But those who live atop the little rise here have always felt a strong sense of place. Until Monday, when gunfire shattered their solitude, this was a place, they say, that danced with children's voices.

"You could hear them laughing, shouting, playing baseball," Ron Doutrich recalled, digging his hands into his jeans and gazing down the road, to where the steeple of a little Amish school peeks over the cornstalks. Now, Doutrich and others wonder: Will the joy that once filled that little hollow ever return?

"It's innocence lost," said Jim Davis, a pastor at nearby Calvary Monument Bible Church. "Wherever people are, evil can reside."

If one could believe that evil exempts certain places, then this would seem the ideal place to come. It's not just that it is peaceful, which it is, or that it is quiet or pretty. It is that this place _ with its horses-and-buggies and women in bonnets _ seems to have preserved a sense of gentleness, so easily submerged in the coarseness of modern life. More...