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Despite the woman’s having the evidence in hand, she had to be mistaken, Susan maintained.
    “Jason would never do anything like that,” she insisted.
    As time passed, the White house became a magnet for disenfranchised neighborhood teens, mostly boys who wore baggy pants, enormous T-shirts, one earring, and backward baseball hats. The older ones drove dilapidated cars, the radios blaring. “The boys were always into something. Susan and Ron were always at work. Those kids would stand up on the roof, calling out obscenities at the little ones in the neighborhood,” remembers Roy. “They took a can of hair spray and fired it into a lit match, causing an explosion. They egged folks walking down the street. Once a shed burned down, and neighbors figured Jason and his pals probably did it. Typical teenage stuff, but worse.”
    Friends say that Ron, too, found his stepson a constant irritant, and Jason made it clear he returned his disdain. They had heated arguments over everything from Jason’s friends to the way he kept his room. Jason retaliated, including one day spiking Ron’s coffee with antifreeze.
    “He didn’t really drink it,” said Gloria, whom Susan later told about the incident. “But Ron was absolutely furious. He chased Jason all over the house.”
    “I never much wanted to be around Ron,” Jason says. “He kept his distance and so did I. He was an old man. All he wanted to do was golf and eat out at restaurants.I asked her, ‘Why’d you marry him?’ My mom said she loved him and he could afford to make a home for us.”
    Jason’s problems weren’t confined to his relationship with the neighbors and his stepfather. As in Louisiana, they spilled over into school, where he disrupted his classes and pulled pranks that made him as common a topic of conversation in the teachers’ lounge as on Valley Bend.
    Susan spent afternoon after afternoon arguing with counselors and teachers. Although she gave him little of her time, she was fiercely loyal to her son. As always, she denied Jason could be guilty of any of the accusations leveled against him. When counselors talked of emotional and behavioral problems and suggested discipline and counseling, Susan, as unconcerned as if they’d mentioned an occasional tardiness for classes, replied that she didn’t believe in pushing the boy.
    “He’s just going through a stage,” she maintained at parent-teacher conferences. “You’ll see. It’s just teenageboy stuff.”
    Before long, and over Susan’s angry protests, Jason was transferred to the Wunsche School, the district’s last resort for kids with physical, mental, emotional, or behavioral problems. “When counseling and regular school don’t work, they’re sent to Wunsche,” explains one former teacher. “Jason was there for emotional and behavioral reasons. He may have been fifteen, but emotionally he hadn’t matured. He was physically small for his age and he still acted like a little kid. He had bad judgment, and he was a follower. If one of his friends told Jason to rob a bank, he’d do it, without even asking why.”
    Once Jason was enrolled in Wunsche, his separation from the neighborhood became complete. While other children waited for school buses on the corner, a smaller bus equipped with a wheelchair ramp to accommodatethe school’s special population pulled up in front of the White household early each morning. Jason was nearly always late, and Calvin Edgin, the driver, grew used to seeing Susan, still dressed in her worn brown terry-cloth robe, wave to him from the front door.
    “Jason’ll be there in a minute,” she’d shout.
    Moments later, she’d reappear with a Styrofoam cup of coffee for Edgin. “She was really friendly, always up,” he says. “And she was always talking about Jason and how he was really such a good boy. She said people just didn’t understand him and all he’d been through.”
    Edgin listened sympathetically, but he knew another Jason, a teenage