“Jesus, I will believe. Jesus, help me to believe in You.”

He was observing her, she knew. In the corner of her eye sometimes she saw Him. But when she turned her head, however slowly, He retreated. Vaguely she recalled that He had taunted her, once-hadn’t He? She would pretend not to remember.

She would come to know, in time: the man whom her father had shot in the cemetery was named Simcoe, fifty-one years old and a former Milburn resident and unknown to Jacob Schwart and his death by Jacob Schwart “unprovoked.” He had died en route to the Chautauqua Falls hospital in an ambulance, of massive gunshot wounds to the chest. His left forearm, uplifted in a futile gesture to protect himself against an explosion of buckshot at close range, had been shredded, a splintered white bone protruding.

This death was the outrage, the injustice. This death was the crime.

The Schwart deaths were lesser, of course. You could see the logic. The shotgun death of Anna Schwart, also at close range. Massive injuries to the head. The self-death of Jacob Schwart, at close range. Strangers would ask the daughter what she knew, what she could tell them. So slowly she spoke and with such confusion and often her voice trailed off into baffled silence so there were observers who believed that she must be mentally retarded or in some way “damaged” like others in the family perhaps, the wife Anna for instance, and at least one of the sons, or both.

And there was the father, the madman.

How Rebecca had left the stone house on that day, where she’d been taken and by whom, she would not recall clearly. What had been sticky and coagulating in her hair, that had to be cut out by a frowning nurse in whose fingers the scissors trembled.

“Girl! Try to stay still.”

In a strange bed nonetheless she slept for twelve, sometimes fourteen hours even with morning sun shining on her mask-face. Slept with her limbs entwined like snakes in winter, in a burrow. Her mouth was open, agape. Her bare feet, icy at the toes, twitched and paddled to keep her from falling. Inside her empty head water rushed rushed rushed over the gigantic ten-foot lock in a ceaseless stream. Damned lucky to be alive! don’t you ever forget damned lucky I didn’t blow your head off you are one of them aren’t you! born here why I couldn’t trust you going behind my back and wasn’t I right?

No memory of how she’d left the stone house. Maybe she’d run outside desperate and screaming. Maybe she’d run panicked as a wounded animal trailing blood, something soft and liquidy in her hair, on her face and arms. Maybe she’d fainted, and someone had lifted her. Onto a stretcher? Thinking that she, too, had been shot, wounded? A dying girl, looks like about thirteen.

In the startling intimacy of Miss Lutter’s kitchen. Where on a shelf with several pots of beautifully blooming African violets, in a tasteful oval mirror-frame, the handsome olive-skinned and dark-bearded likeness of Jesus Christ lifted His hand in a casual blessing as, at the Capitol Theater, in a movie poster Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, James Stewart might lift his hand in a casual smiling greeting to warm the heart.

There were two pieces of raisin bread toast, smeared with honey. Set before her.

“Rebecca, eat. You must.”

“Jesus, I will believe. Jesus, help me to believe in You.”

Personal possessions they were called. Brought to her from the old stone house in the cemetery.

Rebecca’s clothes, her shoes and boots. Such shabby items, Rebecca was shamed to see turn up in Miss Lutter’s tidy house, dumped out of cardboard boxes. Even her schoolbooks looked shabby! And there was the dictionary she’d won as a champion speller of 1946, now warped from the damp in the old stone house and smelling of mildew. Some of Anna’s clothing had been mixed with Rebecca’s, a wrinkled white cotton eyelet blouse far too large for Rebecca, box-shaped housedresses, cotton stockings twisted together like snakes, black suede gloves Rebecca hadn’t known her mother had owned, a much-laundered flannel nightgown big and shapeless as a tent…Seeing the frightened look in Rebecca’s face, Miss Lutter quickly folded up Anna Schwart’s things, and placed them back inside the box.

Here was a surprise: the Motorola console radio that had been shut away in the parlor for years, Jacob Schwart’s most prized possession. In the frayed cardboard box in which it was carried into Miss Lutter’s house it, too, appeared shabby, diminished like something hauled from the dump. Rebecca stared at the radio, unable to speak. Numbly she drew her fingers over the wooden cabinet: she fumbled to turn the dial on, though of course the radio wasn’t plugged in and hadn’t Pa told them with bitter satisfaction that the tubes were burnt out…

Politely Miss Lutter told the delivery men to please take it away. “I have my own radio, thank you.”

Most of the personal possessions were given to the Milburn Good Will shop, by Miss Lutter. So ever afterward so long as Rebecca lived in Milburn, and even after she moved away with Niles Tignor to live elsewhere, she instinctively shrank from glancing into the windows of such secondhand stores as Good Will or Salvation Army out of a dread of seeing her family’s despoiled things on display: old, ugly clothes, battered furniture, the pathetic Motorola console radio in its scuffed imitation-wood cabinet.

In the fall of 1949, the old stone house in the cemetery was razed.

No one had lived in it since the murder-suicide. No one had attempted to even clean it. The Township voted to replace it with another dwelling in which the new cemetery caretaker and his family could live.

By this time Rebecca had been living for nearly five months in Rose Lutter’s tidy beige-brick house at 114 Rush Street, in a residential neighborhood of similar small brick and shingle-board homes. A block away was the First Presbyterian Church, to which Miss Lutter avidly belonged. Her house had a small front stoop upon which, in appropriate seasons, Miss Lutter placed pots of geraniums, mums, and hydrangea. Inside, Miss Lutter’s house wasn’t really much larger than the stone house had been, and yet: how different!

The most startling difference was that Miss Lutter’s house contained no strong smells. Not a smell of kerosene, not woodsmoke, not old, rancid food, or rotting wood, or damp earth close beneath the floorboards. Not that smell of human bodies in cramped quarters.

Only just, in Rose Lutter’s house, most noticeable on Fridays, a smell of furniture polish. And, beneath, a faint sweet prevailing fragrance of what Miss Lutter called her potpourri.

Potpourri was a mix of wildflowers, herbs, and spices prepared by Miss Lutter herself and allowed to dry. Potpourri was placed in bowls through the house including the bathroom where its position was on the back of the gleaming-white porcelain toilet.

Miss Lutter’s mother, now deceased, had always had potpourri in her house. And Miss Lutter’s grandmother, long deceased.

Rebecca had never heard of potpourri and she had never smelled anything like it before. It made her feel almost dizzy sometimes. When she stepped into the house, and the fragrance struck her. Or when she wakened in the morning, and it awaited her.

Blinking her eyes uncertain of where she was, what this meant.

Another startling thing was, the walls of Miss Lutter’s house were so clean. Some of the walls were covered in floral-print wallpaper, and some had been painted white. And all of the ceilings were white. In all the rooms there were windows!-even the bathroom. And at each of these windows, even the tiny window on the back door, there were curtains.

Mornings when Rebecca opened her eyes in the room designated as hers, in the rear, left corner of Miss Lutter’s house, what she saw first was pale pink organdy curtains facing her bed.