His father had been hacked to death in his own bed with an ax the previous November. His mother was similarly brutalized and left for dead with her husband but survived. On the last Monday of that August, after several months and many investigative twists, turns, and fumbles, there sat the son--the prime suspect--in Ellen Laird's literature class, the first class she would teach for the semester. As a "person of interest" in the killings, he attended her community college--while the district attorney's office was building its case--nearly a year after the crimes had been committed. He sat in the center of the second or third row, invariably where the most confident students sit. In the end, the author believes the stories they read in her class helped many of them achieve some degree of understanding of the horror that had taken place in their community. Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" found them discussing whether tension between fathers and sons is inevitable, and the lengths to which some people will go to get what they want, if even for the short time of a flower's "one splendid breath" as Cather puts it. Through Tobias Wolff's "Smokers," they looked at the airs that some private-school students assume and how and why young people strive for a life different from that of their parents. They looked at theft and at lying as measures people routinely use to get to where they want to go. The author asserts her students needed those stories and the subsequent discussion and reflective writing. She needed to help them understand that, through literature, they were experiencing life in all its darkness and all its light, without suffering any of the consequences. Literature was fulfilling its best purpose, as she sees it now. In November, in response to a subpoena, she turned in her class records. The indictment was handed down the next afternoon. What followed was a discussion of truth and fiction, of lies and vengeance, of evil and good, of families. Questions about bad seeds, greed, and money's role in success, corruption, and ruin. Those themes were all there in the stories they were reading, and most certainly in the story that was continuing to unfold in real life that had affected them so directly in their classroom.