William Royden

He noticed that I looked a little sick, but I told him I was just getting over the flu.

I turned our talk to what Robinson was like after my parents had moved us to Annapolis when I was 13.

Steve had never really liked the town that much, but he didn't seem able to leave, never having found his life's purpose.

In his early 20s, just a few years before, he'd had a breakdown and spent some time in the hospital,

I wasn't sure if he had even worked since then.

He reminded me of the Halloween night when we were 18, when he'd driven all the way to Annapolis unexpectedly to see me after he'd gotten a bad scare in Robin's song that he'd felt foolish about later.

He'd been a little drunk and high and searching on foot for a party he knew about, and he got lost in a neighborhood he'd been to many times.

He'd started thinking about a murder that had taken place in Robinsong a few months before.

A blind girl who had once attended our high school was abducted from a local pharmacy and killed.

Her captors hadn't believed she was blind, so they had actually taped up her eyes before they killed her.

After that, people said that whenever anything was broken or damaged around town, it was the

Girls ghost, blundering around, sightless.

Steve said that there really were all sorts of police reports at that time of statues, trash cans, and street signs being knocked over with no apparent purpose.

Early on Halloween night, he'd made the mistake of going on the internet and finding a picture of what the girl's face had looked like when she was found.

And that night, as he walked alone through the streets, he got very frightened.

So frightened, he got it into his head to get in his car and drive all the way to my house nonstop.

Somehow he got there okay.

I remembered that night well.

I asked him if Robinson seemed like a place where strange things often happened.

He said, oh God, of course.