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Mrs. Warburg and I had an interstate, telephonic rum-and-Coke party twice a week the summer Anne was missing. Mrs. Warburg told me about their problems with the house; they had some roof mold and a crack in the foundation, and Mr. Warburg was not handy.

“Roof mold,” she said. “When you get married, you move into a nice prewar six in the city and you let some other girl worry about roof mold. You go out dancing.”

I know people say, and you see it in movies, cascades of hair tumble out of the coffin, long, curved nails growing over the clasped hands. It’s not true. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and although some cells take longer to die than others, after a few hours everything is gone. The brain cells die fast, and blood pools in the soft, pressed places: the scapula, the lower back, the calves. If the body is not covered up, it produces a smell called cadaverine, and flies pick up the scent from a mile away. First, just one fly, then the rest. They lay fly eggs, and ants come, drawn to the eggs, and sometimes wasps, and always maggots. Beetles and moths, the household kind that eat your sweaters, finish the body; they undress the flesh from the bone. They are the cleanup crew.

Mrs. Warburg and I only talked about Anne in passing and only about Anne in the past. Anne’s tenth birthday had had a Hawaiian theme. They made a hot-dog luau in the backyard and served raspberry punch; they played pin-the-lei-on-the-donkey and had grass skirts for all the girls. “Anne might have been a little old for that, even then. She was a sophisticate from birth,” Mrs. Warburg said. I was not a sophisticate from birth. I was an idiot from birth, and that is why when the police first came to look for Anne, I said a lot of things that sounded like lies.

Mrs. Warburg loved to entertain; she said Anne was her mother’s daughter. We did like to have parties, and Mrs. Warburg made me tell her what kind of hors d’oeuvres we served. She said she was glad we had pigs-in-blankets because that’s what she’d served when she was just starting out, although she’d actually made hers. And did one of us actually make the marinara sauce, at least, and was Anne actually eating pork sausage, and she knew it must be me who made pineapple upside-down cake because that was not in her daughter’s repertoire, and she hoped we used wineglasses but she had the strong suspicion we poured wine out of the box into paper cups, which was true. I told her Anne had spray-painted some of our thirdhand furniture bright gold and when we lit the candles and turned out the lights, our apartment looked extremely glamorous.

“Oh, we love glamorous,” Mrs. Warburg said.

In the Adirondacks, the Glens Falls trail and the old mining roads sometimes overlap. Miles of trail around Speculator and Johnsburg are as smooth and neatly edged as garden paths. These are the old Fish Hill Mining Company roads, and they will take you firmly and smoothly from the center of Hamilton County to the center of the woods and up the mountainside. Eugene Trask took Anne and her boyfriend, Teddy Ross, when they were loading up Teddy’s van in the Glens Falls parking lot. He stabbed Teddy twice in the chest with his hunting knife, and tied him to a tree and stabbed him again, and left him and his backpack right there, next to the wooden sign about NO DRINKING, NO HUNTING. He took Anne with him, in Teddy’s car. They found Teddy’s body three days later and his parents buried him two days after that, back in Virginia.

Eugene Trask killed another boy just a few days before he killed Teddy. Some kids from Schenectady were celebrating their high school graduation with an overnight camping trip, and when Eugene Trask came upon them, he tied them all to different trees, far enough apart so they couldn’t see one another, and then he killed the boy who’d made him mad. While he was stabbing him, the same way he stabbed Teddy, two sharp holes in his heart and then a slash across his chest, for emphasis, for something, the other kids slipped