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Nicolas looks over at the high pines whining in the wind, their trunks supple. Hard to guess if a strong wind could take them down. He is anxious and lights a cigarette.

  “I’d bet on a clearing,” he says. “That one over there, without such high trees.”

  He reaches into the pocket of his shorts and takes out his vibrating cell.

  “You know this trip is crazy, Georgie, traveling up the river like we know what we’re doing.”

  He steps away from the fire and checks the phone.

  “I’ve got a call,” he calls out.

  “Yes? Are you there?” he says. “Can you hear me?”

  “Shit!” He hits at the air with his fist. “No go! I thought fucking Verizon worked everywhere. You told me I’d have reception with Verizon here.”

  “I said I thought you would.”

  “And that Mr. Blake guy told you there would be no reception,” Venus says.

  “There’s probably an emergency at the Obama headquarters, and how will I know what’s going on for the next twenty-four hours.” He flips the hamburgers. “I assume there’s a land line at the camp so if there’s a disaster, I can find out when we get there.”

  “There are a trillion other people on Obama’s campaign besides you, Nicolas,” Venus says. “How could there be a disaster?”

  “Anything’s possible. Iraq, something racial—we worry about that stuff. The Republicans are back on the ‘Is Obama an American?’ story.”

  He picks up a cup of wine and drinks it down.

  “Dad,” Jesse says. “Cool it. We’re in the wilderness. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “You’ll be whistling another tune, Jesse, if the emergency happens to be here at the glorious campsite of Missing Lake.”

  They gather around the fire, wrapping blankets around their shoulders, over their heads. Their faces peer out at the darkness like turtles. Oona falls asleep on Georgie’s knees and Thomas on his stomach on a blanket, his feet resting in Rosie’s lap, his chin in his fists.

  “Should we sing?” Venus asks.

  “God no, please Venus. No singing,” Nicolas says.

  “But here we are at the place where Georgie’s mother was murdered,” Thomas is saying. “This is a big deal so we need to talk.”

  “In the big deal category, this registers about a two,” Jesse says.

  “It’s a big deal for Georgie,” Thomas says. “If someone you love dies, he dies again and again for the rest of your life. That is what I think.”

  The wind picks up in gusty intervals—the sky seems less ominous, the fire bright enough for them to see each other as shapes in the darkness. A comfortable silence falls over the night.

  “What do you really want to discover on this trip, Georgie?” Nicolas asks.

  “More than I know now,” Georgie says. “I grew up as if my parents had never been. No one I have met seems to remember them as anything more than crime fiction.”

  “But Roosevelt?” Nicolas asked. “I mean this guy is almost eighty, maybe even with a little dementia.”

  “She wants to find out whether her father killed her mother,” Thomas says. “Pretty simple.”

  “You’re excited to find that out too, Thomas,” Nicolas says.

  “I am.”

  “After all this time, Georgie, what difference will it really make?” Nicolas asks.

  “It makes a difference to me,” Thomas says.

  Venus wraps her sleeping bag around her shoulders.

  “Georgie’s looking for the originals,” she says.

  “I thought we were the originals,” Nicolas replies, crouching next to the fire.

  “Home is what she calls Camp Minnie HaHa,” Venus says. “Always since we were young, she has told us that.”

  “Is that true, Georgie?” Rosie loops her arm over Thomas’ shoulders. “You were only four years old.”

  “It’s where she went the first year she was born,” Thomas says.

  “December 17, 1937. Scorpio, rising Taurus, etcetera, etcetera.”

  “Please, Venus!” Nicolas says. “Spare the stars.”

  He gets up, opens a can of beer and checks his cell phone.

  “News from the front line?” Venus asks.

  “What is the front line?” Thomas asks.

  “We are,” Venus says.

  Nicolas slips into the circle next to his mother, the fire warm on their cheeks.

  “Georgie.” His voice drops assuming a quiet detachment. “Since we’re all here and soon we’ll be there at the camp and it’s not likely we’re going to turn back at this point, I want to ask you …”

  “We want to know about Roosevelt,” Rosie says quickly

  “What about Roosevelt?” Georgie can hear the rising tension in her own voice.

  “We think you are falling in love with him.”

  “With someone I don’t remember and haven’t seen? Who has written me once and talked to me twice since we made the decision to visit him.”

  She sits on her haunches, her hands in her lap.

  “Since I made the decision,” she corrects herself. “And all of you agreed to come.”

  “We know you, Georgie,” Venus says. “We’re all grown-ups now and we can see what is happening to you.”

  “Already you’re imagining a life with Roosevelt,” Rosie says.

  “Not at all,” Georgie says, getting up to head down the hill to her tent, but Nicolas stops her, his hand gentle on her shoulder.

  Nights since Roosevelt’s letter arrived, she has put herself to sleep with scenes of him rushing across her mind—in Washington, in her large kitchen seated at the table, his feet crossed at the ankles on a chair, following her upstairs to her bedroom—in Wisconsin, in a canoe on the Bone River—playing frame to frame across her half-sleep.

  What her children don’t know, what she will not tell them— are the postcards Roosevelt has written to her, weekly postcards slipped into a square brown envelope, no return address. Twenty-five of them in a pocket of her backpack, concealed in a black mesh zipper bag filed by date beginning the day after Christmas 2007. Every week, usually on Thursdays, a day she does not teach, a postcard has arrived, written in his sprawling hand with a photograph on the front of Camp Minnie HaHa. Always the same photograph, taken at night from the water, probably in the fall, the lights in the lodge illuminating the trees.

  “THERE WERE NINE people on the first trip, right?” Nicolas speaks quietly.

  Georgie nods.

  “And it’s very unlikely that anyone—a killer type, even now, would be camped out in the woods of Missing Lake, Wisconsin, waiting to kill strangers.”

  “What about the red wheelbarrow?” Thomas asks.

  “What about the wheelbarrow?” Nicolas replies.

  “Well somebody who has left this wheelbarrow could be around lurking in the woods.”

  “That wheelbarrow was probably left to decorate the campsite a month ago,” Venus says.

  “Decorate?” Thomas asks.

  “To make the place feel homey, you know—for the likes of us arriving in our canoes to spend the night.”

  Venus lights a match, holds it between her fingers watching it burn down to her skin and blows it out.

  “Nothing like a red wheelbarrow to create a feeling of home.”

  “Go on, Nicolas,” Rosie says. “What were you going to say?”

  Nicolas moves closer to Georgie, leans against her shoulder.

  “Let’s be sensible,” he begins. “Why have you always refused to believe that it was your father in spite of the fact that he confessed?”

  “Because … and I have explained this to you.” Georgie rearranges her legs, her back against a slender tree trunk. She should not feel the need to have these discussions with her children. Her grown children. But she does. She always has.

  “Because all the questions that could have been asked, the ones that might have revealed what had really gone on at Missing Lake, were not asked. My father preempted the questions.”
<
br />   “We know that,” Rosie said.

  “I have a letter he wrote to me just before he died in which he takes exception to his confession.”

  “Which letter?” Nicolas asks. “I only know about one letter that he wrote from prison.”

  “That’s the only one I have,” Georgie says. “There will be more news tomorrow is what he says.”

  “He was very ill when he wrote that letter,” Nicolas says. “Likely delirious from fever.”

  “Those were his words. It was as if he were telling me he had not killed her and someday I would discover the person who had,” Georgie says. “I believe what I believe.”

  “But the question is why if he didn’t do it did he say he did?” Nicolas asks. “Unless he was protecting the person who did kill her, right?”

  Georgie shrugs.

  “We’ll find that out when we meet Roosevelt,” she says.

  “So let’s assume it wasn’t your father,” Nicolas says. “Have you wondered at all why Roosevelt wrote to you now? Out of the blue when he’s never seen or contacted you before?”

  “It was my birthday. He’s old. I’m getting old. Lots of reasons.”

  “What about your sixtieth birthday?”

  “Nicolas!”

  “I think we have to be prepared, Georgie. I think we have to consider that Roosevelt might have been the one to kill your mother or that he knows who killed her or even knows it was after all your father. And he wants you to know that now. Or maybe he wants to tell you something else. But surely he wants to say something to you.”

  “Like what?” Georgie asks, tense now, her chin resting uneasily on her bent knees.

  “I think we should be alert, that’s all,” Nicolas says. “You have to admit this is a very strange trip.”

  “I would like to understand who my father was, and Roosevelt is the only opportunity I’ve ever had to do that.”

  LATER, JUST INSIDE her tent, Georgie sits on top of her sleeping bag and opens her backpack in which she has hidden Roosevelt’s postcards. Most nights she reads them before she goes to sleep as she has done, over and over, the same postcards, since December.

  December 23, 2007

  Dear G: Full moon tonight and the skunks are out meandering across the porch of the lodge doing their skunky thing. Sincerely, R

  January 1, 2008

  Dear G—Heading to the town of Missing Lake if I can get the truck through last night’s snow. Sincerely. Happy New Year, R

  January 10, 2008

  Dear G, I figure if I write you every week like this, you’ll get to know me better. Then we won’t be strangers when we meet. Sincerely, R

  By the end of March, there was a change of tone—the postcards stained with the dirty thumb print on the edges as if he read them over and over before they were mailed.

  It pleased Georgie to imagine him considering and reconsidering what he has written to her.

  March 29, 2008 (three postcards in one day, clipped together)

  Dear Georgianna, When we returned to Washington after your mother had been killed and your father taken away, my mother got me a puppy—although she did not like dogs, Not the smell of them nor their unpredictable habits, but she got one for me, a pound dog named Mercy so I would forget about what happened at Missing Lake, Especially watching your father go off to jail. Ever since then I’ve had a dog who sleeps with me at the bottom of the bed, goes where I go, eats what I eat. Now Mercy. Age 14. Love, R.

  Love. Georgie read that postcard again and again: Love, R.

  April 18, 2008

  Dear Georgianna, Change in the sky tonight, young spring sky coming on the horizon—and I’m lying in the cold on my back in a hammock watching the map of the heavens and thinking of you under the same sky but a southern one, a different horizon—and not in a hammock. Love, R

  She replaces them, closes her backpack and waits.

  For what is she waiting? she asks herself. For something to happen? Something seems possible, or is that sense of anticipation just her own uneasiness?

  Should she stay up all night waiting for sunrise?

  Beside her, Rosie is sound asleep. Amazing that Rosie can sleep with such abandon on the hard ground in this unfamiliar landscape as if the accumulation of sorrows in her life has its own drawer which she keeps closed.

  Peering out of the open flap of the tent into the darkness, Georgie listens to the whistle of wind, gathering force as it moves across the water, a strong gust through the tent. And then in the distance, thunder. Thunder?

  Or something else.

  The long, low growl of a large animal in the forest nearby.

  “Bears?” she wonders. “Would bears be foraging at night in Missing Lake?”

  THE BONE RIVER

  June 17, 1941

  William

  The weather had been stormy ever since they launched on the Bone River. Heavy rains pelting the canoes like so many stones, William soaked to the bone even with a slicker. Things were going poorly. Likely they couldn’t have a fire that night when they camped at Missing Lake. Too much wetness on the ground, the twigs and branches soaked with the weight of water. Beans out of a can for dinner. Spam. A glass of whiskey would be good, he thought.

  William was paddling stern in the lead canoe. He always paddled stern, but luckily Roosevelt was in the bow with his powerful arms. Even at eleven and a city boy. A workhorse, Roosevelt, and he was the heft in the boat making William’s job of keeping them on course a lot easier than it would have been without him.

  In the middle, Josephine was sitting with Georgianna between her legs—only Georgianna got to go between his wife’s legs any longer.

  She had gotten fat since the lost baby.

  WHEN WILLIAM FIRST SAW Josie on the steps of the library at the University of Michigan, where they met, he was in his last year of coursework for a Ph.D. in physics—physics because he was good at it and new to the United States from a village in Lithuania and didn’t need perfect English for physics, although he never made use of that degree.

  There on the steps of the library was Josephine Hennings, slender, with almost perfect features—straight nose, wide-set eyes, full lips, high color in her cheek and red hair the color of autumn, spread like a cape over her shoulders. She had small hands like the hands of a child.

  Lately he held Georgianna’s hand lightly in his own just to remember what it had felt like with Josephine at the beginning.

  The high cheekbones had gone to flesh, and her eyes, which were hazel, sunk to golden marbles growing smaller and smaller, only seeds for sight.

  Unwell in body and soul. Depressed.

  He didn’t talk about depression with her family. As far as the Hennings were concerned, depression was a matter of choice.

  Josephine stopped sleeping with William when Georgianna had a high fever and Josie moved into her room and stayed for weeks sleeping on a couch.

  Something happened then.

  In time William gathered the nerve to ask her why she didn’t want to make love any longer—gently, he asked her. She was delicate and refined. Sex was likely new to her when they met— and faithful to her request, they didn’t sleep together until they married—he could imagine with a girl like Josephine that sex was maybe a little dirty or messy, too many fluids coming from god knows where.

  But she accustomed herself to him, not exactly willing, but available.

  This last winter he had finally asked, did her distance from him have to do with something he could change, because that he would gladly do.

  “Distance?” she asked.

  And then he said the first thing that came to mind.

  “Is it because I’m Jewish?”

  WILLIAM DID NOT like Dr. and Mrs. Hennings, not from the first night he had dinner at their house. A formal dinner with a long white table cloth and silver cutlery and gold-rimmed china and bad food. It had struck him as a contradiction to go to all the trouble to dress up a table and then serve bad food. Lamb cooked to death, shards
of black meat like charcoal, and vegetables boiled in water until there must have been more vegetable in the water than squished on the plate.

  “So,” Dr. Hennings said, “you’re getting your Ph.D. in physics at our great university, I understand. You must be planning to teach at university.”

  “Actually not,” William said. “I’m planning to run a boys’ camp in Wisconsin.”

  When William first came to the United States, it was to live with his uncle Irving who was an American-educated physician and lived in Washington, D.C. It had been his uncle’s suggestion that he apply to be the director at Camp Minnie HaHa when the notice of a search for a new director went out. A camp Irving knew well since he was one of three investors in Minnie HaHa with his two close friends in medical school at the University of Michigan, the camp where his sons had gone, where he vacationed with his family after camp closed in August.

  It was Irving’s thought that directing a boys’ camp would provide William with a foothold in America.

  Given the troubles, William would not be going back to Lithuania in the near future.

  Or maybe ever, Irving suggested, as tensions in Germany escalated.

  “You’ll be stuck here just as I’ve been,” his uncle said. “It’s not home but certainly not a bad place to live a life.”

  William wasn’t going to be a physicist either, and if he taught at all, it would be younger boys who had not made up their minds. His job as he imagined it would be to teach them to think. To question was the better word.

  So that’s what he did. High school world history in Chicago in the winter and Camp Minnie HaHa in the summer.

  When William first arrived with his uncle at the camp—the beginning of March—the long dirt road was muddy, deep potholes, streams of water pouring down the hill. At the entrance to the camp where the road opened to a wide expanse of land circled by cabins shadowed with high pines, there was a large, handmade sign painted white with black letters:

  WELCOME TO CAMP MINNIE HAHA, the sign read. NO DOGS. NO JEWS.

  “Something new,” his uncle said. “That sign wasn’t here last summer when I picked up the boys. So it must be the winter folks getting a whiff of what’s going on in Germany.”