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  At seventy—seventy! It is difficult to believe. She wants to be seen by her children as the small, agile, resilient mother she has always been. Which is why she grabs the gunnel so she won’t fall—not apart but down, and falling down would be, for them, another kind of loss.

  Or maybe not. Not has occurred to her. It is altogether possible that they are ready for her to actually die. Ready—just that—not hoping or even thinking it is time or that enough is enough. But practically speaking—and Georgie is a surprisingly practical woman in spite of herself—her death might be for them a kind of freedom.

  Out of the back pocket of her hiking shorts she pulls the topographical map she picked up from the outfitters in Riverton.

  Her grandfather had hung maps of Michigan in the main entrance to their home in Ann Arbor, seven of them from the first recorded map of Michigan before it became a state—very valuable, he’d told her.

  She had asked him if he could draw from memory a map of Camp Minnie HaHa.

  My home, she’d said.

  Ann Arbor is your home, Georgianna, he replied.

  But he was mistaken.

  The night before at the lodge, unable to sleep, Oona beside her, Georgie had filled in the crescent at Missing Lake as she remembered it from the newspaper stories describing the discovery of her mother’s body—a stand of pines where her mother had been found, lowland craggy brush with exposed roots between the river and the pine forest where the tents were pitched. A jagged shoreline. It gave her a sense of order to draw the tents, each with a different-colored pencil—she wrote the names of the occupants in red ballpoint on the side of the map as the Chicago Tribune had listed them.

  “PULL THE CANOE up onto the bank and follow me,” Georgie calls out to Thomas.

  “Bring Oona.”

  She stands with her back to the river, rough this early evening splashing against the muddy shoreline.

  Perhaps a storm is coming, a drop in temperature, an odd calm promising change.

  In Washington, calm announced a storm but the temperature would be hotter, the air heavy. Georgie knew to be close to cover. Storms could be treacherous and quick. Especially the tree-lined streets of Washington, a shallow root system, the wide limbs, weighted with leaves, branches growing around the electrical wires.

  But she doesn’t know the weather in northern Wisconsin.

  River weather.

  She puts her hand in the pocket of her shorts and pops a caramel in her mouth.

  Too late to worry about what she has not planned. Which is nothing, simply nothing, so fixed has she been on her destination.

  The sign for Missing Lake is wooden, the letters burned intaglio and painted black, freshly painted. It could not have been the same sign that had been there in 1941, but was it in the same place, she wonders, looking to the left at the bank rising to a stand of pine trees, a small clearing, a red wheelbarrow.

  A wheelbarrow for what?

  NINE PEOPLE WERE PRESENT at the catastrophe (she prefers the word catastrophe, which seems more accidental than crime, although crime was the word used in the newspaper reports and by her grandparents). She had read the Chicago Tribune story of June 21, 1941, where the nine were listed by name and age:

  William Grove, age 37

  Josephine Grove, age 33

  Girl Child Grove, age 4

  James Willow, age 21

  Adelaide Merry, age 32

  Roderick Brown, age 30

  Alicia Brown, age 29

  Clementine McCrary, age 33

  Boy Child McCrary, age 11

  In the article, the McCrarys were identified as Negroes.

  There were two Negroes, mother and son.

  “I wonder why they called them Negroes?” Georgie had asked her grandmother at the time.

  “Because they were Negroes—that is a classification of race and we are Caucasian, which means white people,” her grandmother had said. “It was unusual for Negroes to be going to a camp in northern Wisconsin where there were Indians but not black-skinned people.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not good or bad,” her grandmother said. “Just a fact.”

  “And did you know those Negroes?”

  “I saw them when I came to pick you up at Missing Lake after the crime. But I didn’t know them or anything about them.”

  GEORGIE WALKS UP the steep hill to a circle of high pine trees just above the sign for Missing Lake. In the distance, Rosie’s canoe appears to be trapped among tree roots extending from the far shore line across the river

  Nicolas calls out instructions: “For chrissake, Rosie, get out of the canoe so you can help Jesse free it up,” he shouts.

  Georgie wishes Nicolas were not so short-tempered and critical, as if growing up in a family of women had entitled him to take charge.

  “It’s too rough,” Rosie calls.

  “You’ll be fine,” Nicolas says. “Just do it.”

  “I can’t!”

  The canoe tips perilously close to capsizing as Rosie slips over the side and sinks into the water, her hands gripping the top of the boat. With Jesse on the other side, she swims the rocking boat away from the bank and into current that has picked up speed.

  “Kick!” Nicolas shouts and, shaking his fist at his mother, calls at the top of his voice, “God, Georgie, what a crazy idea this trip is.”

  Thomas is standing by the water, holding the rope attached to the bow of his canoe, his eyes fixed on the top of his mother’s bobbing head.

  “Are you guys okay?” Nicolas calls.

  “They can’t hear you,” Thomas says, watching his mother, her face in the water. Underwater and up and then it seems as if they are swimming out of the current—her hand in the air, her thumb up.

  “Jesus, Rosie!” Nicolas says as she climbs out of the canoe. “You are impossibly stubborn.”

  GEORGIE IS WALKING toward the spot she has marked on her map, careful not to trip, rocky on the shoreline, a rise from the river, the land flat for a short distance, a pine needle bed, the soil sandy—and then an incline, heavy with tree roots and the sign MISSING LAKE.

  If her mother had been discovered just to the left of the sign— as indicated in the newspaper reports—lying in the root bed of pine trees at the high level of the hill, then Georgie is very close to where it happened.

  She’s athletic, walking every day or at the gym, swing dancing at Glen Echo Park on Saturday nights. Young for seventy— everyone says so. Not that her face is unwrinkled, because it is wrinkled. But because of her body, which is slender and quick. She never stops moving.

  “She doesn’t take pills,” Venus has said with admiration since Venus would happily take any pills offered, never mind the number, so she notices that kind of thing.

  THOMAS PULLS THE CANOE out of the water and picks Oona up in his arms, her legs wrapped tight around his waist. Ahead, Georgie has stopped, her hands in her pockets, her head down as if something on the ground has captured her attention.

  “What’s Georgie doing?” Oona asks.

  “Maybe she is praying.”

  “Praying?”

  “Praying for all of us to be fine and have fun and good times.

  “Is something bad going to happen now?”

  “It’s dinnertime,” Thomas says. “We’ll eat dinner.”

  “What will we eat?”

  “Hamburgers and beans.”

  “But I don’t like hamburgers and beans.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “Mama is a vegetarian.”

  “But she isn’t here, so you can eat hamburgers and beans.”

  “Are we going to sleep in the canoe?”

  “We’re going to sleep in a tent in sleeping bags, and we’ll build a fire to cook the hamburgers and beans and to keep us warm.”

  “Good,” Oona says. “I’ll sleep in the sleeping bag with you.”

  Georgie hasn’t moved.

  It occurs to Thomas that she might be crying, because she should be
crying. They have come to the place where her mother was strangled and he is holding Oona who is four, so Georgie must feel she is still four, as if no time at all has passed since her mother died and four is as old as she will ever get to be.

  At least, Thomas thinks, that is how he would feel if he were Georgie.

  “Do you think we’re here?” Thomas asks, aching to pee.

  “I do,” Georgie replies.

  “Then where are we?” Thomas asks.

  “Exactly here,” Georgie says, halfway up the incline, leaning forward not to fall.

  She would like to believe that she is at the precise place, the small circle of earth where her mother had been sitting when the killer walked up the incline. Maybe it was early morning, not yet light—maybe the middle of the night and her mother had come here away from the tents not to wake anyone, unable to sleep. The night had a full moon, so it may as well have been day—and the killer came, not from nowhere, not some stranger out of the forest, but one among the nine.

  Likely her mother was expecting nothing from the killer—a conversation, even a gesture of affection. Nothing that would have concerned her or caused her to call out.

  And then quickly, in a flash of movement, maybe with a struggle, maybe not—her mother had been fragile, unwell since a stillborn boy the year after Georgie was born. Not emotionally well either for reasons Georgie had never been able to piece together.

  There was a rope and the someone wound it quickly around her mother’s neck and tightened it and held it at that tension until she could no longer breathe.

  Georgie had read the article about her father’s confession from the front page of the Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1941. Her grandmother gave it to her four years after her father’s death in prison from pneumonia.

  “Overcome by an uncontrollable rage,” he was reported as saying.

  “At your wife?” he was asked.

  “At myself,” he said.

  “And why was that?” he was asked.

  But he had nothing to add to his testimony except his deep and agonizing sorrow.

  “Do you believe this is true?” Georgie had asked her grandmother.

  “What part?”

  “That he killed her? Is that part true.”

  “I don’t know,” her grandmother replied, stroking the back haunches of the tabby cat sitting in her lap.

  “What else did my father say?”

  “That’s all he ever said. Nothing more to the lawyers or to the police. He confessed and they accepted his confession.”

  “I don’t believe he killed her,” Georgie had said.

  “That is your choice, my lamb,” her grandmother said. “The only necessary belief you must hold in your heart is a belief in God.”

  “I do,” Georgie said, although she didn’t know what she believed except to wonder why if God had been taking care of His children, had He not taken better care of Georgianna Grove.

  “I wanted you to read the newspaper article for yourself,” her grandmother said. “And now you have.”

  “Front page of the Chicago Tribune because the camp was well known in Chicago,” her grandfather said, a measured man not much given to conversation. “Boys went there from Chicago …” He paused. “What happened didn’t do the reputation of the camp much good.”

  RIGHT BEFORE ROOSEVELT’S LETTER arrived at the Home for the Incurables but before the end of the first semester of classes, a kind of strangeness overtook Georgie’s mind. Not all the time but occasionally like a wave of nausea. The first time it happened she was on her way to the university, thinking about the lecture she was giving that afternoon when turbulence erupted—that’s how it felt—an eruption—moments out of her life swimming through her brain. A friend from grammar school with ringlets, a small scene at a dress store with her grandmother, who insisted Georgie must wear plaid to church, a green velvet chair from her bedroom in Ann Arbor, her grandmother in an open casket at the Walker Funeral Home, turned not faceup but on her stomach and covered with a quilt.

  At 21st and G, she pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out, leaving the engine running, and walked up and down the sidewalk until the movie reel ceased its hysteria through her brain and disappeared.

  And then on the night of her seventieth birthday, after she had announced to her family’s unhappiness the gift of a canoe trip up the Bone River to meet Roosevelt McCrary, it happened again.

  She was in bed in the large four-poster that had belonged to her parents—she never should have kept it—lying on her back, warm with desire, as often happened to her, at ease with a sense of well-being, falling into a soft sleep, and Charley—she had called him Charles then—was standing in the hall of her grandparents’ house in Ann Arbor, his head against the green grapevine wallpaper, reaching his hands down the back of her skirt, pulling her into his body, his tongue hot and silky in her mouth.

  Then he was gone. Gone and she couldn’t catch hold of the memory of him, only the sadness of unfulfilled desire.

  All of the men in her life had left it.

  SHE GOT OUT of bed, turned on the side light, opened the door to her bedroom and started down the stairs when Rosie stepped out of the bathroom.

  “Georgie. It’s after midnight,” Rosie had said. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay,” she said, always fine for her children. “I’m just going downstairs to make a cup of tea.”

  “But Mama—” Rosie said with genuine concern. “What happened to your nightgown?”

  Georgie stood at the top of the stairs and looked down. She must have been in a light sleep instead of a waking erotic dream and taken off her nightgown.

  She smiled at Rosie. “It’s after one, darling,” she said to her daughter. “You should go to bed.” She took hold of the bannister. “Goodnight, my sweet.”

  And she continued down the stairs to the kitchen as if it had been her plan all along to walk naked through the house to get a cup of tea.

  GEORGIE HAD NEVER seen a therapist when she was a child. Therapy would not have occurred to her midwestern grandparents, hardworking Protestants who were clear about mental health. There was no such thing as “mental illness.” A person was crazy or not. Nothing ambiguous about the mind.

  Stiff upper lip, her grandfather would say. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Look on the bright side.

  “You’re a lucky girl to have the temperament you have,” her grandmother had told her. “A sunny disposition just like me.”

  Sometimes Georgie would lie in her small single bed under the eaves on the third floor, close to the stars, covered with the quilt her grandmother had made from her mother’s old dresses thinking how amazing it was that even though her mother was murdered and her father had maybe killed her (but probably not) and was in any case dead—here was Georgie—eleven, twelve, thirteen … a perfectly ordinary girl and even popular and well liked and quite pretty. All the things regarded as necessary for happiness.

  And was she happy?

  Of course she was.

  The story she told herself about her mother’s death was the story her grandparents had suggested she tell. It was the story they told to their friends and neighbors, as if Georgie’s father’s confession were unknown to the people in Ann Arbor.

  Her mother was murdered on a canoe trip where the family was headed to open the boy’s camp and her father had died of pneumonia.

  “You have to have a better story,” Charley told her after he knew what had happened. “Or else tell the truth.”

  “I don’t know the truth.”

  “You can say that. You can tell people you don’t know the truth.”

  Nicolas and Jesse are building a fire, close to the water, the only land flat enough for safety although Rosie suggests the hill where there is softer seating.

  “You should’ve been a girl scout, Rosie,” Nicolas says. “You’d have been terrific.”

  Rosie has changed clothes from her swim and sits near the fire wrapped i
n a towel, another towel around her wet hair. She is small like her mother, with delicate hands and feet, small-featured too, a childlike way about her; although since Richard’s death, she has aged, her eyes have a kind of film over the pupils, the brightness of blue gone, the rose color of her skin for which she was named, faded. Her family notices these things, but she does not seem to. She doesn’t talk about the loss of Richard, doesn’t mention sadness. She has always been distracted by nature, off in another place, and so she is distracted now.

  They pitch the tents on higher land away from the water but too close to the trees to build a fire there. Three tents, one large, sleeping bags.

  Thomas with Oona. The women together in the large tent. Jesse with Nicolas.

  “You and me, Oona,” Thomas says. “Bliss.”

  “What is bliss?” Oona asks.

  “It’s happiness and that’s what we’re going to have on this trip.”

  “Then why is Jesse so bad tempered?”

  “Not his kind of trip,” Thomas says. “Jesse likes life as usual.”

  They are sitting on the hill watching the hamburgers over the fire, Nicolas cooking, Venus laying out the plastic forks and paper plates and napkins, baked beans and fruit, lemonade and cookies. She opens a bottle of wine, pours lemonade for herself and the children.

  Through the trees they watch the sun sinking in the west—rolling patterns of leaves in shadows tumble across the bank, dim patches of light on the river, the waves breaking in crescents across the surface.

  Downstream, the wind sounds a low roar.

  “Do you think we’re going to have a storm?” Georgie asks Nicolas.

  “A storm is predicted,” he says “I told you that. Hot during the day and then all hell breaks loose.”

  “What does that mean?” Venus asks.

  “A bad storm,” Georgie says. “Are you sure?”

  “Who knows what a bad storm is here. Some kind of storm,” Nicolas says. “I for one don’t like Wisconsin, so I’d rather not end my life here.”

  “We should secure the tents,” Venus says, her legs apart, her hands on her hips, the tone of her voice thoughtful. “Move them closer to the trees in a sheltered spot?”