She’s almost at the ridge that drops down toward camp when she hears a woman shouting: “There she is!”

There’s something familiar about the voice.

“Barbara?” someone calls.

“No,” the woman shouts. “Tracy! Tracy’s back.”

And suddenly, her back still turned to Self-Reliance, Tracy realizes why the voice sounds familiar: it belongs to Donna Romano.

Judyta

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

For five minutes, Judy has been standing in one corner of the main room, watching as a middle-aged man speaks quietly in the threshold of the front door to a young woman on the other side. The young woman is beautiful and small, with long dark hair parted in the middle. She wears a Camp Emerson polo and looks up at the tall man before her with an expression that hovers on desperation. Judy can’t hear what they’re saying.

The girl retreats, the man retreats, the front door closes. A moment later, Denny Hayes enters. Catches her eye, beckons her toward him.

“Listen, honey,” says Hayes, when she reaches him. “I got Barbara Van Laar’s counselor with me. I’m gonna transport her to the Wells station. See if I can get any more out of her. I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

She frowns. This seems odd.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “You won’t be alone for long. We’ve got a dozen more BCI guys heading this way. Captain’s even coming up from Albany.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Family’s connected. You know.”

She nods.

“Who was that man?” she asks. “The one in the doorway?”

Denny looks down at his pad, searching for the name. “John Paul McLellan Sr.,” he says. “The Van Laars’ lawyer. That girl back there said he was a family friend.”

Denny and Judy look at each other for a moment, each registering the improbability of this statement.

“What did the parents say?”

“The parents?” says Hayes. Caught off guard.

“The Van Laars,” says Judy. The last thing he told her when they parted ways this morning was that he’d handle the interviews with the parents, at the Great Hall down the hill.

“Oh,” he says—looking flustered. “They went back to the house. Wanted to wait for Captain LaRochelle. I guess they know him.”

He recovers himself, then continues. “If you get hungry, EnCon brought sandwiches. They’re on the lawn.”

She’s not hungry. But she does have to pee. After several cups of coffee at the station that morning, she’s had to for most of the time they’ve been here.

She’s not certain what procedure is. Nowhere in her training did she come across this exact scenario: What do you do if you’re in someone’s private home for hours and hours with no access to the outside world? Rich people especially. She doesn’t want to ask these people for anything. If she were a man, she’d piss in the woods.

She’s heading in that direction when she hears a voice.

“Excuse me?”

She turns. It’s a young woman in a silk nightgown. Judy had noticed her earlier, when she first walked in.

“Do you have a moment?” she says, and in her voice Judy notices an accent.

Judy nods. Takes her notebook out.

“I want to tell you something,” says the woman. She glances over her shoulder.

“Go ahead,” she says.

“Very early this morning,” says the woman, “a man came back through the house after being out most of the night. And he looked like he’d been fighting. His face looked—terrible. He was bleeding.”

Judy writes down phrases.

“Now he’s gone,” says the young woman. “When the counselor and the other policeman came looking for him, I was the one who opened the door. They asked me to get him, but I couldn’t find him. I went all over the house.” She raises her eyebrows, puts her hands forward, palms up, in a gesture that Judy interprets as—Do you see what I mean?

“Do you know his name?”

“John Paul McLellan,” says the woman. “There are two of them. I mean the younger one. The son. I found his father and sister instead,” says the woman. “They told me he’d left early. His father went to talk to the counselor instead.”

Judy nods. This lines up with what Denny told her.

“Do you know how the counselor knew them? The McLellans?”

“No.”

“Any idea how the son’s face got like that?”

“No. No one’s talking about it. I think that’s strange. Don’t you?” The woman leans in closer. “His father is said to be a close friend of the family. I think he works for the bank.”

Judy looks at her, trying to determine how trustworthy she seems.

“Did Barbara’s parents see his face like that? Mr. and Mrs. Van Laar?”

“No,” says the woman. “They were asleep already.”

She hesitates for a second, and then says: “I believe that you’d have this information by now if they did.”

Judy writes this down.

“Well, thank you,” she says. “Is there anything else to add?”

“He seemed drunk. When he came through the house, he smelled like liquor. But all these people drink too much,” says the woman, waving a hand in the air, indicating every guest in the house.

“Also,” she says, “he drives a blue Trans Am.”

Judy looks up, startled by the specificity of the observation. She had not pegged this woman for someone who would notice cars.