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brilliant but erratic.”
    “Charlie, I think this must be about the fifth time I’ve ever had a chance to sit around and talk to you, but I have the feeling we know each other pretty well.”
    “An ominous approach, friend.”
    “I can ask you this. I’ve promised Vicky that I would dig around a little and see if I can find something that will take Alister off the hook.”
    “Why didn’t you make some other promises too? Like gnawing down all the elms in the square with your own little teeth.”
    “It can’t be that bad.”
    Charlie turned his glass slowly between thumb and forefinger. “I’ll make a classic understatement, Hugh. I’ll say that it was an unpopular crime around these parts. Jane Ann was a pretty kid. This is a town that goes for kids. We’ve got good schools, good recreation programs. There isn’t much juvenile delinquency. But there are some bad apples. The kids at Sheridan are, for the most part, good kids. I’ll tell you how we all feel. We feel as if we had a monster among us. We didn’t know it. Now we know it can happen, and did happen, and, following the logical pattern, can happen again. There can be other monsters. Dalton isn’t immune any more. We don’t look at each other the same way we used to. But get this. We do feel a little comfortable that at least we got the monster isolated and out of the way. Anybody who goes around with any idea of trying to prove he didn’t do it is going to be very unpopular. Because that implies that we’ve still got a monster running around loose. Until Frank Leader proved Landy did it, you never saw a town locked up like this one was.”
    “Suppose I have to try?”
    “Then be just as discreet as you can be.”
    “Can you think of any starting place?”
    “If I could think of one, the defense could have thought of one. That defense lawyer was good. John Tennant. I hear it hasn’t done him much good to have taken the case. Maybe you could talk to him. It might give you some kind of a lead.”
     
    I picked Vicky up at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. The old woman glowered at us from a front window of the house. Vicky looked better. She said she had slept deeply for the first time in months. We had breakfast at a roadside place ten miles out of Dalton on the Warrentown road. It was one of a chain operation, comfortable, clean, efficient and characterless. I had not yet made a complete adjustment to having been away for two and a half years. It seemed to me that standardization had been accelerated, perhaps by television. There was less difference between the new cars, between the women, between all conversations. All seemed predigested and tasteless. I knew that in this place we could get ham and eggs that would not differ one milligram in weight or one half degree in serving heat from the same dish in the same chain a thousand miles away. It was all predictable, all designed to eliminate risk. I looked across the small table at her. She was not a part of this standardization. Her mind did not work in the flat, trite, acceptable ways. In our own way we were both aliens, nonconforming, bored with all the reassurances of a cooky-cut world.
    And, with an animal egocentricity, I knew that we were looked at, speculated about. The dark and lovely girl who looked as though she were recovering from some illness. And that deeply tanned man, gray eyes pale in his face. See them talk so intently. See her bend forward, with earnest mouth and look of pleading.
    “The first lawyer was from Dalton. His name is Cowan. When he found out what evidence there was, he backed out. He said it was too small a town. He named some people in Warrentown who might take it. I asked him the name of the best man. He said the best was John Tennant but he didn’t think Tennant would touch it. I drove over and talked to Mr. Tennant. I called him that then. I call him John now. He became a friend. He said he would have to talk to Alister first. They had put Alister in the