“Another thing,” said T.J. “Due to the concern of certain parents, this year’s Survival Trip will look a little different.”

A collective groan.

T.J. held up a hand. “Now listen,” she said. “You’ll still be on your own, in groups. You’ll all be responsible for your own well-being. The only difference is, you’ll have a counselor nearby for those three nights. But they’ll stay about a hundred yards away, unless there’s an emergency you can’t resolve yourselves.”

Silence. And then a solitary voice—male—booed loudly. The rest of the group laughed.

Tracy waited, breath held, to see what T.J. would do. She didn’t look like someone who suffered fools gladly. But she grinned.

“I don’t like it either,” she said. “Trust me.”

•   •   •

That night, after lights-out, Tracy lay in her bed, looking up into darkness, listening first to silence and then to the low sound of stories told in whispers and laughs.

She was alone. She would remain so. Her only job, she told herself, was to make it through the summer.

Louise June 1975

In the dark, Louise held her breath, listening. On the other side of the partition: small wet sniffles. Somebody crying and trying to hide it. This happened every session, on night one.

Louise sat up in bed. Tiptoed past Annabel. Drew aside the curtain. Scanned the room, looking at every camper in turn.

Tracy.

There were Tracy’s eyeballs, glinting in the moonlight, returning her gaze.

•   •   •

Outside, on the steps leading down from the porch, Tracy now sat next to Louise, trying to make herself small. She tucked the nightgown down over her knees. Wrapped her elbows around them, too. She looked, Louise thought, like a large six-year-old.

Again, she sniffed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Louise. Her standard opening—one she’d devised over all four summers—one that left no room for insistence that everything was fine.

The girl shrugged. Embarrassed.

Earlier, at dinner, and then at the campfire that followed, Tracy had seated herself at the end of everything, and then hadn’t said a word. She kept her gaze down. Upon returning to the cabin, she had read a book while the other girls talked, shrieked, ran chaotically about the room, bouncing off every surface like electrons. There was a particular brand of humor employed by twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, especially when they weren’t in the presence of boys: it was at once disgusting and innocent, bawdy and naive. When it wasn’t being used for ill—when no one was its target—this type of humor delighted Louise. From the wall, she watched them quietly, fondly, recalling what it was like to be in this moment of life that was like a breath before speech, a last sweet pause before some great unveiling.

“Did someone say something to you?” Louise asked the girl, gently. “Are you upset?”

The girl shook her head. “I got scared,” she said. Almost imperceptibly, she inched closer to Louise, who put her arm out, encircling the girl as well as she could.

“What about?” said Louise.

“We were telling stories,” said the girl. There was pathos in the phrasing. We, thought Louise. Not they. A wistful bid for inclusion.

“What about?”

She paused. In the moonlight, Louise could make out only the outline of the girl’s face.

She said something then, so quietly that Louise couldn’t make it out. She angled her head sideways.

“Slitter,” the girl whispered, and then looked around quickly. Afraid of who else might have heard.

•   •   •

Of course it was Slitter.

Louise almost smiled in relief. This was one of a half-dozen stories that passed down from one generation of campers to another, sometimes as a prank, sometimes as a warning. The extent to which each camper believed in their veracity was often unclear. Some told them with a smirk, happy to instill fear in others; some told them tremulously, wanting to unburden themselves of the horrible knowledge they had acquired. T.J. had actually addressed the issue at training that year: the little ones, she said, get so scared. Let’s head off the ghost stories, please.

There were several that fit the description: Old Jones, the ghost of an Adirondack guide who rattled the cabin windows at night; Scary Mary, purportedly the jilted wife of a Van Laar ancestor from several generations back.

But Slitter—or Jacob Sluiter, the actual spelling of his name—was no ghost. He was a man, still alive, as far as Louise knew. Still haunting the imaginations of her campers, year after year. The rumors about him—and his rumored connection to the Van Laar Preserve—were the most persistent of all of the stories she’d heard.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” said Louise. “He’s in a jail cell. About two hundred miles away.”

But Tracy shook her head quickly.

“He’s not,” she said. “He escaped.”

“I don’t think so,” said Louise.

“He did,” said Tracy. “T.J. said so. She said it to one of the counselors from Spruce. And the counselor told the CIT, and the CIT told Caroline.”

Louise paused, unconvinced. For one thing, T.J. would have told her, Louise, first, if this was true. Wouldn’t she have? Unless she hadn’t had a chance to.

Louise smiled at the girl. “Even if that’s true,” she said, “he’d have a pretty long way to travel before he reached this area. And I don’t see why he’d want to.”

“I heard them telling stories,” Tracy said. She pulled her knees in closer. “The other girls.”

“Those old stories have been around a long time,” Louise said. “Doesn’t mean they’re true.”

Tracy wouldn’t hear it. She was shaking her head now, imploring Louise to listen. “They were talking about the boy,” she whispered.

Louise paused.

She knew what boy. There was no need to say his name.

Louise Two Months Later August 1975

Louise is running.

On most days, this motion—legs pumping, arms pumping, head and neck erect—feels correct to her: her natural state. Her daily runs on the grounds of the Preserve constitute the only times in her life when she is fully at ease, when her worries are, just for a moment, stayed. She was a sprinter in high school, but she likes running distances better. On long runs she thinks of her body as somehow the mother of her brain—or the way a mother should be, anyway. The way other people’s mothers are.

Today’s run is different.

Today Louise runs frantically, unseeingly. She trips over the ground. Rights herself. She ignores a counselor who calls out to her from across the lawn. “Fine, forget you!” says the counselor—good-natured, oblivious. Louise doesn’t look back.