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  “We trust Georgie too,” Rosie says. “It’s just that we didn’t exactly want to come on this trip and it turns out that we were right.”

  “But we’re here,” Venus says. “And you’ve got to admit that when we find Oona, it’ll be kind of cool that we’re here at the place Georgie has always thought of as Home with this old guy who seems perfectly fine, perfectly ordinary, not at all some kind of Svengali, right? And handsome!”

  “Drop it, Venus,” Nicolas says.

  There’s a long silence, Venus struggling to fill it, but she cannot think of what to say.

  “I do not have a cigarette, Venus,” Nicolas says.

  “I didn’t ask for one.”

  That is where they are for the time being, Rosie tells Venus. Their life as a family has turned a corner to something else.

  If Oona is gone, actually gone, they will never be that family again.

  “I don’t understand Georgie sometimes,” Venus says. “I mean I’m a true believer in the stars and she’s a scientist. But to reenact a murder the way she set this up with all of us—matching the day and the place and the circumstances. It’s disturbing!”

  “Do you think we’re going to be okay?” Jesse asks. “All of us?”

  “Okay? Who knows?”

  “Hush, Venus,” Rosie says. “We will be okay, Jesse.”

  Nicolas is pacing up and down the diving board.

  “Dad’s on the phone!” Jesse calls out. “He’s got a connection. Did you hear the phone ring?”

  “I didn’t,” Venus says.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Nicolas shouts suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon?” Venus says.

  “Mom.” Jesse says quietly.

  “Mom?” Venus asks.

  “He’s talking to Olivia.”

  Roosevelt has come around the lodge and is heading down the hill. He stops at the bank, waits, his hands in his pockets, looking out over the river, checking his watch.

  “Thunder,” he says to no one in particular, but Venus overhears him.

  “Thunder?” she asks. “I don’t hear it.”

  “In the distance. South,” he says. “Maybe it will roll in or maybe not.”

  Nicolas is still on the phone, sitting at the end of the diving board.

  I know, I know, I know, Olivia, he is saying when Roosevelt comes up behind them.

  “Just a second,” he says to Roosevelt. “Goodbye, Olivia. I will call as soon as I have news. We will find her.”

  We will find her.

  He is almost screaming.

  He walks back to the bank, where his family is now stretched out on the grass.

  “News?” he asks.

  “Only this,” Roosevelt says. “The pharmacist was on the camp phone again. He called about the murder.”

  “What murder?” Venus asks. “How many murders can there be around here?”

  “The only murder. The one in 1941. They are interested that I was at the campsite when Georgianna’s mother was murdered.”

  “That was years ago,” Rosie says.

  “People don’t have much to think about in Missing Lake,” Roosevelt says.

  “I wonder if the people in town knew that we were coming?” Venus asks. “If word got around that the Grove family would be here for the first time ever since it happened.”

  “They knew,” Roosevelt says, crouching down, his arm flung around Mercy.

  “How did they know?” Rosie asks. “From Georgie?”

  “Not from Georgie. Mr. Blake didn’t know who Georgie was when she called to reserve the trip.”

  He nestles his face in Mercy’s fur and stands, slowly, the rising of an aging man with a large frame.

  A long quiet as he looks out over the river, the sun in a westward descent, a dark cloud hovering in the distance, a light chop on the water.

  “People knew you were coming because I told them.”

  MISSING LAKE

  June 18, 2008

  Georgianna

  Georgie picks up her backpack and slips her arm through the straps.

  Just after seven now and the sun is lifting over the pines, the pines thick with scent and dampness taking up space in her head— she can actually feel it, demons crowding the recreation room of her brain where she counts on her imagination to be at work.

  “What is a pedophile, Georgie?”

  “Nicolas will say anything when he’s upset.”

  “It means something.”

  “It means nothing to us,” Georgie says.

  They head up the hill, past Oona’s tent, past the red wheel-barrow and into the pine forest.

  “I want to talk about Oona.”

  “We’re not going to talk about Oona,” she says. “We’re not going to talk.”

  “All I want to ask you is why was it so important for Oona to come on this trip which she won’t even remember because she’s only four.”

  “There’s nothing to say about Oona.”

  The path to Missing Lake is slippery and wet, roots protruding and rocks, the rotting smell of fungi in the air.

  Georgie goes to the edge of the forest standing beside Thomas.

  “Here is where I’m looking,” he says.

  He ducks under the branches of a high pine.

  “No one could possibly get through here. It’s too dense.”

  He tries to push into the underbrush, but the low branches of pine slap his face, the undergrowth thick and tough-skinned. He drops to his hands and knees inching over the roots, the fallen branches.

  “Oona’s little enough to get through,” he calls. “She could be in the deep wood.”

  “Why would she do that, Thomas. Especially in darkness?”

  “I’ll go just a little further.”

  A large spindly branched fir scrapes across his skin drawing blood, and he lies flat, wriggles into the clearing.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “I know I’m bleeding,” he says. “I don’t mind blood, but can I ask you just this one thing?”

  Georgie puts her hands over her ears, so that any sound, even that of the river, is a low din rolling in the distance and all she can hear alone with herself is the sound of her own body vibrating as if it is about to explode.

  She cannot have a panic attack. Not now. Not with so much immediately at stake.

  “Thomas?”

  He is walking ahead of her now, wiping the blood off his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

  “You asked why I wanted especially to have Oona here?” She catches up to him. “The answer is not an answer you’ll understand since even I don’t understand it.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I wanted everyone on this trip, but in particular I wanted Oona. I wanted to have a sense of four years old. I have wondered what is it like to be four and how did I make it through what happened,” she says. “Or did I.”

  “I don’t understand,” he says. “I’m only thirteen”

  THE PATH PROM the campsite packed down from rains is easy walking except for the rocks and exposed roots. Mainly pine needles, black soil, a layer of rotting leaves. No evident footsteps or bear paws or clear signs of passage along the route.

  Except, suddenly, just beyond the clearing, a footprint.

  A muddy heel.

  Certainly it is a heel, perhaps from a boot. Maybe a shoe but more likely a heavy boot by the depth of it on the wet ground.

  She squats to get a closer look.

  “A footprint?” Thomas asks.

  He leans down beside her.

  “It’s got to be a boot.”

  “Are there more footprints ahead?” she asks, crouching beside him.

  Thomas walks ahead, his eyes peeled on the ground, but it’s dark on the path, the pine trees high and thick, cutting out the light from the rising sun.

  “Walk along the edge so you don’t step on any evidence in case there are more footsteps.”

  “I don’t see any more,” he calls.

 
“Odd,” Georgie says. “One footprint.” What could have happened to the other foot?”

  “At least we know it’s a new footprint, so someone has been on this path recently.”

  She turns back to the boot print, kneeling beside it.

  A man’s boot heel. Only one. She is thinking what might have happened. Was he carrying Oona? Holding her arms or perhaps her arms were tied so she could not yank out the cloth—maybe a handkerchief-—stuffed in her mouth so she couldn’t scream.

  “You’re sure it’s the footprint of a man?” Thomas asks.

  “I am sure of nothing. But the footprint is fresh and I am guessing it belongs to the person who took Oona.”

  “What if she went to the river on a whim?” Thomas asks. “Or else it was a bear.”

  “Not a bear, Thomas. And I don’t think Oona walked out of the tent and went to the river. She was barefoot. I checked the path from the tent when we were putting in the boats just now. No little feet.”

  “She had on socks.”

  “There still would have been evidence of little feet. The ground is muddy, especially at the top of the embankment where her tent was pitched.”

  Oona is not a child who would walk down to the river in the dark.

  Or fall in the water.

  But what can Georgie really know. What does anyone know about another person. Even about a child.

  She can only trust what is necessary to believe for finding Oona.

  Which is that Oona is somewhere close by and on land and has not fallen into the river and drowned.

  That is the reasonable way to think about finding Oona.

  “So what now?” Thomas asks.

  “We keep walking,” Georgie says.

  “What if there is nothing?”

  “There will be something.”

  So they walk.

  Slowly, with their eyes on the ground as the sun rises higher in the sky and the light through the trees brightens the path on which they are traveling.

  The route bends to the right, narrows, closes in on them so they must go single-file through an opening in the trees, across logs over a slow stream into a clearing.

  In the middle of the clearing, a branch, Georgie’s height, stuck in the ground at an angle and wrapped around the top with a green ribbon, an actual ribbon.

  “Grosgrain,” Georgie says aloud. “Who in the woods has grosgrain ribbon in his pocket?”

  “What do you think?” Thomas asks.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Georgie says getting down on her knees to examine the branch and the ground around it. “Somebody put it here, but I don’t know where here is.

  “Maybe we’re close to the town.”

  “Maybe,” Georgie says

  She puts her hands in her pockets and stretches her back.

  She feels too fragile.

  Through the years, she has developed ways to slow her mind, to keep fear in the dark by dwelling on the small topographical details of a landscape, especially in Africa. The clump of poison ivy, the way pine roots resurface at surprising distances, splashes of white daisylike flowers, lacing through the ground cover in the wood.

  She has been afraid, but never with the sense she has now that she could crumble as if her skeleton has gone soft and porous.

  When Charley was killed, she was ready for the news. She had gone through his dying night after night in the months before he died.

  But this is different;

  Keep moving, she thinks. Just the process of walking—one foot in front of the next, swinging her arms as if to propel her body forward. Even that promises an arrival someplace and someplace is better than no place at all.

  No place at all would be losing Oona.

  “Does it seem crazy to you walking through the woods like this as if we’re going to find her someplace along the way?”

  Thomas falls in step.

  “It’s the only thing we can do now,” Georgie says.

  “What if there isn’t a town?”

  “If not a town, there has to be a place,” she says.

  For so many summers, Georgie has lived in remote places, mainly Botswana with the Baos tribe—places where there isn’t a path to anywhere, no real roads, just a settlement sprouting in the middle of the jungle or the rain forest or by a river.

  Occasionally, not often, she has been panicked—as if dropped in a place where no one can see her. Where she has no sense of being. No existence.

  But this is home. America. Wisconsin. Civilization crowding in just beyond her view. Surely a place will materialize—a village, a town, a filling station where she will find information.

  “Oona must be terrified,” Thomas says.

  “She must be.”

  I was only four.

  Too young to understand that the present may be temporary but what happens in the present remains.

  A story is unrolling in her mind.

  Oona sleeping with Freddy, cozy in the sleeping bag waiting for Thomas to crawl in beside her, his head on the same pillow.

  And then something. A sound. A displacement of air. A body.

  Georgie imagines there is a man who has Oona in mind. He is walking the same path on which she and Thomas are now walking, watching from a distance by the raw light of the moon. His eye is on the tent with Oona sleeping alone. He has been watching and knows she is there and sleeping alone.

  The man crouches, enters in the darkness through the flap so quietly Georgie and Thomas are unaware until that one moment when they hear the bear who was not a bear.

  IN THE DISTANCE, the sound of a truck. A screech of brakes. A low sharp horn, three blasts and silence.

  Ahead the path ends.

  Thomas is walking a few feet in front of Georgie when he suddenly stops and turns.

  “Someone,” he says.

  “Someone?”

  “There.”

  Someone has stepped out of the shadowed darkness onto the path scattered now with sunlight.

  A woman by the size of her, though maybe a man.

  She is standing on the path in front of them blocking their way. Her hands at her side, her feet apart, a wool cap on the back of her head.

  Georgie catches up.

  “I can’t see,” she says, her eyes adjusting to the light just beyond where what looks to be a town has appeared.

  “Don’t worry.” It is a woman with a gravelly cigarette voice. “You don’t need to see.”

  She steps toward Georgie.

  “I know who you are. I’ve known about you all my life,” the woman says. “Do not get near me. I have a gun.”

  She is not holding the gun but her hand is at her hip, resting on the pocket of her shorts.

  Georgie folds her arms tight across her chest as if to contain her heart.

  Something familiar about this woman. Her black hair hanging like so many ribbons over her shoulders, her eyes sunken in a hard face burned by the sun. Or drink or cigarettes or life. A wasted face older than fifty perhaps. Or not.

  She could be handsome. She is tall with strong, bold features. Slender.

  The woman glances into the forest.

  “So you,” she says. “Come out. And don’t talk.”

  Nothing comes from the forest but a rustle of pine needles.

  “Now,” the woman says. “Come out now.”

  The branches part, a small arm through the brush. A child.

  Thomas grips Georgie’s shoulder, but she has already seen the child.

  Oona in her yellow bear pajamas, her black hair tangled, her eyes wide.

  Thomas makes a move, but the woman reaches into her pocket.

  “Don’t even try,” she says. “This is my child now. That’s why I have a gun.”

  “We won’t give you trouble,” Georgie says quietly.

  “Don’t talk to the child. One word and it’s a big problem for you.”

  Oona is silent looking directly at Georgie, but her eyes are flat as though she cannot see.

  The
woman reaches down and takes Oona’s hand.

  “Turn around towards the campsite now. You two, turn around. I’m behind you and if you run …” A deep laugh. “Nevermind. You won’t.”

  They walk along the path—slowly, since Georgie is in the lead sensing something could happen if Oona cannot keep up.

  She can hear the crush of pine needles behind them, the occasional soft whimper, the muffled shhh, but she and Thomas look ahead.

  “Shut up,” the woman says. “Shut up your whining.”

  Thomas’ arm brushes Georgie’s and he leans against her shoulder.

  They could die here, Georgie is thinking. If the woman does have a gun and they upset her. If she is crazy. She could be out of her mind, the way her eyes are lit with fury. Or possibly fear. Or—chaos is the word that comes to mind.

  No one is around. No one likely to be wandering on the dense pine path early in the morning. When they arrive at the campsite, if that is the plan the woman has in mind, Georgie’s children will have already left for Minnie HaHa and nothing in the geography of Missing Lake seems to promise rescue.

  GEORGIE HAS NO REAL MEMORY of what happened on the morning after her mother was murdered.

  She would have been somewhere at the campsite—only so much land to occupy in the half-moon of Missing Lake.

  She has an image of herself inside a tent with a woman, perhaps the nurse—she knows from the newspaper that the camp nurse was at Missing Lake. The nurse is reading a book to her while Georgie examines her arms that have broken out with a red itchy rash. The woman says No scratching and the words No scratching always accompany the memory.

  Even now Georgie has an occasional physical sensation on her skin as if a colony of small insects is running up and down her arms. Occasionally a rash will surface, but it comes and goes. She feels it now sizzling along the surface of her skin and pulls up the sleeve of her turtleneck to check if her arm is mottled red.

  But it is not.

  “What are you doing?” the woman asks.

  “I’m checking a rash I sometimes get.”

  “Well don’t check it again.”

  The only emotion that Georgie has ever imagined that morning of her mother’s murder is terror. But terror is simply a word. Not something she can call up from memory.

  There must have been a buzz of activity—of police and boats with emergency medical personnel and counselors gathered in small, hushed groups, filling the air with muted sounds of terror.