In the town of Bluffwood the year after the murders, there were four pay phones within two blocks of the courthouse square.

The most obvious was in the basement of the courthouse, near the vestibule of the public men’s room, where someone beyond memory had set up a table and chairs so loafers could smoke and play cards. As far as I was concerned, the fact that the phone was the most obvious made it the least desirable. Assuming they could stand the buzz of cutthroat euchre and the stench of cigars and human waste, it was likely to be the first phone the clans would make for during deadline stampedes.

Another phone was in a standalone booth on a corner across the street from the courthouse in front of the First Something Bank of Bluffwood. This one, too, was a little too apparent for my tastes. Even the more delicate twinks could not miss it.

A good prospect was the third phone, which was attached to the wall next to the door of a convenience store a block south of the courthouse. The treasure, though, was buried two blocks west of the courthouse at the back of a drugstore.

I found it when I sat down at the fountain for a honey-laced, toasted cheese and a cherry phosphate, yet another trove unearthed. Not only was the phone remote and hidden, it was a sit-down model situated in a little nook next to the condom rack around the corner from the pharmacist’s dais. For a guy whose paper was too cheap to give him a laptop, it had a shelf under the phone on which to unfold his notepad like gossamer wings while he dictated stories about justice and death.

The pharmacist noticed one of his elderly, female customers scowling at me as I squished my cheeks back and forth on the little stool that stood in front of the phone to test it for comfort, height, and weight loading. Just as I was about to declare this public phone perfect in all its many aspects, he descended from the parapet where he mixed his potions and said: “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Gordon needs to use the phone.”

“Of course,” I said.

I stood, doffed an invisible, feathered cap, and bowed to welcome her to the little stool. It did nothing to soften Mrs. Gordon’s expression of disgust. Maybe she didn’t like sitting among condoms. Probably she was calling to get a ride home so she could empty her ostomy bag.

“May I have change for the phone?” I asked the pharmacist, a short, bearded man with horn-rimmed, half glasses, who looked somewhat gnomish in his lime-green smock.

“Sorry,” he said. Then with a gnomic smile: “I got phone cards.”

“No shit?”

Mrs. Gordon glared at me as though I was speaking to her. Maybe she actually had an ostomy bag.

I knew where the pay phones were in the Bluff because three weeks before the trial I made a scouting trip. I did it on my own time. I took a vacation day. I didn’t mind because I have no life and therefore do not take vacations and I would’ve scouted the Bluff regardless.

It was, in fact, a relatively small price to pay for the General Manager’s constipated promise that the paper would pick up the tab for covering what was likely to be a two-week trial in another small town in the opposite corner of the state. If the GM had had his way, I would drive three and a half hours each way to and from the trial each day, and if I wasn’t staying in the Bluff each night, what did I need meals for? It’d be just like I was working in Failey, for chrissake. At least for his purposes when he talked to the publisher about the budget, the GM, like Crandall, was pretty sure the trial getting moved was all my fault.

Marley and I literally begged to differ. Three times we took our alms bowl to the GM.

The first visit to his office we made upright, as two professionals to a third. It was shortly after that sour bastard of a judge listened to the testimony of Janelle, two twinks, and me about the extent of our coverage and the number of people we were likely to have reached. Based on our testimony, the judge rejected Crandall’s argument that it would be more economical to select jurors from another county and ship them in and ruled that the trial would be held in one of three similarly sized counties as far away from Failey as he could find. Each party could strike one county from the list; the last one standing won. Bottom line: The seriousness of the crimes and the ungovernable behavior of the clans scared the bejesus out of the crabby, old fart.

Not that any of that mattered to the GM. Marley and I were careful to approach him early to point out that the trial was likely to be held next year sometime and we needed to start thinking about how we were going to cover it. We’d need to set aside money for accommodations for at least one reporter throughout the trial and maybe the photographer on a couple of days, telephone costs, maybe some part-time help to fill in for the reporter assigned to the trial, and maybe some equipment, like a laptop.

Marley and I assumed sending a local reporter to cover a sensational local story was a given. The GM, however, is a guy whose background was advertising, the revenue-producing side of the operation, not editorial, the revenue-spending side of the equation. He made no such assumption.

“How ’bout we just pick it up off the wire?” he said. “I mean, Bob, don’t we always say, ‘It doesn’t cost much more than a reporter; it just produces so much more with so much less aggravation?’”

The guy was serious, and he looked at me when he mentioned aggravation. I was pretty much appalled Marley would buy into that exceptionally cynical business model. Marley was so stunned all he could think to say was he’d get back to him.

I may’ve screwed up the second visit, a week or so later. Marley was making a very articulate argument on the very salient point that we’d look like cheap amateurs if we didn’t have our own reporter at such a significant event when the GM said, “Well, you know, if we focus our resources on this trial, we’ll have to divert them from somewhere else. What d’you think we ought to cut?”

Before Marley could speak, I said, “Well, I’d hate to cut stuff like that full page in yesterday’s Lifestyle, the one devoted to what local personalities eat when they brown bag it. You know which one I’m talking about? It was maybe 30, 40 inches of vapid type wrapped around a half-page color picture of a paper sack. I wouldn’t call that wasted wood fiber. No, sir.”

I admit to being annoyed we even had to have the conversation, and I obviously forgot the GM occasionally slept with the Lifestyle editor. Marley spun me out of that office like a giant top.

I regretted I said it. By that time, I would’ve done anything not to be cut out of the story. It was too good. It was too much like the old days. For the first time in a long time, I had a story I wanted to see through to the end.

I told Marley I’d do it on my own time for free. He said he didn’t think I’d have to go that far, but I would have to go the GM on bended knee. I said that might be a problem, me being rotund and all.

As he sometimes does when I talk, Marley’s first response was to look away and mutter “Jesus Christ” under his breath. After he’d thought about it for a while, though, he said that for round three, I’d have to apologize, which I did, keep my mouth shut, which I also did, and leave the talking to him, which he did.

Marley told the GM that we were in business to provide local news, this was nothing if not local news, and the GM knew as well as he did that we’d sell out every edition for the 10 days of the trial and the weekend in between. The last part—the acknowledgment that even we in editorial had to look out for his bottom line—was what the GM was waiting to hear.

Yeah, he said, that was the bet the paper’d make, and since we’d be lucky to break even, I’d better roll sevens. But as he laid out the rules of engagement—cheapest motel as determined by actual, comparative pricing and dickering, minimal per diem, collect calls to Marley only, no weekends in the Bluff, no laptop, and oh, yeah, some help on Lifestyle between now and then—the GM grinned. Marley and I agreed later he’d played the whole long hand just to make us feel eager and grateful to accept his terms.

I looked upon it as yet another reminder why I stay the hell away from the business side of a paper as much as I can.

So since then, I’d covered the usual accidents, burglaries, and fires. As fulfillment of my bargain with the Devil Lifestyle section, I’d written up some play at a nursing home and, God help me, grandparents day at the elementary school.

And now, here I stood, on yet another courthouse square, my face raised to the sun’s warmth on a mild, early summer day, trying to figure out if this was the seventh or eighth ponderous, pointed limestone block I had visited as a reporter for the Mirror-Press and worrying that if we didn’t start this damned trial soon I was going to run out of new things to say.

Crandall had stopped talking to me altogether about any case since the episode at the federal building and the change of venue. Wood and I talked on the phone frequently about all sorts of matters except the murders, and Moze had dropped off the face of the earth.

Yes, Wood said, Deputy Beard still worked for the sheriff’s department, but he was on special assignment. No, Wood said, he would not tell me where Deputy Beard was working or when he would be done with his special assignment. Yes, Wood said, Miss Nusbaumer was in good health and staying at an undisclosed location, and, before I even asked, no, he would not tell me where or allow me to interview her, either by phone or any other means. And, no, he wouldn’t talk about whether Moze’s special assignment had to do with Lottie Nusbaumer because he’d already told me he would not discuss Moze’s special assignment.

Naomi called once or twice a month, just so I wouldn’t forget she was out there. One time, she wanted to know why exactly it was even necessary to have a trial since the police had told her they were certain the people they’d arrested had done it. I said I didn’t think I was capable of explaining the constitutional principle of due process to her and maybe she should talk to a lawyer if she was really curious. She said she already had, and that prosecutor had better get a conviction or she’d sue. Whom she would sue and for what was unclear to each of us.

Another time, she said I should write a story letting people know that she was coping well and moving on with her life. At Marley’s insistence and against my better judgment, I started such a story, not only about Naomi, but also about how all the survivors were coping. In the end, though, Marley had to write it.

I didn’t have a problem reporting that in addition to what Naomi described as the “myriad” of her other interests she had started a fashion design course by mail. But I started to lose my stomach for the story when she told me: “Unlike my husband, I’ve stopped taking Prozac.” And I knew I couldn’t finish it when neighbors told me the Russells had stopped going to church and they’d spotted Bobby Russell, a normally energetic and diligent fellow, a couple times that spring sitting dead-still on a tractor in a half-plowed field, his head bowed to the steering wheel.

“You picked a hell of a time to get squeamish,” Marley said.

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” I said, looking him in the eye, daring him.

In my head, Dill murmured High-Beam homilies, but in my heart, I knew I had not one thing new or instructive to say about despair.

The Rear provided me with some motivation by telling me in the car ride to Failey that I didn’t need to write about his client’s background, there really wasn’t any news there.

It took a while, but I’ve grown comfortable in the understanding that the relationship between lawyers and reporters is symbiotic. At any number of points in our careers, we must feed off each other to thrive: for information, for explanation, for advocacy, for ego. Who knows what else?

The trick is not to buy into the other guy’s notion that you need him more than he needs you. Thus, it is a rule of mine that sources, particularly lawyer sources, don’t get to decide what I report. In fact, when sources, particularly lawyer sources, tell me what they think is not news, that’s usually a pretty good reason to look into it.

Armed now with the Defendant’s name, address, and date of birth, I made my way the day after the arraignment to the next county, where records in the recorder’s office and the clerk’s office told me, respectively, his family owned about 600 acres of prime farm ground and he had married his wife two years previously when she was exactly 15 years old.

“I suppose we’ll be seeing more of your kind now,” said the woman who identified herself to me as the clerk. She was short, round, and slightly beyond middle age. She had dyed her hair to a matte shade of cast-iron black, she had meticulously mudded on a palette’s worth of makeup, and she liked her glasses to dangle on a black, beaded string, perhaps to call attention to an ample chest.

“What kind would that be?” I said absently as I thumbed through a three-inch-thick, red-leather-bound volume of marriage license records.

“Nosy press,” she said.

The sharp, nasal tone made me look up. Her smile was wry.

“That obvious?” I said.

She stood at the other end of the counter from me. She hoisted another of the hernia-popping, two-foot-by-three-foot books out of the rack under the counter and flopped it open in front of her, her finger poised on the right page.

“Cops and press,” she said. “Who else carries them skinny little pads?”

She set the glasses low on her nose, cocked her head back to look through them, and examined the page she had her hand on.

“You guys,” she said. “Always looking at things. Being nosy. I just can’t leave anything out around here.”

“Am I the first?”

“So far’s I know.”

“Well, these are all public records, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “That they are.”

She looked up from the book to me and tapped her index finger on the page of the open book once more.

“Nancy,” she said to a younger, less flamboyant woman who had been listening attentively to us without raising her eyes from her keyboard, “help me out here.” They went into another room.

I moseyed down to the end of the counter and looked at the book the clerk had left open there. The page the clerk had tapped showed that on the morning of the day of the murders someone with the same last name as the Defendant’s had posted a rather substantial bond that apparently allowed the Defendant to walk out of the county jail.

I wrote down the case number. When the clerk and Nancy returned, I handed the clerk my skinny little pad.

“I’d like to see the file with that number and a local telephone book, if I could, please.”

She looked at the pad and grinned in triumph.

“Bet you would,” she said.

The arresting officer’s affidavit of probable cause in the case file alleged that the Defendant had been arrested two days before the murders on several counts of dealing controlled substances. He allegedly offered an undercover cop a smorgasbord of product, ranging from marijuana to PCP.

That last item on the menu caught my eye. Phencyclidine, or angel dust, is remarkable as drugs go. Once marketed as an animal tranquilizer, it used to be fairly easy to obtain in farming areas. More importantly, depending on the dose and the creature you give it to, it is as effective at anesthetizing a pig as it is at turning people deranged and violent. It’s kind of like Thermopane glass that way: makes things warm in the winter, cool in the summer. How does it know? It made me wonder what effect it would have on a teenage boy looking for love.

The guy who posted the bond for the drug charges was the Defendant’s father, a jailer I talked to said. The father owned the 600 acres, which he had pledged as collateral for the bond. I saw a good deal of the acreage when I drove out there.

The father was tall and barrel-chested. He had me by 10, 15 years, and his hair was gray, but I recognized the GI brush cut and the black, plastic glasses as artifacts some guys can’t leave behind when they’re discharged from the service.

“Korea? Marines?” I said. This was after he had opened the interior door, I had introduced myself, and he had told me to fuck off.

“Yes. No,” he said. The fact he’d answered the questions told me he might talk more.

“Army,” I said, jerking a thumb back at my chest, “Vietnam.”

I’ve spent about all the time I care to talking about that time in my life at Meetings, but I’ve never had a problem exploiting my experience for a story.

“Drafted?” he said.

“Hell, yes,” I said.

There was no point in mentioning either the youthful transgressions that had cost me a student deferment or the hubris and juvenile sense of immortality it took to volunteer for that cluster.

He grunted in a snide, superior way. I was more than willing to bet that he’d never seen combat, but finding out was tangential at best to why I was talking to him, and there is little that is more unseemly than old vets pissing on each other’s shoes.

We stood on opposite sides of the screen door of his farmhouse. The house was a well-painted white, trim, narrow, and two-stories upright, kind of like a strict, maiden aunt. Through the screen, he had crossed beefy arms across a spotless white T-shirt and unfaded bib overalls.

“Thought I told you to leave,” he said, when I made no moves.

“I’d like to talk with your daughter-in-law,” I said. “She lives here, I understand.”

“About what?”

“Your son’s attorney said your son was in your house on the night that three children were murdered and an old lady was shot. That true?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you know that because?”

“Because it’s true.”

“When did your son come in that night?”

“No comment.”

“Your son leave your house at any time that night?”

“No comment.”

“Where is your room in relation to that of your son and his wife?”

“That’s none of your goddamned business.”

“I’d like to speak to your daughter-in-law. She home?”

“She’s not allowed to talk.”

“By you?”

“No.”

“Your son’s lawyer?”

“No.”

“Your son.”

“No comment.”

I took that as a yes, but assuming that wouldn’t get me anywhere. He had not told me to go away again, so I tried another tack.

“What’s your son like? What kind of kid was he growing up?”

“Smart, hard worker, well behaved.”

“Where’d he go to school?”

When he told me, I asked, “When’d he graduate?”

“Didn’t. Self-educated. Read a lot. Knew more’n his teachers, other kids.”

His voice sounded clenched. He seemed to have forgotten how to use subjects.

“Did he?” I said. “What did he do after he quit school?”

“Worked.”

“Where?”

“Me, some. Himself, too. Self-employed.”

“Self-educated, self-employed, himself. A lot of selfs there.”

“What’re you getting at?”

“Nothing. He ever work for anyone but you and himself?”

“Well, he tried a couple of places, but they never had anything he was really qualified for.”

“Meaning?”

“It was just factory work. He’s too smart for that.”

“He is well spoken, I agree.”

“You didn’t say you knew him.”

“I don’t. I think maybe I talked to him on the phone a couple times.”

“Then you know he should be in a supervisory position, not line work.”

“What’d he do for you?”

“A little farming, when I need the help.”

“Meaning he ran the machines, fed the stock, that kind of thing?”

“That’s what farmers do.

Maybe, but it didn’t sound like supervisory work.

“How about for himself?” I asked. “You said he was self-employed? Doing what?”

“He was an entrepreneur.”

“Yeah, I heard he marketed pharmaceuticals.”

“Now what’re you saying?”

The old man had done nothing but blow smoke up my ass, and by then, I had way more than a buttload.

“He was busted two days before the murders for dealing drugs,” I said.

“I think we’re done with this conversation.”

A faint odor of pig manure crept up over my right shoulder as we talked. That I could tell by smell the difference between one type of animal manure and another was yet one more sign I had lived in a rural community too long. I half turned toward the odor.

“How many hogs you raise?” I asked, raising an arm to sweep the expanse of horizon in the direction of the smell.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“In the last few years, say, you ever have any of them come up missing?”

He blinked and looked suddenly haggard and ill. In his expression, for just an instant, I could see the years of whitewash he’d painted over what he knew about his son crack open down to the rotted black wood. Then his face sealed. His jaw bulged, and the flush of anger rose on his neck. I half expected him to put his fist through the screen to hit me. I was already backing away when he waved me to my car and slammed the interior door.

By the time Janelle arrived in the Bluff on the afternoon of my scouting expedition, I had traded the promise of two five-night, midweek stays for a very favorable rate at a locally owned and somewhat aged motel, I had located a fine donut shop and determined the range of prices and cuisines at other food establishments, and I had been assured by tellers at two different banks they would be happy to provide me with change and other financial services as I might require.

The editor of the local weekly agreed that, since our papers were on opposite sides of the state and we accordingly were not really competitors we should look for opportunities to exchange information and photographs. I was welcome to use his facilities, phones, and equipment to file. He gave me a key. The editor was even kind enough to give me a complimentary copy of his paper, in which I coincidentally found a listing for the times and places of Meetings in the area, information Marley insisted I return with.

The ladies at the clerk’s office, their dispositions sweetened by pastries from the aforementioned donut shop, said they saw no problems with my visiting them and examining their records whenever I chose, during normal business hours, of course.

“Where’s the secret passage?” I asked my newest clerk friend.

“Whatever do you mean?” she responded coyly in what may have been a failed attempt at a flirtatious, Scarlett O’Hara accent.

“Every courthouse in this state has a set of stairs, usually spiral, that leads from the clerk’s office to the courtroom. Where’s yours?”

She pointed to another room.

“Yonder.” I tried to remember the last time I’d heard that word outside of a western. “But we never use them anymore. The telephone, the elevator in a pinch, work better if the judge needs something.”

“May I?”

I walked around the counter before she could say no and went through a hallway that served as a storage area and into the room to which she had pointed. In one corner of the room, behind a curved oak door, were the spiral, metal stairs.

It was a tight fit for a guy like me, but the stairs put me into a room off the judge’s chambers, where lawyers could meet with their clients. The judge happened to walk by the open door as I emerged, which is how we came to be talking when Janelle arrived. He had agreed to an on-the-spot interview about his background and how the trial would be handled in exchange for some advice about managing the clans.

We stood in the courtroom. As with most such rooms built before the Civil War, it was large, taking up about a third of the top floor of the courthouse, and it had a high, tin-print ceiling. Like a well-designed church, its size and volume aimed to swallow petty human ambitions and motives and impress upon its occupants a certain attention and respect, if not fear, for what went on there. A row of tall, narrow windows made up one side of the room, and the judge and I were bathed in the warm, golden haze of sunlight reflected off surfaces that were primarily original, shellacked oak.

In contrast to his environment, Philip Arthur Secrist was young and colorful. He popped right off the wall.

He was in his early thirties, a pup as judges go. Like a holdout from the 1970s, he wore round, gold wire rims, and he let his brown-going-gray hair fall over his ears. He sported a blue shirt with a white collar and cuffs, gold links in those cuffs, and a red silk tie. I wondered what his father looked like and whether Secrist grew up admiring his old man.

He was born and raised in Bluffwood, went off to college and law school, and returned to set up a solo private practice for a few years before he ran for judge. He won, he said, because none of the other attorneys in the county thought the job paid enough to make it worth their while. He personally thought the challenge, the honor, and the opportunity to serve the people he had grown up with more than made up for the pay, which he didn’t really need all that much of because he was single and it was a small town and the cost of living was low.

“Hard to meet women in your line of work?” I asked.

He pulled one corner of his mouth tight in what might have been a grin but said only that other questions I had about his personal life were, really, in his opinion, irrelevant to the reason for my story, which he decided was to assure the folks in Austin County that he would handle their case well.

Let’s say it was easy enough to spot a healthy dose of self-esteem in Judge Secrist. Even so, he did not act like a martinet or a publicity hound. Instead, he seemed to have given the handling of a sensational trial a lot of thought. He said he was concerned about balancing rather than favoring competing interests he knew he would be asked to accommodate: The Defendant’s right to a fair trial, the victims’ passion to see justice done, and the clamor of press and public for full and immediate access.

With our rumps hooked on the oak rail that separated the courtroom proper from the gallery, we looked at the two columns of ten, long pews each, enough seating for maybe 200 people. Pointing, Secrist said he was thinking of putting the victims’ families and cops in the first few rows of one side of the gallery and the Defendant’s family and friends on the other side of the aisle. The clans could have a few rows behind the victims’ families and cops, and other spectators could have the rest.

“I ’spect it’s wise to keep state people and defense people separate,” he said. “You think three or four rows for you guys?”

I was saying more was better than less, he could always give up a row to the public if the clans didn’t need it, when one of the wooden doors at the back of the courtroom swung open. Janelle put her head in, saw me, and said, “Well, crap.”

With a straight face, I said, “Judge, if she doesn’t think any more of you than that, I’d hold her in contempt.”

Janelle had stepped fully into the courtroom. She wore a maroon blouse under a black, pants suit and carried a black, leather purse the size of a brief case. From the other end of the aisle, she scowled at us, mostly me. Secrist gave her a long, well-practiced look of appraisal.

“Perhaps,” he said, smiling as roguishly as I’d ever seen a judge smile, “I should withhold judgment until we’ve been introduced.”

I made the introductions, but when I mentioned Janelle’s professional affiliation, the playful light went out of Secrist’s eye. He closed his eyes once, I would guess to erase disappointment, and when they opened, his face settled into the impassive mask that we later noticed he donned with the black robe when he took the bench.

“How may I help you?” he asked.

“Perhaps, we could talk privately?” she said, looking at me.

“No,” Secrist said, “let’s talk here.”

Janelle explained she’d just stopped by to see if he’d give her an interview. If now wasn’t good, she’d be happy to come back another time, although really it was better to do it in advance of the trial and, looking at me again while she said it, it didn’t look like he had anything scheduled right now.

Secrist nodded as she talked, but only to indicate he understood her request. He said he intended only to give one interview prior to the trial and that was to me, he was afraid. I was the “media representative” from the place where the murders had occurred, he said, and the residents of that area had a right to know how the case was being handled. It was pretty much the same argument I made to him when he had told me right after he was selected that he wouldn’t talk to anybody.

Janelle tried arguing that this was a story that the whole state was watching and that the best outlet for information to the whole state was her paper and not mine or any of the television stations, for that matter. They didn’t cover nearly as much territory as the Chronicle, nor would they give it the detail it required.

Secrist almost smiled. You could tell: he, too, liked a gamer. But this was a guy who made his living listening to lawyers. Every day, he stood his ground in the face of hissing reptiles; an attractive, young reporter was not going to move him.

“If I say anything of interest to the rest of the state, I’m sure a wire service will pick it up out of Mr. Ambrose’s article,” he said.

He glanced at me, checking to see if he was right. It revealed more knowledge of how we work than he had let on or I gave him credit for.

“But let me ask you a question,” Secrist said, turning his attention back to Janelle. “We have rules against cameras—still or video—in the courtroom, but I’ve had requests from other outlets—mostly radio, but perhaps your own paper—for daily transcripts of the proceedings. My office has the ability, but apparently not the inclination. My court reporter says it’s impossible from a time and energy standpoint, and I’m not inclined to make her unhappy since I have to work with her. What do you think?”

It was a masterful attempt to co-opt her, but as a frequent target of Janelle’s fury, I could see a problem developing.

“All radio guys care about is sound,” I said quickly before she could say anything she might regret. “Maybe you could rig up outlets that would allow them to tap into the Court’s sound system? Anybody wants to plug a recorder into the sound and make a transcript of their own could do it. Might satisfy TV, too.”

Secrist brightened at the suggestion but judiciously said only that he would give the idea some thought. He shook my hand before he excused himself. He knew better than to try with Janelle. He just nodded to her.

“I think he liked you,” I said as we waited for the elevator. “Might’ve asked you out. If he hadn’t found out you’re a reporter. He probably has rules. You know, against fraternizing, the appearance of favoritism, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

She said nothing. Indeed, she said nothing until we were outside on the square, where she rounded on me.

“What is it? Do I smell bad? Is there broccoli in my teeth? There’s not one damn person in this godforsaken town that wants to talk to me?”

Over her shoulder, I saw a guy across the street turn his head. I said, “Maybe you want to keep your voice down?”

“You don’t help a thing,” she said, not lowering her voice a decibel. “Everywhere I go, you’ve been there. I’ll bet they’re talking to you, asshole.”

It was about three-thirty. I’d collected from the clerk’s office a list of potential jurors and a copy of the questionnaire that each had filled out about his or her background and experiences with and opinions of the legal system. The lawyers would use the questionnaires to select jurors from the pool of names that had been drawn for the trial.

I didn’t know exactly how I’d use the information, since a story that profiled potential jurors by name and address was likely to raise concerns about the jurors’ security and impartiality and get me hauled up in front of someone, mostly likely Secrist, whom I did not care to alienate at that point. Maybe I’d just stow the information and use it for a sidebar story on the jury’s background once it had been seated or to contact jurors after the verdict. But in any event, I had the documents folded in thirds in the inside pocket of my jacket.

I was pretty sure Janelle had them nowhere about her person, but short of frisking her, which I would not have minded, the best thing to do was to get Janelle off the square and away from the courthouse, which closed at four.

“Well?” she demanded. “Any of these clods talking to you?”

“I’m going to get a haircut,” I said. “Want to come?”

I had seen a barbershop a couple of blocks off the square when I was making my rounds earlier in the day. I put it on my mental list of potential sources as a place to take the temperature of the town before, during, and after the trial. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the local newspaper guy, but I always like to talk to people directly.

“Don’t even think about pulling out a notepad or a recorder while we’re in here,” I said to Janelle as we walked toward the shop. “If you can’t remember and write it down later, then just listen.”

She was slowing down, hanging back.

“I don’t think this is going to do us any good.”

“Oh, come on. Where’s your can-do spirit?”

She just shook her head.

The shop was Norman Rockwell in hard times. It was a little storefront, with the name of the proprietor in chipped, gold paint on the window that covered the width of the store. The candy stripes twirled on a pole at the door, but it was bent and crooked like it had been bumped by a passerby. Pre-adolescent thug on a skateboard was my bet.

Inside on the right stood a shoe shine stand that looked like it had been unoccupied for at least a couple of decades; newspapers were stacked a couple of feet high between the stirrups at the foot of the throne, and old magazines and comic books had been tossed up onto the seat. On the left against a wall was a row of chairs with duct-taped, plastic upholstery and chipped-chrome arms occupied only by one 10- or 11-year-old boy, reading a comic book.

The place smelled of fresh talcum, stale lotions and aftershave, and a leaky oil furnace. There were four chairs, but only two guys cutting hair. One guy looked to be in his 60s or 70s, with a white flattop, a precisely trimmed, white mustache, and a shiny, cobalt-blue smock. The other was in his 30s maybe. He looked like the older man, only he wore his hair in a mousy, brown mullet complemented by a plaid shirt and khakis.

They appeared to have sorted the customers by age. The old guy had another old guy in his chair, and the younger guy had a middle-aged guy in his. It looked like a toss-up who’d get the kid when one of them finished.

I didn’t see how anyone would ever think we could sneak into a room that size, but a bell hanging above the door tinkled when we walked in. Everybody looked up to see who it was. Both barbers stared at my head, which being bald, brought a smile to the old man’s face and a dismissive glance from the younger man. The glance of both men stopped at Janelle.

“We got no more to say now than we did an hour ago, Missy,” the old man said.

Janelle looked away from me. That explained Janelle’s reluctance to come in here and, at least in part, her fury.

“I need a haircut,” I said. I made a circle around the top of my head with my forefinger. “I pay full price for half the work.”

That got a chuckle. The old barber rose to the challenge.

“Half might be generous.”

“Which one’s Wilson?” I said, ignoring it. I cocked my head at the sign on the door.

“We are,” the barbers said in unison, nodding in satisfaction behind the heads of hair at their own, well-practiced line.

“I’ll only let the proprietor cut my hair,” I said.

“You win either way,” the younger man said in a much gruffer tone than I would use with a customer.

“I need an appointment?”

The whole place tittered at that idea.

“Where’re you from?” the older barber asked

I told them.

“No kidding?” said the old guy in the chair. “You know anything ’bout those murders?”

“I was there the night they occurred.”

It worked like I hoped it would. The scissors stopped, and the middle-aged guy whose chin had been pushed to his chest stared up at me through his eyebrows. Even the kid looked up from the comic.

“Have a seat,” the older barber said nonchalantly when the clock started ticking again. “One of us won’t be long.”

Acceptance, like offer in this case, was implicit. I did not know at that point its bounds, but a guy in my business succeeds each day only by surmounting his ignorance. I took it as a good sign when the older man excused himself from his customer to make a couple of phone calls. As we each took a creaking chair, I caught Janelle rolling her eyes.

When I picked up a magazine without saying anything more, the older guy in the chair said, “Well?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Well?”

“You can’t just waltz in here and tell us you were there and not say anything more.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

I introduced myself by name, position, and employer.

“And, I’m sorry,” I said, “your name is?”

He paused for a minute, then gave it. So I told him a little bit about Moze, a kid deputy and how he had got the call.

“And, I’m sorry,” I said to the guy in the other chair. “I missed your name.”

He gave me a knowing smile and told me, so I talked a little bit about the weather that night and the place where Aunt Lotty’s double-wide is located.

“I know your last name’s Wilson,” I said to the younger barber. “I don’t know your first.”

He waved me off with a comb, but the old man had returned by that time.

“Carl,” he said, tapping his chest with the pointed end of his scissors, “and Cole,” pointing his scissors at his son, who was scowling again.

Another couple of older men came in as he was talking. The old barber introduced them and said, “I thought maybe they’d like to hear what you got to say.” He looked only sheepish enough to be polite.

“Sure,” I said. “You know, I’m going to be around here for a while in the next few weeks. I don’t want to forget who you are. Mind if I write your names down?”

I had already pulled the notepad out of my pocket and started writing before I finished, and nobody said no.

They asked some more questions about what had happened that night, and I gave them an abbreviated version of the first couple stories I had written.

Then, I said, “So, what do people think about the circus that’s coming to town?”

And because I was not condescending and because I’d offered up a little commerce and some new grist for the gossip mill, they told me.

The younger barber thought it was a damned shame and would only bring embarrassment to the town.

“It’s going to be just more of you poking your noses in our business,” he said bluntly.

He struck me as a guy who dwelled in bitterness as the scion of the Bluff’s barbering empire. The others shushed him, his father loudest of all.

The old guy in the chair thought it’d be pretty good entertainment and planned to go early every day to see if he could get a seat in the gallery. The kid asked whether the crime scene was gross. One of the newcomers thought it was damned shame their county had to pay for a trial from across the state.

Cole whipped the apron off the middle-aged guy and snapped the hair out of it. As the guy rose, he said, “Let’s talk about the heart of it. I hope we fry the son of a bitch.”

“Do you?” I said.

“I followed ever’ word written or said about this case,” he said. “There’s nothing that anybody’s going to say that’ll change my mind. The son of a bitch is guilty.”

He looked at me and grinned.

“I ’spect you’ll quote me on that?”

“Probably,” I said.

“You, too, young lady,” he said, pointing at Janelle.

She merely smiled at the man, pleasantly and without commitment. She was getting the hang of this.

When I checked the names on the list of potential jurors later, I found his. He was setting himself up to be rejected as a juror for prejudice. I quoted him anyway.

Janelle said nothing during the conversation. Instead, her nearly black eyes moved constantly from one speaker to the next, absorbing and folding into her memory every word that was said.

When the old man had swept up the white hair from the floor that surrounded his chair, he waved me in. As I started to get up, Janelle put her hand on my arm.

“You know, asshole,” she whispered in my ear. “I swear, I am just not worthy.”

Sometimes talking to Janelle is like having a religious experience. Too often, she talks in tongues.

“I’ve got to go,” she said and gathered up that duffel bag she called a purse

As the old barber cinched the apron around my neck tight enough to make my eyes pop, she turned to the room and threw us all a winning smile.

“Nice to meet you friendly, friendly boys,” she said. “But it’s been a while since I had my hair done.”

By the time I got away from the barbershop, I had lost her. Her story the next day was fuller, more comprehensive than mine. She had talked with and listened to both men and women of the Bluff.