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occasions when she was compelled to travel to town, she could feel the resentment emanating from the merchants she had to deal with and the people she passed on the street. Perhaps they could sense her superiority simply from the way she bore herself. Or perhaps, having ridden by her farm, they were envious of how well-cared-for it was.
    Augusta didn’t mind being shunned by the people of Plainfield. Indeed, she wanted no part of such a backslidden, vice-prone community. Her boys provided all the companionship she needed. The farm would be her own self-contained little world.
    Much as she might have liked to, Augusta couldn’t keep her sons entirely cut off from the world. When Eddie was eight, he began attending the Roche-a-Cri grade school, a tiny one-room building with a dozen students altogether. Later, Roche-a-Cri merged with another country school, the White School, and it was there that Eddie Gein completed his formal education at age sixteen after graduating from the eighth grade. Eddie was a capable if unexceptional student, who managed well enough in all his subjects. (Years later, in the early days of his notoriety, when he was placed under intense psychiatric scrutiny and subjected to a battery of tests, his I.Q. would be recorded as average.) He was a particularly good reader. Indeed, throughout his life, he busied himself with books and magazines on varied and, at times, quite unusual subjects.
    Books were a good way to relax, he believed. And you could learn lots of things from them, too.
    But although Eddie did passably well in his studies, his school years were not a particularly happy time. He felt overwhelmingly alone, hopelessly cut off from his classmates. They related to each other so easily—griping about their chores, exchanging scraps of local gossip they had picked up at the dinner table, talking excitedly about the big fire down at Conover’s Warehouse or the upcoming Donkey Derby at Plainfield Auditorium. Eager to be accepted, he watched how they acted and tried to imitate their behavior. But somehow he could never fit in.
    On a few occasions during his childhood and adolescence, he seemed to be coming close to making a real connection. But as soon as he would return home and tell his mother about his newfound friend, she would immediately begin raising objections. The boy’s family had a bad reputation. There were dark rumors about the father’s past, and the mother was known to be a woman of questionable virtue. Augusta wouldn’t have a son of hers associating with people like that. How could Eddie behave in such a way? By now, her voice would have risen to a scream. Was she raising a fool?
    Eddie would begin to blubber and retreat to his room. The next day, he would go to school and avoid even looking at the other boy.
    From the point of view of his peers, there was definitely something a little different about Eddie Gein. At no point in his life—not, at any rate, until his simmering psychosis erupted into full-blown dementia—did anyone perceive that he might be a dangerously disturbed individual. And, in fact, it would have taken a fairly sophisticated eye to see in young Eddie’s behavior—his social incompetence, for example, and increasing isolation—the signs of incipient madness. But there were things about Eddie that certainly struck his schoolmates as peculiar—the way his eyes kept shifting around whenever he tried to talk to you; the odd, lopsided grin he always wore, even when the conversation had to do with the deer-hunting accident that killed Eugene Johnson or old man Beckley’s heart attack; his habit of laughing at weirdly inappropriate times, as though he were listening to some strange, private joke that no one else could hear.
    Sometimes, one of the girls would turn around in her seat and catch him staring at her with a look of such peculiar intensity that, even at that early age, she would feel vaguely unclean—violated. And there were times when a few of the