A Taste for Violence

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Midnight brought a faint coolness to Centerville, Kentucky. The afternoon and early evening had been suffocatingly hot, and even the whirring ceiling fan in Charles Roche’s study did little more than stir up the somnolent, heat-laden air.

It was a pleasant, pine-paneled study, in a modern nine-room house set on a hillside overlooking the mining town. Windows on the south and west usually caught an evening breeze, though the inhabitants of the village below were sweltering. The location had been selected for that reason, just a little to the north and some fifty-odd feet above the old Roche mansion, built in 1897, where Charles was born and reared.

John Roche, Charles’ father, built the nine-room house for him while the young man was away at war, and at a time when building materials were practically impossible to get, and when men were demanding fantastic sums for their labor. Thus, the house had cost a great deal of money. But nothing, so John Roche had said, was too good or too costly for his eldest son. He knew that Charles and his bride wouldn’t want to move into the gloomy old mansion where he lived alone. Young married folks needed a home of their own.

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