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had had a sudden presentiment about
    her.
     
    "Mom, I don't know why-I just wanted to call and see if everything's
    all right."
     
    Pat began to tell her son what had happened, when Ronnie stopped her
    and said, "Mother, are the doors locked?"
     
    "Oh, my God, I don't know.   Wait a minute.   I'll call you back.
     
    She set the phone down and ran to lock all the doors in the house, but
    then she was struck with a terrible thought: Oh my God, what if I've
    locked him in the house with me?   He could have come up the hedgerow
    that lines the back of the house....
     
    Ronnie held on the line until Pike County's chief deputy sheriff, Billy
    Riggins, raced the two and a half miles from the courthouse in Zebulon
    to Kentwood.   Riggins found an attractive but hysterical woman standing
    at the kitchen phone, clutching an unloaded .22 rifle.   Since Riggins
    didn't know it was unloaded, he gingerly removed the gun from her grip
    and she handed the phone to him.   "Please talk to my son and reassure
    him that you're here with me."
     
    After.   Riggins spoke to Ronnie and hung up the phone, he was assaulted
    with a torrent of words as Pat told him how horrified she had been to
    see her own father-in-law standing there in the hedgerow waving his
    private parts at her.   "I've been ill," she told Sheriff Riggins.   "I
    have a lot of trouble with blood clotting, and what have you, and I
    have to have oxygen.   I have high blood pressure and all from an
    accident I was in-I just got out of the hospital.   This was the first
    day I felt well enough to mow.
     
    "My son said for me to ask you to load the gun for me, so I'll have
    something to protect myself after you leave-at least until my husband
    gets home."
     
    "Where are the shells for this .22?"   Riggins asked.
     
    "I don't know."
     
    Tom called back just then and told Riggins where the keys to the gun
    cabinet were.   The deputy chambered the rounds and showed Pat how to
    shoot the gun.   She wasn't unkno*ledgeable about guns.   She could load
    and shoot a .22 rifle, and she had used a much more powerful gun when
    she went deer hunting with Tom the previous fall.   But she was
    apparently too frightened to think straight, and her hands shook.
     
    Riggins noted that she also seemed terribly embarrassed, and, hell,
    what woman wouldn't be?   It was a humiliating thing to have to turn in
    your own kin for showing off his privates.   It wasn't natural.
     
    "Can you describe the man you saw?"   he asked.
     
    "Yes," she began slowly.   "Of course-I mean I knew it was his father.
     
    . .
     
    . There he stood wearing that same kind of hat that he wears, that kind
    of floppy hat, and his shirtsleeves rolled up like he does, and just
    dropping his pants.   Yet at the same time I was thinking, How could it
    be his father?   You know?   But I know it was him."
     
    The Pike County deputy managed to calm Pat down and suggested that she
    talk with her husband about whether they 99 wanted to bring charges
    against his father.   Pat seemed composed enough when he had to leave on
    another call.
     
    This was, in fact, Riggins's second visit to Kentwood Morgan Farm.   In
    early April, Tom Allanson had called him to report that somebody had
    shot one of his cars full of .22 bullet holes.   The car was parked out
    in back of the barn, and it looked as if somebody had used it for
    target practice.   Riggins had never been able to pin the shooting on a
    suspect, and Tom had had no suggestions.   There were a lot of visitors
    coming and going at Kentwood, and then there was fifteen-year-old
    Ronnie Taylor living there with his mother and stepfather, and from
    time to time his teenage friends.   But this time a suspect had been
    positively identified.
     
    When Tom got home a few minutes after Riggins left, he listened in icy
    shock to Pat's accusations against his father.   His father was a mean
    SOB on occasion, but Tom couldn't even imagine Walter Allanson as