Professor Williamson places his hands on the desk. He stretches out his fingers. “Yeah. He’s a quiet one, your brother. Doesn’t surprise me in the least that he’d be looking for some solitude after something like this. Didn’t tell you where he was going, huh?”
“No, he didn’t. Professor,” asks Sigrid, “when Melinda and the sheriff were here last time, what did they ask you? We discussed it of course,” Sigrid lies, “though it’s always helpful to hear it from another perspective.”
“Well, let me see,” says Dr. Williamson, placing his fingertips together to create a sort of pulsing organ the size of a human heart. “He asked how Marcus and Lydia knew one another, but I didn’t know how they met. As I explained, Professor Jones worked in a completely different department. So I didn’t know her well. She and I were both on the CARE committee—that’s Compliance, Accountability, Risk, and Ethics—which met for two hours a month. We didn’t socialize, though. And with Marcus, though he’s a lovely man and a good teacher, he is only an adjunct, and since I’m head of the department we don’t engage with one another much either. So I wasn’t very helpful.”
“Anything else you all discussed?” Sigrid asks.
“The sheriff asked about the subjects Marcus teaches and whether the students like him.”
“Do they?”
“Oh, yes, very much. He really talks the students through the differences between conservation and preservation. He has a good theoretical understanding of the places versus spaces distinction and—because he’s a foreigner—he can make very interesting comparisons with his native Norway. I don’t see how any of this will help you find him, though.”
The office walls are lined with textbooks and photographs of plants and stretches of land that must mean something, because Sigrid can tell they are not art. Despite not being to her taste, it is a nicer place to work than her office in Oslo. His office has a door and—unlike her own office door back in Oslo—has no windows out to a central room filled with young police officers and their irksome optimism.
“Do you know where he went during his time off?” Sigrid asks.
“I know he liked the outdoors. We didn’t talk about such things much. He was . . . as I mentioned . . . an adjunct.”
“Adjuncts are people too, aren’t they?” Sigrid asks.
“You should get that onto a T-shirt.”
“Is the department secretary here?” Sigrid asks, hoping that—by now—she has proved to Melinda that Professor Williamson is absolutely useless and knows nothing.
“Mrs. Perlmutter? Yes. She’s always here.”
“Melinda,” says Sigrid, turning to her. “Would you mind getting a copy of the curriculum Marcus is teaching and also a list of his students? It might help.”
“You mean . . . now?”
“Yes.”
Sigrid sits up farther in her chair, hoping to communicate certainty, authority, and a touch of urgency. Melinda is about to say something when Sigrid adds, “We’ll be right here.”
Melinda looks at her two elders, who look back at her, and she chooses the path of least resistance by shaking off her doubts and fulfilling the task assigned to her.
With Melinda out of the room and, more to the point, out of earshot, Sigrid fishes for the knowledge she really wants: “Any favorite spots? Places he’d take his classes?” she presses.
Places he might be right now? she doesn’t ask.
“Well,” says Dr. Williamson, leaning back in his chair. It creaks like a graveyard gate and he doesn’t seem to notice. “He takes his class to the Adirondack state park, of course. They go twice a semester for obvious reasons.”
“What obvious reasons?”
“It’s why we’re here,” the professor says, leaning far enough back into his chair that Sigrid wonders how close it might be to flipping right over. “It’s why we teach these courses at this school. Adirondack is special because it’s a state preserve, but a little over half of it is privately owned, which is unique. And I use that word correctly. For this reason, it’s been called one of the greatest experiments in conservation in the industrialized world. If you’re interested in sustainability and the relationship between man and nature, this is the experiment you want to be watching. And we live right next to it.”
“How big is the park?”
“Over six million acres.”
“What’s an acre?”
“Let me put it this way. It’s more than twenty-four thousand square kilometers in area. By way of comparison, that’s a bit smaller than Albania and a bit bigger than Israel. It has ten thousand lakes and fifty thousand kilometers of rivers and streams. A man could get lost in there.”
“Where was Marcus’s favorite spot in the Adirondacks?”
“That’s easy. The Saranac Lake Islands is where they’d always go. For those who stayed for the weekend field trip he’d bring them hiking up Redfield.”
“Do you think Marcus went there?” Sigrid asks.
“If he did, and he doesn’t want you to find him, you won’t. It’s impossible.”
“I see.”
“All that grief,” Professor Williamson adds. He kicks off his shoes for some reason and wiggles his black cotton toes from beneath the desk. Sigrid resists sitting back farther, but the temptation is real. “Lydia dying. That little boy getting shot like that. So much tragedy for that poor family. I remember when it happened. Marcus was upset too. He knew Jeffrey also.”
“What little boy?”
“Lydia’s nephew. Jeffrey. Jeffrey Simmons?”
“I don’t know about this.”
“Oh, aside from the presidential election, that’s the biggest news around here. Lydia’s nephew was shot by the police. He was twelve years old and was playing in his front yard with some other boys. The police mistook his cap gun for a real one and . . . they killed him. We had protests on campus against police violence, there were sit-ins demanding answers, we’ve had guest lecturers coming in to discuss race and racism and the politics of . . . Well, anyway. I don’t want to intellectualize that tragedy. I didn’t see Lydia after it happened. She stopped attending CARE, though I did see Marcus, and he was profoundly changed.”
“Did that happen
