I remembered a girl from 1955 whose newspaper picture looked very much like the girl of the bicycle. She had been attending a summer camp near Pine Hill, and one day, she had disappeared while on a hiking trip. The men of the Shandaken Valley had searched for her for a week, but she was not found. It was Ben Benton’s suggestion, boldly and loudly offered, that the girl had been kidnapped and taken away from the mountains. A year later, Carter wrote to tell me her skeleton had been discovered in a shallow grave not far from the birch tree where I used to meet Amy. No one knew who had killed her, or why, Carter said, but Ben had been questioned because he had tried so hard to convince everyone that the girl had been taken out of the valley. Ben was never charged with the crime, but, as Carter observed, he was forever judged by the harsh court of gossip.

It was an odd coincidence, I thought, that Ben’s daughter, Shirley, was born less than a year after the young girl’s body was found. As a child she, too, had been blond and pretty. I wondered if knowing that his own daughter would have to live with the gossip had caused Ben to pick up a gun one night and shoot himself in the temple. Or was it something more? Had Ben killed the girl, as the gossip ruled, and had seeing his own daughter—blue-eyed, blond, like the missing girl—tormented him and driven him to suicide? The fifties had been curious years. Some things—the murder of a child, or the rumor of murder—were not excusable. Some things were too great to bear.

I had liked Ben. He had accepted me after doubts. He had stepped in front of a switchblade for me. He had laughed with me. I did not want to think he had killed anyone.

Once, I saw Ben talking to Avrum. They were sitting on Avrum’s bench and Ben was leaning forward, his elbows propped on his knees, listening and nodding as Avrum explained something to him, using his hands for exaggeration. Later, Ben told me that Avrum had said the most profound thing he had ever heard.

“What was it?” I asked.

“He was talking about God,” Ben confessed. “He said men were fools to think that God worried a lot about them. You know what he did? He pointed up to the mountain behind the Inn and then he asked me what it was I saw up there. I told him I saw a mountain. Why, hell, I thought that was plain as day. And old Avrum, he said I was right, but he said there was more going on under one tree up on that mountain that God had rather worry about than what was going on in anybody I ever knew.”

“Sounds like him,” I said.