"That's nice. We don't get many religious folks staying here."

Louis's face had the long-suffering look of a saint who has just heard that the rack is to be tightened.

"If you're interested," the woman continued, "we got a Baptist service tonight. You're welcome to join us."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Angel, "but we prepare to engage in our own forms of worship."

She smiled understandingly. "Long as it's quiet and doesn't disturb the other guests."

"We'll do our best," intervened Louis, taking the key.

The woman recognized me as I approached the desk. "Back again? You must like it here in Dark Hollow."

"I hope to get to know it better," I replied. "Maybe you can help me with something."

She smiled. "Sure, if I can."

I handed her a photo of Ellen Cole, the small, ID kind taken in a photo booth. I'd had it blown up on a color copier so that the picture was now eight-by-ten size. "You recognize this girl?"

The woman looked at the picture, squinting her eyes behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. "Yes, I do. She in some kind of trouble?"

"I hope not, but she's missing and her parents have asked me to help them find her."

The woman turned her attention back to the picture, nodding as she did so. "Yes, I recall her. Chief Jennings was asking about her. She stayed here with a young man for one night. I can get you the date, if you like."

"Would you, please?"

She took a registration card from a green metal card box and examined the details. "December fifth," she said. "Paid by credit card made out in the name of Ellen C. Cole."

"Do you recall anything that happened, anything out of the ordinary?"

"No, nothing important. Someone had suggested to them that they visit here, someone they gave a ride to from Portland. That's about all. She was nice, I remember. He was kind of a surly kid, but they can be that way at that age. I should know: raised four of my own and they were meaner than wharf rats until they were twenty-five."

"Did they give any indication of where they might be heading after they left here?"

"North, I guess. Maybe up to Katahdin. I don't know, frankly, but I told them that, if they had some time to spare, they should drive out and watch the sunset on the lake. They seemed to like the idea. It's a pretty sight. Romantic, too, for a young couple like that. I let them check out late in the afternoon, just so they wouldn't have to be rushing to pack."

"And they didn't say who recommended that they see Dark Hollow?" It seemed an odd thing to suggest. Dark Hollow didn't have that much going for it.

"Sure they did. It was an old guy they met along the way. They gave him a ride up here, and I think maybe he met up with them before they left."

I felt my stomach turn a little. "Did they mention his name?"

"No. Didn't sound like anybody from around here, though," she said. Her brow furrowed a little. "They didn't seem concerned about him or nothing. I mean, what harm could an old man do?" I think she meant the question to be rhetorical when she started out, but by the end I don't think it sounded that way to either of us.

She apologized, told me she didn't know any more, then gave me directions to the lakeshore viewing point, about a mile or two outside the town, on a tourist map. I thanked her, left my bag in my room and knocked on the door of the room next door, now occupied by Angel and Louis. Angel opened the door and let me in. Louis was hanging up his suits in the battered brown closet. I put the old man to the back of my mind. I wasn't about to leap to conclusions, not yet.

"What do people do for fun around here?" asked Angel, sitting down heavily on one of the two double beds in the room. "This place sees less action than the pope."

"Endure the winter," I said. "Wait for the summer."

"Fulfilling existence, if you're a tree."

Louis finished arranging his clothes and turned to us. "Find out anything?"

"The manager remembers Ellen and her boyfriend. She told them to go watch the sunset out of town, then reckons they went north."

"Maybe they did go north," said Louis.

"Rangers up in Baxter State Park have no record of them, according to Lee Cole. Apart from that, the options up north are limited. Plus, the woman at the desk says they gave some old guy a ride up here, and it was this old man who suggested that they stay in Dark Hollow."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"I don't know. Depends on who he was. It could be nothing." But I thought of the old man who had tried to take Rita Ferris at the hotel, and the figure of the old man Billy Purdue claimed to have seen the night that his family was taken from him. And I thought too of something Ronald Straydeer had said when he misheard my comment as we stood before Billy Purdue's trailer, discussing a man he might or might not have seen on his property.

You're getting old.

Yuh, he could have been old.

"So what now?"

I shrugged glumly. "I'm going to have to talk to Rand Jennings."

"You want us to come along?"

"No, I have other plans for you two. Take a ride out to the Payne place, see what's going on."

"See if Billy Purdue's turned up, you mean," said Angel.

"Whatever."

"And if he has?"

"Then we go and get him."

"And if he hasn't?"

"We wait, until I'm certain that Ellen Cole isn't in some kind of trouble here. Then…" I shrugged.

"We wait some more," finished Angel.

"I guess," I replied.

"That's good to know," he said. "At least I can plan what to wear."

The Dark Hollow Police Department lay about half a mile beyond the northern end of the town. It was a single-story brick building with its own generator in a concrete bunker at its eastern side. The building itself was quite new, a consequence of a fire a couple of years back that had destroyed the original structure just off the main street.

Inside it was warm and brightly lit, and a sergeant in long sleeves stood behind a wooden desk filling in some forms. His shiny name badge said "Ressler," so I figured he was the same Ressler who had watched Emily Watts die. I introduced myself and asked to see the chief.

"Can I ask what it's in connection with, sir?"

"Ellen Cole," I replied.

His brow furrowed a little as he picked up the phone and dialed an extension number. "There's a guy here wants to talk to you about Ellen Cole, chief," he said, then put his hand over the receiver and turned back to me. "What did you say your name was again?"

I hadn't said it the first time, but I gave it to him and he repeated it into the phone. "That's right, chief. Parker. Charlie Parker." He listened for a moment, then looked at me again, sizing me up. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Sure, sure." He put the phone down then reappraised me without saying anything.

"So, does he remember me?" I asked.

Ressler didn't reply, but I got the feeling that the sergeant knew his chief well and had detected something in his voice that put him on his guard. "Follow me," he said, unlocking a dividing door to the left of the desk and holding it to one side to let me pass. I waited while he relocked it, then followed him between a pair of desks and into a small, glass-walled cubicle. Behind a metal desk, on which lay trays of papers and a computer, sat Randall Jennings.

He hadn't changed too much. True, he was grayer and had put on a little weight, his face now slightly puffy and the beginnings of a double chin hanging down below his jawline, but he was still a good-looking man, with sharp brown eyes and wide, strong shoulders. It must have hurt his ego, I thought, when his wife had commenced an affair with me.

He waited for Ressler to leave and close the door of the office before he spoke. He didn't ask me to sit down and didn't seem troubled by the fact that, standing, I could look down on him.