The Short Answer
Fair warning: this video spoils the whole book, ending included.
Here is the short answer. A thirteen year old girl, Barbara Van Laar, vanishes from a summer camp in August of nineteen seventy-five. Everyone fears she was murdered. She wasn’t. She planned her own disappearance with the camp director, and she is alive on an island at the end. Her older brother Bear, who vanished fourteen years earlier, drowned in an accident that his family covered up.
If you want no spoilers, watch my review instead. Otherwise, here is who did what, and when.
Two Missing Children
The story takes place on the Van Laar Preserve, a huge private estate in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. The Van Laars are a banking family from Albany. On their land sit a log mansion called Self-Reliance, and Camp Emerson, a summer camp where rich families send their kids.
Barbara is the daughter of Peter and Alice Van Laar. She is thirteen, she dresses in black, and this is her first summer at the camp. Her older brother, Peter, nicknamed Bear, disappeared from the same grounds in nineteen sixty-one, at age eight. The book jumps between those two summers, with eight different narrators.
Day One
In August, the counselor Louise wakes and sees the lower bunk by the door is empty. Eight campers, nine beds. Barbara is gone. Louise is twenty-three, and she has a problem: the night before she slipped out to a hidden spot called the Clearing to drink, and the seventeen year old counselor in training, Annabel, who was meant to be on duty, did the same.
So Louise lies. She tells the camp director, T.J. Hewitt, that she and Annabel were both in the cabin. The camp searches, then the state police arrive. Meanwhile Barbara’s bunkmate, Tracy, who had promised to keep Barbara’s secret nights out, goes looking for her and gets lost in the woods. A silent gray haired stranger leads her back.
Nineteen Sixty-One
Now the first mystery. In July of nineteen sixty-one, at the family’s weeklong party, Bear walks out with his grandfather for a hike. The grandfather says Bear went back for a pocketknife and never returned. A groundskeeper named Carl Stoddard is the last person who admits seeing the boy, tying his shoes by the front door.
The searchers find only a small wooden bear on the path, one Carl taught him to whittle. Police zero in on Carl. He collapses during the search and later dies of a heart attack in custody. The family lets the town believe he was the culprit, and his widow spends years trying to clear his name.
The Suspects
In nineteen seventy-five, the case goes to a young state investigator, Judyta Luptack, twenty-six, the first woman investigator in her unit in New York. Her mentor is Denny Hayes. Their prime suspect is John Paul McLellan, the son of the Van Laars’ lawyer, and Louise’s boyfriend.
He turned up that night, beaten, after a fight in the Clearing with a camp cook named Lee Towson. Then he vanished in his blue Trans Am. Police stop him drunk on the highway. In the trunk: a small camp uniform covered in blood. Louise is arrested on drug charges. And fingerprints tie John Paul to a fire tower cabin on Hunt Mountain, where Barbara had said she met a boyfriend.
The Escaped Killer
There is another suspect, and the campers whisper his name. Jacob Sluiter, convicted of eleven murders in the early sixties, escaped from prison in July. The book follows him in short chapters as he moves north through summer homes, and it makes him a real threat.
Then police catch him asleep in a house near North Creek. Judy interviews him. He says he never touched Barbara. But he claims to know where Bear is. He leads investigators by canoe across Lake Joan to a pile of stones at the foot of a cliff. Under it lie a child’s bones. Dental records confirm it is Bear.
What Happened To Bear
Sluiter says he saw a man bury the boy in nineteen sixty-one, while he was hiding in a cave nearby. He did not kill Bear. The truth comes in a flashback told by Vic Hewitt, T.J.’s father, who ran the camp back then.
During the party, Alice, drunk and unsteady, took Bear out in a rowboat. A storm hit, the boat filled and flipped, and Bear drowned. His grandfather found Alice screaming at the boathouse. He dived, and found the boy dead under the hull, his clothing hooked on an oarlock. It was an accident.
The Cover-Up
What turns an accident into a crime is what they did next. Peter, Bear’s father, and his own father decided that Alice must never know, and that the family name, and the bank, must be protected. They told Vic to help them, or lose the camp. Vic carried Bear across the lake in a canoe and buried him at the base of a rock face.
Alice was kept sedated and told “There was no boat. That was a dream.” The family said Bear had wandered off. And T.J., a child of about twelve, saw it all, and was asked to stay silent. Carl Stoddard took the blame, and the Van Laars let him.
What Happened To Barbara
Now Barbara. Her only chapter is near the end, set on the night she disappears. T.J. and Barbara have planned this together. Barbara’s parents are about to send her to a program called Élan in the fall. She wants to stay with T.J. and Vic, the people she calls her true family.
All summer, T.J. has trained her at night in survival skills. That was the secret outing, not a boyfriend. T.J. plants the bloody clothes, which came from an injury Barbara suffered on the Survival Trip, in John Paul’s trunk, and drives Barbara to a cabin on an island, fifty miles north. The plan lasts only until Barbara turns eighteen.
The Slaughterhouse
The turn comes when Judy follows a rumor about the Hewitt family history to an old farm building on the Preserve. She climbs the stairs of the slaughterhouse at night, hears old-fashioned music, and finds a padlocked door. She shoots off the lock.
Inside is Vic Hewitt, confused and elderly, in a bed. He says, “I guess you’re here about Bear,” and then, “I only helped.” T.J. walks in armed and calm, and suggests that Judy tie them up, back to back, with rope from the granary. Judy does, goes for backup, and drives the Hewitts away in a patrol car. By the next day T.J. is at headquarters, ready to sign a statement.
Clues Along The Way
Looking back, the clues are there. A little camper named Christopher tells Judy he saw Barbara walk into T.J.’s tent on the Survival Trip, and visit her cabin every night. Judy first fears the worst about T.J., then learns Louise’s side of the story, and drops that idea.
Then there is the pink room. Barbara’s mother had her bedroom repainted pink while she was away. Under the paint, a conservator finds a mural, with a river whose waves spell the initials of Barbara and John Paul. The investigators take that as proof of a romance. The book lets you decide how deliberate it was.
The Island
T.J. and Vic confess about Bear, partly to keep another innocent person from being framed. Barbara’s father and grandfather are indicted. Then Judy, in September, follows a hunch from a conversation with Louise about a pinned map on T.J.’s wall. On her day off she swims half a mile across a cold lake to an island.
There she sees Barbara, standing on the shore. Judy asks if she is all right. Barbara says yes, and asks the same. Judy asks if Barbara wants to be left alone. After a moment, Barbara says yes. Judy swims back and leaves her there. The book ends on the pines, closing around the girl like a curtain.
Who Did What
Let’s line up the timeline. Nineteen sixty-one: Bear drowns, and the Peters, Vic and T.J. cover it up. Nineteen seventy-five, Day One: Barbara disappears. Day Three: Sluiter is caught. Day Four: Bear’s bones are found.
Day Five: Judy finds Vic locked away above a slaughterhouse. Day Six: T.J. confesses about nineteen sixty-one. September: Judy finds Barbara. So the two disappearances are linked, but not the way the suspects suggested. A killer didn’t take either child. The adults around them made choices.
Where Everyone Ends Up
Alice is not charged, because too much time has passed. Her husband and his father are charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice. Carl Stoddard is cleared after death, and the newspaper photo shows his family. Vic may be charged, but is unlikely to serve time.
Louise lives in Shattuck with her brother Jesse and will testify against John Paul for assaulting her. Annabel admits she was with John Paul that night. Tracy goes home to Long Island, believing Barbara is alive. And Judy goes back to her own rental near Ray Brook, with what she knows.
The Ending Explained
Why does it work? The book asks who gets believed, and who gets protected. Carl, a poor groundskeeper, takes the blame for a rich family’s secret. Louise, from a poor town, is treated as guilty from the first hour. Barbara can only be safe by disappearing.
And the planted evidence does three jobs. It sends the police the wrong way. It points at the man who once beat Louise. And it pulls the spotlight back onto the Van Laars, which is how the truth about Bear finally comes out. That is Judy’s theory as she swims, and it fits everything we see.
My take, and this is opinion, is that the ending is satisfying because it gives Barbara the one thing nobody else in her family gave her: a choice. If you want to talk about it, tell me in the comments whether you think Judy was right to leave her there. The full guide and my review are on bookexplained.com, in the page for The God of the Woods.
