Her injured attacker could not explain exactly how she’d gotten the best of him in the parking lot. “She was stronger than she looked,” the shipyard worker told the police. “She got behind me, somehow.”

The police spokesperson sounded unsympathetic about the attacker’s injuries. It seemed the shipyard worker was attempting to kiss and fondle the woman—“when he found himself lying facedown in the parking lot, with the little woman cranking on his arms.”

“Did you read this?” I asked the snowshoer. For the Exeter Town Crier, it was a virtual novella of a “Police Report.”

“There’s definitely more detail than usual, but it’s both blandly written and inconclusive,” the little English teacher said.

“I’m not talking about the writing!” I exclaimed. The snowshoer shrugged. “A ‘small, pretty woman’ who was ‘stronger than she looked’—she also sounds like she knows how to wrestle,” I told him. “You drive a dark-colored VW Beetle,” I reminded him.

“How did the ever-eloquent Roland put it—‘there’s a lot of them around,’ or words to that effect?” Mr. Barlow asked me. But I wasn’t buying it; my suspicions were aroused. I must have sensed that this was something more than a cross-dressing compulsion. Something stronger was at work than Elliot’s desire to wear a woman’s clothes.

I began to believe my mother. Mr. Barlow was a woman—“she just wasn’t born one,” as my mom had told me.

Yet I didn’t exactly confront the snowshoer—not entirely, not at first. What I said to him was: “It could have been you, Elliot. You look very pretty as a woman, and you’re stronger than you look.”

“And you thought Zimmer was fantasizing,” the snowshoer said.

“You could easily get behind a bigger guy and take him down,” I told him.

“Easily,” he agreed, smiling. “But I’m not sure how I would manage to separate both his shoulders and break both his collarbones,” Mr. Barlow said.

“I’m not sure how you would manage to do that, either,” I admitted, “but I’ll find out.”

“Please tell me when you find out how one does that, Adam,” the snowshoer said, still smiling. “It definitely sounds like it could be a useful thing to know.”

I definitely knew who would know, and I knew when and where to find him. Long before and after wrestling practice—even after the other coaches had showered and left the coaches’ locker room, and well before the other coaches got there—Coach Dearborn could be found smoking on the locker-room bench. Mr. Dearborn lived and smoked in the coaches’ locker room, as if he expected to die there. His wrestlers knew he was available to them there. In those days, no one minded the smoke. Coach Dearborn had been a middleweight at Illinois, but his weight-cutting days were over. Elliot and I had estimated that the revered coach weighed more than two hundred pounds.