The Inverted Forest (43 page)

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,”
she said and placed her sweating face against the door screen. She wasn’t heard—could not have been heard above the cottage’s clanky window fan.

At the drafting table Schuller and James had both folded their arms across their chests and tilted their heads forward in a deep and silent consideration of the materials set out before them: papers and rulers and thin colored pencils. They could hardly have been less alike,
the old man and the boy, except in the directness and the intensity of their concentration. By the look of them, you’d think the world depended on their next move—the selection of a pencil, the drawing of a simple line.

She was able, despite the weary trembling in her legs and a sudden rawness in her voice, to enter Schuller Kindermann’s cottage and speak her son’s name. She knelt down and drew him into her arms. “I’ve been out looking for you,” she said and squeezed his lean little body with a fierceness that might have been vengeful. But she didn’t sob into the boy’s ear. She didn’t scold. For now she held him and coaxed forth his explanation.

What had happened was simple enough. An hour earlier he’d stood on his cot in their living quarters and through the window watched his mother wave down the Kindermann Forest van and confront Christopher Waterhouse. The van pulled away. His mother ran after it. James, who didn’t want to be left alone in the infirmary with Nancy Klotter and Mary Ann Hornicker, went after her. Did Nancy and Mary Ann chase after you? Harriet asked. Did they scare you? They didn’t, he said. What did they do then? Nothing, he said and shrugged. But when pressed, he revealed that Mary Ann Hornicker had tried to bring him a cup of water. When he stepped into the infirmary yard, both women tried to get him to put on his socks and shoes. He wouldn’t allow it. He took off in his pajamas and bare feet and ran along the grassy edge of the meadow after his mother, ran until he lost sight of her. Then he saw the bright lamplight in Mr. Kindermann’s window and went to the cottage door and knocked.

What could Harriet say to this? What rule had been broken? Had she ever told the boy that, when she took off running and left him in the company of state hospital patients, he was supposed to stay put?

So it was an awful misunderstanding. A frightening mess. But at
least James had had the good sense to seek refuge in the director’s cottage. In Schuller Kindermann he’d found a willing host. Materials for a craft project had been set out on the table. Together they’d been drafting the outline of a long and mighty suspension bridge.

“James,” she said, “you climb back up on the stool and keep working on your bridge. Mr. Kindermann and I need to talk over some things. If you need anything, you just call out and ask for it, all right?”

He looked altogether surprised by his mother’s calm demeanor, her new leniency. Up he went onto the stool, happy to oblige her.

She motioned Schuller Kindermann to stand with her by the cottage screen door. He did so without protest. His steps were mannered and deliberate. A vague half grin appeared on his patient face. Perhaps he thought he was about to be lectured to by an overwrought mother.

“Mr. Kindermann,” she said. What a vivid little moment this was. The way he looked at her, so tolerant and alert. She nearly reached out and put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

In her coolest and most instructive voice she explained that an emergency was happening at camp tonight. One of the state hospital campers, a young woman named Evie Hicks, had been put into the camp van and taken outside of Kindermann Forest. The person driving the van, the person who’d taken her, was Christopher Waterhouse. He’d done so in order to molest or rape Evie Hicks. Listen, she said. Listen. She wanted to make it absolutely clear to Mr. Kindermann. She wasn’t speculating about Christopher Waterhouse’s intentions. This wasn’t a matter of camp gossip. Christopher meant to molest or rape Evie Hicks. All of this was happening right now. All of this was—

At the drafting table James had swiveled around on his stool. “Mr. Kindermann,” he said. “Can there be ladders on the bridge? Ladders hanging down from the sides?”

Schuller Kindermann squeezed shut his eyes a moment. “Ladders?”
he said. “Yes, I don’t see why not. Go ahead and draw them in if you like.”

“They’ll hang down almost all the way to the water,” James said.

Harriet waited. All of this was happening now, she said. Evie Hicks was out in the camp van with Christopher Waterhouse. This shouldn’t have been allowed to happen, she said. Christopher Waterhouse shouldn’t have been made the new program director. Linda Rucker shouldn’t have been fired. The original Kindermann Forest counselors shouldn’t have been let go for swimming naked at night. All terrible decisions, she said. All of them your decisions, Mr. Kindermann. There’s no one in charge at camp, she said. There’s no one to stop the very worst people—people like Christopher Waterhouse—from doing what they want.

She could have continued on if she liked. It was startling to realize there wasn’t going to be an interruption, a shout of denial, even a scowl of outrage from Schuller Kindermann. Instead he was listening to her with an interest that could best be described as polite, even
kindly.
His hard opinions, his stubbornness, seemed to have dissolved away into nothing.

“I understand,” he said. “I’ve been listening, Nurse Harriet. You’ve made it perfectly clear. You don’t appreciate my . . . decisions. Is there anything else you have to say?”

“Yes,” she said. “You also need to know that I sent Wyatt Huddy out to look for the camp van on County Road H.”

“Remind me again,” Schuller said. “Who is Wyatt Huddy?”

“One of the counselors.”

“Which one?”

How best to identify Wyatt? She might say,
The one who is large and strong.
Or
The one who, with just a little encouragement, just a few affectionate gestures, can be persuaded to do what I want.
She said, “The one with the distorted face.”

Schuller nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I remember now.”

“He shouldn’t be the only one out there, Mr. Kindermann. We need help from the outside. From the police,” she said. “The police in Ellsinore should be called out to camp.”

He stood and weighed this suggestion while rocking back and forth on the heels of his loafers. “The Ellsinore Police,” he said. “You think they’d be able to help us?” He shook his head, mildly. “Maybe we should just wait awhile. Sometimes these problems work themselves out.”

“Not this problem,” she said. “It’s a call that has to be made. I’ll do it if you like.”

He shrugged. “Well, I’m too . . . tired to be making phone calls tonight,” he said. He turned and surveyed the tidy arrangement of furniture in his cottage. He raised his eyebrows wearily. “If a phone call is going to get made tonight, you’re the one who’s going to be handling it.”

“Fine,” she said.

“And when the Ellsinore police chief comes to camp, you’ll speak to him. Can you do that, Nurse Harriet? Can you be the . . . director of this emergency?”

“I can. Yes.”

“Well, that’s good to know,” he said. “But tell me this, please. If you had a place like Kindermann Forest, if you were the director . . . what kind of camp do you think it would be?”

She could do nothing but stare at him perplexed. “I don’t know, Mr. Kindermann,” she said. “I’m sure it would be a hard place to manage. But the first thing, I guess, is that I’d try and make it as safe a place as possible.”

He gave her answer a cool nod of appreciation. “Well,” he said. “I always had it in my mind that I’d make a camp for children who liked to sit someplace quiet and make beautiful things. A camp for a boy like your son, James. That was my idea. But it hardly ever works out that way. You can’t pick and choose which kids come to your camp.
You get all sorts. All kinds of campers. All kinds of counselors.” He shook his head, dismayed. “You can’t control it as well as you hoped,” Schuller said. “After a while, it all gets away from you. It all goes . . .” He held out his thin arms. “Beyond your reach.”

She hoisted James onto her back and carried him in a stooping walk across the meadow toward the infirmary. He wasn’t often awake this late at night, and from his high perch on her back she could feel him turning about and raising his head to take in his surroundings: the clear, star-crowned, temperate night.

She plodded along. Her son’s bare feet bounced against her hips. In time they reached the infirmary yard and climbed the steps. It was easy to believe in the first few moments of their arrival that her two patients, Nancy Klotter and Mary Ann Hornicker, had fled into the night. She stood with James still clinging to her back and squinted into the shadowed darkness of the infirmary. In the back of the room were two mounded forms: Nancy and Mary Ann. Both women had crawled onto bunks and pulled their blankets up over their heads. From the veils of these blankets, they peered out at Harriet, awaiting her wrath.

In the living quarters she placed James in his cot and tried to explain, without scolding, the panic she’d felt when he ran off. “It’s a terrible feeling not to know where you are, James.” Could he, at five years old, fathom this feeling? Maybe not the exact dread that she’d felt, but some version of this fear had sent him running after her in the first place.

She fetched a damp cloth and rubbed down his ankles and bare feet. Tomorrow he’d pay a price for his wandering in scratches and chigger bites. He’d be tired, too. Already his gaze was weighted and slow. He lay back on his bunk and considered his mother. In a short while his eyes fluttered and he turned his face to the pillow.

She went to the infirmary cabinet and found the list of emergency phone numbers. She put the telephone receiver to her ear. A simple matter, really, of dialing a number and offering a few instructions—and yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she moved out onto the infirmary steps and listened for the sound of an approaching automobile. After a few quiet minutes the sound she was waiting for began as a low hum in the distance. Hundreds of yards up the camp roadway there was a flicker of brightness and then, soon enough, the full wash of approaching headlights. A vehicle was rolling along the camp roadway at an almost inchmeal pace.

She stood there on the steps, and the thing she’d been waiting for, the Kindermann Forest camp van, pulled close and stopped before the infirmary. From the van’s stilled engine came a wet clicking and beyond that, from the far corners of the woods, a steady thrum of insects.

The driver’s door creaked open. Wyatt Huddy slipped out and leaned back wearily against the side of the van.

She stepped down into the infirmary yard. “Wyatt . . . ?” she said. Through the windows of the van she could see various shapes still and dark. Otherwise it was hard to determine what the interior might hold. “Wyatt . . . ?” she tried again. “What happened?”

He placed a hand to his forehead and wiped away a smear of sweat. After a moment he cleared his throat and said, “I’m not used to . . .”

“What?”

“Driving at night. The only time I’ve driven is in the daytime.”

“You did all right,” she said. “You made it back. Wyatt, what happened?”

In answer he stood straighter against the van and pointed to the passenger door on its opposite side.

Around the van she went, to the sliding door. She turned the latch, swung it open. There, strapped into the first bench of the van, was Evie Hicks, stripped naked and roused into a flailing state of panic by
the sudden loud squawk of the van door. She shook her head wildly back and forth and pedaled her bare legs. This was for Harriet an altogether traumatic sight. She’d spent a frantic portion of the night stumbling bewildered across the grounds of Kindermann Forest trying to prevent an
imagined
attack on Evie Hicks. Far, far worse now to be presented with the evidence of that attack: the girl’s startled expression, her bare body straining against the seat belts.

It took time to settle Evie down. From Harriet it required not just a calming voice but a willingness to keep her distance. She sat on the running board by the open door and stared out into the darkened meadow. Eventually she said, “All right, Evie. All right now. It’s getting late, isn’t it? We should see about getting you out of this old van, shouldn’t we?” She reached out and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. At once there was a quick pulling away, an awareness.