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short stay in Jacksonville. Though by no means a high point on their tour, Carl was convinced that it had much to recommend it. It was remote, its spacious fields crisscrossed by obscure, unpatrolled back roads, its isolated farmhouses perfect for what he had in mind. In addition, with dreams of Mexico now faded, penniless and nearly out of gas, the Super Sport already beginning to fall apart, it offered nothing more threatening than a redneck police department Carl was certain he could outsmart.
    Ezell Spencer was perhaps the first to see them. It was nearly one in the afternoon, and he’d been working at his job at Jimbo’s Drive-In in downtown Donalsonville all day, taking the usual midday orders of fast food from the local farmers and workmen. He knew most of the people who came by Jimbo’s, but he did not recognize any of the four men who pulled into its gravel parking lot that afternoon in a dark green Chevy Super Sport stuffed to the gills with men and supplies. They ordered quickly in Yankee accents, then sat talking to each other while they ate their burgers and fries.
    To Spencer, glancing out at them from behind Jimbo’s large picture windows, they appeared rootless and road-worn, and it crossed his mind that they might be headed toward the small hippie community that had lately sprung up near Americus, and which the people of Seminole County regarded with a xenophobic caution and distrust. Certainly the younger ones, the dark-haired youth behind the wheel and the blond boy in the back seat, possessed that dusty, hippie look of long-haired scruffiness that Spencer associated with San Francisco and New York.
    If not hippies, he concluded as he watched them pull out of Jimbo’s parking lot, they were certainly drifters of some type. It was a suspicion that seemed confirmed about two hours later when he saw the same green Super Sport cruise slowly through the back lot of Jimbo’s once again, this time without stopping, but with the same four men sitting silently inside, staring straight ahead, still looking, it seemed to him, for a place to stop.
    Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Foster was the next to see them. She’d lived many years in Donalsonville, Georgia, the small county seat of Seminole County. Accustomed to its slow, rural pace, she was surprised to see the dark green car as it barreled toward her from down the road. As she neared the Oak View Church, the car suddenly swerved toward her. To avoid collision, she jerked the wheel to the right, then held on to it tightly as the car slammed into the shallow ditch just beyond the road’s narrow shoulders. The other car was far ahead by then, but she’d gotten a quick glimpse of it as it had hurtled by her, enough to notice the four men inside. They had not even looked back to see what had happened to her as their car bulleted on down the road, a green speck disappearing into an even greener landscape, leaving her shaken and slightly injured behind the wheel. Local boys would have stopped, she thought; only outsiders would have driven on heedlessly as they had done.
    A little over ten miles away, Ernestine Alday had been working since just after sunrise. Large-boned and physically strong, she was a farm woman, born and bred, and she had never wanted to be anything else. The call that sometimes drew the seniors of Seminole County High School to the urban jungles of Dothan, Albany, and Atlanta had never sounded in her ears. “The family,” she would say many years later, “was always the most precious thing I ever had.”
    That family was gathered closely around her, both in terms of relationship and physical proximity, a closeness whose most visible manifestation was the midday meal.
    Ernestine prepared it every day, cooking all through the morning while she completed other chores. By noon it was ready, the table completely stocked with beef or chicken, corn, peas, potatoes, corn-bread, and iced tea. As they had for