Night Film

Trip to Crowthorpe Falls, NY, and The Peak Estate

S. McGrath

Kate Miller

So I said I’d go straight into town and call an ambulance. I asked if there was anyone else with her, and she shook her head.”

Miller continued down Old Forge, but not before she stepped to the road’s edge and looked inside the car again.

“This time I noticed there was someone lying in the backseat,” she said. “A large man all in black, unconscious, covered in bandages. They were all over his arms and face. They looked bloody. But I didn’t stop to argue — she’d just been in a wreck after all and probably didn’t know what she was saying. I decided to get help as fast as I could.”

Fifty minutes elapsed between the time Miller walked the two miles, dialed 911 from a gas station, and an ambulance and police arrived at the scene. They found a woman who identified herself as Astrid Goncourt. The car, a silver 1989 Mercedes, was empty.

Goncourt admitted she’d been speeding, submitted to a Breathalyzer test, and passed. Police saw no sign anyone else had been with her in the car. She was treated at a local hospital for minor cuts and scrapes, and hours later, discharged.

The following day, the New York Daily News and Albany’s Times Union reported that Mrs. Cordova had been in a car accident driving home from a friend’s birthday party and suffered minor injuries. The fact that The Peak is an hour’s drive from Bainville (a lengthy drive to begin at 5:00 AM) failed to alert police, though it was unclear if this was Astrid’s story or simply a case of lazy reportage.

Three weeks after the accident, Miller re-contacted police. She’d read about Astrid and her famous husband in the intervening period—"I’m not into horror movies,” she explained, when I asked her why, initially, the names meant nothing to her — and she now identified the person she’d seen in the car as Stanislas Cordova.

The Bainville Police Department took her statement and showed her the door.

Miller’s claim was never investigated further.

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