when you have to tell your kid that he can’t go to the college of his choice because you can’t afford it, you’ll feel differently.”
Becky bit her lip. “Alex?”
Bonnie scooped up a stack of curtains. “He got accepted at Cornell. But the aid package wasn’t enough.” She nodded toward another pile of cloth. “Grab those, will you?”
“So where is he going?”
“State University at Plattsburgh. Between the loans and the track-and-field scholarship, we can manage it. I hope. If the car lasts another four years and we don’t have any medical bills.”
Becky followed her sister. She was amazed to find Patrick fully dressed in the living room. He had even remembered to brush his hair. “Get your Game Boy if you want to bring it to Grandma’s,” she said. “I’m driving you.”
“All right,” he said. “Can we stop at Kmart? There’s this game cartridge I want to look at.”
“Maybe,” she said. She carried the curtains out to Bonnie’s car and shoved them in alongside the rest of the piles and boxes.
“It’s game cartridges and braces and shoes and class trips.” Bonnie leaned, on one hip, against her aging Taurus. “It never ends, Beck. And then when the kids are gone, you have to think about yourself, about whether you can retire, whether you can afford to move to a place where you can walk around outside in the winter without worrying about breaking your hip.”
“You mean like Mom and Dad.”
“God only knows, I understand the lure of those woods. It’s kept them scraping by for forty years. But it’s sucked so much life out of them. Dad may be cussing and kicking about selling out, but I think it’s the best thing to happen to them in a long time. If he can get a decent price for the business.” There was an edge to Bonnie’s voice. In the cold sunlight, Becky could see the lines around her eyes.
She shifted from foot to foot. The deal she was so proud of, the deal that was going to make her a player in the conservancy and in the national arena of land preservation, was the reason her dad was selling Castle Logging. She wanted everything she was going to get from this deal, but she also wanted her parents to be healthy and solvent and living in the same house they had always lived in, not forced into retirement. “I’m sorry,” she said, not really sure what she was sorry for.
Patrick bounded out of the house. “Go back and get a coat on!” his mother yelled. Bonnie let out an impatient breath. “Don’t worry. It’s me. It’s been-things have been tense with them lately. Everything will be okay.”
Because Becky wanted to, she tried to believe.
Russ had been prepared for the sight of Haudenosaunee. He knew the history of the camp, and although he had never been a visitor before, he had seen black-and-white photos of the World War II-era construction, deliberately simple in a time when both men and materials were hard to come by. He had been prepared for the glorious view of the mountains, where the trees and brush had been cut away to expose range after range fading into the northwestern sky. What he hadn’t been prepared for was the number of vehicles parked in the drive.
“What the hell’s going on?” Ed Castle asked, descending from his SUV. They had pulled in along one side of the drive, closest to the road out, intending to thank Eugene van der Hoeven for opening his land and to let him know about the fine six-point buck dangling off an old bike carrier bolted to the back of Ed’s Explorer.
Russ walked past his hunting partner toward the row of trucks. He pointed toward the nearest, a wide-bed pickup with double rear wheels supporting metal gear lockers. “This is John Huggins’s.” He glanced at the next truck. “Uhhuh. And here’s a search and rescue sticker.” He turned toward the log house. “Let’s see what the search and rescue team is doing here, shall we?”
Russ let Ed lead the way. The older man rang the doorbell. The wait for someone to answer was long enough for Ed to turn to Russ with a worried frown, but then the door opened, cutting off whatever it was he might have said.
“Ed Castle. Hello.”
“Eugene.” Ed shook hands with the man in the doorway. “Good to see you again. I’ve been hunting on your property today, brought a friend of mine. I don’t know if you’ve met him. Russ Van Alstyne. Police chief down in town.”
Russ had heard the stories, of course, so the face that turned to him wasn’t too much of a shock. “Mr. van der Ho-even.” He extended his hand. “You’ve got good hunting land up here.”
Van der Hoeven’s grip was cool and dry. “I like to think so. Did you take anything?”
Russ shook his head. “Afraid not. But Ed here harvested a beauty.”
“Six points.” Ed rocked back and forth on his heels, every orange-and-camo-clad line of him radiating satisfaction. “We field-dressed the old boy and hung him up, and after having to do some work, Russ decided he’d had enough.”
Russ smiled good-naturedly. “No use letting the meat sit around getting old. Gotta get it home and butcher it.”
“It’s just as well.” Eugene looked toward the woods visible from his front door with an expression of resignation. “The search and rescue team is out there searching for my sister. Any game in the area is gone to ground today.”
“Your sister?” Russ spoke more sharply than he had intended to.
Eugene looked at him for a moment, then stepped back from the door. “Why don’t you two come in?”
Ed made some noise about their smell-dressing out a buck wasn’t a clean process-but Russ followed van der Hoeven in without comment. He didn’t think a little fresh blood from a healthy deer made them offensive. He had seen and smelled far, far worse in twenty-seven years as a cop.
The interior of the great camp should have felt welcoming. The wood and rugs made patches of quilt-warm color, and the spindly antiques were balanced by genuinely comfortable chairs and sofas, but there was something off-putting about it. Cold. Maybe it was the sheer size of the place; the living room-dining room was almost as big as the footprint of Russ’s house.
“I set some coffee and pastries out for the searchers. May I offer you anything?” Van der Hoeven waved toward a sideboard that would have filled up half the Van Alstynes’ kitchen.
“No. Thanks.”
Ed wasn’t as reticent, grabbing a muffin out of a basket made of looping silver wire set next to a coffeemaker.
“So what’s this about your sister?” Russ asked.
“Maybe I should have rung up your people instead of John Huggins.” Eugene’s gaze was unfocused, as if he were looking into the misty past. “But I reasoned the only thing the police could do would be calling out the search and rescue team.”
“Are you sure she’s lost?”
“It’s the only thing I can think of.” Van der Hoeven ran a hand over the back of his head, smoothing his overgrown hair, bunching it into a little ponytail in his fist. “Millie and I were having dinner last night-”
“Millie is your sister?”
“My younger sister, yes. Our older sister, Louisa, lives in San Francisco. Anyway, after dinner, she said she was going to take a walk. I was tired, and planning on getting up early to hunt, so I said good night. When I arose this morning, she wasn’t in her room. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. I took a quick turn around the paths and buildings nearest to the house, and as soon as it was obvious she wasn’t anywhere nearby, I phoned search and rescue.”
“What time did your sister go out on her walk?”
“We dined at eight, so it must have been close to nine.”
Russ looked at the dining table, a shining mahogany plain dominating the room. Hell of an overkill for two people. “Kind of late to be taking a stroll in the woods, wasn’t it?”
“The lady on the search team said the same thing.”
Russ raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t heard of Huggins adding any new members to the team. Let alone a woman.
