The small, wooded campground was on the eastern side of the lake, only ten miles from the village, and yet upon my arrival I felt like I was deep into the Adirondacks. The spot felt isolated, off the beaten path, though there were a couple of tents bivouacked amid the trees.
I wandered for a couple of minutes through the grounds, taking in the mossy, mushroomy scent of early autumn. As my feet swished through the dry leaves, it was hard to picture Page and Amy deciding to spend two days and nights here. Maybe Amy had developed a taste for the outdoors without Kayla knowing about it, becoming a girl who loved L.L.Bean gear and the smell of Sterno in the morning, but that didn’t gel with the images I’d seen of her and Page in thePost Star. With their cute clothes and blown-out hair, they’d looked like city girls biding their time upstate.
Even more improbable as a destination for the two women was Muller’s. The bar turned out to be a full twenty-five-minute drive southeast from the campground, situated in the tiny, not-very-picturesque town of Fort Ann. The bar itself, in a tired, three-story brick building, looked like a total dive.
I slid out of the Jeep, and in the distance to the east I could see a row of soft-hued mountains. Not the Adirondacks anymore. I was looking at the Green Mountains of Vermont.
I climbed the saggy steps outside the bar and swung open the door, letting the refrains of a mournful country-western song spill onto the porch. The lights were low inside, but I could see the place was mostly empty, except for a half-dozen guys on barstools, a couple with the tops of their butt cracks smiling rudely in my direction. The place smelled musty, with a top note of BO.
It took a minute for me to focus, and as soon as I did, I saw the bartender’s eyes flickering in surprise.
“What can I get ya?” he asked, moseying over.
I was briefly tempted to say “a cooties shot” but asked for a Bud instead. I figured being a paying customer would afford me an ounce of leverage.
The bartender thrust his hand in the cooler, yanked out a Budweiser, and set the bottle and a glass on the greasy wooden bar.
“I’ve got a question, too, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Try me, and we’ll see how I do.”
By this point a couple of the dudes at the bar had turned their heads to investigate.
“I’m wondering if by any chance you’ve worked here for at least ten years?”
He snorted. “You mean ’cause the 401(k) plan is so damn good? Nah, I’ve only been here a couple of years.”
“What about the owner?”
“You doing an oral history on the town’s hot spots?”
I smiled again. “No, I’m trying to track down information on a girl named Amy Hunt. She disappeared ten years ago, after stopping here.”
The song about heartaches and regrets had ended with a long, woeful chord, and the place went deadly still. The only sound now was from the buzz of a neon beer sign above the bar. And I could have sworn I saw the shoulders on one of the customers tighten. There was, I realized, something vaguely ominous in the air, like the barometric pressure had suddenly nose-dived.
“The current owner’s had the place for maybe five years,” he said. “And the dude he bought it from is dead.”
“Have you heard about the case, though? Amy apparently stopped by with a friend around seven o’clock on a Sunday night.”
His lips parted for a split second and then pressed back together, like he was about to answer one way and then changed his mind.
“Nope,” he said finally.
I didn’t see any other options at this point. I thanked the bartender, setting my mostly full glass on the bar. Unlike Sheryl Crow, I didn’t like a good beer buzz early in the mornin’.
Back in the Jeep, I brooded over the scene in the bar. What in God’s name had Amy and Page been doing in such a dump—and so far from their campsite? If they’d wantedbetter action than watching chipmunks scamper around their campsite, why not head to a bar in the village of Lake George, which would have been about ten minutes from the campsite?
An explanation I couldn’t ignore: they’d come here to meet up with someone. And perhaps that person was responsible for their disappearance. He could have forced them into his car when they left the bar, though there were two of them and they reportedly had consumed only one beer each. But then what became ofAmy’scar, anyway?
I was a few minutes out of town when my phone rang. It was Marc Horton, the former FBI profiler. I could tell from the Bluetooth sound effect that he was probably in his car as well.
I ran him through the case as quickly as possible, ending with the tip Alice had received about the stigmata-like cuts on the hands and feet of the victims.
“Freaky,” Horton said when I’d finished.
“I thought freaky was the name of the game for you.”
“Yeah, well, this one sounds especially so. Many serial killers desecrate their victims before or after, but in my own work I didn’t come across much religious stuff.”
