Halfway through the summer, she was walking back from the washroom on a break when she came across Lowell Cargill, the other object of her affection, seated at a picnic table. His face was obscured by a newspaper.
Above the fold, the date: July 13, 1975. Below the date, a man’s face gazed toward the viewer: bespectacled, balding, unsmiling. This, she ascertained from the caption, was Jacob Sluiter—known to the campers as Slitter. She had heard whispers in the dark about him, knew there to be some rumored connection between Slitter and Bear Van Laar; but the details to that point had eluded Tracy.
As nonchalantly as possible, she sat at a different table, facing the paper. She squinted in the article’s direction, attempting to make out details. In moments like these, she regretted not wearing her glasses. SIGHTING REPORTED, said the headline. And beneath it, large words like dangerous and armed.
“Nervous?”
Tracy flinched.
Lowell Cargill was regarding her over the top of the paper in his hands.
“Says here he might be making his way northward, toward his old hunting grounds,” said Lowell, casually.
He folded the paper. Crossed one leg over the other, ankle to knee.
Then, seeing Tracy’s face, he added: “Don’t be scared. He was all the way down at Fishkill when he got out. If he’s walking, he wouldn’t be in this area yet. And I bet they find him before he gets here.”
He paused.
“Unless he hitchhiked,” he added, uncertainly. “But who would pick him up?”
“Where did you get that paper?” Tracy asked.
“From the canteen,” said Lowell. “They sell papers there every day. Most people just don’t want ’em.”
I do, thought Tracy. At home, she liked reading the daily paper with her mother. And she saw it as further evidence of her compatibility with Lowell Cargill that he, too, read the newspaper: a quality she considered unusual in a boy his age.
Abruptly, Lowell stood up and stretched his arms into the air, revealing a slice of midriff that thrilled her.
“You can have this if you want,” said Lowell. “I’m done with it.”
She took it into her hands—knowing without a doubt that she would keep it in her trunk for the rest of the session, a sort of holy relic, sanctified by Lowell Cargill’s touch.
The PA system crackled to life then, announcing the end of free hour, and Lowell turned away.
Then, as if remembering something, he turned. “Hey,” he said. “Barbara said you’re a good singer. Do you want to sing with me sometime?”
Tracy felt all the blood in her body leave her head.
Lowell furrowed his brow. “It’s okay if you don’t,” he said. “I was just wondering. I’m trying to learn how to harmonize.”
He began walking.
Tracy watched the back of him, cursing herself for her cowardice. And then, when he was ten strides away, she willed herself to speak. “I will,” she said. And then again, louder.
“Right on,” said Lowell. “I’ll find you.”
• • •
On her top bunk, after dinner and before lights-out, Tracy folded the front page of The Saratogian into a small square, and read the article.
From it, she learned the full story of Jacob Sluiter. He was, she read, a notorious killer who had haunted the Adirondack Park just over a decade prior. Sluiter was accused of and prosecuted for eleven murders, all of which took place between 1960 and 1964, the year in which he was finally apprehended. Most of these killings took place at campgrounds or remote cabins. The victims—couples, sometimes single women—were bound and stabbed; no firearms were used. What allowed Sluiter to elude capture for so long was his deep knowledge of woodcraft, forged over the course of a childhood spent in rural poverty. He could trap and fish with great skill. During each of the four winters he was on the lam, Sluiter moved from unoccupied cabin to unoccupied cabin, stealing canned goods and other provisions left behind by summer people; from May to September, when the region became more populated and owners returned to their cabins, he camped out in the wilderness. He might have gone on this way forever if not for a stroke of bad luck: a cottage he assumed to be empty for winter was, in fact, the site of its owners’ annual Christmas celebration. Pulling into the driveway, the owner spotted a fire in the fireplace. Before Sluiter could get to his gun, the owner was inside, on top of him.
Jacob Sluiter was tied to a chair while the authorities were called. On December 23, 1964, he was captured at last.
He confessed to nothing. He maintained his innocence, despite the evidence that damned him irreversibly: possessions from victims among his belongings; his fingerprints at all the crime scenes; testimony from two siblings about sadistic tendencies; and, at last, a positive visual identification from one survivor of an attempted homicide. Still, Sluiter denied it. His lack of transparency, wrote the reporter, led to speculation that Sluiter may have been responsible for even more homicides than those he was accused of. Certain cases involving persons who’d gone missing while out hiking—who were formerly considered to have simply gotten lost—were reopened.
Including Bear Van Laar’s? Tracy wondered. This was the frightening rumor she’d heard her first night at camp.
The article went on: ten years after Jacob Sluiter’s capture and sentencing—life in prison, without parole—he feigned illness to oblige a transfer to a lower-security prison. And three weeks ago, Jacob Sluiter escaped that prison, over two hundred miles south of Camp Emerson. The issue of The Saratogian she held was published in his fourth week of being on the lam; the headline reported a possible sighting near Schoharie, New York.
To the side of the article there was a diagram, a sort of map that displayed the location of Sluiter’s known killings, and also of his previous apprehension. And Tracy couldn’t help but notice two of the several reference points the artist had included on the map. One was the town of Shattuck, five miles from Camp Emerson. And the other was the Van Laar Preserve itself. Tracy used her finger, and the key, to judge the distance from where they were to where Sluiter’s arrest had been. Twenty miles, or thirty at the most. She traced a path from Camp Emerson, to the arrest, to the closest killing, also twenty or thirty miles away, and in the process produced a neat isosceles triangle, an eastward-pointing arrow with Camp Emerson as its tip.
Tracy
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
Lowell Cargill, it turned out, was more than just talk. An excruciating week went by, and then he arrived on Balsam’s porch—guitar case in hand—and knocked on the door. One of the Melissas answered, confused. When he asked for Tracy, her mouth fell open further.
Lowell’s suggestion was that they go to the amphitheater to practice, and this was how Tracy found herself following him silently across the grounds of the camp. She tried and failed to think of something to say to him. But Lowell seemed comfortable not talking—until they arrived at their destination. Then he sat down on a stump, opened his guitar case.
One thing Tracy had noticed, the first time she heard Lowell sing, was that he evinced no self-consciousness at all—but really sang, his eyes closing sometimes, as if blocking out the rest of the world.
Today was no different. He began the same Ian & Sylvia song he had sung before—the one that Tracy knew.
Facing Lowell now, Tracy was conflicted: a large part of her was struggling not to burst into hysterical giggles, and she began to dig her fingernails into her own palm to prevent them. But another part of her found Lowell’s passion inspiring, even attractive. His earnest face, beautifully sculpted, moving in agitated ways: it was perhaps the most erotic thing that Tracy, at twelve, had ever witnessed.
“Okay,” said Lowell, when he had sung the song through one time. “Now I’ll teach it to you.”
