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were in different colors.
    Most awesome and beautiful, however, were the grounds of the resort hotel.
    More than two thousand acres of gardens, grape arbors, barber-cut lawns, and virgin woods, which hotel guests were encouraged to tour on foot, or even in a horse-drawn buck-board.
    From most rooms there was a breathtaking view over the evergreens and apple farms that stretched nearly to Newburgh, some thirty miles distant on a thin blue ribbon that turned out to be the Hudson River.
    Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Vanderbilts, and Kennedys had had the wind knocked out of their sails by the Cherrywoods Mountain House view. “The finest view on the Atlantic Coast,” travel editors raved.
    “Someone really ought to make a scary movie here,” Nick Strauss had always said, and once had shamelessly suggested to hotel guest Roman
Rosemary’s Baby
Polanski.
    Maybe someone
would
make a horror film there, Dr. David Strauss thought as he surveyed the land one overcast and particularly graphic afternoon.
    For it was at Cherrywoods Mountain House where the members of the Strauss family were sequestered under specially arranged-for FBI protection, and where they waited in safety, hoping that their lives would soon return to normal.

CHAPTER 15
    In the beginning of David’s stay—the three weeks before the hotel reopened for regular guests (just a trickle of Cherrywoods’s normal spring business, though)—he rarely went out of his suite of rooms on the fifth floor of West House.
    David Strauss was obsessed with his grandmother’s, his brother’s, and his wife’s murders. David was particularly obsessed with memories of his and Heather’s life together before the evening of April 25 in Scarsdale.
    Once he began to go out on the hotel grounds, David tried to lose himself in a flurry of physical activity.
    Mornings at dawn, he rowed a modified scull around and around Lake Arrow. He went for long solitary swims and long jogs through the pine forests.
    In the afternoons, David offered a free medical clinic for hotel workers and their families. He tacked up a very unofficial-looking sign in one of the long hallways on the ground floor.
    Dr. David Strauss. Hours: 3 P.M . until I’m finished
.
    More and more, though, David found himself being drawn to the subject of modern-day Nazis. He pored over Nazi books and stared at old Nazi movies, with unhealthy attention. Almost daily he tried to reach an old friend of his grandmother’s, the famous Nazi-hunter Michael Ben-Iban. Ben-Iban, however, never seemed to be at his home in Frankfurt.
“I’m sorry, Ben-Iban is away in Israel”; “Ben-Iban is on business in England,”
David heard from the old man’s secretary.
    David had always overintellectualized the Nazis, he decided midway through his reading and research.
    So who exactly were these Nazis?
he now asked himself over and over like a monotonous broken record.
    In May of 1980, who were they?
    Who was it that had attacked his family on Upper North Avenue?
    Who had murdered Heather?
    Why?
    In a suite of hotel rooms, David stockpiled some three hundred Nazi books and pamphlets, many of them supplied by the Ulster County Lending Library Association. Among the Nazi books were Hugh Trevor-Roper’s
The Last Days of Hitler
; Thomas Mann’s
Order of the Day
; hefty tomes by Walter Langer, Michael Bar-Zohar, Shirer, Speer, Toland;
The Final Solution; Hitler’s Twelve Apostles
.
    There was also the swastika-covered and quite stupefying
Hate Book
; pornographic Nazi paperbacks imported from a drugstore in nearby Poughkeepsie—
Gestapo Prison Brothel
and
Bitch of Buchenwald;
and
The National Socialist White People’s Party Songbook
(To the tune of “Jingle Bells”: “Riding through the Reich/In a big Mercedes-Benz/Killing lots of kikes/Making lots of friends”).
    There was also the Holocaust volume of
The Jewish Encyclopedia
, the complete Lucy Rabinowitz, Samson the Nazarite, and Jabotinsky.
    Almost daily now, too, a man named Harry