“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
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day Four
Louise opens the door.
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.
