The words landed heavily in the empty room.
“All of us worried that George would change when they married,” said Peter. “And do you know something? He did.”
After that, the two of them were silent.
Carl
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
In the large main room of Self-Reliance, Vic Hewitt was tending to a blaze in the stone fireplace that centered the space. A dozen people stood or sat around it; nobody spoke. They ranged in age from twenty to eighty. Aside from the Van Laars themselves, the only two Carl recognized definitively were the younger Mrs. Van Laar’s parents, come up from the city. Their daughter—Bear’s mother—was absent. Taken to bed, perhaps. Crying in some other room. Carl’s wife had been that way for Scotty’s final weeks. For the whole year after.
Everyone in the room appeared to have recently returned from spending hours in the woods. Their faces were dazed and drawn and streaked with dirt; their clothing was stiff, newly dried by the fire after the rain that had fallen earlier.
A queasy stillness pervaded the room. Reality settling in. He could imagine them at the start of their search, early in the afternoon, in the daylight: nervous, tipsy laughter as they scoured the grounds, sure they’d find the child, shouting for him in the rain, hopeful that he was pulling a prank, hopeful that by cocktail hour they’d be recounting the tale of their search over drinks.
He could imagine their mood as it shifted.
They should have called earlier, Carl was thinking. This had been the truth unspoken by all four volunteers as they drove toward the Preserve. Vic Hewitt, at least, should have known better. All four of the volunteers had basic tracking skills, and Dick’s brother Ronald had a hound, Jennie, with a good nose on her. But Ronald had been unreachable, so they’d left without a dog. Between the rainstorm and the general trampling the ground had taken by then, both tracks and scents would be more difficult to pick up tomorrow. Why hadn’t Hewitt called?
• • •
None of the central room’s dozen occupants had risen upon their arrival. It was only when Vic Hewitt spoke that anyone seemed to take notice of them at all.
“The folks from the local fire department are here,” he said—addressing the younger Mr. Van Laar. “In case you’d like a word.”
• • •
In the kitchen, away from the crowd, the elder and younger Mr. Van Laar faced the volunteers. It was then that Carl remembered his hat, a floppy felt thing his wife had given him several birthdays ago. He snatched it from his head, pawed at his hair and beard, smoothing them.
When no one else spoke, he did.
“Well,” said Carl. He looked down at the floor as he spoke, unable to meet anyone’s gaze. “So. When’s the last time you saw the boy?”
“Three o’clock,” said the elder Van Laar.
“And he was—hiking?”
“You know this already,” said the younger Van Laar. “We spoke on the telephone.” There was impatience in his voice as he said it. It occurred to Carl that he might believe they were going to set out into the woods this very night. They wouldn’t get far, doing that; they had one flashlight and one headlamp between them, and the latter was out of batteries, if Carl remembered right. There might be more equipment lying around the estate, but still—the state police, with their taxpayer dollars, would have to be called to make any progress at all.
“Would you mind repeating the information for the others, sir?” Carl asked. “In case I missed anything when I told them.”
“The two of us were hiking, yes,” said the elder Van Laar. “Bear had been begging to go for a hike. We left the house around three o’clock. We walked through the woods—there’s a shortcut, about a quarter mile long, that connects our house to the trailhead at the base of Hunt. But as soon as we reached the trailhead, Bear said he’d forgotten his pocketknife. He wanted to turn back for it.”
“How come?” asked Dick Shattuck—unable to keep quiet any longer, it seemed. Carl was relieved.
“He said he wanted to show me something,” said the elder. “I don’t know what it was.”
For a moment, Carl felt dizzy. Firewood, he thought. Loose and light and floppy. He wanted to show you how to figure out what wood was good for starting a fire, thought Carl. And then he thought, I taught him that. He had, in fact, taught Bear many things: How to whistle with an acorn cap. How to whittle an owl and a bear and a fox’s head. How to tell when rain was coming. The same things he had taught his own Scotty.
“And you said all right,” said Shattuck, prompting Mr. Van Laar.
“Yes,” said Mr. Van Laar. “I was impatient. But I said yes.”
“You watched him head back toward the house,” said Shattuck.
“Yes.”
“When did you lose sight of him?”
The elder considered. “Almost immediately,” he said. “There’s a turn that the path takes”—here Van Laar demonstrated with his hand—“about a hundred feet from the trailhead, back in the direction of the house. I watched Bear until he reached that point, and then he turned left, and was gone.”
“What’s the trailhead like?” asked Shattuck.
Carl knew. He’d been there himself a handful of times with Bear, who’d been given permission from his parents to go as far as the base of the mountain whenever he liked, but no farther than that. The trailhead was a turnaround at the end of a dirt road that led to Route 29, the main paved road into town. Hunt Mountain, by virtue of its small size, wasn’t among the most popular peaks in the Adirondacks, but when the weather was good there were usually a half-dozen cars parked here and there in the lot.
“What do you mean,” asked the elder.
“I mean—is it a busy place? Active?”
“Not usually,” said the elder.
“And today? Were there other people on the mountain, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” said the elder. “There were no cars in the lot, but I never got as far as the mountain. I stood at the trailhead, waiting for Bear, until it began to rain.”
There was silence then. Uncomfortable.
Carl watched Bob Lewis. Of the four of them, he was the cynic, the pessimist. He had a paranoid streak that sometimes caused him to leap to conclusions about bad actors and questionable motives. Twice, he had made the case for arson when a fire’s cause couldn’t easily be explained. (So far, there had been no actual cases of arson in Shattuck Township—not on their watch, anyway.)
