The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  “I do know. I’d have stayed right there at the depot in Jeff City. And I’d have been by myself.” He touched the corner of his glasses and nodded. “I’m that kind of person,” he said.

  At eight o’clock that evening Harriet called the on-duty manager of Living Cottage No. 8 and reported that she and Wyatt Huddy had gathered branches and grass trimmings from her backyard, gone for a walk, and had dinner together. He’d shown every indication of enjoying these activities. His state of mind was calm. She said that, in the ten hours he’d been her guest, Wyatt had been at all times pleasant and cooperative.

  “And where is Wyatt now?” the cottage manager asked. “What’s he doing while we’re speaking?”

  “He’s upstairs in the guest room,” Harriet explained. “I’ve got the radio turned on for him. He’s listening to the Cardinals play the Dodgers. He’s got his game cards out and he’s doing his thing.”

  “His thing?”

  “He’s keeping track of each play—the strikes and hits and errors and so forth.” Through the phone line she could hear the cottage manager typing these comments into a computer—a scuttling click, click, click.

  “That sounds like a nice way to spend the evening,” the cottage manager said. “Thank you. We’ll talk again tomorrow, Ms. Foster.”

  “Yes, we will,” Harriet said. “Tomorrow. Goodbye.”

  In nearly all her dealings with the Gateway staff, Harriet had to rein in the urge to speak forcefully on Wyatt’s behalf. She’d figured out a long time ago that any argument she might wage would be both futile and unnecessary.

  Still though, to the officious cottage manager, Harriet wanted to say, Look here now. You have a job to do. We both know that. But we also know that Wyatt Huddy has never acted out—never lost control, never screamed or made threats. More important, he’s never harmed a staff member or living cottage resident. And he never would. Harriet could vouch for him. She could promise. If necessary, she’d put up everything she owned as collateral. She was prepared to offer a personal guarantee.

  All of this she was ready to do from the vantage point of her handsome kitchen—more than a hundred miles from the weedy ruins of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp, more than fifteen years removed from the night Christopher Waterhouse had loaded Evie Hicks into the camp van and taken her for a ride along County Road H.

  Chapter Seventeen

  On that night, June 27, 1996, at Kindermann Forest, she’d not been able to offer any guarantees.

  She’d stood outside The Sanctuary, under a dome of hazy floodlight, and pushed the sweat back from her bangs. “What one of us should do,” she’d said to Wyatt. “What you should probably do . . .”

  Fortunately, he’d understood. He rose from the picnic table and flexed his arms to show her how capable he was. “I’ll take a walk,” he said. “I’ll see if I can find them.”

  How very grateful she was to hear this. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Wyatt.” She stood there weary and shaken and watched him march off into the darkness.

  Inside her chest a tightly coiled knot of feeling was beginning to unwind—a slackening of her panic. Her determination, too. She could feel it draining away, the persuasiveness she’d needed to enlist Wyatt Huddy to her cause, the strength it took to make large decisions. Small decisions were still within her reach. She noticed Wyatt’s open book on the picnic table and decided to scoop it up and tuck the book under her arm. She had modest plans to safe-keep Lives of the American Presidents until it could be returned to its grateful owner.

  Across the open meadow the lighted windows of the infirmary seemed to wink at her. She wanted—ached really—to be back at her work desk, back among the open medical files, the hum and chilly breath of the air conditioner. The telephone, too. Perhaps she’d make use of the phone. The police could be called. Not could, she warned herself, must.

  She broke into a loping jog along the grassy border of the roadway. Once she’d drawn closer, she could see the infirmary door hanging open. Poised on the lighted threshold to the infirmary was a figure, a person, leaning out the doorway a moment and scanning the darkness, then withdrawing back inside.

  The person was state hospital camper Mary Ann Hornicker. Mute and retarded, Mary Ann was able to convey a complicated sense of crisis just by bouncing up and down on her small feet and clutching the hemline of her billowy pajama top.

  Harriet sprinted across the infirmary yard. Easy does it, she chided herself. It was important to remember that this would most likely be a small crisis—wet bedsheets maybe, or something messier on the bathroom floor.

  She took a deep, steadying breath and, upon entering the infirmary, headed straight for her living quarters.

  The covers on James’s empty cot had been thrown back, hastily it seemed to Harriet. No sign of the boy huddled beneath the cot or squeezed under Harriet’s bed. Stunned, she wheeled back toward the infirmary. In Mary Ann Hornicker’s wide-eyed and freckled face, Harriet saw the flicker of something—an awareness, a cringing sense of obligation. Mary Ann Hornicker must have seen James cross into the infirmary and step out the front door—step or been frightened. Perhaps he’d been chased.

  It was too much for Harriet. Too much to bear the thought of her son wailing in anguish, running out into the darkness, toward graver dangers. Just to imagine it made her wild and belligerent.

  “What did you . . . WHAT DID YOU DO?” she screamed at Mary Ann Hornicker and at the other infirmary patient, Nancy Klotter, who was burrowed into her bunk, a sheet drawn up over her head. “Did you SCARE him?” Harriet shouted.

  They would not, either of them, engage with her.

  “DID YOU SCARE HIM?” she screamed.

  No answer from Mary Ann Hornicker or Nancy Klotter. Or rather, no intelligible answer. Nancy Klotter, under the tent of her bedsheet, pretended to writhe and moan from some terrible quaking sickness. Mary Ann Hornicker took a few unsteady steps forward. She unsealed her lips. Her plump throat convulsed. The round and unremarkable features of her face began to tighten and crease until they’d contorted into a mask of violent straining. From her open mouth came a dry clicking of teeth, a homely croak.

  Aggrieved, Harriet stumbled out into the infirmary yard and ran unthinkingly toward the mess hall. “James?” she called out. “James?” In the hall she flipped on as many wall switches as she could find. The fluorescent lights flared. The heavy tables, the long serving counter, the gas range and ovens all blinked into view.

  But it made no sense to look here. James had never shown interest in the mess hall or kitchen. He wasn’t the type to rise in the night for a snack. She made herself stop and concentrate. The possibilities she overturned were heartbreaking and grim.

  She threw open the mess hall doors and took off running down the gravel pathway. As she ran, she scanned the open meadow, lush and rolling and edged with dark, spindly tree shadows. No movement at all on the wide surface of the meadow. No strolling people. No loping dogs even. Two paths led into the woods: one to the sleeping cabins, the other to the swimming pool. A pair of adult figures—love-struck counselors by the look of them—were slipping away hand in hand down the swimming pool path.

  She nearly called out to them. But what a time-consuming chore to try to explain herself, to shout her message across the darkened meadow. My son is missing. He is everything to me. She’d have to make it clear to this couple. Whatever you’re feeling for one another right now, it does not compare to the way I cherish my son.

  She took the path to the sleeping cabins and entered the woods. Her breaths were loud and grunting, the tree-shrouded pathway obscenely dark. But she was able to track her footsteps on the white gravel. At the second fork in the pathway she clambered up a wood walkway and arrived at a concrete landing. She pounded her open hand against the screen door of Cabin Two.

  Gibby Tumminello, the assigned night watch counselor, came to the door.

  “James,” she said out of breath. “My son, James.” How much feeling there was squee
zed into these three words. “He’s run off. He’s gone missing.” Her wrecked expression seemed to have made it clear to Gibby: she wasn’t talking about a boyhood lark. This was a crisis.

  “I want you to do two things,” she said. “I want you to help me search the whole cabin for James. Every room. Every inch. And I want you to make sure that the worst troublemakers you have—Dennis Dugan and Frederick Torbert—are here in the cabin. I want to be sure they’re accounted for.”

  Gibby gave her a wide-eyed nod. Under normal circumstances, he was a feckless and deeply immature young man, too full of boyish humor to warrant much attention from the girl counselors. But he seemed to grasp at once the gravity of Harriet’s request. “Will do,” he said. “Will do, Nurse Harriet.” He grabbed a flashlight and darted into the right-side sleeping barracks.

  She didn’t have to go far to find Dennis Dugan and Frederick Torbert. They’d been moved, along with their bunk mattresses, out onto the floor of the screened porch: Dennis, his mouth crooked open, sleeping on his side like a collapsed drunk, Frederick Torbert awake and staring up at Harriet from beneath the ridge of his jutting forehead. Earlier in the day he’d reached out with his bandaged hand and rubbed the crotch of her blue jean shorts. Maybe she was paranoid. But it was easy now to believe he was staring at her and turning the memory of that illicit touch over and over in his mind like a shiny penny. He raised himself up with his brawny arms.

  “Lay back down, Frederick,” she hissed at him. “Lay back down, God damn it.”

  After a moment of silent calculation, he did what he was told. Perhaps it had been the look on Harriet’s face, the scowling authority brought on by this particular emergency.

  She stepped across the porch and entered the left-side barracks, a long, stuffy wreck of a room crammed with off-center bunk beds. A terrible salty-sweet body odor had filled the barracks, arising, she was sure, from the filthy underwear and socks and sweat-soaked T-shirts that were mounded wall to wall across the floor. What a nightmare, this laundry. Two days from now it would have to be stuffed into duffel bags and dragged reeking back onto the state hospital buses. Nearly all of the Cabin Two male campers had fallen into an exhausted sleep, their odd faces gone slack and unguarded. “James,” she whispered urgently. “James.” She stepped over an outstretched arm and searched, row by row, all the way to the far corner of the barracks. None of her worst imaginings proved true. The huddled form in the corner of the cabin was a listing duffel bag and not a boy. The mound in the bed beside a sleeping camper was wet towels and not a child. Still, it shook her to the core to have imagined, if only for a second, such obscene possibilities. She stumbled back to the front porch. By then Gibby Tumminello had completed his search of the right-side barracks and the Cabin Two bathroom and come up empty-handed.

  The next stage of her search must have looked to an outsider like a pure expression of panic or the most crippling kind of indecision. She ran to the screen door of men’s Cabin One, peered inside, but did not go in. A notion came to her, and she set off running along the pathway, out of the woods, up the sloping hill of the meadow toward The Sanctuary. There might be other off-duty counselors—in addition to the Lonesome Three—lounging on the Sanctuary couches. She would storm inside and demand they form a search party.

  But halfway across the open meadow she spotted a strong light brightening the window of Schuller Kindermann’s cottage. The presence of this light derailed her hasty plans. She was suddenly indignant. It was outrageous, really. None of what was happening tonight—the crisis with Evie Hicks and Christopher Waterhouse, the crisis with James—would have occurred if Schuller Kindermann hadn’t been so disastrously wrong in his decisions. Again and again he’d proved himself to be an incompetent leader. An absent leader. If she had any real hope of help, it would have to come from outside camp. She’d have to call the Ellsinore Police. She would place this call from the camp office. But first she would pound on Schuller’s cottage door and inform him of the twin emergencies. She’d let him know what a fool he was.

  She bounded up the pine board steps of his porch. Her hand was raised and ready to knock. She looked through the screen door window and nearly collapsed in relief.

  Inside the cottage, sitting on stools before a brightly lit drafting table, were Schuller Kindermann and her son, James.

  “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. S
he 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.”