oh, a minute or more. Nobody answered, so (Mr. Ewalt suggested that we go to the house and try to 'wake them up.' But when we got there - I didn't want to do it. Go to the house. I was frightened, and I don't know why, because it never occurred to me - well, something like that just doesn't. But the sun was so bright, everything looked too bright and quiet. And then I saw that all the cars were there, even Kenyon's old coyote wagon. Mr. Ewalt was wearing work clothes; he had mud on his boots; he felt he wasn't properly dressed to go calling on Clutters. Especially since he never had. Been in the house, I mean. Finally, Nancy said she would go with me. We went around to the kitchen door, and, of course, it wasn't locked; the only person who ever locked doors around there was Mrs. Helm, the family never did. We walked in, and I saw right away that the Clutters hadn't eaten breakfast; there were no dishes, nothing on the stove. Then I noticed something funny: Nancy's purse. It was lying on the floor, sort of open. We passed on through the dining room, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Nancy's room is just at the top. I called her name, and started up the stairs, and Nancy Ewalt followed. The sound of our footsteps frightened me more than anything, they were so loud and everything else was so silent. Nancy's door was open. The curtains hadn't been drawn, and the room was full of sunlight. I don't remember screaming. Nancy Ewalt says I did - screamed and screamed. I only remember Nancy's Teddy bear staring at me. And Nancy. And running . . ." In the interim, Mr. Ewalt had decided that perhaps he ought not to have allowed the girls to enter the house alone. He was getting out of the car to go after them when he heard the screams, but before he could reach the house, the girls were running toward him. His daughter shouted, "She's dead!" and flung herself into his arms. "It's true, Daddy! Nancy's dead!" Susan turned on her. "No, she isn't. And don't you say it. Don't you dare. It's only a nosebleed. She has them all the time, terrible nosebleed, and that's all it is."
"There's too much blood. There's blood on the walls. You didn't really look."
"I couldn't make head nor tails," Mr. Ewalt subsequently testified. "I thought maybe the child was hurt. It seemed to me the first thing to do was call an ambulance. Miss Kidwell - Susan - she told me there was a telephone in the kitchen. I found it, right where she said. But the receiver was off the hook, and when I picked it up, I saw the line had been cut."
Larry Hendricks, a teacher of English, aged twenty-seven, lived on the top floor of the Teacherage. He wanted to write, but his apartment was not the ideal lair for a would-be author. It was smaller than the Kidwell's, and, moreover, he shared it with a wife, three active children, and a perpetually functioning television set. ("It's the only way we can keep the kids pacified.") Though as yet unpublished, young Hendricks, a he-mannish ex-sailor from Oklahoma who smokes a pipe and has a mustache and a crop of untamed black hair, at least looks literary - in fact, remarkably like youthful photographs of the writer he most admires, Ernest Hemingway. To supplement this teacher's salary, he also drove a school bus.
"Sometimes I cover sixty miles a day," he said to an acquaintance. "Which doesn't leave much time for writing. Except Sundays. Now, that Sunday, November fifteenth, I was sitting up here in the apartment going through the papers. Most of my ideas for stories, I get them out of the newspapers - you know? Well, the TV was on and the kids were kind of lively, but even so I could hear voices. From downstairs. Down at Mrs. Kidwell's. But I didn't figure it was my concern, since I was new here - only came to Holcomb when school began. But then Shirley - she'd been out hanging up some clothes - my wife, Shirley, rushed in and said, 'Honey, you better go downstairs. They're all hysterical.' The two girls - now, they really were hysterical. Susan never has got over it. Never will, ask me. And poor Mrs. Kidwell. Her health's