But the figure before her says nothing. Instead, it holds a finger up to its lips, and then gestures once—a beckoning wave—and then begins to walk silently in the direction from which it apparently came.
Its silver hair glints in the scant light that filters through the trees above. The way it moves is ghostlike, and for a moment Tracy is reminded of Scary Mary—one of the legendary ghosts on the Preserve—who is always described in this way. A gray-haired lady, standing still in the woods. Campers report seeing her only from a distance; then she moves on.
The problem with this theory is that this stranger walks, in Tracy’s mind, more like a man than a woman.
The stranger turns and waits. For a moment, Tracy considers staying in place. But her hunger and thirst make the decision for her. She moves instead in the stranger’s direction.
• • •
They walk for perhaps twenty minutes, Tracy trailing behind. Whether the figure ahead of her is leading her to safety or danger, she doesn’t know.
And then she sees a clearing through the trees, and suddenly she is oriented again.
The stranger points silently in the direction of Self-Reliance, and then recedes into the wild again.
• • •
There, ahead of Tracy: a swarm of activity on the lawn. All of the police cruisers that crossed her path as she was setting out that morning are parked now at odd angles on the lawn, along with four pickup trucks, an ambulance. Tracy wonders if there’s any chance that—in the hubbub surrounding Barbara’s disappearance—her own absence has gone unnoticed. With this in mind, she turns south and begins to walk in the direction of Camp Emerson. She keeps her head down, picks up her pace.
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.
