An excerpt from the book . . .

That Mad Butcher of Cleveland, she thinks. They never did catch him. Because this sound is forceful, alarming. Not just the rumble of an automobile, driving off beneath the regal elm sentinels that line Western Avenue, into the genteel stillness of the night. Not just a hand knocking or the slam of the front door.

     What really rouses Alice Allyn, however, is the silence that follows.

     Her eyelids flutter open, and she sits up abruptly once more. Then out of the silence comes a voice, familiar yet faltering: her husband, but not calling out from his own bedroom or the top of the staircase. Not just saying good-night.

     Alice, well and truly awake now, starts from her bed, leaning on her hip to roll her throbbing legs from the high mattress. She hears her husband’s voice again, and this time knows it through and through, as you do after nearly four decades. Yet his feeble whisper ripples with an unusual tone of distress.

     Pulling on her bathrobe, Alice Allyn flings herself, aches and all, down the carpeted staircase toward her husband’s voice, but stops short on the triangular landing, three steps above the patterned wooden floor. There, crumpled at the foot of the stairs, is a heap of a man—her husband of thirty-eight years—propped at an impossible angle. He is “kneeling beside a chair,” according to the Advertiser, “his face pressed into the cane seat and blood flowing from his head.”

     That’s out of place, Alice thinks, because the other thoughts vying for a place in her mind are far too unpleasant.

     Blood and gore have matted her husband’s hair and mottled his face. His eyeglasses are on the floor nearby, shattered; his right eye socket is bloody. His clothes, too, are red-stained and rumpled, his stockinged feet missing their slippers. She takes stock of these things but does not give in to fear or frenzy.

     Where’s the other chair, then? she wonders instead. It is rather more comfortable to be annoyed by the disheveled room than horrified by her disheveled husband.

     Resisting the urge to right the chair, Alice trips down those last three steps to bend over him. She doesn’t scream. How could she? She can barely breathe.

     Leaning in toward his ruined face, she whispers tentatively, “Lewis,” and again, “Lewis.” It is both a plea and a dirge, for there is blood everywhere and she cannot see a way out of this except dressed in mourning black. How has this happened?

     Her next thought comes in a flash. “I’ll call the ambulance,” she murmurs, her voice hoarse with unshed tears. Lewis Allyn is clearly in need of one.

     Despite his condition, her husband is trying desperately to speak, to convey the final message of his life. All he can manage, however, is a single, faint phrase: “The police . . .” His words trail into a mumble, strangled by futile efforts to gasp for air, gasp for life.

     Alice blinks, unwilling to enter this topsy-turvy world. Then she stands and sleepwalks toward the little table by the front bay of windows. Reaching for the telephone, she hesitates and squints through the glass. Someone, some intruder, has attacked her husband. Is he out there now, peering in at the grim scene he has created?

     Yet contacting the police department is not her first instinct. As she lifts the receiver, awareness sinks in, like an anchor plunging through cold, dark waters toward the thud of the sea floor. Sirens. Uniforms. Men rushing through her living room. Soon this ghastly scene will be all too real.

     When Alice picks up the phone, she rings neither the ambulance nor the authorities. Instead she calls the neighbors at 6 Hawthorne Avenue, just steps away: Mr. Clarence Kinard, manager at the Westfield Gas and Electric Department, and his wife Minnie. “It’s Lewis,” she gasps into the receiver. “Please come!” Then she turns back to the horror in her living room.

     Staunch New England woman that she is, she will have to do something about this unseemly disarray. Crumpled up like that—imagine the neighbors! She clamps her hands on her husband’s shoulders and, though she is a meager woman, eases him to the floor. On his back now, he looks like a corpse already. But it’s all she can think to do. Then, out of habit, she finally does what her husband asked her to do.

     Reaching the night desk officer at the police station, Alice cries into the phone, “My husband . . . Professor Allyn . . . They shot him! Send a doctor!” In a flurry, she then repeats her husband’s dying words: “Send the police!”