“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
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.
