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Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania

T he three teenage boys are racing through the trees pretending they’re Marines.

This is the Poconos. Racing around in the woods with knives or guns is normal here.

In these dense woods, the kids can play paintball all day.

And Airsoft. And they can hunt critters.

And they can lose one another for hours on end.

Two of the boys don’t notice exactly where the third boy, a tall kid with bulging eyes, positions himself.

They don’t see if he’s close to the house or even inside it.

The house is invisible from the road. Its owner, Mark Baylis, a former Navy SEAL who is the father of one of the boys, bought it for precisely that reason.

He liked its remoteness, that it was surrounded by woods. Mark is a skilled hunter. Of animals but also of men.

But even though he’s a Special Forces veteran with skills and experience, he cannot catch the person who is repeatedly stealing his knives, his coins, his prescription pills, his girlfriend’s jewelry.

It maddens him. He keeps calling the cops, but they are worse than useless.

They show up, file a report. Do nothing.

So Baylis stays frustrated. Could the thief be one of the veterans he houses nearby as part of the charity he founded? That’s a bad feeling.

He doesn’t put it together until years later that the thief must have been one of his son’s friends.

He doesn’t see it in the moment, but he’s sure, later, how it happened: The first time, he believes, the tall, pale kid who weirded him out waited for the others to run off into the trees, then forced the lock and entered the garage where Mark kept his collection of army knives. And took one.

On the next visit, Mark thinks, he took another. One by one, they vanished. Next, it was Baylis’s coin collection. Worth twenty-five thousand dollars.

Baylis talks to his son Jack and his nephew Brandon about the thefts. He says he’s going to catch the thief if they try again. Shoot him.

Jack tells the third kid, whose name is Bryan, that his dad is pissed. Bryan tells Jack he reveres his father. That’s what he says, or at least what he puts in a text.

But what he does—or what Mark thinks he does—smacks of something different than straight-up hero worship.

Someone starts to stalk Mark Baylis. The stalker hides in those trees, camouflaged, munching on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, dropping the wrappers on the ground, waiting for Mark to leave on one of his orange motorbikes or in his pickup truck.

The stalker forces the door open with a knife and heads for the bathroom, where Baylis keeps old prescription drugs.

And the thief can guess where he’d keep jewelry: in the bedroom. One time the thief is up in the bedroom and hears wheels in the driveway. Baylis is back.

Later, much later, Baylis puts the scene together in his head.

He comes to believe that Bryan, knowing he has the element of surprise on his side, hides, waits for the veteran to walk toward the back of the house, then sprints out the front door and into the woods he knows will protect him.

Through the trees and onto the road.

Safe.

For now.