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was closed. Down the road, they saw Margaret’s car in the driveway of the bar owner. His father parked up the road, and carried Derik to the house. Through a front window, they saw Margaret and the bar owner in the living room, having sex.
    Derik remembers his father banging through a screen door and setting him down inside.
    He remembers his mother grabbing a knife from the kitchen, and his father pulling out the buck knife he’d used during the fishing trip.
    He remembers his father chasing the bar owner outside.
    He remembers his mother screaming: Don’t kill him, kill me! and Derik’s father replying: Don’t worry, bitch. You’re next.
    He remembers his father, back inside and on top of his mother, stabbing her with the buck knife, over and over.
    He remembers shaking his mother awake. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and her eyes were strange. Derik gave her another push, and blood sprayed, so he stopped shaking her.
    He remembers finding his father, who was on his knees, his flannel shirt soaked in blood, the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Derik called to his dad, who looked at him, let out a sigh. His dad dropped the gun and picked up Derik.
    He remembers hanging onto his father as he ran to the truck, Derik looking back, over his father’s shoulder, the house getting smaller and smaller.
    Of the next year, Derik remembers almost nothing.
    Hours after the double homicide, Robert Nolan turned himself in to police. He went to trial the following summer on charges of aggravated manslaughter. He argued that he’d been driven temporarily insane by seeing Margaret and the tavern owner having sex. The jury deadlocked, causing a mistrial. In a second trial, he was acquitted. He did some out-patient therapy and then resumed his life. He remarried, this time to a woman five years younger than himself who had been named Miss Sullivan County the year before Robert killed Margaret. They moved to Free-hold, New Jersey, where Robert built a concrete company and sponsored a Little League team. Robert’s company thrived. The Nolans put up showy Christmas decorations and threw a pool party every summer.
    Derik’s aunt and uncle had taken him in during the trials, so he continued to live with them during the school years. They had a small farm, where they raised horses and chickens. Summers, he lived with his father and his new family, which included three young sons. Derik played quarterback in the fall and pole vaulted in the spring, and when he wasn’t doing those sports, he was likely skipping school, hunting deer and riding four-wheelers on the farm. The day after his high school graduation party in 1995, he moved to Florida. He said he was going to college, but he just wanted out of New York. He got a job at a nightclub, went to a few classes at Palm Beach State College before quitting. He became a plumber, making good money.
    But the story with his father wasn’t finished. Almost three years after Derik graduated from high school, Robert Nolan’s second wife served him with divorce papers. They’d been married for ten years. She said he was extremely cruel, though not physically abusive. The day after he got the divorce papers, Robert followed her into a walk-in closet and shot her point-blank with a 20-gauge shotgun. He went out behind the pool cabana, smoked a cigarette, drank a Scotch, and shot himself in the head with a .25-caliber Beretta handgun.
    The story of Robert Nolan’s dead wives became a cautionary tale about the persistence of domestic violence as well as the fatal flaw of the insanity defense (his first trial had taken place the same summer as would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr., was found not guilty by reason of insanity). The New York Times published an in-depth story about the case. So people knew about Derik’s father, and Derik didn’t keep it a secret. Chris George knew about it, though he and Derik never discussed it in any detail. Derik already had a reputation. People