New York State gives Jenny a landscape in which secrecy depends on distance, routine, and careful choice rather than disappearance. After leaving New York City, she makes her way north by train and settles in the Hudson River region, where an isolated job, a post-office box, and familiar rural roads let her live under an assumed name. The same geography later draws Frazer toward her: bridges, towns, and the distances between them become clues in his effort to locate her. The state’s rural settings also intersect with the legal story, as a murder in Monticello turns the places where the fugitives have lived and traveled into parts of a public account of their crimes.

The Hudson River Region and Jenny’s Arrival

Jenny chooses Rhinecliff at random, deciding to travel only as far as one fourth of her money will take her. After the train journey from New York City, she stands on the station platform looking out at the river, then takes a taxi to the nearest motel, which is several miles inland near Rhinebeck. The motel consumes another large share of her funds. The next day, an advertisement in the Rhinebeck Gazette leads her to work at Wildmoor, where she accepts room and board as part of her pay. She arrives in late October 1972, when Nixon placards appear along the wooded country drives.

This sequence makes the region a place Jenny enters through constraint as much as choice. She has little money and few options; a newspaper advertisement and the provision of lodging determine where she can remain. Wildmoor gives her a way to stay in the countryside without requiring her to establish herself openly in a town. Her work there eventually leaves a small record beyond her private life: a local historical-society newsletter praises the workmanship of a visitor called Iris Wong and invites readers to tour the house. That notice will later connect Jenny’s assumed identity to the place where she had hidden.

Red Hook and the Practice of Concealment

Jenny selects Red Hook for a post-office box because it is barely a town, with the post office standing near an isolated intersection and serving scattered farms. She calls herself Iris Wong and subscribes to the Rhinebeck Gazette. Two or three evenings a week, after the post-office window has closed, she drives to Red Hook to collect her papers. She reads them in her car at a neglected riverside park, using its solitary, vandalized picnic table only as a feature of the place, not as a place to sit. She starts with the national news, opening the newspapers and scanning their pages warily.

The arrangement turns ordinary geography into a system of safeguards. Red Hook is close enough to reach repeatedly from her rural home, but its sparse settlement and the timing of her visits help keep the routine unobtrusive. The box separates her correspondence from the address where she sleeps; the assumed name separates the newspaper subscription from her identity. At the same time, the routine creates a pattern: a regular drive, a recognizable destination, and a local newspaper that records the name she uses. The region affords concealment, but it cannot make every trace vanish.

Roads, Bridges, and the Search for Jenny

Frazer’s search shows how New York State’s distances can be read as a map of habits. In Red Hook, he drives repeatedly along the roads through the sparse center, then studies a map and reasons that Jenny would not want to live too near the post office or too far from it. He marks Red Hook and draws a circle representing an estimated half-hour drive. His theory rests on the belief that people remain within familiar patterns, so the roads and distances become a way to infer where Jenny might choose to live.

The Hudson River gives that search a more consequential boundary. Frazer counts only four bridges across the 150-mile stretch between the city and Albany and initially bets that Jenny would not cross the river to collect her mail. Later, while following her from Rhinecliff, he watches her take the bridge road and cross to the far side. She then leads him nearly five miles along level roads through open farmland, changing routes frequently before the road climbs into wooded country. The crossing overturns part of his expectation, while her careful driving and repeated turns leave him unsure whether she is trying to lose him. The landscape does not simply hide Jenny: it tests Frazer’s assumptions about how well he knows her.

Local Records and the Statewide Story

The region’s minor records preserve what the larger public story leaves out. Years later, Anne Casey tells Jim Shimada that a man calling himself Joe Smith had tried to help Jenny, though Anne could not substantiate his account or publish it. She gives Jim an unsealed envelope containing the Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck historical-society newsletter. Its small item about Iris Wong and the restoration at Wildmoor provides concrete evidence that Jenny had been there, doing quiet work under another name. For Jim, the detail confirms that his daughter’s life left traces even when she did not become part of the story being told about the fugitives.

New York State also enters the account through the case against Jenny and her companions. In custody, Jenny learns that Pauline has named her as an accessory to the killing of a grocery-store owner in Monticello. A newspaper placed beside Jenny’s unsealed letter names her, Juan, and Yvonne and identifies the gun. The rural geography that had enabled movement and concealment thus acquires a second meaning: Monticello is not merely another town on a map, but the setting of an accusation with immediate consequences for Jenny’s understanding of her position. Across the novel, New York State joins private refuge to public record, showing how a person may be nearly invisible in the broad narrative and still be located through a box number, a local newspaper, a remembered route, or a small notice in a newsletter.