There were other towns—like Little Washington, off 211, farther north—where the soul-destroying work of entertaining tourists had overtaken whatever local economy had been left. Those were museum towns, in effect—towns whose white shingled barns were crammed with doubly marked-up Colonial Homestead china and “authentic” milk-glass saltshakers and “regional” beeswax candles crated in from a factory in Trenton. Farms were converted into overpriced eateries ; daughters of woodworkers and pipefitters and farmers—those who sought to stay, anyway—laced themselves into frilly “colonial”-style costumes and practiced saying, “My name is Linda and I’ll be your waitress this evening.” The locals greeted visitors with manufactured warmth and the wide smile of avarice. What kin ah do you for?

That green tide of tourism had never reached Millington. It didn’t take Janson long to size up the place. Though scarcely more than a village, it was somehow too real to be picturesque. Perched on a rocky slope of Smith Mountain, it regarded the natural world as something to be overcome, not packaged and sold for its aesthetic value. There were no bed-and-breakfasts in the vicinity. The nearest motels were utilitarian, boxy affiliates of downscale national chains, run by hardworking immigrants from the Indian subcontinent : they did just fine by truck drivers who wanted to crash for the night, but had little appeal for businessmen in search of “conference center” facilities. It was a town that was dark by ten o’clock, at which point the only lights you could see came from dozens of miles down the valley, where the town of Montvale sparkled like a flashy, decadent metropolis. The biggest single employer was a former paper plant that now produced glazed bricks and did a side business in unrefined mineral byproducts; about a dozen men spent their working hours bagging potash. A smaller factory, a little farther out, specialized in decorative millwork. The downtown diner, at Main and Pemberton Streets, served eggs and home fries and coffee all day, and if you ordered all three, you got a free tomato or orange juice on the side, though it arrived in something little bigger than a shot glass. The gas station had an attached “foodmart” with racks of the same cellophane-wrapped snacks available everywhere else on the U.S. roadways. The mustard in the local grocery store came in two varieties, French’s yellow or Gulden’s brown: nothing coarse-grained or tarragon-infused burdened the condiment section of the chipped enameled shelves, no moutarde au poivre vert within township limits. Janson’s kind of place.

Yet if the decades-old accounts were accurate, there was a vast estate hidden somewhere in the hills, as private a residence as you could hope for—legally as well as physically. For even its ownership was completely obscure. Was it really conceivable that “Novak”—the mirage who called himself that—was nearby? Janson’s scalp tightened as he mulled the possibilities.