n't called
the sheriff. What had got into him? He had never been a sex maniac
before! But still ... it was hardly unexpected.

Might as well wait to start on those rabbit cages until tomorrow, he
decided. This evening he felt like exploring.

The house was so big, and packed with so many things that he never found
and examined them all. Or if he did, he forgot a lot about the things
between times, so it was like reading a favorite book over again, always
discovering new things in it.

The parlor was red in the fading light, and the hall beyond the sliding
doors was deeply shadowed. In the sewing room, he remembered, in the
drawers of the treadle machine the radio was captured. The rings and
secret manuals of the days when radio had been alive. He hadn't looked
over those things in some little time.

He looked up the shadowed stairway. He remembered the night, a few weeks
before Christmas when he had been twelve and really too old to believe,
his mother had said she was going up to see if Santa Claus had left any
packages around a bit early. They often gave him his presents early,
since they were never quite sure he would live until Christmas.

But his mother had been playing a trick on him. She hadn't been going up
after packages. She had gone up those stairs to murder his father.

She had shot him in the back of the head with his Army Colt .45 from the
first war. Collins never quite understood why the hole in back was so
neat and the one in front where it came out was so messy.

After he went to live with Aunt Amy and the house had been boarded up,
he heard them talking, Aunt Amy and her boy friend, fat Uncle Ralph. And
they had said his mother had murdered his father because he had gone
ahead and made her get pregnant again and she was afraid it would be
another one like Sam.

Sam Collins knew she must have planned it a long time in advance. She
had filled up the bathtub with milk, real milk, and she went in after
she had done it and took a bath in the milk. Then she slit her wrists.

When Sam Collins had run down the stairs, screaming, and barged into the
bathroom, he had found the tub looking like a giant stick of peppermint
candy.

* * * * *

Aunt Amy had been good to him.

Because he didn't talk for about a year after he found the bodies, most
people thought he was simple-minded. But Aunt Amy had always treated him
just like a regular boy. That was embarrass