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really known this Bonnie Von Stein? For years, she’d been a stranger beside them. Of such a person, it was easy to believe the worst.
    This, as much as anything, might have been what led to the first wave of suspicion, although the existence of a $2 million inheritance—and it was not long before news of this swept the town—was no doubt a contributing factor.
    The rumors had begun even before the neighbors had finished scrubbing the blood from the bedroom walls. Even the local paper referred to them, with a spokesman for the Washington police department quoted as saying he had “heard rumors about the incident but discounted most of them as ill-informed or malicious.”
    Still, even as Bonnie lay in her hospital bed with the chest tube firmly in place, all over Little Washington people she had never met were muttering their doubts about the existence of genuine intruders in the night.
    â€œI must say,” Lewis Young recalled later, “she looked pretty incapacitated. Her head looked bad. My head was hurting just looking at her. If there was all that money involved, she obviously had a motive, but I’d never seen a crime where a person inflicted injuries that serious to themselves, or had them inflicted by somebody else, just to take the heat off.”
    He asked her to tell him about the weekend. She said Chris had been home that Saturday night and had barbecued hamburgers for them all. The next morning, she and Lieth had slept late and then gone to Greenville for breakfast. They’d eaten at The Waffle House.
    It was the sort of thing they liked to do on weekends, the sort of thing they considered recreation. Twenty-five miles might seem a long drive just to get to a place called The Waffle House, but if you stayed in Little Washington, your breakfast options were McDonald’s or Burger King.
    She’d asked Angela if she wanted to join them, but Angela was on her way to the Five Points Equestrian Center to spend the day among horses. Angela loved horses, always had. The chance to ride was about the only thing that could get her up at eight-thirty on a weekend morning. Chris had gone back to school the night before, after the barbecue, saying he had to work on a term paper.
    So it had been just the two of them. After breakfast, they’d made a brief stop to look at mobile homes. Having just come into a large inheritance—Bonnie said it was $1.3 million—Lieth had been planning to quit his job at the end of the year and devote full time to managing his investments. With both children finally in college, they’d be free to travel.
    That afternoon, they’d spent a couple of hours at the computer, entering and updating stock market data. Then, she said with some embarrassment, they’d enjoyed some “private moments” in their bedroom.
    They drove back to Greenville that night, and because their favorite restaurant, The King and Queen, was closed, they’d eaten at Sweet Caroline’s. Lieth drank a couple of vodka martinis and Bonnie a Tom Collins before the meal. He ordered the chicken and wild rice special. She had the blackened steak. They’d had wine with the meal, too, though she herself had drunk, at most, a single glass.
    He’d gone to bed as soon as they got home. Lieth did that. He went to bed early. As she’d said the day before, she had stayed up to watch the Ted Bundy miniseries. Not because she cared about Ted Bundy: just because she happened to like the actor who played the role. Yes, her rooster had been with her. She’d grown up in farm country, she’d loved animals all her life, and she didn’t see anything strange about either having thirteen cats in her house or about bringing her rooster inside while she watched television.
    She had turned off the television shortly after the eleven o’clock news had begun. Then she’d gone upstairs and awakened Lieth to ask him if he’d like a glass of tea. He had