I knew why the guy had called him crazy—everyone did. Maybe six months before that, the police had been called after Wilson punched out his neighbors’ windows. Three houses in a row. He smashed panes of glass over and over with his bare fists, shouting in the middle of the night. When it stopped, Mr. Pascall, who lived next door, went outside. He found Wilson stark naked on the road, crying, his hands and arms bleeding. Wilson had looked up and said, “You should call the cops now.” Not long after the Sun Bowl, we heard he’d been involved in a holdup that went wrong, where a gas station attendant was tied up. Some people said Wilson had been the getaway driver. He must have done something, because after that he was gone for a few years, no one was sure where. When he came back, he started showing up at parties, hanging around teenagers not much older than me, just there on the edge of things.

“Maybe Ellen hid when she heard the motorcycle because she was scared it was Wilson.”

“You don’t even know him. I’ll call you when she gets here.”

I watched the television with the sound turned down low. Fantasy Island came on. It all looked so ridiculous, the little man shouting “De plane! De plane!” and the guy in the tuxedo who was supposed to have godlike powers telling all the staff to smile for the rich clients. I switched to The Rockford Files. I couldn’t sit still. It was almost eleven, over three hours since Ellen got out of the car.

Mrs. Boucher had subscriptions to magazines and newspapers and walls lined with books. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times were on the coffee table. The main story on both covers was still the Atlanta child murders. I tried reading the story but couldn’t concentrate on the words. I had heard it on KYW News that morning when we drove to school. The police had been keeping all of Atlanta’s bridges under surveillance, and the week before they had observed a car stop on one of the Chattahoochee River crossings, and then heard a splash below in the water. They pulled the driver over, and two days later, downriver, a body washed up. They thought they finally had the murderer. I prayed it was him. Over twenty Black children were missing or dead. I felt scared in the Bouchers’ house alone. It was all glass, and at the back the ground sloped, so that in the living room I felt as if I were floating in the trees. I could see why Mrs. Boucher called it her tree house. There were no curtains, and windows everywhere.