“You remember what to do? You remember your training?”
Judy nods.
“Good luck,” says Hayes, and strides down the hill toward the summer camp.
• • •
Outside the house called Self-Reliance, Judy Luptack contemplates the iron knocker, in the shape of a fly. Three times, she lifts and drops its thorax, feeling oddly squeamish about touching it.
After a moment a woman comes to the door. A maid, perhaps.
The woman takes her in for a beat before speaking. “May I help you?”
Judy speaks aloud, for the first time, the words she has been trained to say: “I’m Investigator Judyta Luptack. I’m here to assist in the search for Barbara Van Laar.”
• • •
Inside the main room, a dozen people stand and sit in small groups. They aren’t like the rich people she knew from her work at the golf club—those were generally older men and women who dressed in stiff formal clothes and sat up very straight in their chairs.
The people here, on the other hand, are sprawled out in pajamas and robes. Judy gets the feeling that they’re in no hurry to change. Two of the women wear silk nightgowns, and through them she can distinctly see the outline of their breasts. Two young girls—more hired help—move quietly about, picking up the remnants of a party.
Judy looks down at her notepad, busying herself, steeling herself for her first approach.
She’s already decided who it will be: an older man who comes closest to reminding her of one of the members at the Iroquois Golf Club. He’s white-haired and tall and seated on a low bench near the front door, tying up a sturdy pair of hiking boots. Next to him is a woman who might be his wife.
Judy walks toward them, stands before them, clears her throat. The room feels very quiet to her. Conversations have stopped.
The couple doesn’t hear her, or they don’t care.
“Excuse me, sir?” says Judy—and feels suddenly transported back to her work at the club.
Slowly, the man looks up.
“May I ask you a few questions?” she says.
Jacob
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day One
At dawn, walking just inside the tree line that borders the Northway, he had reached a stream and felt the inexplicable urge to follow it to its beginning. Some memory awoke in him that felt almost ancestral: he knew this stream, though he didn’t know how.
Jacob does not believe in any god except himself. He’s superstitious, though, inclined to subscribe to the idea that coincidence does not exist, that when one encounters the unexpected or uncanny it’s important to spend a few extra minutes considering the why.
Why, he wondered, had he come across this stream in the middle of his journey north? Why did it look so familiar to him? In the near-light, he considered options: it was time to bed down for the day, but the stream drew him forcefully into the woods. What harm, he thought, in following for a while?
• • •
Some hours commenced then of walking and wading and sinking slightly, at times, into the marshy ground. His shoes became muddy, soaked through; he’d have to swap them out for a stranger’s as soon as he could.
The woods were growing thinner: through the last remaining trees before him, he could see a county road crossing his path. The stream he’d been following disappeared into a culvert.
He waited awhile, and then—seeing no cars—he darted across the road, found the culvert on the other side, and continued.
There, just beyond him: a series of small cabins, one after another, moving away from him in two lines that framed the little stream. Here and there, small bridges crossed it. To his left were larger buildings; beyond them, a hill.
In an instant, he understood why he was drawn to the water, and why he had followed it this far.
He’d been to this place before.
Judyta
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day One
Judy Luptack, having asked the gentleman before her for a few minutes of his time, is waiting for a response.
She begins again. “My name is Investigator Luptack. I’m here to help locate Barbara. May I—”
“I’m afraid not,” the man says. And he turns his back to her. Looks out the window, toward the trees.
For a moment, she stands frozen, uncertain what to do. Old instincts instruct her to defer to him—this man she could have served at the golf club. New ones say to be direct.
“Sir?” she says. “It will only take a moment. Just a few questions.”
“I’ll wait for your sergeant,” says the man. “I don’t like repeating myself.”
“There’s no—” Judy begins. Sergeant is not the word for the person above her in the BCI: it’s senior investigator. But she doesn’t feel like telling Denny Hayes, who occupies that role, that she’s failing already.
Instead she says, simply, “Please.”
