So that people now believed that the place was cursed. He had wanted to tell her the place was worthless because people believed in the curse upon it and upon his family. They thought he was crazy to reopen the camp, to drop twenty-five thousand dollars of his own money to refurbish it and bring in inner-city kids. Everyone in town thought drunken Old Ralph was crazy with his talk about death curses and the Lord's vengeance but were they really any better? At least Ralph said what was on his mind. Maybe they didn't say it out loud like Ralph did, but they thought it. He was convinced that some of the problems his father had experienced could be traced directly to the residents of Crystal Lake. He wondered as he went around town, picking up supplies.

Which of the people he had encountered had been the ones who set the fires?

Which ones had vandalized the cabins and poisoned the wells?

If there was any curse upon his family, he thought, it had been put there by some of the locals who didn't want to see the camp succeed. They were convinced it was an evil place and they had suited their actions to their beliefs. It was a lot like a salesman who tried to sell a product he didn't believe in. Because he didn't believe in it, he didn't get behind it. And when the product, not surprisingly didn't sell, he justified his own beliefs, his own failure by saying see? It's just no good. I knew it all the time.

Well, he wasn't going to fail with the camp. It was all he had: His legacy, his beginning. If he could make a go of it and turn it, sell it as a successful little business instead of a rundown piece of lakefront property that would be of little use to anyone except some businessmen from the city who wanted to use it as a hunting retreat, then he could make a profit on it. More importantly, he could establish himself as a real estate speculator who had taken a worthless piece of property and made something out of it. That was the sort of thing that banks would look favorable upon and it would allow him to pyramid his investment: to get into something more ambitious. Something he could build upon.

You got to start somewhere, he thought, you gotta have a dream. Why couldn't Alice see that?

Maybe he just couldn't compete with that guy out in California. Maybe that was it. Maybe all Alice wanted was a reason to go back to him because he could offer her more and she was using the camp as that reason. If that was the case, he couldn't fight it and he wasn't going to try.