She nods.
“If you’re right, and he had anything to do with Miss Pelletier’s disappearance, this guy has a lot to lose—and he knows it. He may be dying to tell someone, but sooner or later his self-preservation instinct will kick in, and he’ll come to his senses. And if it’s too late, if he’s already told you, you may be in serious trouble.”
“I know.”
Gaffney sighs. “You’re determined to do this, aren’t you?”
“I want to find out what happened.”
He shakes his head. “This is not a game, Miss Campbell.”
“I know,” she says. Though her voice is resolute, her legs are trembling. She twines them around the cool metal pole and smiles at Gaffney. “I’ll be careful,” she says, but it’s only a formality, and neither of them believes it.
Chapter 31
Days go by with no word from Hunter. Kathryn begins to feel like a jilted lover, wondering what she said or did to scare him off. She finds herself checking her mother’s answering machine several times a day, driving through the high-school parking lot in search of his black Jeep, which isn’t there. She leaves her car doors unlocked, almost hoping he’ll put something on the seat. She looks up his name in the phone book and finds it—Hunter, Richard, at an address on Birch Lane—and she copies it onto a piece of paper. But instinctively she feels it would be wrong to call him. She doesn’t want to seem pushy; she’s afraid it would make him more suspicious than he already is. When he’s ready, she tells herself, he’ll be in touch.
Her mother is happy to hear that Kathryn’s foray into investigative reporting seems to be over. “I’m so glad you let that drop,” she says. “Your father and I both thought it was getting a little dicey.”
“You’ve talked to Dad about me?” Kathryn says, incredulous.
“Well, I was concerned about what you were getting into, so I called him for advice. Turned out we were on the same page.” She smiles. “He can be very perceptive, you know.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
Her mother shrugs lightly. “Before we were bitter enemies, remember, we used to be best friends.”
“No, I don’t remember,” Kathryn says pointedly.
When Jack proposes another story idea, a profile of an eccentric artist who lives on the coast and builds larger-than-life sculptures out of found materials, Kathryn takes the assignment. She drives down to Mount Desert Island one afternoon and interviews the woman in her Bass Harbor studio, then spends two hours walking through her sculpture garden on a sloping hill leading to the sea. The experience is magical; the massive figures, placed in a circle and facing each other, appear to be dancing in the mutable afternoon light.
Doing the story reminds Kathryn of what she used to love about covering the arts: The focus was on the work, not the person; the artists she interviewed were passionate about what they did, and that passion was contagious. She drives back to Bangor, to her mother’s office, to use the computer, finishing the story at one in the morning in a rush of adrenaline. For the first time in a long time she’s pleased with the work she’s done. The next day Jack proposes an interview with a band called Tidewater that’s being featured on the summer fair circuit, and she readily agrees. It’s better than sitting around.
At the end of the week, as Kathryn is backing out of the driveway on her way to Borders to pick up a Tidewater CD in preparation for the interview, she notices a piece of paper pinned under the windshield wiper. It’s folded in half, with her name neatly printed in block letters on the front. Opening it quickly, she looks around to see if anyone is watching, but no one’s in sight.
I’ve been thinking about you, it reads in a small, vertical script—about your idea that we articulate the complications. I’m not sure that’s wise. Regardless, I think we’re beginning to understand each other. I look forward to showing you how to find your way out of the woods.
It’s from Hunter, of course. Kathryn studies it for a moment, trying to make sense of it. I think we’re beginning to understand each other. What does that mean? She turns off the car and goes into the house, scrounging in a kitchen drawer for the slip of paper she’d put there with his number on it. Then she picks up the receiver and dials.
The phone rings three times, four. Then a male voice says, “Hello?”
For an awkward moment she realizes she’s never called him anything but Mr. Hunter. “Hello,” she says finally. “This is Kathryn. Campbell.”
“I know who you are. That was fast.”
Shit, she thinks, closing her eyes, I should’ve waited. “I’ve got a lot going on,” she says briskly. “I wanted to get back to you before my day fills up.”
“Glad you could fit me in.”
I sound ridiculous, she thinks. Calm down. Relax.
“I thought you might come by the school. I’ve been half expecting you.”
“I didn’t want to push anything. I figured if you wanted to see me, you’d call.”
He laughs, a dry sound in the back of his throat. “I thought you said you weren’t playing games.”
“I’m not,” she says. But you are. She pauses. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little afraid of you.” She means it—she is a little afraid of him. But she also knows that by saying it she might take him off guard.
“Why?”
“You can be intimidating.”
“Really? I don’t mean to be.”
“Oh, I think you do,” she says.
For a moment he doesn’t answer. Then he says, “There’s something I want to show you. Let me tell you how to get to my place.”
A FEW HOURS later, clutching in one hand the directions she scrawled on a napkin, Kathryn is in her car driving to Pushaw Lake with a microcassette player in her bag on the seat beside her. After ten miles or so the roads narrow, three lanes to two lanes to one. She turns onto an unpaved tributary that seems to have been carved haphazardly out of forest, identified by a wooden marker: Sunshine Way. This strikes her as funny; though it’s the middle of a bright, cloudless day, trees shade the road so completely that little sunlight can get through. After what seems like miles but is actually, according to the odometer, just under one, the road forks and Kathryn bears left, onto Birch Lane.
The road is deeply rutted, as if an eighteen-wheeler had barreled through on a rainy day. But a big truck would never make it. The road takes sharp turns at odd angles; trees press close on each side. Kathryn begins to feel a creeping panic—where the hell is she? what is she doing here?—and she stops the car in the middle of the road, holding on to the steering wheel with both hands to calm herself. She’s all alone, miles from anywhere, and no one knows where she is. She peers up through the lattice of leaves to the blue sky beyond. “What are you thinking?” she says aloud, and she laughs at the insanity of taking such a risk.
She’d called Jack before she left, but he wasn’t at his desk. The message she left was vague and halting. She hadn’t wanted to say too much; she didn’t want him to try to stop her. “Hi, it’s me,” she said. “I’m going to be gone this afternoon, on old business. If you don’t hear from me by this evening … But I’m sure you will. This is a good thing. I know what I’m doing.” Now she wishes she’d been more specific.
She shuts her eyes and starts to reason with herself. She’s being paranoid. She’s never seen Hunter do anything remotely violent; why would she imagine he’d ever try to hurt her? It occurs to her that maybe this whole thing—this idea that Hunter had something to do with Jennifer’s disappearance—is some kind of fantasy, a story she’s concocted because she can’t accept that Jennifer just vanished. Because she needs an answer, any answer, whether it’s the truth or not. Maybe this is all a stupid, laughable mistake, and Rick Hunter is simply a charismatic young teacher who had a relationship with one of his students ten years ago. So what? Kathryn thinks. He wasn’t much older than they were—six or seven years, maybe. He might have been twenty-five when they were seniors. Jennifer was a wise child, ol
der than her age. She wasn’t about to share the details of her difficult life with some immature boy. If she loved this man, if he filled a need for her, what crime was there in that?
A horn sounds loudly on the road behind her, stantling Kathryn out of her thoughts. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she sees a dirty white sedan and in it a man wearing tinted glasses, chewing on a toothpick. He nods and lifts his hand to get her attention. “You okay?” he hollers out the window.
“Yeah. Sorry,” she yells back. She starts the car, and he follows behind her until she turns into a driveway marked by a small wooden plaque that says HUNTER’S LODGE. He beeps his horn again and keeps going.
Fifty yards down the drive the trees fall back, and Kathryn finds herself in a large, grassy clearing. Straight ahead and slightly to the left is a neat shingled cottage; beyond that the sparkling lake, a wedge of shoreline, and the deep-blue sky make a vivid terrine. She parks beside Hunter’s black Jeep and gets out with her bag, experiencing the slight vertigo one can feel after an arduous journey to an unfamiliar place. She leans against her car for a moment to steady herself.
“You made it.”
Hunter is standing by the door to the cabin. He’s wearing a faded green T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tan hiking boots. Kathryn is struck again by how young he seems out of his teaching uniform of starched shirts and ties and pressed pants. He looks like anyone she knows, any of her friends from graduate school.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to get out of here in the winter,” she says. “How do you make it to school every day?”
“It’s not bad. You just need four-wheel drive and a shovel.” He smiles, and she smiles back. He seems different, somehow—more relaxed. It makes her feel more relaxed, too. “C’mon, I’ll show you around,” he says.
She follows him to the front of the cabin, which is surprisingly modern, a wall of glass opening onto a broad, high deck. “I’m facing south, so I get the sunrise and the sunset,” he says. “I designed it so I’d be able to see both.”
“This is not what I expected,” she says.
“I used to live in a little shack on this same spot with a woodstove and no phone, but I got sick of roughing it.” He laughs. “That’s my dirty little secret, I guess. I like a good hot shower now and then.”
“I won’t tell.”
“I knew I could trust you.” Leading her up the steps and through the sliding glass doors into a big, sunny room with a high ceiling and exposed beams, he explains how he cut trees on his own property to build the cabin, selecting them carefully so there wouldn’t be a gap in the woods.
Kathryn looks around at the simple furnishings: two Adirondack chairs, a Danish modern off-white couch, a wrought-iron lamp with a parchment shade, a coffee table fashioned from a tree trunk, Bose speakers. An old black rotary phone. Low, built-in bookshelves line the walls; interspersed among the rows of books are pieces of handcrafted pottery, old clocks, and some scattered Americana—an old Coke bottle, a handmade doll, a worn wooden shoe form. “You have good taste,” she murmurs.
“Surprised?” he says, an amused lilt in his voice.
She walks through the living room, setting her bag on the couch, and peers into the immaculate modern kitchen at the far end. “I was envisioning a few deer heads on the wall, maybe a varnished fish.” Wandering over to the fireplace, she scans the framed snapshots on the mantel. There’s a close-up of a lily, a long shot of a woodpile, a mountain stream. “You don’t have any personal photos,” she remarks.
“No,” he says. “I don’t see much point.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in fetishizing people. Photographs do that.”
“Oh. I thought they just helped you remember.”
“You don’t need a photograph to remember,” he says. “What’s important stays in your head. In your heart.”
The sentimentality of these words startles her, and she turns to look at him, but she can’t read his expression. “Are you close to your family?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“Why not?”
He pauses before answering, a small reprimand for her nosiness. “My mother is unstable, and my father died when I was young.”
Like Jennifer, she thinks. “Do you have any siblings?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
He shrugs. “It’s not so much where they are as who they are. I have nothing in common with them.”
“Have they ever been here?”
“No.”
“Has anyone ever been here?” She smiles to show that she’s kidding, but he takes the question seriously.
“I’m not a total recluse, but I’m also not afraid of being alone. What about you, Kathryn?” he asks abruptly. “How do you feel about being alone?”
She walks over to the wall of glass overlooking the water. Outside, the colors seem artificially heightened, like a colorized movie: a robin’s-egg-blue sky, a navy-blue lake, emerald-green trees. “I used to hate it,” she says.
“What changed?”
“I changed.”
“Ah,” he says, “back to our old debate about whether people change. I guess we have a fundamental difference.”
“You don’t think you’ve changed at all in the past ten years?” she asks, turning back to look at him.
He shakes his head. “People learn to tolerate things, or hide things. Our essential natures stay the same.”
“So if you met Jennifer today—” she begins.
“Whoa,” he says, stepping back. “Where did that come from?”
“I just wondered,” she says quickly, her eyes innocently wide, as if the question had randomly occurred to her.
“Why?”
“I wondered if she’s your type.”
He studies her face as if trying to figure out how it works.
“Not that she’s a type,” she adds. “But if she came back—”
“Kathryn, she’s dead,” he says bluntly.
She blinks. “I—How do you know?”
“Everybody knows.”
“What do you mean?”
He rolls his eyes. “C’mon. The girl vanished ten years ago and hasn’t been spotted since. What’d you think, she ran off to be a movie star?”
“But there’s no proof—”
“What proof do you need? At some point you just have to accept the empirical evidence.”
Taking a deep breath, she says, “Okay, then. What happened to her?”
He shrugs. “Oh, everybody has a theory, don’t they? I don’t think it really matters. The point is”—he flips his fingers out aggressively—“she’s gone. That fact alone renders idle speculation meaningless.”
“I don’t agree,” she says. “It does matter.”
“But there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”
“What they can do is find out the truth.”
The corners of his mouth turn up slightly. “My. I never knew you were such a crusader.”
That night by the river flashes through her mind. Come on, Jen. Don’t get deep on me. “I never was,” she says.
He stands there looking at her for a moment, with his hands on his hips. Then he rubs his chin. “Let’s define our terms,” he says. “I’m not sure I believe there is such a thing as the truth. There are facts. But truth is variable, open to interpretation.”
“Facts, then,” Kathryn says. “Facts would be enough.”
“Ah,” he says, “but facts will only take you so far. You can have all the facts and still not know what happened.”
This is going in circles, she thinks; I’m not going to get anywhere this way. “Jennifer was in love with you,” she says. “Is that a fact? Or is it the truth?”
“She was young. She didn’t know what it meant to be in love.”
“She didn’t know,” Kathryn persists, “so it wasn’t true?”
“She wasn’t in love with me,” Hunter says abruptly, turning away. “If she’d been i
n love with me …”
“What?”
The telephone rings, a burbling, old-fashioned sound. They both jump.
“Just a minute,” he says. He goes over to pick it up. “Hello?” Kathryn watches his face.
“Um. It’s for you,” he says with a questioning look.
“Me?”
He nods, holding the phone out.
She walks over, as if she’s in a trance, and takes it from him. “Hello?”
“Kathryn? It’s me, Jack.”
“Oh.” She looks at Hunter, who’s watching her impassively.
“Are you okay? Is everything all right?”
Her head is light with panic, and she needs a moment before she can answer. She takes slow, shallow breaths. “How did you find me?”
“Give me a break,” he says. “It was obvious where you were headed. I’d be pissed as hell right now if I weren’t so concerned.”
“Don’t try to track me down again,” she says.
“What?” She can hear the puzzlement in his voice.
“I told you it was over, Jack.”
He’s silent for a moment. Then he says, “Do you want me to come out there?”
“Not right now.”
“Do you want me to call the police?”
“No.”
“Has he confessed to anything?”
“I told you, no.”
“Listen.” He sighs. “Be careful. Don’t say or do anything that might rile him up. I’m going to wait an hour, and then I’m coming. A guy here knows Hunter; he’s been to his house to play poker. I’ll get directions from him.”
“You can talk all you want, but it’s not going to make a difference,” she says.
“I’ll park at the end of his driveway. And I’ll keep the lights on so you can see me. If I leave the car for any reason, the keys will be under the seat. Okay?”
Hunter’s arms are crossed; he’s leaning against the wall. Kathryn rolls her eyes at him. “This is embarrassing, Jack,” she says. “Why can’t you just accept the truth?”