Sandy was the only one who didn't look at him as if he were his father's ghost. He had lingered at the counter, enjoying a hot dinner, munching a hot slice of apple pie and nursing his coffee, much as he used to linger over cokes and ice cream sodas at the same counter when he was a kid and a much younger Sandy. He used to flirt with him, making him feel older.

She always had a smile and a friendly word or two and if she ever said anything about the camp, she didn't talk about it in his presence. She seemed to understand that it was a sore point with him and that this was something he needed to do, if for no other reason than to prove everyone wrong about Camp Crystal Lake and his father.

I'll make a go of that damn place, he thought, I'll make a go of it and show them what a bunch of superstitious nonsense all this stuff about 'Camp Blood' is. I'll show them they were wrong about it, just like they were wrong about my father. A man, whose only curse was an incredibly pathetic run of the worst luck in the world. And it would serve them right if I sold the goddamned place for a healthy profit to some real estate developer who would come in and put up condos.

He grimaced. That did not seem very likely, although Alice thought it could happen. Lakefront property, she'd said, how can lakefront property be worthless?

He'd wanted to tell her. Tell her the real reason. Instead, what he had told her was that it can be worthless if it's in an area that's economically depressed. Small towns were dying all over the country. No jobs. The agriculture industry was going down the tubes with banks foreclosing on small farms and small-town businesses being bled dry as they lost their customers. It would take a lot more to turn things around than an occasional rock concert of music video to benefit the farmer.

Every domestic industry was being affected as the country shifted more and more to service industries and moved away from production, unable to compete with cheaper goods and labor from abroad. There had to be production. People had to get back to working with their hands. They had to have faith in themselves, in their own abilities, in the American spirit. Even the Japanese were saying that.