The Woods

“I know.”

“But it’s close.”

She nodded.

“I met this young woman who knew Gil. She said she overheard him talking about us. He said that we lied.”

Lucy kept still for a moment. She spun the chair so that now I saw her profile. “We did.”

“Not about anything that mattered,” I said.

“We were making love,” she said, “while they were being murdered.”

I said nothing. I partitioned again. That was how I got through my day. Because if I didn’t partition, I would remember that I was the counselor on guard duty that night. That I shouldn’t have sneaked off with my girlfriend. That I should have watched them better. That if I had been a responsible kid, if I had done what I was supposed to, I wouldn’t have said I had done head counts when I hadn’t. I wouldn’t have lied about it the next morning. We would have known that they were gone since the night before, not just that morning. So maybe, while I put check marks next to cabin inspections that I had never done, my sister was having her throat slashed.

Lucy said, “We were just kids, Cope.”

Still nothing.

“They sneaked out. They would have sneaked out if we were there or not.”

Probably not, I thought. I would have been there. I would have spotted them. Or I would have noticed empty beds when I did my rounds. I did none of that. I went off and had a good time with my girlfriend. And the next morning, when they weren’t there, I figured that they were just having fun. Gil had been dating Margot, though I thought they’d broken up. My sister was seeing Doug Billingham, though they weren’t too serious. They had run off, were having fun.

So I lied. I said I’d checked the cabins and that they’d been safely tucked away. Because I didn’t realize the danger. I said I was alone that night—I stuck to that lie for too long—because I wanted to protect Lucy. Isn’t that strange? I didn’t know all the damage. So yeah, I lied. Once Margot Green was found, I admitted most of the truth—that I’d been negligent on guard duty. But I left off Lucy’s role. And once I stuck with that lie, I was afraid to go back and tell the whole truth. They were suspicious of me already—I still remember Sheriff Lowell’s skeptical face—and if I admitted it later, the police would wonder why I lied in the first place. It was irrelevant anyway.

What difference did it make if I was alone or with somebody? Either way, I didn’t watch out for them.

During the lawsuit, Ira Silverstein’s office tried to lay some of the blame on me. But I was only a kid. There were twelve cabins on the boys’ side of the camp alone. Even if I had been in position, it would have been easy enough to sneak out. The security was inadequate. That was true. Legally, it wasn’t my fault.

Legally.

“My father used to go back to those woods,” I said.

She turned toward me.

“He would go digging.”

“For what?”

“For my sister. He told us he was going fishing. But I knew. He did it for two years.”

“What made him stop?”

“My mother left us. I think he figured that his obsession had cost him too much already. He hired private eyes instead. Called some old friends. But I don’t think he dug anymore.”

I looked at her desk. It was a mess. Papers were scattered, some half-tumbling off like a frozen waterfall. There were open textbooks sprawled out like wounded soldiers.

“That’s the problem when you don’t have a body,” I said. “I assume you’ve studied the stages of grief?”

“I have.” She nodded, seeing it. “The first step is denial.”

“Exactly. In a sense, we never got past that.”

“No body, ergo, denial. You needed proof to move on.”

“My father did. I mean, I was sure Wayne had killed her. But then I would see my father going out like that.”

“It made you doubt.”

“Let’s just say it kept the possibility alive in my mind.”

“And what about your mother?”

“She grew more and more distant. My parents never had the greatest marriage. There were cracks already. When my sister died—or whatever the hell happened—she totally withdrew from him.”

We both went quiet. The last remnants of sunlight were fading away. The sky was turning into a purple swirl. I looked out the window to my left. She looked out too. We sat there, the closest we had been to each other in twenty years.

I said before that the years had been surgically removed. They seemed to return now. The sadness was back. I could see it on her. The long-lasting destruction to my family from that night was obvious. I had hoped that Lucy had been able to get past it. But she hadn’t. There hadn’t been closure for her either. I don’t know what else had happened to her over the last twenty years. To blame that one incident for the sadness I saw in her eyes would be too pat. But I could see it now. I could see myself pulling away from her that very night.

The student journal had talked about how she had never gotten over me. I don’t flatter myself to that degree. But she had never gotten over that night. What it did to her father. What it did to her childhood.

“Paul?”

She was still looking out the window.

“Yes?”

“What do we do now?”

“We find out what really happened in those woods.”

CHAPTER 22

I REMEMBER ON A TRIP TO ITALY SEEING TAPESTRIES THAT seem to change perspective depending on where you stand. If you move to the right, the table appears to be facing the right. If you move to the left, the table follows you.

Governor Dave Markie was the human embodiment of that. When he walked into the room he had the ability to make every person feel as though he were facing and looking at them. In his youth I had seen him score with so many women, again not because of his looks, but because he seemed so interested in them. There was a hypnotic intensity in his gaze. I remember a lesbian friend at Rutgers who said, “When Dave Markie looks at you like that, heck, I’d switch teams for the night.”

He brought that into my office. Jocelyn Durels, my secretary, tittered. Loren Muse’s face flushed. Even the U.S. Attorney, Joan Thurston, had a smile on her face that showed me what she must have looked like when she had her first kiss in the seventh grade.

Most would say that it was the power of the office. But I’d known him before the office. The office was a power enhancer, not creator.

We greeted each other with a hug. I noticed that guys did that now—hugged as a greeting. I liked it, the true human contact. I don’t have a lot of real friends, so the ones I do have are hugely important to me. They were specially picked, and I love every one of them.