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  The wife of a Jew. The father of her child.

  Not a Jew, this child.

  HE WAS NEGOTIATING the rocks and roots on the hill that led down to the river when there was a shout—more like a crow’s call, a gravelly shriek.

  For chrissake—NO!

  Straining to look in the direction of the tent, William could make out two figures—the tall, lean, straight-as-a-pole body of Clementine and the smaller, rounder, familiar shape of his wife.

  He took a step to the right into the darkness, out of the moon’s reach.

  “William?” James put his hand on William’s arm, his voice a whisper.

  “I didn’t even see you,” William said.

  “Trouble,” James said.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” William said.

  “What you heard just now was the cook.”

  “I could tell it was the cook,” William said. “I know her voice.”

  They stood side by side, off to the right where the woods took over the landscape—their shoulders touched, their lanky figures melted into the trees. James, fair-skinned, the taller and thinner of the two. William—five feet ten—rugged, slender and fit. Dark-skinned by birth and years in the out-of-doors.

  “Did you hear the argument?”

  “I did,” James said. “I was just by the river when Josephine pounced.”

  “Pounced?” William gave a small laugh. “Josie?”

  “Josie, yes. She said to the cook in a voice loud enough for me to hear her clearly, We’ve never had Negroes at this camp.”

  William felt his blood drain.

  “That’s not like Josie, James. She is difficult, but she isn’t cruel.”

  “Maybe jealous?”

  “I’m not sure that Josie has enough interest in me to be jealous.”

  “It was a mistake, you know it was a mistake, William, to ask this cook to join the camp this summer.”

  “Possibly.”

  “So why did you ask her?”

  “She’s an excellent cook,” William said, “and I wanted Roosevelt to have a healthy summer. Washington is wretched in the heat.”

  James shrugged.

  “Also,” William said softly. “She was kind to me when my mother died.”

  BELOW ON THE RIVERBANK where the women had been arguing, Josie had moved out of view.

  “Is it possible that you have more than a professional interest in the cook?” James asked.

  “It is not possible.”

  “Well … it’s fraught and we aren’t even at camp yet.”

  “What has been going on?”

  “This is what I know,” James began in a stage whisper. “What I heard standing just about where we are right now. Nervous as a cat, something about the weather and the wind. And here comes Josie down the hill, heading straight for the cook.”

  He settled just slightly against William.

  “The cook was leaning on the tree, and Josie had stopped just there by the tent where the cook’s son is sleeping. Good evening, the cook said, and Josie replied—quite loud because I was over here in the woods where we are now and I heard each word in spite of the wind.” James spoke quickly. “What she said stopped me in my tracks.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, I want to know if you are here because you have an interest in my husband, William Grove, the director of this camp. That is what I want to know.”

  William leaned his head back against the pine branches.

  “And that’s when the cook said For chrissake, NO! So loud that you could hear her up the hill,” James said.

  “That does not sound like Josephine.”

  “Maybe not, but that is what she said.”

  “She’d be ashamed to reveal herself in such a manner to …”

  “To a Negro?”

  “That is not what I was going to say, James.”

  “So you must have heard what the new cook said in response.”

  “I heard For chrissake, NO.”

  “And then she said—” James continued.

  “Her name is Clementine,” William said. “You know that, so call her by her name.”

  “She said, I am a cook in the home of his uncle, Dr. Irving Grove, and do not occupy the same world as William Grove.”

  “That’s the whole conversation?” William asked.

  “It was just a conversation,” James said. “Not a calamity or I wouldn’t have told you. A little cat fight that I thought would be of interest to you.”

  William pulled up his trousers, tightening the belt. He kicked one muddy boot against the other, scanning the darkness.

  “Did you notice where Josie went?” he asked.

  “Along the bank just a moment ago,” James said.

  “She’s not a swimmer.”

  “She’s not going to fall in the river,” James said. “She’s too cautious for that, as you would say yourself.”

  “Upset, anything can happen,” William said.

  “I see someone now moving in the woods.”

  “Where?”

  “Just there, on the bank above the river.”

  A small round figure emerged from the trees heading toward the tents.

  “I’m sorry.” James’ hand was gentle on William’s arm. “I know that things are not going well at home.”

  “They aren’t.” William brushed by James’ shoulder as he turned.

  He was suddenly concerned about James. Whether they were friends or not, whether their friendship was in the balance.

  Who to trust and who not? Or was trust even a word worth considering.

  Was James actually pleased to see William in a trouble spot?

  Fair-haired James with his perfect bones, his fine Anglo-Saxon skin and slim figure.

  Did he wish William well? Or did he not.

  William had met James when he was a student in a junior-year class in European history and philosophy. His best student—an odd boy who spoke a kind of lyrical prose in a soft, insistent voice reminiscent of the boys in his classes in Lithuania.

  A mannered acquiescence about James. And something else William couldn’t identify.

  “Mr. Grove,” James would say in class, “It has come to my attention—” Always that: “It has come to my attention… ,” as if James was the one student at Boys’ Latin High School who might be capable of understanding the significance of a historical event.

  William would find himself almost by accident falling into James’ strange web of worship and rejection as if the one led almost immediately to the other.

  “You’re a simple man, William,” James had once said to him.

  “Simple?”

  “Not in a bad way,” James said. “Quite the contrary. You don’t make a mountain out of a molehill, the American expression for reasonable.”

  They had long talks, especially in the years they traveled together, just the two of them. William especially liked the talks about history, but he didn’t care for the long, personal conversations turning William inside out as if James were engaged in a dissection in the biology laboratory, as if he wished to know William way beyond William’s own interest in himself.

  But lately, since last summer, William had become uncomfortable with James.

  A wariness, as though there were something James wanted from him more than the friendship they had had as teacher and student.

  A friendship that had been a matter of fact for William.

  But maybe not.

  WHEN HE GOT BACK to the tent at the top of the hill, Josie was in her chair, the flashlight in her lap and turned off.

  “You followed me?” she said.

  “I didn’t follow you,” William said. “When I came back up from warning Clementine about the river, I assumed you’d gone to the woods to relieve yourself.”

  He dropped down beside her.

  “But you had left.”

  “I went down the hill to speak to the cook.”

  “I know that now.” />
  “She has an attitude.” Josie looked up at him. “Wouldn’t you agree she has an attitude?”

  “Possibly.” He could not deny that about Clem. “Did you check on Georgianna?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “So she’s okay.”

  “I said she is sleeping.”

  Josie turned on the flashlight, swirling it in a circle, nervously swirling round and round, shining it into the sky, light zigzagging crazily across the horizon.

  Stop! was on the edge of William’s tongue as he stood up from the camp chair, but he refrained.

  He ducked inside the tent, sat on his sleeping bag, untied his boots and put them behind his pack, shook out the double sleeping bag and crouched in the darkness, collecting himself, watching the back of Josephine, her hair pinned up off her neck, thinking what to say, what possibly was there to say to change the direction of the air between them.

  “William?” Josie was sitting directly in front of him, facing the river.

  He didn’t stand and she didn’t turn around to face him.

  “James told me earlier that the Nazis were taking over Lithuania in the next few days.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Your uncle told you?”

  “He did.”

  “Is that what’s been on your mind making you so cruel?”

  “I didn’t know I had been cruel.”

  “You seem crazed, like a trapped animal. I don’t feel safe.”

  “I am not conscious of being an animal, Josie.”

  “YOU ARE TOO tightly wired, William,” his mother would say to him. “Stand straight, take six deep breaths one after the other and breathe out slowly.”

  William would follow her instructions.

  She was his mother and they were in Lithuania and he was young.

  He had only once gotten into serious fisticuffs in school, a fight he lost, with a bloody nose and a broken hand. But the boys in school were wary of him. He was known to have a temper.

  Even now, the broken hand, poorly set in the clinic, was sensitive to weather.

  “I’m ready for bed, Josie,” he said quietly, a whisper of seduction in his voice which he intended as much for himself as for Josephine.

  He took off his trousers, folded them on top of his boots, ran his hand over his stomach. Taut—the belly from winter flattened.

  Josie reached out her hand, unable to stand from a low chair without his help. There was pain in her face.

  “Does something hurt?” he asked.

  “Nothing hurts,” she said.

  He climbed into the sleeping bag, sitting up, still in his heavy sweater, watching while Josie sorted through her belongings for a gown, undid her hair so it fell to her shoulders, her face still lovely in repose. She found the gown, changed her mind, stuffed it back in the pack and climbed in next to him fully clothed.

  “Too cold?” he asked.

  “Too cold?”

  She pushed the top of the sleeping bag into a facsimile of a pillow and lay down on her back.

  “Sleeping in your clothes.”

  The sleeping bag was pulled up to her thighs, her arms across her stomach and William lay next to her, pushing down so they were side by side.

  He reached over and took her hand in his. Gently. She did not resist.

  Lying on his back, his jacket folded and under his head, he watched the slow rise and fall of her belly. The way a tendril of her curly hair fell across her cheek, her cheek flushed.

  He lifted her hand across his groin and lay it on his cock.

  She was still and quiet, her breath soundless—her eyes closed, a light flutter of eyelash, a tightening of her lips.

  “Josie?”

  “Yes.”

  In the distance, a rumble of weather, the high screech of a hawk settling to quiet, a light wind.

  “Do I disgust you?” he asked, turning off the kerosene lamp.

  Josie turned her head away, looking into darkness—her hand lifeless against him.

  MISSING LAKE

  June 18, 2008

  Georgianna

  Amuddy dawn spreads through the tent, and there in the place where Oona had been is Freddy, the scruffy pink pig.

  Thomas waits, his breath trapped in his throat.

  Just up the hill, Georgie is stretched out on top of her sleeping bag, her arms extended above her head, her hands open, palms up. Her eyes are closed, but she is not asleep. In fact, quite awake, lightheaded thinking with actual relief that they have made it through the night. No visitations. No terrible storms galloping down the Bone River. Morning, and soon the sun would break through.

  Today, Roosevelt.

  She sits up, stretches, spreading her fingers in the chilly air.

  Ahead, Thomas’ back is in her line of sight.

  Strange.

  He is just sitting there on his haunches.

  She rolls her sleeping bag, ready to leave for Minnie HaHa, and comes up quietly behind him.

  “Are you okay?” she asks, kneeling down beside him.

  He is not okay. He can’t catch his breath to speak, his hands are fisted. A sound like a hum in his throat.

  “Oona.”

  His voice is not his own.

  Georgie looks into the tent at the empty sleeping bag where Oona had been.

  “Gone?”

  Thomas nods.

  Georgie moves slowly, stops to gather her wits, settle her racing heart.

  “I knew something would happen to Oona on this trip,” he says,

  “Maybe she climbed into the sleeping bag with Nicolas.”

  Georgie’s mind rushes to solutions.

  “Or maybe she’s with Rosie.”

  “If she woke up in the middle of the night, she would have come up the hill to find me,” Thomas says. “Not Nicolas or Rosie and not Jesse.”

  He takes Georgie’s hand and she pulls him to his feet.

  “I think she drowned.”

  “No, Thomas. She did not drown. She’s a careful girl and wouldn’t go to the water in the dark.”

  “She would do that,” he says. “I know her very well.”

  “We’ll check,” Georgie says. “We’ll check the tents to see if she is there. Then check the river and the path along the bank.”

  They walk down the hill, Thomas leaning against Georgie, a dead weight at one hundred pounds.

  “Everything will be okay, won’t it, Georgie?” he asks. “You think that, don’t you?”

  Georgie lifts the flap of Nicolas’ tent.

  Nicolas is on his back, the cell phone beside his head. Jesse lying on his side in his sleeping bag, his eyes open.

  “Nicolas?” Georgie asks.

  “He’s awake,” Jesse says. “He snores when he’s asleep.”

  “I was wondering is Oona here?” Georgie asks as though it is the most casual of questions.

  Though it is clear that Oona is not.

  Jesse shakes his head.

  “Oona?” Nicolas sits up and grabs his phone. “She was sleeping with you, Thomas.”

  “She wasn’t sleeping with me any longer.”

  His voice is barely audible.

  “But she was, isn’t that right. She was sleeping with you all night for chrissake.”

  “Not all night,” Georgie says quietly.

  Since she can remember, she has been able to turn the nerves in her body on low, necessary in the fieldwork she does in Africa.

  “Last night, Thomas and I were talking just up the hill and Oona was sleeping in the tent below us so we could see her. We could see very well even in the dark.”

  Nicolas pulls up his pants and zips them.

  “If you could see, then you should have seen her leave the tent, isn’t that right?” His voice is trembling. He picks up a sweater from the ground and pulls it over his head.

  “I didn’t sleep all night. Only some of the night,” Thomas says. “I didn’t really sleep, not hard, but I was up there …”

  He poi
nts to the hill where most of the night he had been talking to Georgie.

  “I was up there with Georgie and we could see everything.”

  “What the fuck!” Nicolas heads up the hill, Thomas and Georgie just behind him as he lunges into the tent where Oona had been.

  “Freddy’s here,” he says, coming out with the pink pig.

  “Right here,” he says, swinging the pig.

  “Oona would never leave Freddy behind.” He shakes his fists in the air. “You guys were supposed to be in charge of my daughter, Got it, Thomas?—you were going to be sleeping next to her and she fucking trusted you with everything.”

  Nicolas draws back, fists his hands and in an awkward movement, almost like a dance, he hits his head with his own fists.

  Blows to his cheekbones and his skull, a long high wail, the sound of an injured animal rising out of him.

  Venus is coming from the tent where she has been sleeping.

  “What is happening?” She starts up the hill. “Nicolas!”

  “We don’t know,” Georgie says.

  “We do know,” Nicolas says. “We know that Oona is gone,” he calls out in a loud voice. “My daughter disappeared in the middle of the night in this godforsaken forest.”

  “Gone?”

  “Thomas was supposed to be sleeping with her,” Nicolas says, bending at the waist as if his stomach is cramping.

  “And he didn’t sleep with her. He left her alone. Alone, and she’s four years old.”

  “This is not Thomas’ fault,” Georgie says under her breath.

  “It is my fault,” Thomas says quietly.

  “It is my fault,” Georgie says.

  “It is your fault, Georgie, for bringing us on this trip. And so what! So fucking what if we find out who it was that killed your mother. Or why. Or what difference your mother should make to any of us. Or your father.”’

  A kind of growling sound from deep in Nicolas’ body as though something inside has erupted and shatters the air.

  A sound like the commotion of birds, and he falls to his knees, his forehead on the ground, his arms straight out by his head. Sobbing.

  “Nothing has happened yet, Nicolas,” Georgie says, although he cannot hear her. “We need to think. We need to be clear headed and think. What to do next? What to do.”