•   •   •

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

1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day Four

She has seen dead bodies before. She has seen her own grandparents, 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

1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day Five

At morning briefing, LaRochelle confirms it: the dental records are a 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.