A woman behind the front desk took her eyes away from the two bearded hikers with whom she was talking and watched me as I stepped into the parlor. She was tall and broad-shouldered, with a weathered complexion and hard gray eyes like chips of stone. She had reddish white hair gathered together in a topknot. The sleeves of her orange fleece pullover were pushed up to her elbows, revealing powerful forearms.
“Can I help you?” Her voice was as deep as I would have expected, and she had a strong German accent.
“I hope so. I’m Mike Bowditch. I’m with the Warden Service.”
“Did you stay with us during the search?”
The two hikers moved aside. One of them smelled so strongly of BenGay it stung my nostrils.
“I did, but I came in late and left early.” I cleared my throat. “Is Mr. Ross here?”
“He has gone to bed. I’m Steffi Ross. What can I do for you?”
She was so much more outdoorsy and vital than her husband—more the kind of person I would have expected to find running a way station on the Appalachian Trail.
“I’m looking for Stacey Stevens,” I said. “I didn’t see her IF&W truck out front. Did she check out?”
“Not unless she left without telling me.” Steffi Ross turned to the two hikers listening in on our conversation. Both looked freshly showered. “Have you guys seen her around? The woman in the uniform?”
One of the guys grinned through his blond beard, his teeth barely visible beneath his brushy mustache. “She wasn’t at dinner.” He had an English accent.
“I think she might have gone to her room,” said the other Brit.
“Would you mind if I take a look?” I asked Mrs. Ross.
She brought one of her big hands to her chin. “Does she know you are coming?”
I decided a bluff was in order. “She was hoping I could stay the night with her. How much is it for an extra person in the room?”
She narrowed her eyes, cocked her head, and gave me the once-over with a closemouthed smile.
“Why don’t you have a look at her room, ja? In case she left. Pay me later for the room if you stay.”
“Thanks. What room is she in?”
“Number twelve,” Steffi Ross said.
I thought I understood the layout of the building, but there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the room numbering system. After two dead ends, I finally found myself outside Stacey’s door. I rapped on the wood and spoke her name.
I listened but heard only music playing in the adjoining room. Phish.
When Stacey didn’t respond to my second knock, I tried the knob. It twisted easily in my hand, and the door swung inward. The bedside lamp was ablaze, and clothes were falling out of an unzipped duffel bag on the floor. Her toiletries kit hung from a nail on the wall.
She hadn’t left Monson yet. So where was she? I couldn’t deny that I found the scene disquieting.
I sat down on the bed and felt the springs shiver underneath my weight. The duffel bag was red, manufactured by L.L. Bean, with a monogram on the side: SOS. I’d never asked Stacey for her middle name. Was it Ora, after her mother?
She hadn’t bothered to hang anything up in the closet or put her socks in the drawers of the bureau. Evidently, she hadn’t expected to be in Monson long. I stared at the open duffel, trying to resist the urge to rummage through its contents.
SOS.
I rose to my feet and followed the twisting halls back to the lobby. The bearded hikers had retired to the fireplace, where they had joined half a dozen other tanned and longhaired young people. One of them was tuning a mandolin, which he must have carried on his back all the way from Georgia.
Mrs. Ross had a wireless phone pinned between her shoulder and her ear. “Listen, I have to go. Someone is here.” She replaced the telephone on its charging stand. “Did you find your girlfriend?”
“No, but her stuff is still in the room. I don’t suppose you spoke with her this afternoon?”
She brought her hand to the lower part of her face again. “We talked a bit, sure.”
“Can you remember anything she said?”
“You’re not stalking this young woman, are you?”
“Would I tell you if I was?”
She let out a laugh that showed me the metal fillings in her molars. “Good point!”
“I’m worried about Stacey because no one knows where she is. Do you remember what you talked about?”
Near the fireplace, the traveling minstrel had begun strumming the strings of his mandolin while a woman passed out pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from a paper bag. The hikers were digging their hooked fingers into the containers and lifting gobs of Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey into their mouths.
Steffi Ross motioned me into the office behind the front desk. I pushed aside a curtain of beads to enter. She crossed her arms and leaned her rear end against a paper-strewn table with a computer monitor, keyboard, and inkjet printer.
“Your friend was in a bad mood when she came in, ja?” she said. “I had been hearing all day about the scene over at the store. It sounded disgusting. But that is not what we talked about. She wanted to know about that kid who got hit by a truck—McDonut.”
So news of the hit-and-run was making its way through the village. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“What did she want to know?” I asked.
“Everything.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I told her McDonut seemed a little strange, but a lot of the people who come through here are odd ducks, you know? He brought in some beer to share. That is something the hikers do. He got a little drunk, you know? But he seemed nice.”
Her account matched what Chad McDonough had told me about his night at Ross’s.
“Did he seem nervous or anxious?” I asked. “Like he was afraid of something or someone.”
“No,” Steffi Ross said. “That kid was the life of the party.”
“Did she ask you about Samantha Boggs and Missy Montgomery?”
“Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth? Ja.”
“You’re using their trail names,” I said.
“That is our practice here. I feel that trail names are more honest, you know, because they are chosen. They are closer to who a person truly is.”
“What was yours when you hiked the AT?”
Her cheeks flushed, whether from embarrassment or anger, I couldn’t tell. “Das Shieldmaiden.”
I decided to let it go. “What did Stacey ask you about Samantha and Missy?”
“If I knew the girls were homosexual.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, I could tell right away that they were a couple. They were quite open. They kissed and held hands.”
Samantha and Missy had been closeted at Pentecost University, afraid the world would learn about the romantic nature of their relationship. Very few of their classmates had known they were secretly lovers. But somewhere along the hundreds of miles of the Appalachian Trail, the women had found the courage to make their feelings for each other public. They really had been on a journey of personal discovery. The revelation seemed to make what had happened to them all the more tragic.
“What else did Stacey ask you about them?” I said.
“She asked if I could remember any little details. I thought I’d told the police everything.”
She removed a tube of lip balm from her pocket. She took a moment to apply it to her heavily chapped lips. I had the impression she was stalling.
“You left something out of your statement to the police,” I said. “What was it?”
She let out a sigh that went on for ten seconds. “Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth asked me about churches, ja? I told them about the Community Church and the United Church of Christ. ‘Or you could check out that crazy tabernacle on Main Street,’ I told them.”
“Do you think they might have visited the tabernacle on their way back to the trail?”
“I had meant it as a joke. I didn’t think they’d actually go there.”
“What can you tell me about it?”
“The preacher is nuts! He calls himself Brother John. My husband thinks he might have been a hiker himself. That is how he found Monson. Me, I’ve never been inside the dump.”
Out near the fireplace, the hikers had broken into song. They were shouting along to “Free Bird” while the guy with the mandolin played.
Steffi Ross’s throat flushed from her breastbone to her cheeks. “I don’t understand the point of these questions. I thought coyotes killed those poor girls.”
“We’re still waiting for the report to come back from the medical examiner. In the meantime, the investigators are looking into all the ways Samantha and Missy might have died.”
“So now the police think those girls were murdered?”
“They’re looking at all the ways the women might have died,” I repeated.
I had the sense that Steffi Ross felt mad at herself for having forgotten to mention the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle to the detectives. She was expressing her embarrassment to me as frustration.
“But what is your friend’s interest in this? Did she know them?”
“Not personally.”
“I do not understand what that means.”
I wasn’t sure that I could explain. “I appreciate your talking to me, Mrs. Ross.”
“You might look for her at Shoebottom’s. There is a bar that serves drinks. Ja?”
A thought occurred to me as I turned to leave. “There is one more thing. Do you ever have outsiders here?”
“I do not understand what that means.”
“People who come for supper, who aren’t staying at the inn.”
“On Saturday nights we serve lobsters for ten dollars. There are some people who come in for dinner, you know?”
“Did you have any outside guests the night Samantha and Missy were here?”
“I think not.”
“Thanks anyway.”
Lynyrd Skynyrd on the mandolin accompanied me to the front door.
“Wait!” Steffi Ross called after me. “There was somebody here that night. Nonstop was here.”
“Bob Nissen was at the inn?”
Mrs. Ross placed her hands on the desk and leaned forward. “He trades us honey for lobsters, so he comes for dinner. He likes the attention from all the pretty girls, you know? He is a famous figure on the trail.”
“Did he speak with Samantha and Missy?”
“I do not know. Sorry.”
“Thanks anyway.”
I pulled my collar up as I stepped out into the chilly evening. Somewhere out on the dark waters of Lake Hebron, a loon was giving his eerie, half-crazed call. Why hadn’t Nissen told anyone he had been in the same dining room as Samantha and Missy? It was a significant omission, to say the least. As soon as I tracked down Stacey, I would need to have a talk with the legendary thru-hiker.