“Do you think he’s cute?” Tracy said now. It was the best question she could come up with. And Barbara shrugged.
“I guess so,” she said. “If you like the artsy type.”
“What type do you like?” Tracy asked.
“I don’t know,” said Barbara. “I don’t really think about that stuff anymore.”
Tracy nodded. She wasn’t certain what Barbara meant, and she was too embarrassed to ask.
“I’ve got a boyfriend now,” said Barbara. An explanation. Then there was no time to say anything further, for the two of them had reached the porch.
Louise
Two Months Later
August 1975
At seven a.m., the search for Barbara begins.
While they wait for the counselors to arrive, following T.J.’s request over the intercom, T.J. sits in her living room, on a brown love seat so old that it’s swaybacked in the middle. She keeps her head down. Imagining, no doubt, a particular scene: revealing to the Van Laars that their daughter has gone missing while in her care.
Louise stands awkwardly nearby—feeling somehow that it wouldn’t be right to sit. That she doesn’t deserve to.
“What’s she been like this session?” T.J. asks. “Happy?”
“Oh,” says Louise. “Yeah, I guess she was. Is. Everyone likes her. Admires her, I think.”
“She never said anything that made you think she might run off?”
Louise shakes her head.
The truth is—and she doesn’t know how to say it—Barbara has never actually seemed to need her, or to look up to her in the way the other girls have. She has always struck Louise almost as a peer. They like each other, but they are not close; over the last two months, Barbara has never made a confession to her, or sought her advice on a friendship or a crush—something that happens at least once a session, usually more, with all the other campers she’s ever had.
“Who’s she close with?” T.J. asks. Reading her mind.
“Her bunkmate. Tracy.”
T.J. pauses for a moment, thinking. “They were paired for the Survival Trip. They shared a tent.”
Louise nods.
“We should find Tracy. We need to talk to her too.”
A knock at the door. The first counselors, arriving.
Through the front window, Louise can see groups of CITs and campers moving slowly past T.J.’s office toward the commissary for breakfast, dragging their feet as they strain to catch a glimpse of what’s going on inside. Everyone must know that something’s wrong.
• • •
There are fourteen cabins, fourteen counselors, fourteen CITs, meaning the room is crowded once everyone has arrived. T.J. stands up on the seat of the small sofa she’s been sitting on to get a better view. She begins.
“Barbara Van Laar was not in her cabin this morning,” says T.J. There is no need to say A camper from Balsam or Louise’s camper. Everyone here knows who she is.
“In a moment,” she continues, “I’m going to give each of you an assigned location. We’ll spread out over the grounds and do a high-speed search for her. See if we can find her ourselves. No need to frighten the family unnecessarily. But first,” says T.J., “is there anything I need to know?”
The counselors are silent. They shift a little, looking around to see if any of them will speak.
“Anything happen overnight?” says T.J.
This is the moment, Louise knows, when any of them might snitch—might say something about seeing Annabel in the woods last night, drunk; say something about Louise’s nightly outings to be with other counselors. But no one does. Everyone, Louise knows, is hoping that this is all a misunderstanding with an easy fix.
T.J. tries a different tack. “Anyone aware of any—relationships Barbara might have formed while she was here?”
“One of my kids had a crush on her,” says a counselor named Davey. He’s a nice boy with glasses who once, embarrassingly, wrote a song called “Louise” and played it in front of a group at the Clearing when everyone was wasted. No one has mentioned it since.
“You think they were together?” said T.J.
Davey shakes his head. “No, I think he just liked her. He got ribbed for it. But I know he asked her to last night’s dance. And she said no.”
T.J. nods.
“I’ll go talk to him after this,” she says. “Anyone else?”
Silence.
“All right,” she says. And gives them the plan.
• • •
T.J. herself, after speaking with Davey’s camper, will walk up to the main house, Self-Reliance, to give it a thorough search—beyond what Louise did earlier. The rest of them are given assignments that cover the camp and its environs. Seven of the counselors have been given cabins and buildings; the other seven the nearby woods. All of them have been instructed to blow the whistles they keep around their necks all summer in a pattern of two threes—T.J. demonstrates on her whistle, quietly—if Barbara is located.
And if they learn something else, or see something else—a clue, or anything suspicious—they are to blow their whistles in four twos. And T.J. alone will come to them.
