COFFEE SHOPS AND RESTAURANTS. We read about it the next morning on the front page of the Daily Observer. We had taken note of the first incident, the one reported by Robert Sutliff, which had seemed to us a misunderstanding of some sort, a bizarre error that would soon be explained. A second attack was far more serious. It seemed to be part of a deliberate plan, though exactly what was at stake remained unclear. All over town, people were talking about it: in coffee shops and restaurants, at gas station pumps, in the post office and the CVS, in high school hallways, on slatted benches beside potted trees in the mall. We wondered who he could possibly be, this stranger who had appeared among us with his angry eyes. Some argued that the man was mentally unstable and was working out some private drama. Others insisted that he knew his victims and had lain in wait for them. Still others, a small group, claimed that the attacks were some form of social statement: it was no accident, they said, that the assailant had chosen the station parking lot during early-evening rush hour, when businessmen carrying laptops were returning from the city to their leafy suburban town. Everyone agreed that the incidents were disturbing and that the station parking lot was in need of twenty-four-hour police surveillance.

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