But not in Robin Whiteman’s case. Despite her twenty-three years, she was still living at home with her parents, in a trailer park on Brattleboro’s western edge.

Here Willy was staked out in his nondescript car, parked in the shadows of a large tree roughly one hundred feet away from her residence.

The trailer park had been a fixture for decades, and no one seriously referred to any of its homes as being mobile anymore. A few still had tires tucked behind the hay bale skirts designed to stave off the cold air. But that was only because the owners hadn’t bothered to remove them when cinder blocks had usurped their usefulness. Otherwise, these fading, sometimes sagging metal boxes had become as natural to the locale as the trees growing up among them.

Trailer parks were endemic to Vermont, as to most other rural locations across the nation. Dismissed by casual observers as harbors for the down-and-out, a huge number rivaled their stick-built suburban counterparts for tidiness and pride, including the presence of gardens and flower beds, playgrounds, and swimming pools, and often being serviced by either paved roads or well-maintained dirt equivalents.

Not this one, however. Where Robin Whiteman’s family had put down roots, the streets were little better than forest trails, rutted and gnarly with roots and rocks. There was no lighting aside from what spilled from nearby windows, and any notion of a community center or clubhouse was laughable. This was a neighborhood on the fringes.

It was also not given to the quotidian habits of a block of homes like Willy’s, where school and employment dictated schedules. Here, people came and went almost haphazardly, either not having jobs or because their work was less defined, buffeted by unpredictability.

It wasn’t crucial that Willy interview Robin Whiteman apart from her parents, one of whom he could see crossing before the trailer’s kitchen window, but it was his preference. With that in mind, he was hoping either they or she might leave, allowing him to follow her or be rid of them for the brief time he needed. If he saw her at all.

No sooner contemplated than he did just that. With a bang of the trailer’s flimsy front door, a silhouette appeared at the top of the metal steps, and Willy recognized Robin Whiteman, dressed in a Taco Bell uniform.

“My lucky night,” he said to himself, watching her cross to a ramshackle car, fire it up, and begin bumping her way toward the distant highway.

He fell in behind her as she led him across town to where the local miracle mile peters out near the northernmost interstate exit. There, he came to a stop beside her parked car at the rear of the employee parking lot.

“Robin Whiteman?” he asked as they separately stepped from their vehicles.

“Who’re you?” she asked nervously, eyeing the intimidating combination of his sharp features and lopsided appearance.

He opened his coat to display his badge. “When does your shift start?”