The murders of Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden are recalled through the placement of their bodies: they had been propped against an old, twisted sycamore. Later, while Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis approach a cabin through dense trees, Alex recognizes a similar tree and considers whether Paul Ulrich, also known as Michael Ferris Burke, had noticed the resemblance. The echo turns the remembered scene into a possible clue about how the killer arranged and understood his surroundings.

The remembered scene

The passage supplies one precise detail about the murders rather than reconstructing their course: Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden had been propped against a sycamore. The tree is described as old and twisted, an image that later returns in a different setting. The evidence does not specify the victims’ wounds, the method of killing, or the circumstances in which their bodies were placed there.

The echo near the cabin

During the present investigation, Alex and Milo leave the road and walk roughly a thousand feet before a gray clapboard cabin comes into view through pine, gum, and sycamore trees. One of the sycamores recalls the tree associated with the victims. Alex wonders whether Paul Ulrich had registered the parallel, imagining that he might have appreciated its symmetry and irony; this remains Alex’s inference, not a confirmed statement of Ulrich’s thoughts.

Narrative significance

The murders return as a visual pattern embedded in the landscape. A tree that once marked the victims’ placement now becomes a point of comparison on the approach to the cabin, allowing Alex to connect the earlier crime with the investigation’s present setting. The resemblance sharpens suspicion without, by itself, proving that Ulrich deliberately repeated or recognized the image.