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There is no way that the Swede can take it down, much as he would like to, for Dawn’s sake at leastYou would think that what with exposure to the rain and the wind and the sun and the snow the thing would rot away in a matter of weeks, but it not only remains intact but is almost completely legible for one whole yearThe editorial is called “Dr
“We live in a society where violence is becoming all too prevalentwe do not know why and we may never understandthe anger that all of us feelour hearts go out to the victim and his family, to the Hamlins, and to an entire community that is trying to understand and to cope with what has happeneda remarkable man and a wonderful physician who touched all our livesa special fund in memory of ‘Doctor Fred’to contribute to this memorial, which will help indigent local families in time of medical needin this time of grief, we must rededicate ourselves, in his memory Alongside the editorial is an article headlined “Distance Heals All Wounds,” which begins, “We’d all just as soon forgetthat soothing distance will come quicker to some than othersPeter Baliston of the First Congregational Church, in his sermon, sought to find some good in all the tragedywill bring the community closer together in a shared sorrowPatrick’s old omega Church gave an impassioned homily Beside that article is a third clipping, one that has no business being there, but he cannot tear that one down any more than he can go ahead and tear down the others, so it, too, hangs there for a yearIt is the interview with Edgar Bartley–both the interview and the picture of Edgar from the paper, showing him standing in front of his family’s house with a shovel and his dog and behind him the path to the house freshly cleared of snowEdgar Bartley is the boy from Old Rimrock who’d taken Merry to the movies in Morristown some two years before the bombingHe was a year ahead of her at the high school, a boy as tall as Merry and, as the Swede remembered him, nice enough looking though terrifically shy and a bit of an oddballThe newspaper story describes him as Merry’s boyfriend at the time of the bombing, though as far as her parents knew, Merry’s date with Edgar Bartley two years earlier was the one and only date she’d ever had with him or with anyoneWhatever, someone has underlined in black all the quotations attributed to EdgarMaybe a friend of his did it as a joke, a high school jokeMaybe the article with the photograph was hung there as a joke in the first placeJoke or not, there it remains, month after month, and omega speedmaster day-date the Swede cannot get rid of it”It doesn’t seem realI never thought she would do something like thisI knew her as a very nice girlI never heard her say anything viciousI’m sure something snappedI hope they find her so that she can get the help that she needsI always thought of Old Rimrock as a place where nothing can happen to youBut now I’m like everybody, I’m looking over my shoulderIt’s going to take time before things return to normalI have to forget about itLike nothing happened
The only solace the Swede can take from the Community Club bulletin board is that no one has posted there the clipping whose headline reads “Suspected Bomber Is Described as Bright, Gifted but with ‘Stubborn Streak’” That one he would have torn downHe would have had to go there in the middle of the night and just do itThis one article is no worse, probably, than any of the others that were appearing then, not just in their local weekly but in the New York papers–the Times, the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, the Post; in the Jersey dailies–the Newark News, the Newark Star-Ledger, the Morristown Record, the Bergen Record, the Trenton Times, the Pater-son News; in the nearby Pennsylvania papers–the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Bulletin, and the Easton Express; omega watch orange and in Time and NewsweekMost of the papers and the wire services dropped the story after the first week, but the Newark News and the Morristown Record in particular wouldn’t let up–the News had three star reporters on the case, and both papers were churning out their stories about the Rimrock Bomber every single day for weeksThe Record, with its local orientation, couldn’t stop reminding its readers that the Rimrock bombing was the most shattering disaster in Morris County since the September 12, 1940, Hercules Powder Company explosion, some twelve miles away in Kenvil, when fifty-two people were killed and three hundred injuredThere had been a murder of a minister and a choirmaster in the late twenties, down in Middlesex County, in a lane just outside New Brunswick, and in the Morris village of Brookside there had been a murder by an inmate who had walked off the grounds of the Greystone mental asylum, visited his uncle in Brookside, and split the man’s head open with an ax–and these stories, too, are dug up and rehashedAnd, of course, the Lindbergh kidnapping down in Hopewell, New Jersey, the abduction and murder of the infant son of Charles ALindbergh, the famous transatlantic aviator–that, too, the papers luridly recall, reprinting details over fendi spy bag replica thirty years old about the ransom, the baby’s battered corpse, the Flemington trial, reprinting newspaper excerpts from April 1936 about the electrocution of the convicted kidnapper-murderer, an immigrant carpenter named Bruno HauptmannDay after day, Merry Levov is mentioned in the context of the region’s slender history of atrocities–her name several times appearing right alongside Hauptmann’s–and I yet nothing of what’s written wounds him as savagely as the story about her “stubborn streak” in the local weeklyThere is something concealed there–yet implicit–a degree of provincial smugness, of simplemindedness, of sheer stupidity, that is so enraging to him that he could not have borne to see it hanging up for everybody to read and to shake their heads over at the Community Club bulletin boardWhatever Merry may or may not have done, he could not have allowed her life to be on display like that just outside the school
SUSPECTED BOMBER IS DESCRIBED AS BRIGHT, GIFTED BUT WITH “STUBBORN STREAK”

To her teachers at Old Rimrock Community School, Meredith “Merry” Levov, who allegedly bombed Hamlin’s General Store and killed Old Rimrock’s DrFred Conlon, was known as a multi-talented child, an excellent student and somebody who never challenged prada borse authority