“Follow me,” Peter II commanded. His voice was low and urgent.
“I need to find my daughter,” said Victor. “I need to make sure she’s all right.”
“She’s fine,” said Peter II. “Bear’s not.”
Victor looked at the man: his nominal brother. His enemy. At that moment, Peter II’s entire face was trembling slightly, his mouth downturned, his eyes bulging in what looked like an effort not to shout, or faint, or cry.
He set off toward the boathouse. Wordlessly, Vic followed.
Halfway there, he heard a noise that stopped him in his tracks. He listened, alert, his whole body still.
A fox, he thought—he’d heard that sound in the night, an eerie throttled cry that raised the hair on his neck.
But foxes were nocturnal; this was no animal.
It was, he realized at last, the sound of a woman wailing.
Victor
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
Together, the two men stood in the threshold of the boathouse, looking out toward the lake and the sinking, upturned rowboat.
Peter II had been the one to find Alice. After her embarrassing entrance into the great room—after his attempt to divert the boy from boating with his obviously incapacitated mother—Peter II had gone outside to where he’d told his grandson to meet him for a hike, and found him absent.
Thinking at first that he might have gone ahead toward Hunt Mountain, Peter II had walked in that direction awhile, until the rain began in earnest, at which point a terrible thought occurred to him.
The boy would not be at the trailhead. He would be at the lake, with his mother. He was devoted to her; he would have noticed her distress, when she stumbled into the crowded great room and issued him the invitation to go boating.
“At which point I ran,” said Peter II to Vic Hewitt. His face, as he looked toward the lake, was still. His formality would not waver, even in that moment.
When he reached the boathouse, the storm was receding. And there before him, climbing up the ramp, a terrible vision: Alice, waterlogged, hysterical, screaming incomprehensibly. In the far distance, the rowboat, overturned.
“Where’s Bear?” he said to her, urgently, but she made no noises he could understand. Only pointed in the direction of the water, doubled over as if in physical pain.
He had scanned the water, and the shore. Just as he was doing now. He hadn’t seen Bear.
“I sat Alice down,” said Peter II. “I commanded her to be still. Then I dove in.”
He was hoping, he said, to find the boy alive, under the hull of the boat. He was praying for this.
But when he reached the rowboat, and dove under, he was met with a terrible sight: his grandson, lifeless.
His clothing hooked to the oarlock.
“I pulled him to shore,” said Peter II. “He had no pulse.”
Did you breathe into his mouth? Vic wanted to ask. Did you pump his chest? It was a technique his father had taught him; that his grandfather had taught his father.
To ask these questions aloud felt cruel, and so Victor was silent.
Peter was too. For a while, neither spoke; Peter II cleared his throat several times in a row, and Victor turned to him: this man he had known since birth. Peter I had told Vic, on his deathbed, that he hoped they would come to see one another as brothers. But for all those years of acquaintance, he had never once felt any sympathetic impulse for the man, until now.
Tentatively, Vic put one hand on his shoulder.
The look that Peter II cast in his direction—imperious, appalled—made him withdraw quickly.
“Alice can’t know,” said Peter II, after a short pause. “Peter’s with her now, trying to keep her calm. But we have both decided that she can’t know what happened.”
Vic furrowed his brow.
“Where is she?”
“In one of the farm buildings, I think,” said Peter II. “In your brother’s old apartment. Far enough away that she won’t be heard.”
This didn’t seem right, or useful.
But it was not, he knew, Alice’s well-being that concerned them. It was theirs. And the bank’s.
To have their name in the papers for anything other than success was anathema to the Peters. And a scandal like this one—Bear’s mother, drunk, taking her son out boating in a storm—something that would affect their business, shake the confidence of their clients in the entire enterprise—well, they wouldn’t let it happen. That much was obvious.
A long silence ensued, until Peter II said, “Look.”
He pointed in the direction of the rowboat. Only the faintest trace of it was visible now, the seam of its white belly facing up toward the clearing sky.
Together, they watched as it sank beneath the water. Then it was gone.
• • •
