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  Georgie dimmed the light on the side table and opened the map of the Bone River charted from the canoe launch to Camp Minnie HaHa. The river curled in an S, and Missing Lake was more than halfway to the camp on the top left curve of the S, a crescent of land, not large but deep, surrounded by a pine forest noted by tiny inverted V’s with a single line for the trunks.

  According to the description of the murder scene in the Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1941, there had been four canoes pulled over the bank and out of the water. And four tents. James Willow had been in a single tent furthest from the water. Roosevelt, with his mother, had been in a tent closest to the water; the camp nurse married to the swimming counselor had been in a tent with Georgie. Her father and mother had been in a double tent parallel to James and closest to the spot where Josephine Grove’s body was discovered.

  GEORGIE LOVED MAPS. She loved the sense they gave of permanence, as if what appeared on the map had existed through centuries of life on earth, of weather and shifts in the earth’s tectonic plates, of vegetation living and dying, of animal sacrifice and human traffic. As a child, she used to play dig your way to China, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Shanghai.

  As an anthropologist, she liked to believe that occurrences that had taken place on a single spot of earth remained more or less in the same topography, so the earth contained its own mysterious layered history. It was up to the present to peel away the layers into the past.

  If she were present at the actual place, it was at least possible that some kind of revelation might occur in real time—memory of what had happened, as if memory, like matter, is mutable but indestructible.

  “Magical thinking,” Nicolas had said when Georgie explained what she hoped would happen when she arrived at the place where her mother had died.

  Oona curled into her body, her arm flopped over Georgie’s belly, and in the dim light from the lamp, Georgie looked at her sweet and open face, her lips turned up as if she were dreaming in smiles.

  Four years old, Georgie thought, an undercurrent of emotion sweeping through her blood.

  This child is four years old.

  Just this last summer in Botswana, there was a problem with a monkey. The monkey, a very small monkey, had taken off against Lale’s new baby boy, swaddled in cloth, next to his mother’s feet. It happened every morning, and Georgie, in the next hut, heard the chattering before dawn and woke to see the monkey heckling the baby. She’d jump branch to branch on a jacaranda tree in full bloom, dropping to the ground next to the child, screaming at him in her high squabbly monkey voice, chasing back and forth, back and forth, across his line of vision. But the baby was too young to see, and the mother of the baby shouted at the monkey and threw sticks and stones, and finally Georgie took the baby into her own hut and set him high on a table.

  The monkey went crazy. Charged the hut and, armed with speed and fury, flew across the entrance while Georgie stood guard. A vervet monkey with a tufted gray head, gray body and a black face, a social mammal, often used to study the behavior patterns of humans and known among scientists for her alarm calls in situations of perceived danger.

  This monkey was out of control.

  Georgie wondered about rabies—infrequent in Botswana except with dogs, very occasionally monkeys—but rabid is how the monkey was behaving.

  She motioned to Lale, not wishing to leave her post at the entrance to the hut, and the mother looked over, her eyes blank. She made no effort to get up.

  “Rabies?” Georgie asked.

  The mother shook her head.

  “Death,” she said. “Monkey smell death.”

  Georgie turned away into the darkness of the hut, leaning over the baby who lay still and swaddled on the table. His tiny face was in repose, his eyes closed. Of course they would be closed— sinking is how he looked, folding into himself, no evidence of life in his face, but he was breathing. Irregular breathing? She checked. Slow breathing with barely perceptible hesitations, as if the effort to breathe was not worth the trouble.

  And then he died, just stopped breathing without a shudder as Georgie was watching him.

  There and gone.

  HER CHILDREN HAD come upstairs from the bar. She heard them chatting in the corridor, doors opening and closing, Venus and Rosie in the room together, Nicolas with the boys.

  Outside her bedroom door, Nicolas was on the cell phone with Olivia.

  “Nothing is going to happen, Olivia,” he said in a rising stage whisper. “Count on it. Two days and then we’ll be home. Safe and sound.”

  “Hush,” Venus called out loud from the room next door to Georgie’s. “There are people trying to sleep.”

  “Oona will be fucking fine, Olivia,” Nicolas was saying. “She’s sleeping with Georgie. I’m here. Rosie. Venus for what that’s worth. Please, Olivia. Get a grip.”

  Oona was on her back now, her fingers wrapped around the Hudson Bay wool blanket under her chin. She took hold of Georgie’s wrist.

  “Georgie?” she whispered. “What does fucking fine mean?”

  “It means you will be fine Oona, Just fine. Nothing at all to worry about.”

  OF COURSE NICOLAS was on edge. All of her children were, but especially Nicolas, who was always on edge, and now since he had joined the Obama press team, there were expectations unlike any he had as a lawyer at the Washington Post.

  Tonight was the beginning of a trip her children had not chosen to take. They agreed to come only for Georgie, who believed in her instincts in spite of her children’s reservations, in spite of her own uneasiness.

  Tomorrow they would travel upriver, paddling to Missing Lake on an adventure that could change their lives.

  Ever the optimist, Georgie, Nicolas had said to her.

  She had almost fallen asleep—Oona breathing softly beside her—when Nicolas came up the wooden steps, walked past her room and knocked on the door to Rosie and Venus’ room.

  “Good news, comrades,” he called. “The bartender says a storm is coming tomorrow. Hot in the morning and then all hell breaks loose.”

  From the memoir of Thomas Davies

  (for publication)

  We are a small family traveling the Bone River in northern Wisconsin on our way to a place we have never been, called Home—traveling by canoe. I am in the lead canoe paddling stern, and in the bow is Georgie who planned this trip and gave it to us with the requirement that we come. No one, not my Uncle Nicolas or my Aunt Venus—her favorite choice for a name change—or my dreamy mother or either of the cousins, wanted to come except for me, but they didn’t have the heart to tell Georgie.

  I wanted to come on this trip enough for all of us.

  On the floor of our canoe in her little red life jacket spreading banana on my bare leg is Oona, my uncle Nicolas’ daughter, and although she is only four, she is the person in the world I love completely and it worries me to think I love her enough to lose her.

  If that were to happen, I would die.

  I think of death (and I think about death all the time) as flat without any curves or indentations. A long perfectly straight line, which I imagine when I’m sitting in Mr. Johnson’s English class and he’s telling us about roses blooming in his mouth when he thinks about poetry and I hope he won’t think about poetry until after the bell rings.

  WE ARE PADDLING in three canoes and arriving exactly now, still daylight at Missing Lake, Wisconsin, the place where we will spend the night before we reach our destination.

  Now Georgie is raising her paddle in the air pointing to a cove shaped like a saucer with high pines surrounding a crescent of sandless beach. She motions for me to turn us toward shore.

  Here we are!

  Here is where my great-grandfather William killed his wife on the 17th of June, 1941. Or confessed to killing her as Georgie says. She believes that by taking this trip, re-enacting, she calls it, we will discover “evidence to the contrary” that her father, in spite of his confession, did not kill his wife. Georgie is an anthropologist wh
o spends her life researching in order to discover what has been lost so that it can be found. That is how my mother describes her work.

  Which is why I am keeping a journal so that thousands of years from now another anthropologist, someone like Georgie, will uncover the journal from layers and layers of earth where it has been buried. And read it and know that we, seven of us, were here on this Bone River in the town of Missing Lake on the planet earth.

  Georgie likes what she calls Planned Coincidence.

  “The stars must be in alignment, but you can miss them if you don’t pay attention,” she says.

  And taking the stars into account, she makes a plan.

  “What a coincidence that Oona should be exactly the same age as I was when my mother was killed,” she told us all at Christmas. “That Thomas will be thirteen, which is close to the same age as Roosevelt McCrary in 1941 and so we will plan to travel on the same days that my parents were traveling sixty- seven years ago up the same Bone River to the same destination.”

  “And then what?” Uncle Nicolas asked at Christmas dinner.

  “Then, by following these signs, these telling signs, we may have a chance to discover what really happened at Missing Lake, Wisconsin, on June 17, 1941.”

  That is how Georgie speaks. Not all the time, but occasionally with emphasis, as if she holds some kind of key to the unknown and if we stick with her, we’ll discover it too.

  The unknown, that is.

  “Why now, Georgie?” Uncle Nicolas asked. “You’ve had more than sixty years since your father died to find out what happened.”

  “Because, now is when I want to know.”

  IN THE SECOND CANOE, my mother Rosie is paddling stern in that sleepy way she has of doing everything. So the canoe keeps heading for the bank on the opposite side of the river because she lets the paddle laze in one direction.

  I can hear my cousin Jesse over the whistle of wind. “Rosie,” he shouts. “Pay fucking attention.”

  Jesse is too old to say fuck in every sentence, but that is what he does. And I want to kill him when he yells at her.

  Our whole family is on this trip except the cats and our dog, Kubla, a retriever, who was given to me last Christmas as a substitute for my father, who died two years ago in August. Kubla Khan. Uncle Nicolas’ choice of a name.

  When we got Kubla, I begged my mother to name him for my father and I wish she had been willing. My father loved dogs, and if a dog had his name, which was Richard Davies, he would still be alive.

  “Richard,” I would call going to the back door. “Come here, Richard Davies. Dinner is ready.”

  And he would come wagging his tail, and I would give him dinner and sit down on the floor of the kitchen with him while he ate.

  Richard Davies captured in the brave heart of our dog.

  But my mother said No, under no circumstances. It’s disrespectful, Thomas, and nothing, not even your father’s name shouted from the mountaintops, can make a difference now. And certainly not his name on a dog.

  I LOVE MY MOTHER very much, but it is difficult to get her attention—as if when she looks at me, she sees not me—and I know she loves me—but a painting she is imagining on the inside of her eyelids. For that is what she does. Paint, and she is known for it and her work is in museums even though she’s only forty-three. And pretty. She is very pretty and kind of fairylike, floating through a room.

  But there are no people in her art work, only rooms, bedrooms with the sheets tossed half off the bed as if someone has just left and is brushing his teeth in a bathroom next door, a dining room, food on the table, a wineglass turned over, chairs pulled back, napkins on the floor, a living room with a book facedown on the couch, a chair leaning against the wall, a painting crooked, something disturbing as if a fight happened in that room and the people who had been fighting left.

  Uncle Nicolas is in the last canoe and paddling alone since Aunt Venus is sleeping in the bottom of the canoe because that is what she does on family trips. Sleep.

  We’ll only be gone two days because Nicolas is on the traveling press corps for Barack Obama’s campaign to be president of the United States and has to work 24/7 as he says. We are all very excited about Barack Obama and what his election will mean and what he believes in and what he will do for the country. And I am also excited but mainly to be invited to the White House to have dinner with Sasha and Malia and Michelle and even the president if he gets to be president.

  “I’m sure we can arrange something, Thomas,” Uncle Nicolas says.

  So having dinner with Barack Obama is a little like this trip. Maybe I will find out that Georgie’s father did murder her mother. Or maybe that he didn’t. Either way, I will have a story to tell when I go back to school in the fall.

  MY FATHER TOLD ME not long before he died that I should take care of my eyes. He was sitting in a chair in the hospital in Chicago next to a window overlooking the beautiful city, and by then he was a little fuzzy, his words spoken as if through the thickness of vanilla pudding, but “Thomas,” he said. “Take care of your eyes because you can see things that other people don’t. Most people are very poor at looking. Your mother, for example, is a painter, but what she sees is in her imagination. What Georgie sees is in her past. And what you see is here.”

  What I have discovered already by looking at people is that nothing is normal. Most people are stranger than they seem to be and you never know what to expect of them, even of yourself.

  I should let you know, although you probably can already tell, that I’m not a regular thirteen-year-old kid absorbed like water into the center of the group. For starters—ever since my father died, I have had a speech problem that Georgie says is nerves and the doctor says is a speech problem. I begin a perfectly normal sentence and five words out, maybe six or seven, I can’t speak. I see the sentence on the screen of my brain rolling out word after word just as I planned it, but nothing. Silence.

  So now I’m in acting classes playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night in the summer children’s theater when I get back home.

  “If you memorize someone else’s words instead of making up your own, maybe you’ll be able to speak sentence to sentence …”

  At least that was my mother’s idea in sending me to acting classes.

  Which I love. Which are the best part of my life. Nothing could be better than being someone who I am not.

  WHEN I WAS little, maybe three or four, I fell in love with dinosaurs. I could spend day after day lying on my stomach in the living room of our apartment in Chicago reading dinosaur books or playing with the dinosaurs my father had bought me at the Natural History Museum. Or dreaming about them.

  Until I understood extinction. And then for weeks and months I would lie in my bed, the covers drawn up to my eyes, alert to changes in the atmosphere around us which might announce the arrival of extinction.

  I was heartbroken for the dinosaurs, apologizing to each one—the diplodocus, the triceratops, the stegosaurus—as if I were in some way responsible. But that gave way to a terrifying fear for my family and me.

  If those huge and powerful beasts roaming the same earth on which we live could disappear, what did that mean for me and my mother and my father and the rest of us, and I told my parents one night at bedtime that I thought it a good idea not to have any more children.

  “If you never become alive,” I explained to them, “there is nothing of you to disappear.”

  I was ten when my father died of brain cancer on the morning of August 20, 2006, just before school started. I knew he was going to die. Everyone had told me—my mother and Uncle Nicolas and Venus and even Georgie, who does not believe that children should be left without hope. Georgie explained that they told me the truth about my father so I would be prepared for his death when it happened.

  But I was not.

  MISSING LAKE

  June 17, 2008

  Georgianna

  In the bow, paddling lead of the three canoes, Georgie is losing the r
hythm—dip swing, dip swing, dip swing—she reminds herself, her mind caught up in what is to come.

  “Georgie!” Thomas shouts from the stern. “Paddle. You keep forgetting.”

  “Got it,” she calls back, lifting her thumb in the air.

  Ahead, the river is black and calm, the sun above the tree line but falling in the West—no longer hot as it has been all day. High clouds roll across the northern horizon, but there is no rumble of weather in the air, no atmospheric change announcing trouble. They are close to Missing Lake, where they will spend the night, and the storm has not arrived.

  Will not arrive, Georgie is thinking,

  Ahead there’s a bend in the river, the bank curving into the S shape of a cove, and she sees the crescent of Missing Lake as they paddle around the circle of land, a large sign in the distance although she cannot read the letters.

  “Here we are!” she calls out to Thomas, lifting her paddle, pointing in the direction of land.

  In shallow water, muddy under foot, Georgie throws her leg over the side of the canoe and climbs out, both hands on the gunnel to steady herself, conscious that her family is watching for any sign that she will—as Rosie had put it just that morning— fall apart.

  She is small, with long brown hair—a dusting of white— piled loosely on her head and secured with combs that will regularly fall out to make a comb path to the water by the time they leave Missing Lake.

  “Don’t scatter, Georgie,” Rosie said earlier as they put in their canoes from the outfitters’ launch. “You know, don’t fall apart.”

  Scattering is what happens when she takes on more than she can do—her wallet lost, her keys tossed accidentally in the trash, her sweater on inside out, a marked-up student dissertation left at the coffee shop. Not often but lately.

  “Of course I won’t fall apart, babes,” she said, surprised that Rosie of all her preoccupied children, trapped in their own emotional worlds of profit and loss, would notice her mother’s distraction.