madman? Little wonder my heart practically stopped when that gravelly voice came at me again days later out of the blackness of our cellar.
“I seen him," it said. “I seen him do it.”
I was forbidden by my father to tell my friends. Yet word got around, and a few of Mother's piano students found excuses to drop out of weekly lessons
rather than run the risk of encountering the boogieman haunting our house.
I had trouble sleeping, nightly shadows taking threat- ening shapes on the walls. For a time, I refused chores that involved going to the basement.
And my mother didn't make an issue of it.
I'm not certain exactly how much later it happened. But the sudden departure of the mysterious vagrant did nothing to produce the blissful sens of relief
I so desired.
The detective was a plainclothes officer. I couldn't take my eyes off the pistol grip that bulged from the holster in a black leather strap that his
coat slid back to
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reveal. He looked too big for our sofa, and his questions produced startling lies from my parents' mouths.
“But your neighbors saw him around your house,” the detective said.
My father, whose hairline glistened with beads of perspiration, developed a vague recollection after looking again at the pictures of the body that had
been fished from the Ohio River near Ludlow. “He might be a bum we rousted from our garage,” he agreed.
“This was found on him.” The policeman produced a scrap of paper that was gray from printing on both sides. It appeared to have been ripped from a phone
book. Something was circled in pen.
I thought my father had been stricken. He clutched his chest and folded at the waist like a deck chair. My mother shrieked. The policeman lifted an eyebrow.
After a brief commotion, my father recovered. “I swear to you, officer,” he gasped, “we do not know this man.”
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