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from State, but Larry already had committed, and he stuck by his fateful choice.
    Larry liked Appalachian and especially the Blue Ridge Mountains in which it was situated. On visits, his family would accompany him on outings along the Blue Ridge Parkway and hiking trips on nearby trails. Larry did well in his first year of college, attaining high grades and the plaudits of his instructors. He spent long hours studying and had little time for dating or other outside activities. His parents never worried about Larry, confident that with his likeable and easy-going nature, his intelligence, dependability and willingness to work hard, his future was bright. They had no foreboding that his sophomore year would bring forces into his life that would end in tragedy.
    Laura could not have imagined that Barbara and Larry would become involved in a sexual relationship. Baptist girls just didn’t do that. But years later Barbara would tell a friend that she had wasted little time with Larry, having sex with him the first time they were alone together—in the instruments closet of the campus band room. Her eagerness, her almost desperate hunger for affection and approval, though, produced only a cautious wariness in Larry.
    He made no mention of a girlfriend in letters and visits home that winter, and even Laura got the feeling that he wanted to back away from Barbara, that she was pushing him too hard and too fast. That was confirmed for her after an incident on a snowy Saturday night in February.
    Barbara returned to the dorm room that night in a state that Laura could only describe later as “bizarre.”
    “Barbara, are you all right?” Laura asked.
    Only guttural sounds came, “almost animal-type.”
    “What’s wrong?” Laura asked, but she got no response other than the strange noises.
    Barbara slumped on the edge of her bed, her hair in her face, her head shaking, moaning eerily—“almost like a cry inside that wasn’t coming out,” according to Laura, who hurried to the room next door for help when she couldn’t get Barbara to tell her what had happened. Dormmates were of no assistance in snapping Barbara out of her spell, and the dorm mother was summoned. When she, too, was unable to get a response, she called the campus police, who took Barbara to the hospital in a security car. Laura went along to be of help if she could.
    “I have never seen anything like it,” she said. “I felt like I needed to be there if she wanted to talk.”
    Barbara did not want to talk. Doctors sedated her and kept her at the hospital overnight.
    Laura called Barbara’s parents to tell them she was in the hospital. “They really didn’t say a lot,” she said. “I was surprised.”
    Barbara was okay the next day but subdued when Larry and Steve went to the hospital in a station wagon they borrowed from a friend to take her back to the dorm. Barbara never talked about the incident, and within a couple of days she seemed normal again. Only later did Steve tell Laura that Barbara’s bizarre behavior had been precipitated by Larry telling her that he wanted to break off their relationship. But by then Barbara and Larry were back together. They had resumed the relationship the day Barbara got out of the hospital.
    Barbara’s parents did not come to check on her, and Laura could not help but wonder if that was because they had seen Barbara display this type of behavior before. Was Barbara’s episode a genuine breakdown in the face of stress, a dark secret the family did not want to acknowledge? Or was it just a device Barbara used to get her own way when things did not please her, something the family knew would quickly pass as soon as it had achieved its purpose?
    Doris Ford was surprised in early May when she looked out the window of her farmhouse and saw Larry driving up unannounced in a car he had borrowed from a friend. Something must be wrong, she thought, and she knew that she was right as soon as she saw his worried face.
    Larry