“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.
Already, she has searched in the following places for Barbara: the latrines, the commissary, the community room, the beach. Already, she has checked the nurse’s office and the boathouse. She has gone up to the main house, where a sympathetic maid prowled the corridors for ten minutes while Louise waited outside. But Barbara has not been in any of these places, and no one Louise has spoken with has seen her this morning.
When she reaches the Director’s Cabin, she pounds on the door. Waits thirty seconds. Pounds again.
She’s home, Louise knows. T.J. is a woman who strictly adheres to her routine, whose mornings are always the same. At 6:30, she plays reveille over the public address system, signaling to campers that the moment has come to wake up and get to the showers. And at 8:05 she emerges and walks to the commissary, catching the end of breakfast, inspecting the ranks.
Louise checks her watch: 6:40 a.m. In twenty minutes, the campers will be walking to the commissary for breakfast.
Still no answer. She places her palm on the door handle. Depresses the latch. Except for the bathroom stalls, there are no locks at Camp Emerson. Still, it feels wrong to enter the Director’s Cabin (in which T.J. lives year-round—in which she grew up, no less) without an invitation to do so, despite the fact that Louise knows T.J. in a way that feels different from the other counselors. Shares a history with her that she keeps hidden from everyone else on the grounds.
At last, Louise swings open the door. She has to.
“Hello?” she calls. Steps into the wood-paneled living room, which doubles as the camp’s main office. A desk faces a window in the front wall; two small chairs opposite hold a permanent place for campers in need of a talking-to.
Louise has spent hours and hours in this room. On one occasion, a whole cold January week.
Louise listens. The house smells like T.J.: the camphor and tar of her homemade blackfly repellent; beneath it, the iron and musk of her sweat.
From the back of the house, she can hear the shower running.
