Smiling, she held out her hand. "Here. Sit by me, and we'll cut out pictures." Afterward I asked her, "Where is the secret drawer?"

She laughed. "There isn't any. That was a joke."

I didn't believe her.

My mother died not long after that, and Miss Annie Hodge came to keep house for my father and me. She was a wheezy, slack-jawed old woman with a face the color of suet pudding. We loathed each other on sight.

I remember her cackling laughter the day she came into my room unexpectedly and found me sorting my box of paper dolls. Later my father ordered me to bring them down to the living-room. "A boy your age playing with these!" he said in a tone of searing contempt, and he burned the box in the fireplace.

It was in the living-room with its grim, mahogany furniture and livercolored wall-paper that we had most of our "talks." He must have thought of them as man-to-man talks.

He said a good deal about being manly and mixing with the crowd and playing the game. Beneath it all was the implication that I'd somehow failed to measure up to his expectation, although he was never clear as to what his expectations actually were.

"What do you intend to make of yourself?" he asked.

"A writer," I said, and he struck his forehead and groaned, "God! I might have expected that!"

Once he came home and found me reading by the fire.

"The fellows are down on the corner playing ball.” He demanded sharply, "Why aren't you out playing?"

"I don't want to play," I said.

"They were teasing you, weren't they?"

"No."

"Don't lie to me. I always know when you're lying. They said you threw like a girl, didn't they?"

I didn't answer.

His mouth twitched. "For God's sake, keep your hands down at your sides! And don't stand like that!" He jerked me erect. I shrank away from him. Instinctively I lifted my hands again. It was a defensive gesture. In a fury, he struck me, and I fell...

An odd boy, people called me. Wherever I went, it seemed they were watching, whispering, laughing. I didn't know why.

"You have no friends," my father flung at me, in a kind of accusation. "I don't want any friends!" I shouted back.

It wasn't true, of course. Sometimes I thought I couldn't endure the crushing loneliness of another day.

To help fill the hours, I kept a voluminous diary. Writing became a part of my life. Sometimes I lived in a world of fantasy. I was a famous author surrounded by admiring friends. Hintonville was forever behind me.

Father talked darkly of sending me to military school, but nothing ever came of that, and I continued in Hintonville High. A week after graduation I went to work in the bank. From the first, I hated it. I was trapped. I could see no way out.

And while I dreamed of freedom, Fred Zimmerman was "making his territory." Fred Zimmerman in his old green car was coming nearer to Hintonville.

I was sent to the hotel one day with some cancelled checks the manager

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