Dr. Hall nodded. “But you knew him only as a child.”

“Duane didn’t live long enough to get out of childhood,” said Dale. “But he sure was a strange kid.”

“How so?” Dr. Hall put his yellow notepad on his lap and clicked his ballpoint pen open—a habit that Dale found distracting and vaguely annoying.

Dale sighed. How could he explain? “You would had to have met Duane, I think, to understand. On the outside, he was a big slob of a farm kid—fat, sloppy, lousy haircut. He wore the same flannel shirt and corduroy pants all the time, summer and winter. And remember, this was back in 1960—kids actually dressed up for school in those days, even in little hick towns like Elm Haven, Illinois. Nothing fancy, but we had school clothes and play clothes and knew the difference, not like the slobs in school today. . .”

Dr. Hall’s supposedly neutral expression had shifted to the very slight frown that signaled that Dale had wandered from the subject.

“Anyway,” said Dale, “I met Duane shortly after my family moved to Elm Haven when I was in fourth grade, and right away I knew that Duane was different—almost scary, he was so smart.”

“Scary?” said Dr. Hall, making a note. “How so?”

“Not really scary,” said Dale, “but beyond our understanding.” He took a breath. “All right, summer after fifth grade. The bunch of us boys used to hang around together in a sort of club we called the Bike Patrol, like a junior Justice League of America. . .”

Dale could tell that Hall had no idea what he was talking about. Perhaps male psychiatrists had never been boys. That would explain a lot.

“Anyway, our clubhouse was in Mike O’Rourke’s old chicken coop in town,” continued Dale. “We had a sprung sofa in there, an old easy chair from the dump, the shell of a console radio. . . that kind of crap. I remember one night in the summer after fifth grade when we were bored and Duane started telling us the story of Beowulf. . . word for word. Night after night, reciting Beowulf from memory. Years later, when I read the epic in college, I recognized it. . . word for word. . . from Duane’s storytelling on those summer evenings.”