He looks up at her slyly, his implication bare. She feels a low thud of want in her stomach.
“I have to go,” she says—ashamed, suddenly, to be so distractible.
“You sure you don’t want help? Finding Barbara?”
She hesitates. She does.
“I don’t think T.J. would like it,” says Louise. And somehow she knows that this is true.
He nods. “It’ll be okay, Louise. She prob’ly just ran away,” he says. “They’ll find her soon. Or she’ll come back. Don’t you think?”
She considers this. It’s what she wants to believe.
“You’re probably right,” says Louise.
Alice
August 1975
A phone is sounding someplace in the house.
Alice opens an eye. Closes it. The sun is up; already, the house is growing warm.
“Someone get that,” she says, unconvincingly. Her throat is dry. Her skin, too. In her temples, a familiar throb begins.
Where is everyone? It’s eight in the morning, according to the clock on the wall. Surely someone on staff should be here to answer. Alice closes her eyes.
• • •
A banging now—the door.
If their behavior last night was any indication, every guest on the grounds will be just as bad off as she is. Even Peter, who prides himself on his abstemiousness—who judges her, keeps a running count of every glass she has—even Peter was feeling his oats last night, telling long-winded stories in his odd formal way, tripping at one point over an upturned corner of carpet, cursing it in his wake.
The pounding on the door stops.
She turns her head to the window. And sees, striding down the lawn in the direction of the camp, T.J. Hewitt—the source of the urgent knocking, she imagines.
Barbara, she thinks. Barbara has no doubt done something wrong, something so egregious that even T.J.—her greatest ally—can no longer ignore it. From the time of Barbara’s birth, T.J. has watched over the girl each summer like a guard dog, a faithful companion, always on duty, just out of sight. She should have been like family.
She wasn’t.
Through the window, Alice watches until T.J. is out of sight, then closes her eyes again.
For a while, she falls into and out of a dream, feeling trapped inside her body on the bed. T.J., in the dream, is wearing a carrier she’d made one year out of rope and a curtain, something that she had fashioned to take then-baby Barbara on hikes. The two of them were a sight: teenage T.J., all sinew and frown; Barbara’s round baby face beneath her chin, peering out at the world.
Where are you going? asks Alice, in the dream. To find Bear, says T.J.
Alice’s eyes open abruptly.
Awake for the day, then. She rises.
• • •
Alice’s bedroom is across the hall from the largest bedroom, which Peter, of course, sleeps in. She slept there too, at one time. Now she doesn’t.
She shuffles past his door. It’s standing slightly open, and she averts her eyes.
Down the hallway now, past the room presently occupied by Marnie McLellan, John Paul Sr. and Nancy’s daughter. Past—think it—past Bear’s room, once decorated in the trappings of young boyhood, everything blue, everything messy, wet bathing suits and towels forever in a pile on the floor. It’s long since been done over. This week, it’s occupied by the Southworths.
A short, windowed corridor connects the southern wing of the house, where the bedrooms are, with the great room at its center. As Alice passes through it, something outside catches her eye.
Two vehicles are approaching, moving slowly up the driveway, making a turn toward Camp Emerson. One is Shattuck Township’s single fire truck, the property of the only volunteer fire department in a twenty-mile radius. The other is a yellow-and-blue Dodge: a statie.
Alice pauses, entranced, reminded of another day.
In the great room, the telephone begins again.
• • •
“Mrs. Van Laar?” the man says, on the phone. “Mrs. Van Laar?”
He is, he tells Alice, a sergeant from the state police.
“I’ve got some hard news to relay,” he says.
Alice, receiver in hand, takes in her surroundings.
What do you see, Dr. Lewis would ask her, in moments like this one.
There’s glass on the floor, she thinks. Damage from the party last night. There’s a painting askew on the wall. There’s glass on the floor, and a painting askew on the wall, and a bottle of wine on its side, and a large wine stain on the rug.
