Hesitantly, Warren nodded. It would mean more trips to town, Alice knew; it would mean a change in plans for all the temporary staff who had initially been contracted to work just the week.
But Peter had already made his decision. The guests had already cheered.
The dinner looked set to proceed, until someone on the periphery spoke up.
“Is that all right?” said Delphine. Everyone turned in her direction. “Warren, did you have other plans?”
Silence.
The impropriety of this exchange was obvious to everyone on the beach. What right did Delphine—a widowed woman, alone at the party—have to directly address a member of the Van Laars’ staff?
Suddenly, Peter’s father—who generally let his son run the show—stood up from the deep Adirondack chair he’d been sitting in with a spryness that would have been surprising in any other man of his age.
He addressed the group as a whole.
“Warren will be happy to accommodate you all,” he said. “As will we. Thank you for your concern, Mrs. Barlow.”
• • •
In bed that night, Peter’s good mood was gone. A quiet fury had replaced it.
“What was she thinking,” he said, over and over. She, Alice presumed, was Delphine.
“She means well,” said Alice. “She’s just—she’s always been different. Ever since we were children.”
Peter was silent.
“She has good qualities, too. She’s very good with Bear,” said Alice—thinking frantically of anything she could say to mollify her husband. “She’s always been kind to him. She sits with him, you know. She brings him toys every time she comes.”
“The presumptuousness of that woman,” said Peter. “I know she’s your sister, Alice, but I’m not certain we can keep inviting her.”
He turned over, away from Alice.
Tentatively, she put a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. Then he stood up. He put his robe on. He walked out of her room, across the hallway, and into his.
She didn’t want the spell of the week to be over. She didn’t want to go back to the way they’d always been.
• • •
She hadn’t had as much to drink that week as she normally did; she’d been happily distracted by Peter’s attention. But the final Saturday of the Blackfly Good-by—when she realized Peter would not be coming out of his room—she took a glass of wine at lunch, and continued to refill it in the kitchen whenever she had a moment to herself.
By four o’clock, the smell of the air had changed. Rain was coming, everyone said.
The staff had been busy all day, bringing bags of groceries back from town.
At some point, somebody proposed an outing on Lake Joan: it would be their last chance to boat before the storm. And so the decision was made, and everyone retreated to their rooms to change.
Bear would enjoy that, thought Alice. And she set off to find him.
For most of the week, he’d been running here and there with John Paul and Marnie McLellan; she could go long stretches without seeing him. She’d never paid so little attention to him as she did that week; she’d never had anything to distract her the way that Peter had. It was all right, she told herself. Bear, too, was having fun.
Tessie Jo Hewitt was part of their group as well. Slightly older than the rest, she seemed to be their leader. Alice wasn’t certain, but she thought it possible that Vic Hewitt had assigned his daughter the task of acting as babysitter for the other children.
Alice didn’t find Bear in his room, or in any of the McLellans’ rooms.
She looked down at the beach, and in the boathouse, where two of the staff were readying several watercraft for that afternoon’s excursion.
“Have you seen Bear?” she asked them, but they hadn’t.
• • •
She saved Peter’s room for last. For one thing, she thought it unlikely that her son was there: Bear and his father had become closer, lately, but really he was hers alone. Peter seemed always to look at him from a distance, even when they were in the same room.
She walked down the carpeted hallway of Self-Reliance, listening for children’s voices, for the voice of her son.
She stood outside Peter’s room, her ear to the door.
And then, hearing nothing, she turned the knob.
Judyta
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day Two
Inside the now-abandoned slaughterhouse, Judy stands silent.
She listens: more footsteps. Five, six, seven in a row.
Toward the back of the shadowy room, she sees a staircase leading upward into darkness. If she were in a movie, she thinks, she’d head in that direction. But all of her training tells her not to go solo toward a potential threat, and so instead she backs out of the structure.
