But all that was hours ago, time’s passage magnified by the distance they had traveled. Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, the last passed entirely in darkness, viewed only through the cones of the Corolla’s headlamps. They’d crossed into Oregon at sunrise on the second morning, traversed the wrinkled plateaus of the state’s arid interior as the day wore away. All around them the empty fields and golden, windswept hills were blooming with purple sagebrush. To keep alert, Wolgast drove with the windows open, swirling the interior of the car with its sweet perfume: the smell of boyhood, of home. In midafternoon he felt the Toyota’s engine straining; they’d begun, at last, to climb. As darkness was falling the Cascades rose to meet them, a brooding bulk that sawtoothed the rays of the setting sun and lit the western sky in a fiery collage of reds and purples, like a wall of stained glass. High up, their rocky tips glinted with ice.
“Amy,” he said. “Wake up, honey. Look.”
Amy lay across the backseat, covered with a cotton blanket. She was still weak, had slept most of the last two days. But the worst seemed over. Her skin looked better, the waxy pallor of fever worn away. That morning she’d actually managed a few bites of an egg sandwich and some sips of chocolate milk that Wolgast had bought at a drive-through. One funny thing: she was acutely sensitive to sunlight. It seemed to cause her physical pain, and not just to her eyes. Her whole body recoiled from it, as if from an electric charge. At a service station he’d purchased her a pair of sunglasses-movie-star pink, the only ones small enough to fit her face-and a foam trucker’s cap with the John Deere logo, to pull down over her eyes. But even with the hat and glasses, she’d barely peeked her head from the blanket all day.
At the sound of his voice, she rose against the tidal pull of sleep and followed his gaze out the windshield. Still wearing the pink sunglasses, she squinted into the sunlight, cupping her hands around her temples. The wind of the open car tossed the long strands of hair about her face.
“It’s… bright,” she said quietly.
“The mountains,” he explained.
He drove the final miles by instinct, following unmarked roads that took him ever deeper into the forested folds of the mountains. A hidden world: where they were going there were no towns, no houses, no people at all. At least that was how he remembered it. The air was cold and smelled of pine. The gas gauge was nearly on empty. They passed a darkened general store that Wolgast recalled vaguely, though the name was not familiar-MILTON’S DRY GOODS/HUNTING, FISHING LIC.-and began their final ascent. Three forks later he was on the verge of panic, thinking he’d gotten them lost, when a series of small details seemed to rise before him out of the past: a certain slope of the roadway, a glimpse of star-dressed sky as they rounded a bend, and then, beneath the Toyota’s wheels, the expansive accoustics of open air as they crossed the river. All just as it had been when he was small, his father beside him, driving him up to camp.
Moments later they came to a break in the trees. By the side of the road stood a weathered sign reading, BEAR MOUNTAIN CAMP, and beneath that, hanging from a pair of rusted chains, FOR SALE, with the name of a real estate agency and a phone number with a Salem exchange. The sign, like many Wolgast had seen along the road, was pocked with bullet holes.
“This is the place,” he said.
The camp’s driveway, a mile long, traced the crest of a high embankment above the river, then hooked right around an outcrop of boulders and took them into the trees. The place, he knew, had been closed up for years. Would the buildings even still be there? What would they find? The charred ruins of a devastating fire? Roofs rotted and collapsed under the weight of winter snow? But then, out of the trees, the camp emerged: the building the boys had called Old Lodge-because it was old even then-and behind and around it, the smaller outbuildings and cabins, about a dozen all told. Beyond lay more woods and a pathway that descended to the lake, two hundred acres of glasslike stillness held in place by an earthen dam and shaped like a kidney bean. As they approached the lodge, the Toyota’s headlights flared across the front windows, momentarily creating the illusion of lights coming on inside, as if their arrival were expected-as if they had traveled not across the width of the country but back through time itself, across the gulf of thirty years to when Wolgast was a boy.
He pulled the car up to the porch and shut off the ignition. Wolgast felt, strangely, the urge to say a prayer of thanks, to acknowledge their arrival in some manner. But it had been many years since he’d done this-too many. He climbed from the car, into the stunning cold. His breath gathered in equine streams around his face. The beginning of May, and still the air seemed to hold the memory of winter. He stepped around to the trunk and keyed the lock. When he’d opened it the first time, in the parking lot of a Walmart west of Rock Springs, he’d found it full of empty paint cans. Now it held supplies-clothes for the two of them, food, toiletries, candles, batteries, a camp stove and bottles of propane, a few obvious tools, a first aid kit, a pair of down-filled sleeping bags. Sufficient to get them settled, though he would have to go down the mountain soon enough. Under the glow of the trunk’s bulb, he found what he was looking for and ascended the porch.
The hasp on the front door gave way with one hard yank of the Toyota’s tire iron. Wolgast turned on his flashlight and stepped inside. If Amy woke up alone, she might be frightened; but still he wanted to have a quick look around, to make sure the place was safe. He tried the light switch by the door, but nothing happened; the power was off, of course. Probably there was a backup generator somewhere, although he’d need fuel to get it going, and even then, who knew if it would work at all. He shone his beam around the room: a disorganized assemblage of wooden tables and chairs, a cast-iron woodstove, a metal office desk shoved against the wall, and above it a bulletin board, bare except for a single sheet of paper, curling with age. The windows were uncovered, but the glass had held; the space was tight and dry and, with the woodstove going, would warm up fast.
He followed his beam toward the bulletin board. WELCOME CAMPERS, SUMMER 2014, the paper read, and beneath it, filling the page, a list of names-the usual Jacobs and Joshuas and Andrews, but also a Sacha and even an Akeem-each followed by the number of the cabin to which he’d been assigned. Wolgast had been a camper for three years, the last-the summer he’d turned twelve-working as a junior counselor, sleeping in a cabin with a group of younger boys, many of them beset by a homesickness so debilitating it was like an illness. Between the ones who cried all night and the midnight antics of their tormentors, Wolgast had barely slept a wink all summer. And yet he’d never been so happy; those days were, in many ways, the best of his boyhood, a golden hour. It was, in fact, the very next autumn that his parents had taken him to Texas and all their troubles began. The camp had been owned by a man named Mr. Hale-a high school biology teacher with the deep voice and barrel rib cage of a linebacker, which he once had been. He was a friend of Wolgast’s father, though he’d never acknowledged this friendship through any special treatment that Wolgast could recall.
Mr. Hale had lived upstairs during the summers with his wife, in some kind of apartment. That’s what Wolgast was looking for now. He stepped through a swinging door off the common area and found himself in the kitchen: rustic pine cabinets, a pegboard of oxidizing pots and saucepans, a sink with an old-fashioned pump, and a stove and refrigerator with its door half open, all surrounding a wide pine-plank table. Everything was coated with a heavy scrim of dust. The stove was an old commercial unit, white steel, with a clock on the faceplate, the hands frozen at six minutes after three. He turned one of the burner dials and heard a hiss of gas.