Reluctantly, his daughter nodded.

Victor

1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975

His assignment, overnight, was to keep watch over Mrs. Van Laar, in her 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

1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975

Each time she surfaced from sleep, she was greeted by the same set of 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

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

She’ll sign a statement?” says Hayes.

“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.”