“Poor guy, his parents must have been nuts,” Bankston said with a snigger, until he remembered from my raised eyebrows that he was talking to a woman named Aurora Teagarden.

“I met Robin when he came in to get his utilities turned on,” Lizanne was telling John Queensland. John was saying all the proper things to Robin Crusoe, glad to have such a well-known name in our little town, hope you stay a while, ta-dah ta-dah ta-dah. John edged Robin over to meet Sally Allison who was chatting with our newest member, a police officer named Arthur Smith. If Robin was built tail and lanky, Arthur was short and solid, with coarse curly pale hair and the flat confrontive stare of the bull who knows he has nothing to fear because he is the toughest male on the farm.

“You’re lucky to have met such a well-known writer,” I said enviously to Lizanne. I still wanted to tell someone about the phone call, but Lizanne was hardly the person.

She sure didn’t know who Julia Wallace was. And she didn’t know who Robin Crusoe was either, as it turned out.

“Writer?” she said indifferently. “I’m kind of bored.”

I stared at her incredulously. Bored by Robin Crusoe?

One afternoon when I’d been at the Power and Light Company paying my bill, she’d told me, “I don’t know what it is, but even when I pretty much like a man, after I date him a while, he gets to seem kind of tiresome. I just can’t be bothered to act interested anymore, and then finally I tell him I don’t want to go out anymore. They always get upset,” she’d added, with a philosophical shake of her shining dark hair. Lovely Lizanne had never been married, and lived in a tiny apartment close to her job, and went home to her parents’ house for lunch every day.

Robin Crusoe, desirable writer, was striking out with Lizanne even now. She looked-sleepy.

He reappeared at her side.

“Where do you live in Lawrenceton?” I asked, because the newcomer seemed dolefully aware he wasn’t making the grade with our local siren.