Before Victor lay two clear paths. One was to disagree with the Peters. He could tell them that he would not lie; he could say to them that an untruth as large as this one would have consequences they couldn’t foresee. His own father had taught him this well, when he was learning to guide: in the woods, each decision you make is irreversible, and sometimes catastrophic. A forgotten compass. A wrong turn. A fire lit in defiance of a drought. He could tell them he would not stand for it, and leave.
But in the process, he would lose the trust of the overseer of his inheritance. Lose the camp. His livelihood.
If Victor were deciding for himself alone, this was the path he would go down, surely. He reassured himself of this. Nodding once, as if to seal the thought inside him.
But he wasn’t deciding only for himself: there was Tessie Jo to think of, too. His daughter, who loved the land as much as he did. Whose unusual demeanor and appearance and comportment had already drawn stares in town. With the camp, her future was secure: she would never be required to marry, not if she didn’t want to. She could live, without restriction, what he thought of as an unconventional life.
Every choice would be open to her. This was what he told himself, as he took one step down the other path that lay before him: to hide the truth, at the command of the Van Laars.
“How can I help you?” said Victor.
He thought of his own father, holding a compass in his hand, watching its needle wobble, and then calm.
Victor
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
Together, they lifted Bear’s body from its place on the floor of the boathouse and into the bottom of a red canoe. Vic stood guard while Peter II walked up to the slaughterhouse to switch places with his son. Then Peter III came, white-faced, and asked for a moment alone.
Outside the boathouse, Vic froze. From inside came the muffled sounds of a grown man crying. Trying not to be overheard.
Five minutes passed. Ten. And then Peter III emerged, red-faced and red-eyed, looking straight ahead, away from Victor.
“Do what you must,” he said. And then he walked away.
• • •
Vic pushed the canoe into the lake. In its belly, beneath a blanket, was the body of Bear Van Laar. Next to it, a shovel.
He sat in the stern, keeping his eyes ahead, trying hard not to look down at the small figure he was ferrying across the water to a permanent repose.
When he did, it was not revulsion that he felt, or fear, but tenderness.
He, too, had loved the boy.
As gently as he could, he moored the boat on a rocky bank, on the opposite side of Lake Joan. He lifted Bear’s small strong body from the boat. It was so strange to see it still: the boy had been in motion, always, from the time he could walk. Tessie Jo’s shadow, following her wherever she went.
Vic took the shovel from the boat. Cradled the boy in his arms. Thirty feet inland, he laid the boy down at the foot of a sheer face of rock, and began to dig.
At Self-Reliance, he knew, the Peters would be making the announcement to the guests, who would be rising lazily from an afternoon nap, or looking up from the books they had brought out when it became clear that the storm would keep everyone inside.
“We need your help,” they would say. “Earlier, Bear went for a walk with his grandfather. Now it seems as if he might be lost.”
This was the plan they’d created while, above the slaughterhouse, Alice Van Laar slept, stupefied by a dose of Valium that bordered on dangerous.
“Vic Hewitt is already scouting the area,” they’d say. In case anyone saw him out in the canoe.
“We’re calling the fire department now,” they’d say.
Victor’s face betrayed his doubt.
It would work, the Peters insisted.
• • •
Now, with Bear safely inside the ground, Vic bade him farewell and began the work of filling in the hole. When he was finished, he began to walk away—and then thought better of it.
He gathered a cache of stones.
He built a cairn.
He’d visit the boy from time to time. He’d bring Tessie Jo, too, when she was old enough.
For now, she would not have to know the truth.
Victor
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
What he didn’t count on was that Tessie Jo would have seen.
Her absence that day made him assume that she was busying herself someplace, finishing one of her projects elsewhere on the grounds. And he was glad for it—glad that he would not have to explain things to her, while she was still so young. There would be time for that eventually, he thought.
• • •
But then—after the firefighters arrived, after he had persuaded them to wait until morning to begin their search in earnest—Tessie Jo had come tearing out of the forest, her mouth wide, her face white, her long braid damp.
He had managed to corral her, before she could speak. He had managed to hustle her down a hallway.
