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
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day Four
Judy sits in the belly of a canoe, being rowed across Lake Joan by two 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
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day Four
Louise stands in her childhood bedroom.
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.
