The Inverted Forest (42 page)

He sat frowning at what he’d just heard. He shook his head. “It wouldn’t have been that kind of life,” he said.

“What kind?”

“Not a
much better
life.”

She was taken aback for a moment—by the sharpness of his assessment, by its essential truth. After all these years she could still be fooled by his off-center face and awkward manners. At times she
could still make the mistake of thinking him simpleminded, naïve. “But you don’t know for sure,” she insisted, weakly.

“I do know. I’d have stayed right there at the depot in Jeff City. And I’d have been by myself.” He touched the corner of his glasses and nodded. “I’m that kind of person,” he said.

At eight o’clock that evening Harriet called the on-duty manager of Living Cottage No. 8 and reported that she and Wyatt Huddy had gathered branches and grass trimmings from her backyard, gone for a walk, and had dinner together. He’d shown every indication of enjoying these activities. His state of mind was calm. She said that, in the ten hours he’d been her guest, Wyatt had been at all times pleasant and cooperative.

“And where is Wyatt now?” the cottage manager asked. “What’s he doing while we’re speaking?”

“He’s upstairs in the guest room,” Harriet explained. “I’ve got the radio turned on for him. He’s listening to the Cardinals play the Dodgers. He’s got his game cards out and he’s doing his thing.”

“His thing?”

“He’s keeping track of each play—the strikes and hits and errors and so forth.” Through the phone line she could hear the cottage manager typing these comments into a computer—a scuttling click, click, click.

“That sounds like a nice way to spend the evening,” the cottage manager said. “Thank you. We’ll talk again tomorrow, Ms. Foster.”

“Yes, we will,” Harriet said. “Tomorrow. Goodbye.”

In nearly all her dealings with the Gateway staff, Harriet had to rein in the urge to speak forcefully on Wyatt’s behalf. She’d figured out a long time ago that any argument she might wage would be both futile and unnecessary.

Still though, to the officious cottage manager, Harriet wanted to
say, Look here now. You have a job to do. We both know that. But we also know that Wyatt Huddy has never acted out—never lost control, never screamed or made threats. More important, he’s never harmed a staff member or living cottage resident. And he never
would.
Harriet could vouch for him. She could
promise
. If necessary, she’d put up everything she owned as collateral. She was prepared to offer a personal guarantee.

All of this she was ready to do from the vantage point of her handsome kitchen—more than a hundred miles from the weedy ruins of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp, more than fifteen years removed from the night Christopher Waterhouse had loaded Evie Hicks into the camp van and taken her for a ride along County Road H.

O
n that night, June 27, 1996, at Kindermann Forest, she’d not been able to offer any guarantees.

She’d stood outside The Sanctuary, under a dome of hazy floodlight, and pushed the sweat back from her bangs. “What one of us should do,” she’d said to Wyatt. “What you should probably do . . .”

Fortunately, he’d understood. He rose from the picnic table and flexed his arms to show her how capable he was. “I’ll take a walk,” he said. “I’ll see if I can find them.”

How very grateful she was to hear this. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Wyatt.” She stood there weary and shaken and watched him march off into the darkness.

Inside her chest a tightly coiled knot of feeling was beginning to unwind—a slackening of her panic. Her determination, too. She could feel it draining away, the persuasiveness she’d needed to enlist Wyatt Huddy to her cause, the strength it took to make large decisions. Small decisions were still within her reach. She noticed Wyatt’s open book on the picnic table and decided to scoop it up and tuck
the book under her arm. She had modest plans to safe-keep
Lives of the American Presidents
until it could be returned to its grateful owner.

Across the open meadow the lighted windows of the infirmary seemed to wink at her. She wanted—ached really—to be back at her work desk, back among the open medical files, the hum and chilly breath of the air conditioner. The telephone, too. Perhaps she’d make use of the phone. The police could be called. Not
could,
she warned herself,
must
.

She broke into a loping jog along the grassy border of the roadway. Once she’d drawn closer, she could see the infirmary door hanging open. Poised on the lighted threshold to the infirmary was a figure, a person, leaning out the doorway a moment and scanning the darkness, then withdrawing back inside.

The person was state hospital camper Mary Ann Hornicker. Mute and retarded, Mary Ann was able to convey a complicated sense of crisis just by bouncing up and down on her small feet and clutching the hemline of her billowy pajama top.

Harriet sprinted across the infirmary yard.
Easy does it,
she chided herself. It was important to remember that this would most likely be a small crisis—wet bedsheets maybe, or something messier on the bathroom floor.

She took a deep, steadying breath and, upon entering the infirmary, headed straight for her living quarters.

The covers on James’s empty cot had been thrown back, hastily it seemed to Harriet. No sign of the boy huddled beneath the cot or squeezed under Harriet’s bed. Stunned, she wheeled back toward the infirmary. In Mary Ann Hornicker’s wide-eyed and freckled face, Harriet saw the flicker of something—an awareness, a cringing sense of obligation. Mary Ann Hornicker must have seen James cross into the infirmary and step out the front door—step or been frightened. Perhaps he’d been chased.

It was too much for Harriet. Too much to bear the thought of her son wailing in anguish, running out into the darkness, toward graver dangers. Just to imagine it made her wild and belligerent.

“What did you . . . WHAT DID YOU DO?” she screamed at Mary Ann Hornicker and at the other infirmary patient, Nancy Klotter, who was burrowed into her bunk, a sheet drawn up over her head. “Did you SCARE him?” Harriet shouted.

They would not, either of them, engage with her.

“DID YOU SCARE HIM?” she screamed.

No answer from Mary Ann Hornicker or Nancy Klotter. Or rather, no intelligible answer. Nancy Klotter, under the tent of her bedsheet, pretended to writhe and moan from some terrible quaking sickness. Mary Ann Hornicker took a few unsteady steps forward. She unsealed her lips. Her plump throat convulsed. The round and unremarkable features of her face began to tighten and crease until they’d contorted into a mask of violent straining. From her open mouth came a dry clicking of teeth, a homely croak.

Aggrieved, Harriet stumbled out into the infirmary yard and ran unthinkingly toward the mess hall. “James?” she called out. “James?” In the hall she flipped on as many wall switches as she could find. The fluorescent lights flared. The heavy tables, the long serving counter, the gas range and ovens all blinked into view.

But it made no sense to look here. James had never shown interest in the mess hall or kitchen. He wasn’t the type to rise in the night for a snack. She made herself stop and concentrate. The possibilities she overturned were heartbreaking and grim.

She threw open the mess hall doors and took off running down the gravel pathway. As she ran, she scanned the open meadow, lush and rolling and edged with dark, spindly tree shadows. No movement at all on the wide surface of the meadow. No strolling people. No loping dogs even. Two paths led into the woods: one to the sleeping cabins, the other to the swimming pool. A pair of adult figures—love-struck
counselors by the look of them—were slipping away hand in hand down the swimming pool path.

She nearly called out to them. But what a time-consuming chore to try to explain herself, to shout her message across the darkened meadow.
My son is missing. He is everything to me.
She’d have to make it clear to this couple.
Whatever you’re feeling for one another right now, it does not compare to the way I cherish my son.

She took the path to the sleeping cabins and entered the woods. Her breaths were loud and grunting, the tree-shrouded pathway obscenely dark. But she was able to track her footsteps on the white gravel. At the second fork in the pathway she clambered up a wood walkway and arrived at a concrete landing. She pounded her open hand against the screen door of Cabin Two.

Gibby Tumminello, the assigned night watch counselor, came to the door.

“James,” she said out of breath. “My son, James.” How much
feeling
there was squeezed into these three words. “He’s run off. He’s gone missing.” Her wrecked expression seemed to have made it clear to Gibby: she wasn’t talking about a boyhood lark. This was a crisis.

“I want you to do two things,” she said. “I want you to help me search the whole cabin for James. Every room. Every inch. And I want you to make sure that the worst troublemakers you have—Dennis Dugan and Frederick Torbert—are here in the cabin. I want to be sure they’re accounted for.”

Gibby gave her a wide-eyed nod. Under normal circumstances, he was a feckless and deeply immature young man, too full of boyish humor to warrant much attention from the girl counselors. But he seemed to grasp at once the gravity of Harriet’s request. “Will do,” he said. “Will do, Nurse Harriet.” He grabbed a flashlight and darted into the right-side sleeping barracks.

She didn’t have to go far to find Dennis Dugan and Frederick Torbert. They’d been moved, along with their bunk mattresses, out
onto the floor of the screened porch: Dennis, his mouth crooked open, sleeping on his side like a collapsed drunk, Frederick Torbert awake and staring up at Harriet from beneath the ridge of his jutting forehead. Earlier in the day he’d reached out with his bandaged hand and rubbed the crotch of her blue jean shorts. Maybe she was paranoid. But it was easy now to believe he was staring at her and turning the memory of that illicit touch over and over in his mind like a shiny penny. He raised himself up with his brawny arms.

“Lay back down, Frederick,” she hissed at him. “Lay back down, God damn it.”

After a moment of silent calculation, he did what he was told. Perhaps it had been the look on Harriet’s face, the scowling authority brought on by this particular emergency.

She stepped across the porch and entered the left-side barracks, a long, stuffy wreck of a room crammed with off-center bunk beds. A terrible salty-sweet body odor had filled the barracks, arising, she was sure, from the filthy underwear and socks and sweat-soaked T-shirts that were mounded wall to wall across the floor. What a nightmare, this laundry. Two days from now it would have to be stuffed into duffel bags and dragged reeking back onto the state hospital buses. Nearly all of the Cabin Two male campers had fallen into an exhausted sleep, their odd faces gone slack and unguarded. “James,” she whispered urgently. “James.” She stepped over an outstretched arm and searched, row by row, all the way to the far corner of the barracks. None of her worst imaginings proved true. The huddled form in the corner of the cabin was a listing duffel bag and not a boy. The mound in the bed beside a sleeping camper was wet towels and not a child. Still, it shook her to the core to have imagined, if only for a second, such obscene possibilities. She stumbled back to the front porch. By then Gibby Tumminello had completed his search of the right-side barracks and the Cabin Two bathroom and come up empty-handed.

The next stage of her search must have looked to an outsider like
a pure expression of panic or the most crippling kind of indecision. She ran to the screen door of men’s Cabin One, peered inside, but did not go in. A notion came to her, and she set off running along the pathway, out of the woods, up the sloping hill of the meadow toward The Sanctuary. There might be other off-duty counselors—in addition to the Lonesome Three—lounging on the Sanctuary couches. She would storm inside and demand they form a search party.

But halfway across the open meadow she spotted a strong light brightening the window of Schuller Kindermann’s cottage. The presence of this light derailed her hasty plans. She was suddenly indignant. It was outrageous, really. None of what was happening tonight—the crisis with Evie Hicks and Christopher Waterhouse, the crisis with James—would have occurred if Schuller Kindermann hadn’t been so disastrously wrong in his decisions. Again and again he’d proved himself to be an incompetent leader. An absent leader. If she had any real hope of help, it would have to come from outside camp. She’d have to call the Ellsinore Police. She would place this call from the camp office. But first she would pound on Schuller’s cottage door and inform him of the twin emergencies. She’d let him know what a fool he was.

She bounded up the pine board steps of his porch. Her hand was raised and ready to knock. She looked through the screen door window and nearly collapsed in relief.

Inside the cottage, sitting on stools before a brightly lit drafting table, were Schuller Kindermann and her son, James.