Then she pauses, waiting for her training to kick in.

“Can you both tell me about your day today? What time you woke up, what you did after that?”

The man sighs heavily. He’s the sort of person from whom disapproval radiates nearly autonomically. He folds his hands on the table.

“Miss . . .” he says.

“Luptack.”

Investigator Luptack, thinks Judy.

“Miss Luptack, you look very young,” says Mr. Van Laar. His wife glances at him swiftly. “You might be—twenty years old? Twenty-two?”

He waits. Twenty-six, thinks Judy. She doesn’t say it.

“My guess is you have not been doing this work very long,” says Mr. Van Laar. “Allow me to assist you.”

“Peter,” says his wife—the first word she has spoken—but her husband holds one hand out in her direction, and she doesn’t continue.

“Our granddaughter has run away,” he says. “The reason I know this is because she has threatened to run away nearly every day for two years. Increasingly, ‘appeasing Barbara,’ ‘not upsetting Barbara,’ has become nearly the only topic of conversation in my son’s household. She’s a thirteen-year-old girl acting the way that most thirteen-year-old girls act. Only worse.”

He pauses. Coughs.

“Our whereabouts this morning are not important pieces of the puzzle you’re trying to solve. What you and your people need to be doing is sending a large search party into those woods. Because they’re the only danger to Barbara in this moment, aside from Barbara herself.”

He stands up abruptly, then looks down at his wife, waiting for her to follow suit. More tentatively, she does.

“Now,” says Mr. Van Laar. “That’s where I’m heading, with some dogs. That’s where I was heading when you detained me. Jot that down in your notebook. In case any of your superiors are looking for me.” He walks out of the room. His wife looks at Judy for a moment before following, her expression inscrutable.

“Sir,” says Judy. The word comes out before she knows what she’ll say next.

He waits. “What is it?”

“It’s just—in light of your grandson’s disappearance,” says Judy. “It seems as if we should treat Barbara’s with the same care.”

The man’s expression changes completely. He has been annoyed with the conversation; now he’s enraged. He opens his mouth to speak, and Judy is reminded of an animal baring its teeth.

“Don’t talk about my grandson,” says Mr. Van Laar. “Don’t even speak his name.”

He leaves. His wife follows.

Judy sits for a moment, alone in the large kitchen. It looks as if a party took place the night before. Containers of food are open on the counter, things that should have been refrigerated. Cold salads, chocolaty desserts.

Judy looks down at her notepad. She crosses out the word tense.

Demeanor: hostile, she writes.

A stack of flatware in the sink, precariously arranged, shifts suddenly, and the noise bounces sharply off the walls.

Judy doesn’t flinch. The noise of kitchens generally comforts her.

She’s thinking about Mr. Van Laar’s disproportionate reaction to her mention of his grandson. The hate in his eyes, the flash of his yellowing teeth. She’d seen that same expression on someone else.

Now it returns to her: Mrs. Charles Hanover, she thinks. At a Christmas party at the golf club several years ago, she had rounded a quiet corner to find Mrs. Hanover methodically going through the pockets of furs in the coatroom. Now and then she produced something, examined it, and put it into her own purse. Judy watched, stunned, until Mrs. Hanover turned and caught her eye. Then she smiled, found her own coat, put it on, and walked out.

Judy had rushed to the kitchen to find Chick Janowicz, the GM, who raked his hands over his cheeks and stood looking at the floor for a few beats. Then he nodded, departed, resigned to his fate.

From the kitchen, Judy had heard the howls of indignation all the way down the hall. Then the swinging door flew open and there were the Hanovers, the wife in the lead, an angry finger pointing in Judy’s direction, the expression on her face exactly the same as Mr. Van Laar’s had been at the mention of his grandson.

“You have no idea what the hell you saw,” Mrs. Hanover was saying to Judy. “You little—”

“Paulette,” her husband said warningly.

Mr. Janowicz had to threaten to call the police before Mrs. Hanover finally turned out the contents of her purse. Inside it were five wallets and two cigarette cases. Though the Hanovers were banished from the club, Paulette Hanover was never reported to the law.

Rich people, thought Judy—she thought this then, and she thinks it now—generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.

Tracy

1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day One

She learns, that day, the answer to the question she has had since the start of camp.

What are they actually supposed to yell when lost? Their instructions stopped short of the answer.

As it turns out, Tracy yells: I’M LOST.

She yells this continuously, in a kind of hysterical chant; and then, remembering that she is supposed to conserve her voice, she pauses for longer intervals.

At first, shouting this ridiculous phrase, she seethes with self-loathing and embarrassment, certain that she’s only a stone’s throw from the edge of the woods, certain that some ten-year-old camper will at any moment come wandering over in his uniform, looking scornful, pointing in the direction of the camp. Still, she continues to shout it, resigned to her fate. Better to get it over with, she thinks.

•   •   •

She’s been thirsty for a while. Now she’s growing hungry. This alone convinces her that perhaps too much time has passed. And is the light around her growing dimmer? Impossible, she thinks. It was early morning when she struck out. But in the woods, time seems to move strangely. She’s entered a different reality from the one she knew.

“I’m lost,” Tracy yells, again and again.

The world around her is blurry and green. She curses herself for her vanity, for being too proud to wear the glasses she was prescribed this year.

This is no longer an adventure. Real fear has settled in, finally, and she screams without words. Now, she does not say “I’m lost” or “Help”; instead she simply hollers, guttural primal howls that are punctuated, every so often, with “Mom, Dad”—a surprise to her. Tracy thinks of herself as independent, even at her age. But here she is, thirsty, hungry, crying, screaming for her parents, who don’t even speak to one another anymore.

•   •   •

After a while of carrying on like this, Tracy freezes in the middle of a howl to listen with her whole body. She holds her breath. Hears what sounds like footsteps.

She waits for a bit.

“Hello?” she says.