"Hi, Professor," she said. "I really enjoyed your book. I was an anthro minor," she added by way of explanation.

"I’m glad you liked it," he said with the tolerant smile of a gracious celebrity. Actually, he was delighted. As the author of A Structuro-Functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny, he’d yet to become jaded by the approbation of the masses.

Gideon swung his suit bag over his shoulder and they walked up the sloping lawn to the main hotel building. On the way, John explained about the three missing persons. Two had disappeared six years before on the then new but since closed Matheny trail between the Queets and Quinault rain forests. The third, Claire Hornick, had vanished only a few days ago, about eight miles from there. The search for her had turned up the bones, and that’s when the FBI had been called in.

Gideon checked into the lodge and left his bag at the registration desk. They walked across the grand old lobby with its ancient, wicker furniture, old-fashioned and comfortable.

"I haven’t seen wicker writing desks in an American hotel for a long time," Gideon said. "Or a parrot in the lobby."

"Yes," Julie said, "it’s a great old place."

John held open the door, and Gideon awkwardly bowed Julie through, not at all sure if she would like the gesture. She went through with a pleasant smile, and they stepped out into the town of Quinault. It was a shock. They had entered the hotel building from a spacious, sunny lawn peopled with sunbathers and laughing volleyball players, and with ten square miles of open lake at their backs. When they walked out through the rear entrance, no more than forty feet away, they stepped into a sunless shadowy world of almost solid green, hushed and perceptibly cooler and more moist than the lawn.

The "town," invisible from the air, consisted of several buildings out of the nineteenth century along either side of a narrow road.