• • •
At home, Maryanne was still awake. She was sitting up at the kitchen table, laying out a hand of solitaire. She’d played almost every night since Scotty died; said it helped to empty her mind before sleep.
“Any luck?” she asked Carl, without turning. She was straight-backed, tense.
“No,” said Carl. “Search’ll broaden tomorrow. We’ll bring Ron Shattuck’s hound.” And then he paused, considering.
He had told nobody, yet, what Bear had said about his grandfather. The way Bear’s posture had changed upon hearing his name called in that stern voice. For a moment he considered telling Maryanne. But he could never predict her reactions to what he said, these days. Any wrong thing might drive her to anger—the emotion she most readily expressed, lately, as if all of her sadness since Scotty’s passing required replacement with something. But she spoke first.
“I’ll come too,” said Maryanne, calmly.
“To the Preserve?” said Carl.
“Yes.”
Carl paused. His deference to the Van Laars was so ingrained that his first reaction was to wonder whether she would even be welcome on the grounds. Then he came to his senses; surely the Van Laars would want as many hands as possible. “Are you certain?” he asked.
Maryanne nodded. Placed a seven atop an eight. “Mother will watch the girls. I’ve asked already.”
“All right,” said Carl. Still tentative. He settled at last on the one subject he generally knew to be safe: “How were they?”
Maryanne smiled, waved a hand. “Oh, all right. Jeannie’s upset about a grade. Margaret’s upset about a boy. Antonia’s upset about a friend.” She turned to him, at last, and for a moment he saw a glimpse of humor in her eyes. “I’d be more worried if everyone was fine.”
A surge of warmth arose in him. He had the instinct to go to her, his straight-backed, pretty wife, and place his hands on her arms, and stand there for a while. They so rarely touched one another these days. They had not made love in a year; the last time it happened Maryanne had wept so violently afterward that he promised himself he would not ever approach her again. Not until some invitation was issued, at least, and so far there had been none. So that night, also, he did not go to her, but cleared his throat instead, and walked up the stairs to the bathroom, where he washed before going to bed. One or two hours would pass, he knew, and then Maryanne would enter the room quietly, already dressed in her nightclothes, and she would lie down beside him, and no part of their bodies would meet.
In the early morning, he woke to the smell of breakfast.
His mother-in-law was seated at the table already, coffee in hand. But for her boots, Maryanne had dressed herself in her church clothes, her Sunday school teacher outfit—blue dress, cloche hat—which normally would have been odd for a day’s work in the woods. But these were the Van Laars’ woods, and these clothes, in Maryanne’s mind, were a sign of respect.
At six in the morning, Carl phoned the fire hall to let Bob L. know he’d be driving separately, due to Maryanne’s decision to come.
“Well, that’s fine,” said Bob L. “Turns out everyone else’s wife is coming too.” A note of complaint was in his voice.
The wives’ decision to come may have served as a harbinger, but the full scope of the volunteer effort only became apparent upon Carl’s arrival at the Preserve.
There on the lawn stood what appeared to be most of Shattuck’s adult citizens: several hundred bodies, waiting for instruction. Ron Shattuck was there with his hound, Jennie; another several dogs were on-site too, held by men Carl did not recognize.
Up near the house were four patrol cars with open windows.
And at the very top of the hill, standing before the front door of Self-Reliance, were the elder and younger Van Laar men. To their right was Vic Hewitt, conferring with the staties.
Carl, taking in this scene with Maryanne beside him, faltered momentarily. Last night, the four members of the volunteer fire department had seemed to be in charge; today they had been deposed. He scanned the crowd until he saw Dick Shattuck, looking similarly uncertain, for once in his life. His wife, too, was beside him—a thin woman named Georgette whom Maryanne had been calling stuck-up since all of them were in grade school together. Maryanne was making small throat-clearing noises now, and he took this to mean she wanted him, Carl, to take charge in some way.
So Carl strode, Maryanne on his heel, toward what he perceived to be the action. On the way he caught the eyes of the Bobs and Dick Shattuck; they followed behind.
When they reached the group of men standing out front of Self-Reliance, no one turned.
With some trepidation, Carl spoke up.
“Morning,” said Carl, drawing raised eyebrows from several troopers, and a pause from Vic.
“Men, this is Carl Stoddard,” said Hewitt. “He’s a groundskeeper here and a volunteer firefighter nearby. Carl, these men are from the state police. They’ll be helping us search.”
“Anything happen overnight?” said Carl, and Vic shook his head.
“I built a fire best I could,” said Hewitt. “Despite the damp. Sat up all night. I guess I dozed a little, on and off.”
“No sign,” said Carl, uselessly.
Hewitt shook his head. “I was saying,” he continued, “most important thing is not to disturb any tracks that might be left. Or scents. More than they’ve already been disturbed, I mean. We’ll let the men with dogs head out first, get a good head start. While they’re searching, I’ll divide the rest of the crowd up and teach them how to move. What to look for.”
The troopers nodded, listening. It was interesting, Carl thought, that none of them asserted any authority here; to a one, they all seemed to recognize their place, as subordinates to the family running the operation, and to Vic. It was true, too, that the Hewitts had been known for generations as the best guides in the region, and Vic was thought to have a special gift. A few of the troopers were local boys who no doubt knew his reputation.
Abruptly, then, Vic Hewitt turned and strode away, leaving Carl and the others alone with the troopers, who closed in on themselves to form a tight circle.
Bob L., never shy about complaining, was the first to say it. “It’s like we’re not here.”
• • •
The men with dogs went first, as planned.
Ten minutes after the hounds, the rest of the crowd departed, some in vehicles, to the locations assigned to them by Vic Hewitt. The four firefighters and their wives had been given the task of searching a square mile of woods on the opposite side of Route 29; they drove to the site in question and pulled over in a line at the edge of the woods.
The goal, Vic had said—raising his voice as well as he could to address the entire crowd—was to form a line of humans, evenly spaced, and march forward as a collective. Keep your eyes on the ground, said Vic. Sweep them left to right. Watch for unusual colors, unusual depressions in the undergrowth. Every thirty seconds or so, call out for the boy.
This, it turned out, was the most difficult part for Carl. For all the men.
They were unaccustomed to raising their voices in this way, to calling out one person’s name repeatedly.
