"Maybe there will be a ghost story about the girl who just disappeared," she said.
"Excuse me?" Ludwig said. "I don't know to what you're referring."
"You mean you didn't hear?" the woman said. A ripple went through the room. Some seemed to know what she was talking about, while others craned their necks to look at her as though they didn't know anything. "Some girl, a student here, she disappeared yesterday. Vanished into thin air."
"Are you joking?" Ludwig said.
"No, not at all," she said, and many other heads nodded in agreement as though they had heard the news as well.
It took Ludwig a moment to realize that his mouth was hanging open. He could imagine the color disappearing from his face, like water running out of a drain. The class was looking at him now, a hundred sets of eyes expecting a response, something profound, something adult.
But he didn't have anything to offer.
He looked at his watch. They still had twenty minutes to go.
But he couldn't wait.
"Okay," he said. "That's good enough for today."
He jammed his notes into his briefcase and left as fast as he could.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Nate Ludwig always worried he'd turn into the kind of academic he saw at conferences. They were men and women with greasy hair and thick glasses, the kind who wore out-of-date clothes and blinked in the light of day as though they'd spent years holed up in small, windowless rooms, shuffling paper and dusty books, ignoring the world around them, waiting for a once in a lifetime chance at recognition or importance that never came.
After hearing the news in class that morning, Nate Ludwig thought his time had come.
His hands shook as he turned on the radio in his office and started his computer, desperate for any news of the disappearance he had just heard about.
It's probably nothing, he told himself. College kids come and go like cats. She's probably drunk or off with her boyfriend.
Was it sick of him to wish it were the real deal, that the girl had really disappeared?
To hope that her misfortune would allow him to finally find the clearing in the woods where The Pioneer Club met?
The radio told him nothing. They were into a morning call-in show, people asking a gardening expert what they could do with their perennials in the fall.
Did anybody care about this drivel when important things were happening?
He checked his email and found a campus crime alert that mostly confirmed what his students had already told him. A Fields' student named Jacqueline Foley had gone out for an afternoon bike ride the day before and never came back. She was believed to be riding her bike in the Union Township area, ten miles west of New Cambridge. The email included a map of Jacqueline Foley's usual route, a grid of county roads and two-lane highways. Ludwig knew the area well. He had been studying it in recent months.
Ludwig's desk was a mass of papers—student work, bills, university memoranda—but he always knew how to put his hands on the most important things, the things that made up his research, and he brought out the map he had been working on recently. It was crude and hand-drawn. He had tried doing it on the computer but couldn't get it to work and eventually gave up in favor of the old-fashioned method of a pencil. And he liked the feel of having the map in his hand. He could put it on the floor and stand above, orienting himself to the locations he was studying and thinking about.
And trying to find.
He laid it on his desk and compared it to the map in the email. For the past six months, he had been trying out a new theory concerning the location of the secret meeting place used by the men of The Pioneer Club of New Cambridge. Most of the documents relating to the area's founding were lost when the original courthouse burned to the ground shortly after the Civil War, a fire whose cause was never adequately determined and may have started as the result of arson. Over the years, Ludwig had combed through newspaper clippings, old letters and diaries, the debris of lives he came across in antique stores and estate sales, and through a process of elimination began to narrow the possibilities for the location of the meeting place, and he had come to the conclusion that the site had to lie in Union Township, somewhere in the many acres of woods that covered the area. All he needed was some sort of final confirmation, some contemporary proof that he was on the right track, and now he might just have it, proof in the form of another disappearance.
*
Faith Brenner was just the tip of the iceberg.
Among the documents he had collected over the years, Ludwig had found stories of at least twenty unexplained disappearances, all of them women, all of them long forgotten.
His quest had begun at the county historical society with a letter addressed to a Dr. Upton Jones, a physician and Methodist minister who founded the first church in the township. The letter was dated March 19, 1805 and read: