger and fries.

“I’ll have a steak, please, Mrs. Driscoll,” says Louise. “Medium rare.

Thank you.”

Connie Driscoll vanishes into the kitchen, her sneakered footsteps silent on the wall-to-wall carpet that covers the floor.

Jesse and Louise fall into silence.

“What were you saying?” says Louise. “About being okay?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Jesse. “I just know you worry about me. But I’m actually fine. Mom’s tough, but I’ve got friends who look out for me. And half the teachers in my school. They liked you and they look out for me

because of it.”

Against her will, Louise smiles.

“You’re welcome,” she says.

“No, I’m serious,” says Jesse. “I’m fine. I’m almost twelve years old. I can

look out for myself.”

“Jesse. C’mon,” says Louise.

“Well, then let Mom look out for me for a change,” he says. “It doesn’t always have to be you.”

Louise looks down. Unwilling to break the news to him: their mother will never watch over him. Not the way Louise does. No one will.

“I worry about you too, you know,” says Jesse. “If you took care of yourself a little better, that would help me out. If you really wanna help, I

mean.”

“Took care of myself how?”

Connie Driscoll returns with a Shirley Temple for Jesse. A Coke for

Louise.

“On the house,” she says.

He sips.

“Started dating better guys,” he says. “For one thing. Or no guys,” he adds, as an afterthought.

Louise nods. It’s painful to hear, but it’s true. When, Louise wonders, did Jesse become the person in front of her? In her mind she sees the version of her brother who, when tired, used to drape his small body onto hers, place

two of his own fingers into his mouth. Time, she thinks, moves differently in Shattuck from how it does at the Preserve.

“And also,” says Jesse, “You should get a different job.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, Lou. You’re really smart. You can do anything you want.

You could go back to Union.”

“On whose dollar?” says Louise.

“I dunno. Borrow it from a bank. Isn’t that what they do?”

It sounds exhausting. She feels as if she’s at the base of a mountain, looking up.

But she’s climbed mountains before. She’s run up mountains, even.

• • •

They eat their meal in comfortable silence, listening to the clack of pool balls, the warbly music coming over the speaker system.

Connie Driscoll asks them if they’d like anything else, and Louise orders dessert. Why not? she thinks. She has enough saved in her bank account to support herself, and Jesse, for a little while.

Tonight, she thinks, she’s taking a break from worry—a little respite while she awaits her hearing.

Someone puts a nickel in the jukebox, and the music changes. The Everly Brothers, singing about dreams. Then, beneath their close hypnotic harmonies, Louise hears the squeak of a barstool being pushed backward.

The lone woman who has been sitting there stands, digs out her wallet.

When she turns, Louise sees that the woman looks familiar, but she can’t quite place her. She’s wearing a suit with some stains on it. Her hair is short.

She looks young: Louise’s age, or a few years older.

She also looks, if not drunk, then like she’s deposited two beers into a body not used to alcohol.

Louise knows, before she hears it, what the woman will say. “Excuse me?”

But when Louise turns, the woman is looking not at her, but at Jesse.

“Do you go to Camp Emerson?” says the woman. She’s holding a finger out in Jesse’s direction, pointing to his polo shirt, which bears the camp’s

green logo.

Jesse looks suddenly frightened.

“No,” says Louise, rising, standing in front of him. “He doesn’t. But I’m a

counselor there.”

The woman turns her gaze toward Louise.

“I recognize you,” she says.

Tracy

racy leans her head against the window of the Stutz Blackhawk. HerT father’s car is the first she’s ever ridden in that has air-conditioning. The car he’d had for years prior was a Chevy, a practical four-door pickup that was also strong enough to tow a horse trailer.

She misses the Chevy. More than that, she misses the version of her father that drove the Chevy.

• • •

The house in Hempstead is exactly as Tracy left it at the start of the summer.

Silver front gate, astroturf lawn, artificial flowers in plastic window boxes beneath each of the two front windows.

And her mother—her mother is sitting on the front steps, head high, waiting for the two of them to arrive.

The Blackhawk roars to a stop in the driveway, and Molly Jewell stands up.

Tracy jumps out of the car, and runs to her mother—her kind, funny mother, who has always been exactly herself, who makes no attempt to be anyone or anything she isn’t.

With a jolt, Tracy realizes whom she reminds her of.

“Oh, Tracy,” says her mother. “I’m so sorry about your friend. It sounds

like she meant a lot to you.”

“She does,” says Tracy.

How, wonders Tracy, will she ever explain to her mother how her life was changed by a person she knew for two months?

Her father, having unloaded the car, now clears his throat awkwardly.

“Good to see you, Molly,” he says. She nods.

He hugs Tracy, and then he is gone, leaving Tracy and her mother standing in the driveway with all of her things from Camp Emerson. This, she understands, is how things will be for the rest of her childhood: the two of them, together. The two of them, alone.

She’ll see her father again at his wedding to Donna Romano, and at holidays where, for each of the three years afterward, a new baby half-sibling will appear. She will make conversation. She’ll be polite. But they won’t be her family, not anymore. The only family she has left stands beside her.

“Mom,” says Tracy. “Have you ever heard of punk music?”

“No,” says her mother. “Will you tell me about it?”

• • •

The sky above Hempstead is growing dim. Tracy thinks of Barbara Van Laar.

Wonders if she’s alive, if she’s seeing the same sky, three hundred miles to the north.

She pictures Barbara’s strong limbs, her upright steady head, her skillfulness in water and in woods. She pictures Barbara as she was on the Survival Trip: building a tent, building a fire, bringing back food for them.

Keeping everyone alive.

And she knows—or believes, at least—that Barbara is still in the world.

Judyta

n her Beetle, Judy pulls into the driveway of her parents’ home inI Schenectady. She sits for a moment, preparing herself.

It’s a Saturday, and she knows precisely what they’ll be doing: Inside, her mother will be vacuuming while her father dusts. Her brothers will be changing lightbulbs, or doing other odd jobs that their parents have requested of them. It’s the same thing they’ve done every Saturday for as long as she can remember. For years, she would have been working alongside them, folding laundry, making beds. Only this Saturday, Judy is, for the first time, a visitor.

A month ago, she moved all of her things out of her childhood bedroom and into a tiny rental a few miles from headquarters at Ray Brook. She had no help doing so; her father, upon her arrival, had nodded once in her direction, and then left the house.

• • •

Now she gets up out of the car. Closes the door. The noise brings her brother Leonard to the door.

Seeing her, he calls backward into the house. “Ma.”

Judy enters the house, and Leonard hugs her.

The sound of the vacuum, ceasing. “What is it?” her mother calls.

Leonard grins.

“The Nation’s First has returned.”

• • •

Ten minutes later, all the Luptacks sit at the kitchen table. Her mother has set out tea. Her father, the last to arrive, stirs sugar into his cup, clears his throat.

All of them are silent, until Leonard says, “We saw your name in the paper

again.”

Judy looks up.

“You did?”

Leonard nods. Stands up from the table. Returns with a sheet in his hands: another clipped article from the Times Union.

She takes it into her hands, and reads.

• • •

Van Laars Indicted, reads the headline. Beneath it, a subhead: Original

Suspect Posthumously Cleared.

The story continues.

Alice Van Laar, who would no doubt have been charged originally with vehicular manslaughter in the death of her son, will go free: the statute of limitations has run out.

But Peters II and III will be charged with criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. Their ongoing lies to the police about the fate of Bear—including those made in the wake of Barbara’s disappearance—make the charge timely.

At the moment, they’re out on bail, awaiting trial. Their attorney, the journalist notes, will no longer be John Paul McLellan Sr.

A picture accompanies the article.

In it, the Stoddard family—Maryanne, her three daughters, her sons-in- law, her grandchildren—stand together, posed formally in front of a neat house in Shattuck, their faces solemn, their posture straight.

Justice restored, reads the caption.

• • •

Judy hands the article back to her brother, who hands it to his father, who folds it along its original creases and tucks it into his shirt pocket.

“Did you see your name?” her father says. “It’s right there in the second

paragraph.”

Judy smiles. “I did.”

“I always knew that family did it,” says Judy’s father. “Back when it happened. Everyone knew they had something to do with it. We just didn’t know exactly how.”

Judy’s mother, who has been silent this whole time, suddenly takes Judy’s cup from her. Pours her more tea. She is a visitor in their home, now; a guest.

The realization makes Judy feel proud and sorrowful at the same time.

“What about the girl? Barbara,” Leonard says. “Any leads there?”

There are. But she can’t tell her family about them—not yet—and so

another curtain is drawn between them.

“Nothing substantial,” she says.

• • •

On the way back to Ray Brook, Judy watches the pines become taller and denser. She reaches her exit, turns onto 73. Climbs up and up in her Beetle.

In the car, she lets her mind wander again to the most recent developments in Barbara Van Laar’s disappearance.

Most interestingly: Annabel Southworth—Louise’s CIT—has come forward with a confession. She was with John Paul McLellan the night of Barbara Van Laar’s disappearance: once at ten p.m., during the community dance; and again in the early hours of the morning. She has provided him with an alibi; her parents, Katherine and Howard, have verified her story as well. The two families—the Southworths and McLellans, both good friends

of the Van Laars—are supportive of the new relationship, despite Annabel’s young age.

They’re very compatible, said Katherine Southworth, in her signed affidavit.

The only other charges they had against John Paul—driving while intoxicated, and felony possession of a controlled substance—have been resolved. The bloody clothes—which John Paul maintains were planted—are not admissible as evidence without a charge. He’ll do no jail time; instead he’s been commanded to perform one hundred hours of community service work by a judge who seemed, to Judy, particularly chummy with John Paul’s father.

Judy is surprised by none of this: only slightly disappointed at the outcome.

• • •

But since then, there’s been something new. Although they may never be able to charge John Paul McLellan with anything related to the disappearance of Barbara Van Laar, they will be able to charge him with something else:

second-degree aggravated assault.

The victim: Louise Donnadieu.

After some discussion with Judy, Louise has agreed to come forward with a complaint. Even better: several people have agreed to testify on Louise’s behalf. Judy has done the legwork of tracking down the witnesses who were there in John Paul’s shared house near Union College, the night of the attack: his roommate, Steven, along with three girls Steven named as guests of theirs on that occasion.

She thinks of the boys she went to high school with. The girls, too. Would they have been so brave? She isn’t certain. But it’s 1975 now, she tells herself. The world has changed.

• • •

“So what’s your theory?” her brother had asked, at the kitchen table. “If you can’t give us any new details—give us your hunch.”

“About?”

“Barbara Van Laar,” said her brother, and to her right her mother had made the sign of the cross. That poor child, she muttered lowly.

Judy looked out the window.

“I think she’s all right, actually,” said Judy.

Leonard furrowed his brow.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling,” said Judy.

• • •

The night she ran into Louise Donnadieu at Driscoll’s Pub, Louise said one thing that has echoed in Judy’s mind for weeks.

On a whim, Judy had asked Louise about T.J. Hewitt. Because, despite her belief in T.J.’s innocence, she could never shake the story that the boy— Christopher—told her.

Why on earth, thought Judy, was Barbara going into T.J. Hewitt’s tent at night? What could she have been doing there, aside from something— incorrect?

And so, with two beers in her belly, and her inhibitions lowered, she floated this idea to Louise Donnadieu. Making sure she was out of earshot of

her brother before she did.

Louise had laughed.

“What?” said Judy.

“There’s no way,” said Louise.

“Why?”

“A lot of people think T.J.’s strange,” said Louise, “but she’s harmless.

She’s better than harmless. She’s a good person. All she wants to do is hunt and fish and be alone. Her family’s got a place on an island up north. I think she’d move there now if she could.”

Louise flagged the bartender down. Ordered a beer for herself.

“She just needs money first,” said Louise.

Judy watched her.

“Where exactly?” she said.

Louise furrowed her brow. “Where what?”

“The island. The house.”

“Oh, I don’t know the name of it,” said Louise. “But she’s got a map of it on the wall of the Director’s Cabin. Last time I looked, there was a pin where

the cabin is.”

She drank again.

And then, slowly, she looked up at Judy. Realizing.

• • •

It would be career-making for Judy. Finding Barbara Van Laar—finding her alive, no less—would mean a promotion. Maybe two. It would set her on a path for success. And it would resolve the question that’s hovered over her head since she began her work as an investigator, the one that every male investigator she’s encountered has thought upon seeing her. Are women cut out for this work?

Captain LaRochelle, she knows, would find Barbara if he could. Every investigator would—but none of them would take into account Barbara’s preferences, or her safety.

Instead, they’d sacrifice Barbara’s well-being to better their own lot in life.

This, in fact, is what Captain LaRochelle did do, in a way, when Bear Van Laar disappeared, and when Carl Stoddard became a convenient suspect: he let Stoddard, voiceless in death, take the fall, while LaRochelle took the promotion that came with a closed case.

Judy disagrees with many of the things her parents have taught her, but one thing she respects them for is this: their belief in putting others before themselves.

If Barbara Van Laar has chosen to hide in the woods, of her own volition —if she is safe, and protected, and fed, and self-reliant—who is Judy to drag her back into the world she abandoned?

• • •

Still, she wants to be certain that her theory is correct.

And so, from her small apartment in Ray Brook, she makes plans: she’ll go back to the Van Laar Preserve; she’ll go back to the Director’s Cabin where she spent so many hours. Her guess is that it will be abandoned; the Hewitts, after all, have cut ties with the Van Laars. She’ll open the door, which has never had a lock.

She’ll pray that the map is still tacked to the wall.

If it is, she’ll make a note of the spot that a pin, or pinhole, marks: The site of the Hewitt family’s cabin, way up north, in the middle of the High Peaks of the Adirondacks.

Barbara

he bed is empty.T In the moonlight, in the threshold of the cabin called Balsam, Barbara Van Laar takes a last look over her shoulder, saying goodbye in her mind to Tracy, to her bunkmates, to Camp Emerson.

She’s leaving later than she’d agreed upon with T.J., who’ll be pacing her cabin, buzzing with nerves. But Barbara’s counselors stayed out much later than she’d predicted; she had to wait for them to return, one after another, and then wait some more, until the sound of their movements quieted, until the sound of their breathing steadied.

Then she stood up, as silently as she could, and tiptoed to the doorway, where she now stands.

Her bag. She’s forgotten the paper bag she brought back from the main house—the one that almost gave her away.

What’s in the bag? Tracy had asked her, last week, and she pretended not to understand.

• • •

Outside, the air is fresh, the moon so bright that she doesn’t need the flashlight she brought along.

Her other things are waiting for her in T.J.’s cabin: her backpack, loaded with fresh food that should hold her for a week, at least. Her warm clothes, her hiking boots, into which she’ll change as quickly as she can.

Sure enough: when she steps onto the porch of the Director’s Cabin, the door opens swiftly. There is T.J., checking her watch. It’s almost three in the morning, says T.J.; they’ll barely make it.

“Should we wait a day?” asks Barbara, but T.J. shakes her head, fast.

Tonight’s the last night of the party up the hill. It’s tonight—while the guests are on the grounds—or never.

And never means being sent away to Élan in the fall. Never means not seeing T.J. or Vic—her true family—for years.

• • •

In silence, they walk to T.J.’s truck, a canoe strapped to its roof; as quietly as possible, they close both doors. Then T.J. starts the truck, and it rumbles up the hill, past Self-Reliance on its right, past the parking lot full of cars.

“Were you able to get into it?” asks Barbara—gesturing toward John Paul McLellan’s blue Trans Am.

T.J. nods. “Clothes’re in the trunk now,” she says. “He won’t see them.

But the police will, when they search it.”

“Why will they search it?”

T.J. grins. “That’s not all I planted in the car,” she says. “When he’s apprehended—they’ll have probable cause to perform a search.”

• • •

Once they reach the thruway, they continue for an hour. T.J. drives as fast as she can without risking the attention of the police: nine miles over the speed limit, exactly. She glances up at the sky as she drives, which is lightening

with every minute that passes.

On the way, T.J. quizzes her.

What do you do about water? she asks.

Build a fire. Boil it. Use iodine.

What do you do if you’re sick?

Use the medical guidebook you’ve put on the shelf. Look for medicine in the cabinet.

The same instructions they’ve been over, again and again, during the nightly training sessions T.J.’s been giving Barbara all summer. Preparation for life in the woods—not forever. Just until she turns eighteen—at which point she’ll be legally allowed to make her own decisions.

Then, she can do as she pleases, without fear of her parents imposing their rules. Or their punishments.

If at any point she changes her mind: all she has to do is emerge. It’s Barbara’s decision, completely, T.J. says.

Barbara glances at T.J., taking in the contours of her profile, her kind face.

When Barbara was a baby, a small child, it was T.J. who tended to her most.

T.J. who helped her and taught her. The word motherly is not one that applies to T.J. Hewitt, and yet T.J. is the only mother Barbara has ever known. Her own, though living, has been unreachable for all of Barbara’s life. A walking shell.

“I put tea in your pack,” says T.J. “The kind you like. Some chocolate, too,

for a treat at night.”

Then: “Will you have enough to read?”

Barbara nods. “I will,” she says. “And I’ll write if I run out.”

“I’ll be able to come to you soon,” says T.J. “In a month or two. I just have to be certain I’m not being followed.”

She glances at Barbara, pats her knee. “I know you can make it until then.”

“I can,” says Barbara—reassuring T.J. as much as herself.

But in truth, she does feel ready. T.J. has made her so. All of their training, every night; all of the preparations they made.

The one thing she’ll miss is music: this, she has had to leave behind.

Both of them fall into silence again. And then, just before the sun rises, T.J. pulls off the highway.

• • •

Two headlamps light their way as they dismount the canoe from the roof, and then portage it for a half mile through the woods.

T.J., Barbara knows, is growing nervous: the whole plan will fail if she isn’t back on the grounds of Camp Emerson before the rest of the staff wakes up. And so Barbara picks up her pace, despite the fact that her lungs are burning, despite the fact that the backpack she carries is weighing her down.

“We’re almost there,” says T.J., again and again.

• • •

The sun is rising as the two of them row quietly over the surface of the lake, toward an island in its middle. As they approach, Barbara can see—just beyond the tree line—the flat surface of a man-made structure.

“Remember there’s deer here,” says T.J., climbing out of the stern of the canoe and onto the shore. “You can always hunt for deer. There’s two guns in the house, and plenty of shot.”

Barbara has a sudden flash of her own mother following her, ghostlike, about the house—admonishing her not to eat so much. The opposite, always, of T.J., who throughout her life has fed her every chance she got—even coming to Barbara’s school from time to time to hand-deliver coats and clothing and other treats she knew Barbara liked.

She used to sneak in and out a window to do so.

It was never a problem, until the one time she was seen by the house mother from behind, and Barbara—flustered, in a panic—said that T.J. had

been a teenage boy.

From there, things went terribly wrong.

“I’ll remember,” says Barbara, now. “I remember everything you taught me.”

• • •

They’ve reached their destination. For a moment, the two of them regard each other.

“Go,” says Barbara.

“You’ll be fine,” says T.J.

“I’ll be fine,” says Barbara.

• • •

Now Barbara stands on the shore of the island, watching T.J. move away in her canoe. She waits until she can’t hear the dip of the paddle into the lake, until T.J. disappears, at last, into the forest on the other side, turning back with one last wave before she goes.

Barbara closes her eyes. She listens, waiting for a sign: and a hermit thrush answers with its beautiful song.

She walks to the cabin that the Hewitts built, many generations prior.

Inside, it’s cool and shadowy and stocked with the supplies that T.J. has been ferrying over for months, in anticipation of her stay.

Something new is in the corner: an acoustic guitar. A beginner’s instruction book. A way, Barbara realizes, for her to make her own music.

She sets her heavy pack down gratefully on the ground. At the top is the paper bag she brought with her from Self-Reliance.

She opens it, pulls out the one nonessential object she permitted herself to transport today: it’s a framed picture of her brother, Bear.

He, too, will have a home here.

She sets the picture on the rough table at which she’ll eat her meals.

You’re safe now, she tells her brother, in her mind.

Judyta

t the edge of a lake fifty miles north of the Van Laar Preserve, JudyA Luptack stands with her hands on her hips, squinting toward an island in the distance. She has brought no boat with her.

She’s trying to estimate the distance between the shore and the island. Half a mile; maybe slightly more. She’s never been a strong swimmer, but she takes off her shoes and dips a toe in nonetheless, testing the water.

It’s freezing. For a moment, Judy rethinks her decision. She has no evidence that she’ll find anything on the other side. It’s a Saturday. Her day off. She could go home, back to her rental in Ray Brook; she could go to the grocer and buy food for dinner. Already, she’s learning the names of the people in the town. She could be doing anything she wants. Instead—pulled by a hunch that she hasn’t been able to shake, ever since she spoke to Louise Donnadieu—she strips down to her bathing suit. Plunges into the cold water before her.

She has no idea how long the swim will take her. You can always float, she tells herself. If you get tired, you can float.

• • •

As she swims, she thinks. If she’s right in her theory—if she’s right, which remains to be seen—she can understand the logic at every step: the bloody uniform that resulted from what Christopher Muldauer described as Barbara’s accident on the Survival Trip. The sudden realization, for T.J. and Barbara, of how useful it might be. Planting those clothes in John Paul McLellan’s trunk would serve a dual purpose: not only would they throw investigators off the scent of where Barbara had really gone—but they would function as a neat form of justice. Justice for Louise Donnadieu, who had once gone to T.J. with fresh injuries, inflicted on her by John Paul. Justice for Carl Stoddard, who was himself framed after death by two families—the McLellans, the Van Laars—who wished to preserve their good reputations.

To avoid a scandal, at the expense of an innocent man. Justice, too, for T.J.

Hewitt’s own father—who had entered into the sort of agreement that went against his own set of ethics. Reduced him to something no better than the Van Laars themselves.

With two simple actions—revealing the truth about Bear, and helping Barbara to hide—the Hewitts have redeemed themselves. They’ve retraced their steps to their last wrong turn, and taken a different path instead.

• • •

It’s difficult to know how much time has elapsed since Judy left the opposite shore. Sometimes, she takes her own advice and floats, looking straight up into the blue September sky. She closes her eyes. Lets herself be cradled by the water. Then goes on.

• • •

At some point, the shore in front of her is closer than the shore behind. She stops, treads water. If she squints, she thinks she can see a trail of smoke rising into the sky, as if from a chimney.

• • •

At last, she makes land. And in the near distance, she sees a figure peer out

from behind a tree.

Barbara Van Laar.

Judy would recognize her anywhere, though she’s never seen her in the flesh.

From the water, Judy raises a hand in the air, tentatively. Barbara won’t know who Judy is; she was gone long before the state police descended on the grounds. Judy has the feeling of looking through a one-way mirror, knowing far more about Barbara than Barbara understands. In her bathing suit, trembling with cold, Judy must look slightly ridiculous, amateurish: an especially adventurous hiker or camper, who didn’t expect to be seen.

Across from her, Barbara stands still, both hands at her sides.

“Are you all right?” Judy calls out.

“Yes,” Barbara says. Then—“Are you?”

Judy nods.

“Do you want me to leave you alone?” says Judy.

For an instant, Barbara hesitates.

Then she says, with finality: “Yes.”

• • •

The swim back feels longer and slower than the swim there. Judy is so cold that her teeth clack. Still, fifty feet into her journey, she pauses, turns back toward the island to take a last look.

There she is: Barbara Van Laar, standing straight and strong. At home in her body, at home in the woods. Something about her looks immortal, thinks Judy: a spirit, an apparition, more god than child.

Judy keeps swimming until, at last, she reaches the opposite shore.

When she looks back to the island she sees only the pines, drawn closed like a curtain around the girl.

Book Renzo

The God of the Woods — VII. Self-Reliance

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