I could’ve fought Wood. I could’ve demanded my First Amendment rights and decried the prior restraints on my ability to report the news. But cops usually hoot when you spout that stuff, and it wouldn’t have accomplished anything.

I needed at least a phone and maybe a car. Both were at Hack’s, so I started walking.

The news, said the oracle Dill, is a fickle bitch. Either she has too little time or demands too much from what she has, so do the math. Always do the math, she said.

It was nearly 4 a.m. on Saturday morning. The press would roll at 11. So far, I had the victims, some background, and a good idea of how they died. I had the babysitting angle and the Halloween angle. But in a small town like Failey, with its disproportionately high ratio of free minutes to mouths, nothing I knew so far would still be news by the time the press rolled.

What would make papers fly out of the boxes would be stuff nobody else knew and since I had the time to find it, I would be expected to have it. What I came up with was an old guy sitting in the shadows of his back porch in front of a blood-spattered door.

Three squads drew my attention to him. Down the ridge and across a field from the gravel road on which I walked, their red-and-blue lights flashed silently in the distance as the squads pulled from a driveway and headed toward town. All the lights remained on in the house they had left.

It occurred to me that maybe there’d been another murder. It occurred to me that Aunt Lotty had gone to a neighbor’s house for help. It occurred to me that already my feet hurt, and even at that time of night, since they were up anyway, maybe the occupants would let me use the phone. Any one of those occurrent thoughts seemed like a good reason to stumble down the ridge and through the bean stubble across that field.

The old guy could’ve been dead. He was hunched on the steps outside a screened-in porch that hung like it had come unglued from the back of the old, white, frame farm house. He had his knees up, his arms on his knees, and his head on his arms. A single, yellow bulb drooping from the eave gave a jaundiced cast to his white head. It also deepened to almost black the maroon marks, fanned like rose petals, head high on the edges of the porch’s white door.

He had to be alive. As a rule, cops don’t go off and leave behind stiffs. But I waited outside the yellow crime scene tape the cops had strung around his back yard until I saw his shoulders heave.

He heard me duck under the tape and step closer. He raised his eyes off his arms to look at me, then slowly straightened up. He had on a dingy, ribbed undershirt and bib overalls, and his peaked, gnarled feet were bare. In the cold night, the feet alone made me forlorn.

The old guy dropped his left hand to his side. The barrel of a rifle appeared out of the darkness beside his left knee.

A fat man does not raise his hands over his head if he can help it. I held mine out palms up and away from my body, so he could see I had nothing in them. A delicate introduction seemed appropriate.

“You all right?” I said.

His expression reflected a lot more uncertainty than I would’ve expected from a guy holding a gun. He looked at me some more, not quite sure who I was.

“You come back to clean up your mess?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought you people’d gone,” he said, the disgust evident in his tone.

“I’m not police, if that’s who you mean.”

He raised the barrel an inch. That, of course, stopped my gut from roiling since on me the head presents a so much smaller target.

“Well?” he said, and I told him who I was.

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Fine. Could I use your phone?”

It caught him off guard. He was gearing up for an argument, and he had stop and think about it.

“There’s shit all over it,” he said finally.

He had a long face and a day or two’s worth of white stubble on a narrow, tapered jaw. His voice was low, earthy, like he had to push a lot of wind through his box to make noise, and he talked slowly. But I doubted that his name was Lenny or that he raised rabbits. It was more that he was methodical and deliberate; once he’d decided where he was going it took him time to shift course.

“You’ve lost me again, partner,” I said.

“Gray shit,” he shouted. “That print shit,” he said a little more calmly.

“The cops dusted you?”

He held up his right hand so that I could see his palm. The tips of all five fingers were black with what I assumed was the ink the cops would have used to take his fingerprints.

Pronouncing each word distinctly and pausing a beat in between, he said, “They did not clean up their damned shit,” as if that defined the issue. I decided maybe there was another one.

“They let you keep that?” I said, cocking my chin at the rifle.

He looked at the rifle with surprise as though he’d forgotten he held it. When he looked back at me, I could see that he realized what I was thinking. He quickly put the rifle down and shrugged.

“They took my goddamned shotguns,” he said, as if those would have been his firearms of choice.

“Did they?” I said. “How many?”

He held up two fingers.

“You fired them lately?”

He said, “That’s what they asked.”

“After they sniffed them, I imagine.”

He looked at me with surprise as though I had read his mind, but I just said, “And?”

“Squirrel season,” he said.

“You hunt with them.”

He gave me a curt, grudging nod.

“And you hadn’t cleaned them.”

He shook his head.

“And you didn’t tell them about the rifle.”

He shook his bowed head slowly.

“It was in the barn,” he said. “And they didn’t ask. Just wanted shotguns.”

“They take anything else?” Maybe I could figure out what exactly they were looking for.

“The shells,” he said. “My robe. A blanket. A towel. Had blood on them.”

“Yours?”

He shook his head. I considered the door and its rose-petal dabs.

“Lotty came here.”

I had said it gently, but I didn’t give him the option of a question, and he nodded.

“They think maybe you did it?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

I said, “Maybe you ought to get your story out before they do.”

He cocked his head and his eyes went blank. He was a methodical man. He had to think about that.

I do not like to think of myself as sentimental, but I am sometimes touched by the openness and willingness to trust that I encounter among the good people of Austin County. Having spent the better part of my life in that rude place Chicago, I am sometimes ambushed by amiability here.

The old guy had, I will gratefully acknowledge, dropped his gun on a stranger who approached him at four in the morning after his neighbors were killed. More importantly, he agreed with my premise, although it seemed a weak one, since as a rule, cops are no more likely to leave behind good suspects than they are stiffs. The honesty the Program demands, however, also requires me to say, as I might not have before, that the fact that I am occasionally touched by the trusting nature of these folks has never stopped me from exploiting it.

His name was Orlo, he said after a moment and spelled it without my asking. Orlo Ratliff, he said and did not bother to shake hands or invite me to sit. It took me a second to realize we were down to business; he was starting the interview.

His mother had called him Bunny, he said. I could call him that if I wanted.

“Ever’body does,” he said in a resigned tone that made it sound as if he couldn’t do much about it at this point. “I suspect you’ll put Bunny in those marks in the middle of my name,” he said.

“Sounds like you read the papers, know our style,” I said to ingratiate myself.

He didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he seemed to have other clear, preconceived ideas about what kind of information I wanted and proceeded to deliver it.

He was 62 years old, he said. He was not married, never was married, and he wanted me to know that, no sir, he did not do it. He had been in a war, he said. Korea, he said. He had killed men, but never children. If he could not kill children then, he could not kill children now.

And he would not hurt Lotty. Goddamn, he said, his voice cracking, goddamn, he loved her. And when he had breathed deeply a couple of times, he added: “Not that it made much difference to her, of course.” He saw something on the cement between his feet and frowned. “Or them policemens.”

Orlo rubbed at the cement with his thumb, looked at it, and abruptly stood up and went in the house. I thought he’d ended the interview, but just as I was about to pound on the door and holler for him to come back, he returned with a bucket and a brush.

“That’s her,” he said, pointing to spots on the cement but talking with surprise and affection as though he had found someone in a family album he wanted me to see.

“She just appear at your door or what, Orlo?”

He looked at me funny. Orlo and Bunny were a tossup when it came to which I’d least like to be named, but he obviously didn’t care for Bunny, so I’d used his given name.

He smiled, gratified and a little embarrassed. But he was a methodical man. He would tell a complete story, and he would pick his own place to start.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” Orlo said, “except the service, of course. So I’ve knowed her a long time.”

There was a spigot off to one side of the porch. He took the bucket there and started to fill it.

Lotty used to live on the other side of the place, her parents’ place, he said. Her father farmed. The mother probably was a housewife, since that’s what women did then and Orlo didn’t mention anything unusual like a job. Lotty, he said, helped her dad farm and her mother around the house and she started babysitting.

“What else’s an old maid going to do anyway, unless she teaches or gives piano lessons or something?” he said, a hard edge of disgust suddenly entering his voice.

Then her parents got old and sick. Lotty farmed and cared for them in their sickness, Orlo said. And when they died, she didn’t want to live in their house anymore. “Too much to take care of. Didn’t feel like home no more,” he said with a certainty that made me think he was talking more from his own experience than hers.

“She can be a pistol,” Orlo said, the judgment expressed with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement. “Particular,” he said after considering it another moment. “Independent.”

About ten years ago, she’d sold off all her parents’ place except the woods on the back. She’d bought herself the double-wide, set it up in the clearing, and put the money left over in the bank.

“We was neighbors then,” he said. He brought the bucket back to the porch. “But we never paid each other much mind until Sister died.”

“Who’s Sister?” I asked.

He took up the brush and stiffly lowered himself to his knees to scrub at the spots on the steps.

His sister, Adell. He had lived with his mother and her until his mother died, then he had lived with Adell until she died. That was seven years ago.

“Then,” he said, as though it was a revelation, something that could not be foretold, “then I lived by myself.

“I do her favors,” Orlo said. “Lotty,” he said in his careful way, as though I might’ve forgotten whom we were talking about. “I fix things, plow her garden.” He turned to look up and back over his shoulder at me with a grin. “She’s scrawny. Little, tiny woman.”

“Needs you, does she?” I said, although I was beginning to suspect it might be the other way around.

“Not to hear her tell it. God damn her.”

“Orlo, I can’t tell whether you like Lotty or not.”

“Oh, I like her well enough.” He scrubbed back and forth in an arc like a windshield wiper. His brush strokes became wider and harder. “She don’t always care much about me.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Says I ain’t been around women enough. Don’t know what they want.” He dipped the brush and shook off the excess water with a snap. “Says I would’ve knowed more if I hadn’t lived with my mother and Sister.”

I almost missed that. “You’re . . . “ I struggled to find the right word and not sound too incredulous. “Lovers?”

“Well,” he said. He stopped brushing. “You going to put that in the paper?” he asked without looking up.

“No.”

“Well,” he repeated. “Just when it suits her. Just when she’s got needs.” He shrugged. “Then I get invited to supper.” He climbed to his feet, sloshed what was left of the water around in the bucket, and threw it on the steps. “And I ain’t s’posed to show up till it’s good and goddamned dark.”

The coffee-shop theorists—the ones with nothing better to do than rehash the whole business—still wonder about Orlo. He was her lover, they say, and she treated him like dirt. If he’d ever been romantically attached to a woman, no one could remember it, and a lifetime of isolation, living as a bachelor on a farm with only his mother and his sister, had left him socially stunted. He didn’t like children much, and he was known to be jealous of the time Lotty spent with them. He had shotguns and Lotty’s blood all over his house. He was stubborn and odd.

All true, but I never bought what the wags called the Bunny theory. I saw his face when he looked at his door. He was appalled.

It caught his attention when he looked up from his chore. He stared, his eyes darting from one side of the door to the other, for a long time.

“I missed that,” he said finally, sounding defeated.

He filled the bucket again and carried it back to the door. Two ladder-back chairs, painted white, set against the wall next to the steps. I’d been on my feet long enough, so I took one. I could see his face from there, too.

He had wet the stiff-bristled brush and raised it to the paint, but then thought better of it. Orlo stood before the door, again perplexed.

“She joked,” he said, thinking, staring at the door, and talking now to himself. “I thought she was horsing me around.”

“When was this, Orlo?”

“Around midnight. Could’ve been earlier.” He turned to me to explain. “I don’t leave the light on. I go to bed. Got to get up. Don’t have nothing the little shits’d want anyway.”

“Halloween’s tonight, Orlo.”

“Yeah,” he said, the distinction not of any consequence for his attention had returned to the door.

He dropped the brush back in the bucket and raised his arms like a supplicant at an altar. He held his big hands over the marks on either side of the door. They were not rose petals or random spatters, I now saw, but palm prints, three or four on either side of the door and not much bigger than a child’s. Orlo played his hands above them, hovering for a moment over each one.

“I ‘spect she was down here a long time ‘fore I heard her,” he said.

With both hands, he slapped the door. It rattled the house, echoed off barns. When the sound bounced back, he banged the door again, three times, hard.

“Why didn’t I hear that?” he sobbed.

After a moment, I said, “You must’ve eventually.”

“Yeah,” he said and sucked up two quick breaths. “Yeah, I did.”

Orlo took a pressed and folded blue bandana from the rear pocket of his overalls and dabbed each eye. As he started to refold it, he looked at the stains. He wet a corner of the handkerchief with his tongue and dabbed at the edge of one of the prints. It turned orange and faded.

“I thought she was funning.” he said.

“Funning. You mean joking?”

Orlo did. It was the night before Halloween, and he thought she was tricking him. He’d finally awakened to the pounding on his door, thrown on his overalls, and come downstairs. When he turned on the porch light, her face was pressed to the glass.

“It was streaky,” he said. “Like she’d walked into a black spider web.”

When she saw him, she slumped, disappearing from his sight and blocking the door. He was mad, goddamn her, for waking him out of a sound sleep, for teasing him, for scaring him like that. But she’d never come to his place before, and she didn’t move when he tried to open the door, and he didn’t know what to think.

“She was just laying in a heap. Right on the steps. God damn her, then I thought she was dead.”

He dipped the bandana in the bucket and wrung it out.

“My lord, she was bloody. Her back and her head.” He waved his arm around over the back of his own head. “Looked like somebody’d spread her with jam.”

He applied the wet bandana to one of the marks on the door. When he pressed, two orange lines flowed down toward the steps.

“What’d you do?”

Orlo got a blanket, popped a screen, and crawled out the window to get to her. He’d wrapped her in the blanket, and, best he could, carried her inside to his couch.

“She talked shit in my arms,” he said. “Didn’t understand a bit of it. Shit about robbers and hoodlums.” He pronounced it hoodlooms. “About how they’d shot the babies. Said they wouldn’t, but they did. And she’d laid there. She’d heard it. I needed to get up there, she said. I needed to plug it, she said.”

Orlo paused and passed the back of his hand across his forehead. “I wasn’t going up there.” His head was bowed, as though he was ashamed. “Not with the shape she was in. Not knowing what was up there.” He shrugged. “I just called it in.”

“Did she say how many there were?”

Orlo shook his head.

“Men, women, both?”

He shook his head again and started to wipe down the other side of the door. “Just said she saw ‘em. ‘Can’t sleep now,’ she said. ‘Got to remember.’”

He paused and looked away, out over the fields.

“I told her to tell me. I’d help her. I’d help her remember. But she said no, no she couldn’t, like I was too dumb. I said I’d write it down, but when I got back with a pad, she was out.”

His resignation was palpable.

“Did she say why they didn’t kill her, too?” I asked.

“I reckon her wig.”

Lotty was embarrassed about her hair, Orlo said. It was thin, and her scalp showed through; she nearly always wore a gray wig. Before she passed out, she made him wrap her head in a towel because she didn’t have on her wig. I thought of the sodden, tangled mass lying next to the couch and jumped ahead of him.

“They thought they’d blown off the back of her head when all they did was blow off her wig?”

“Yes sir. She played possum. Or they left her for dead,” Orlo said. “Either way, the sons a bitches.”

That’s what the cops thought, but in Orlo’s opinion, they were sons of bitches, too.

“They said, ‘Bet you were surprised, Bunny.’” He pitched his voice to mock. “’Bet when she showed up at your door you filled your pants.’ ‘How come didn’t you finish the job? You had time. You think better of it? The children preying on your mind?’”

But Orlo was working backward now. The sheriff’s deputy who had arrived first had been nice enough, he said. He’d steered Orlo into his kitchen and helped load Lotty into the ambulance. He wouldn’t let Orlo go with her when he found out they were not kin, Orlo said, but he did talk with him quietly until two troopers and a guy in a suit arrived a couple of hours later.

“Suit or sport coat?” I asked.

“Blue suit coat, gray pants.”

“McConegal?”

“Could be. Don’t remember. He was real friendly at first. Said he was sorry. Wanted me to tell him what happened. Asked if his mens could look around, and I said sure.”

Orlo poured the remains of the wash water down the sides of the door. The scrubbed areas were several shades whiter than the rest of the house.

“They found the guns and he wasn’t so friendly anymore. Said I didn’t have to say nothing and I could have a lawyer.”

“Did you ask for one?”

“What for?”

I sometimes forget how quick an opinion expressed can kill a story. I had sensed that people too often treated him as stupid, but that didn’t stop me from saying, “Jesus, Orlo.”

“Didn’t need one,” he shouted at me. “Didn’t do nothing.”

He stood shaking and glaring at me. He picked up the bucket, the brush, and the rifle and went inside. The clean, porch door banged on the frame.

I put my dignity on the shelf a long time ago, when I got into this business, maybe before. I pounded on the door and shouted for him to come back. I said I didn’t think he’d done anything. I said I was sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. I said I couldn’t tell his story unless I got back to town. I stepped back when he swung open the door.

“Where’s your car?” he said.

I’d about had it with that question. “In town. Let me call for a ride.”

He looked back into his house, measuring how much he wanted me inside.

“I’ll drive you,” he said.

Orlo made me wait on the steps while he pulled on a pair of work boots, went into the barn lot, and came back with an old pickup.

“Didn’t do nothing,” he repeated as we pulled from his drive.

“Orlo, I never said you did.”

There was a lot of play in the wheel and Orlo spent most of his time jerking it back and forth compensating as we bounced along the gravel road.

“And I didn’t need no lawyer,” he said. “That county lawyer came.”

“Crandall?”

“Him. He did Mama and Sister’s wills. That cop and him got into an argument about when he should’ve told me about not having to say nothing and having a lawyer. Told that cop he’d best start ever’ f’ing conversation with anyone with that from now on. Told me I shouldn’t go anywhere for a while.”

Orlo had become practically gregarious, but I’d already heard enough to know that that part of Orlo’s story could be covered by a sentence that said a man whom police declined to identify had been questioned but no arrest had been made.

When I told him to take me to Poteet’s funeral home, he looked doubtful. When we pulled up there and I took out my wallet and offered him a ten, he shook his head and looked hurt.

“Where’d they take her, Orlo?” I said.

Maybe I’d changed topics on him too fast because he said, “Who?”

“Lotty, Orlo. Who else?”

He thought a long time before he said, “Can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

He thought about it some more. He was a methodical man and, in the end, an honest one. He said, “Both.”