She never looked his way.
• • •
During the day, behind the tree line, Jacob slept on the softest ground he could find.
It was summertime. There’d been little rain. The one night it poured, he had stayed inside the house he’d entered, sitting at the kitchen table, listening with all his senses for any motion in the house. When the rain stopped, he walked out into the fresh new air.
His father, who was not proud of him for anything, might have been proud of him for this one thing: his resourcefulness, his ability to make do with what nature and the rich provided.
He came from a long line of resourceful men. His great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-uncles had been loggers whose work was first threatened by Verplanck Colvin’s grumblings about logging in the Adirondack Mountains. Sensing danger, they sold their land—and they were wise to do so. Within two decades, Governor Roswell Flower had founded the Adirondack Preserve. Forever wild was the sentimental term that prevented any further logging on the land—even their own property. In an instant, the Sluiter tract—those acres and acres that Jacob’s ancestors had purchased at a bargain, dreaming of good fortune and financial security for generations to come—was stripped by the government of its profitability.
So his ancestors had pivoted to other work: tourism for some, guiding wealthy visitors from the city; factory work for others, manufacturing shirts and paper in towns like Corinth and Troy. A few—including his grandfather and his father—became builders and handymen. And the funny thing was that they always had work. The state was all right with it when the wealthy decided to clear the land for their colossal homes. It was only regular people—people like the Sluiters—who were barred from their former work, who were tasked only with keeping the land pristine for the enjoyment of the Roosevelts and Rockefellers of the world.
Therefore, when Jacob entered these homes each night—purloined food from their stocked pantries and refrigerators, purloined clothing—it was with a certain amount of enjoyment. Once or twice, in truly empty homes, he had even taken a shower.
He wasn’t sure how many days it had been since his escape. He did know, from a front-page story on a newspaper on a kitchen table, that he was being tracked.
He also knew that the northern territory he was moving into was more remote.
This meant two things: that he’d be harder to find.
That he’d have to be more resourceful.
II
Bear
Alice
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
Alice Ward, seventeen and a half years old, kept her eyes closed tightly on the way to Grand Central. It was a nervous habit: one she had had for as long as she could remember. It soothed her, allowed her to pretend, if just for an instant, that she was alone in the world. She did it only when she believed that no one was watching. In this case, she was wrong.
“Alice,” said her sister, Delphine, the elder of the two. “Are you sleeping?”
Alice opened her eyes.
• • •
Three weeks earlier, in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, she had made her debut. Her military escort was a West Point junior whose name she had already forgotten. Her civilian escort was supposed to have been Stuart Parker, an unpleasant boy she had known since birth, until—miracle of miracles—he had come down with measles the day before the event. Delphine had been the one to come up with a last-minute replacement: a college friend of her husband George. Someone who happened to be staying with the two of them while in Manhattan to meet with a client.
His name, said Delphine, was Peter Van Laar. And yes: he had a tuxedo.
Alice’s mother had been enthusiastic. Her father less so.
“Van Laar,” he had said. “Do we know the Van Laars?”
They did, her mother assured him. The Van Laars of Albany. (In her tone was a note of concession: Yes, Albany. Still.) Bankers, thought Mrs. Ward. Conservationists. A Roosevelt had been very lié with the grandfather.
“How old is he?” Alice had asked.
“Oh, George’s age,” Delphine had said, waving a hand in the air, as if something so trivial as age did not matter at all in a man.
The answer, Alice learned later, was twenty-nine.
• • •
After a week, an envelope arrived in the mail. It was addressed to Miss Ward and Chaperone, and inside it was an invitation to Peter Van Laar’s summer home in the Adirondack Mountains—the one he had spoken of, with surprising tenderness, while seated next to Alice at dinner.
I very much hope that you’ll come, Peter had written, in a steady hand. I so enjoyed meeting you.
• • •
Now here they were, Alice and Delphine, awaiting a platform announcement at Grand Central. It was odd, actually, to be standing side by side like this; they had not spent so much time together since they were very small.
Delphine was five years older and five inches taller than Alice. She played the piano brilliantly. She never seemed shy. She had an intellectual air about her and an interest in politics, two traits that made her stand out from the rest of the Ward family, whose main topics of conversation at the dinner table tended toward gossip. At one point, Delphine had posed to her parents the question of applying to Barnard or Radcliffe, an idea at which her father had scoffed, even though, at Brearley, she had been first in her class.
Alice, meanwhile, had barely graduated.
Now Delphine was twenty-two and married to George Barlow. It was a love match, one that almost did not happen, due to their father’s belief that George, despite his indisputable pedigree, was an eccentric. Soon she’d no doubt be expecting a baby. Alice could see Delphine’s future laid out ahead of them clearly; it was her own she couldn’t imagine. When she tried, she saw something hazy and indistinct. It gave her a knot in her stomach.
• • •
At North Creek they were met by an unusual car driven by a small ruddy man wearing corduroy clothes, Miss Ward on a card in an ungloved hand.
The driver, uncomfortably chatty, had asked questions of them that horrified Alice with their intimacy. Where had they come from, he wanted to know. Were they married? Did they work? She looked sideways at Delphine, waiting to see whether she would say anything, but Delphine was placid. Amused, even. She answered all his questions; asked him some in return.
“Who’ll be hosting you at the Preserve?” asked the driver, and Alice waited for Delphine to respond, but instead she said: “Go on, Alice.”
