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were the Caynes, watching the movers unload the truck and put their boxed belongings in the white two-story three-bedroom house on Twixt Road, just before it inter sected with Town Street, which ran down by the river. The neighbors watched too, slowly pulled out of their houses and down the street, attracted to the yellow moving truck as if it were a huge magnet. They came by and introduced themselves and stood with the Caynes like spectators at a parade, a ball game, or some great historical event worthy of a rapt, attentive crowd. My friend Carl Hathorne and I rode our bikes over and stood with the large group that had formed. We didn’t really care about the truck or what came out of it; we didn’t really care about the parents and what they looked like. We’d already heard that the Caynes had an only child, a girl our age. We wanted to see the girl. We were disappointed; she was not what we had ex pected, and far from what we had hoped for. She came out of the house wearing a pair of headphones over her short, straight blond hair, the cord snaked into the pocket of a short black jacket. It was the kind of jacket someone would pump gas in, worn on a hot, humid day when it was, with complete certainty, the only jacket being worn in town. Under the jacket she had a black shirt, which, I found out later, was long-sleeved. She never wore short sleeves. She was also wearing a pair of jeans and heavy boots—black. She wore thick black eyeliner and a black expression. She sat down in the grass and started writing in a black notebook. I didn’t give her much thought that day,