The McGees Flee to Tashmore Pond

The McGees’ flight to Tashmore Pond is a hard-won pause in their escape, not its resolution. Two days after the burning at the Manders farm, Andy McGee and Charlie McGee reach Granther McGee’s cottage in a battered Willys Jeep. The journey brings them to shelter for the winter, but Andy’s growing recognition that they are still cornered turns the refuge into a place where flight must give way to a decision about what to do next.

The Road from the Manders Farm

The Jeep was already in poor condition before Irv Manders directed them onto muddy woods roads, and the rough route did little to help it. At dusk, after the long day that began in Hastings Glen, they were still less than twenty yards from the end of the second, worse road. Route 22 lay below them, hidden by thick bushes; they could hear passing cars and trucks but could not see the highway. They spent the night bundled together in the Jeep, trying to keep warm.

They set out again shortly after five the next morning, while daylight was still only a faint whiteness in the east. Charlie looked pale, listless, and exhausted. She did not ask whether shifted roadblocks might trap them, and Andy understood that if the barriers had moved east, they would be caught. Abandoning the vehicle was no practical alternative: Charlie was in no condition to walk, and neither was he. Their escape depended on keeping the failing Jeep moving.

Andy pulled onto the highway and spent the October day taking secondary roads beneath a white sky that threatened rain without delivering it. Charlie slept much of the time. Her sleep worried him: he feared she was using it to flee what had happened rather than to begin facing it. Her troubled silence gave him no reassurance. He tried to comfort her by admitting that fathers could be frightened too, making his own fear part of the bond between them rather than concealing it behind promises of certainty.

Reaching Granther’s Property

They slept another night in the Jeep and were back on the road by six in the morning. The clouds broke; by ten, the day had become clear and warm for October. After crossing into Vermont, they passed apple orchards where men worked among the trees on ladders and trucks stood loaded with bushel baskets of apples. At eleven-thirty they left Route 34 for a narrow, rutted dirt road marked as private property. Andy felt the tension in his chest loosen: they had reached Granther McGee’s place.

The drive continued for perhaps a mile and a half toward the pond. Red and gold leaves swirled in front of the Jeep as the road divided near the first glimpses of water. A heavy steel chain blocked the smaller branch. Its rusted yellow sign warned against trespassing by order of the county sheriff, and old marks around several dimples suggested that someone had once shot at it with a .22. The sign and chain marked the boundary of the property; the old damage also made the barrier feel less like a newly raised defense than a long-standing feature of the place.

Andy got out and examined his keyring. A leather tab bearing his initials was almost worn away; Vicky Tomlinson McGee had given it to him for Christmas before Charlie was born. Nearly two dozen keys hung from the ring. He thought of how keys gathered around a life, including keys that had outlasted the uses for which they were kept. At the threshold of Granther’s property, the small, worn object brought his earlier family life into view beside the urgent task of finding refuge.

A Winter Shelter, Not an Ending

That winter, Andy’s desperate assurance that things would somehow be all right seemed, for a while, to have come true. The cottage was not an idyllic refuge. Charlie caught a cold after Christmas and remained sick until early April; she had a fever for a time. Andy gave her half aspirin tablets and set himself a limit: if the fever did not fall within three days, he would take her to a doctor across the lake in Bradford, regardless of the consequences. The fever subsided, and the cold became a persistent nuisance rather than an immediate crisis.

The harsh weather tested them in other ways. Andy suffered a minor case of frostbite in March. On a subzero night in February, he overloaded the woodstove and nearly set the two of them on fire; Charlie woke and discovered that the cottage had become far too hot. The reversal matters: the child whose own power made fire dangerous to approach was the one who noticed the danger created by her father’s heating the house. Their survival depended not only on hiding, but on ordinary vigilance in a place where cold itself could threaten them.

They marked the passage of time through birthdays: Andy’s on December 14 and Charlie’s on March 24. Charlie turned eight. She had grown past her father’s elbow, and her hair had grown long enough that she braided it to keep it out of her eyes. These domestic details register what the winter offered them—time together and the chance to watch Charlie grow—without undoing the circumstances that had driven them there.

The Refuge and the Decision to Act

Tashmore Pond gave Andy space to think. In February, he crossed the frozen lake on a path less than a mile across, while the pond stretched far to either side. Four feet of snow covered the ice. The white expanse, bordered by pines beneath a hard winter sky, made the walk quiet and physically demanding. The exertion cleared his thoughts; it also recalled a kind of bodily effort he had forgotten while teaching literature and grading papers.

In that silence, Andy faced what the cottage could not change: he and Charlie had come to Granther’s place for the winter, but they were still running. The uneasy attention of the old-timers gathered around the stove, with their pipes and inquisitive eyes, brought home that they remained exposed even within a family refuge. Andy thought that they had been driven into a corner. He was angry that his family, American citizens in a supposedly open society, had endured his wife’s murder, Charlie’s kidnapping, and the continuing hunt for the two of them.

He considered getting their story to one person or several, believing that public exposure might bring the pursuit to an end. He had not done so earlier partly because the strange hypnosis connected with Vicky Tomlinson McGee’s death had continued to affect him. He also feared that Charlie would be displayed as a freak or institutionalized, whether for the country’s supposed good or her own. Beneath those concerns, he recognized a further obstacle: he had lied to himself, even after seeing his wife crammed into the laundry ironing closet with a gag in her mouth, by continuing to believe that the family would eventually be left alone. The winter refuge therefore marks a change in Andy’s understanding of their situation. Tashmore has bought them shelter and time, but his walks on the ice make clear that safety cannot simply be waited for; he must confront the possibility of making their story known.