Photo courtesy of Russell Rowland

In Open Spaces: Alzada
For the next week, questions of who and where the murderer was took our country hostage. Because we didn’t have telephones yet, and because Annie Ketchal didn’t want to deliver the mail in the middle of the night until they caught the killer, we relied on her to fill us in each day on the news. But there was little to report. In fact, the only reports she did have were rumors, most of which were absurd. It seemed that of the sixty-nine people who made up the population of Alzada, everyone over the age of fifteen was a suspect, whether there was any hint of a motive or not. (202)
Rowland, Russell. In Open Spaces. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.