In Tragedy's Shadow

But, regionally, consider: Washington and Lee University, about an hour up the road, charges tuition of $34,650, and ranks No. 17 in liberal arts schools in the same magazine rankings.

Tech -- you pull in one entrance, you get the smell of barns and cow dung. Further on, there's a patch where they do turf grass research.

Then there's Mr. Jefferson's university.

"There's a difference in heritage of institutions, between us and the University of Virginia, but there's probably not a dime's worth of actual difference between the students now," says Thomas C. Tillar Jr., Tech's vice president for alumni relations. He points out that the school's research and engineering schools are drawing top students from around the nation and internationally, not kids who couldn't cut it over in Charlottesville.

There are more than 192,000 living Hokie alums out there, and Tillar says the school has been overwhelmed with support since the shooting.

"In 48 hours, $300,000 came in for a special fund to help the students' families, the school," he says. "There's been an outpouring of sympathy and support. People understand that the students, and the university, in a way, were victims of a completely senseless shooting. . . . I hear so many people saying, 'I'm so proud of my university, of how well the students are representing us on television, in the media.' "

The town seems to believe the bad news is temporary, too.

Let's go down to Main Street, stop into Poor Billy's Seafood Restaurant.

Here's Eric Schmid, nursing a Bud. He grew up here, left for D.C. and a life tending bar, now he's 45 and back taking care of his elderly dad. He used to live in Silver Spring, paying $1,700 in rent; now he rents a nearly identical place in Blacksburg for $500.

What's the other difference, D.C. and down here?

"There's nothing to do." Good-natured laugh. "People are so friendly. They speak to you on the street. My wife, she's from Philly, she's like, 'What's with these people?' "

What's the difference in town from when you were a kid?

"Michael Vick. He put this town on the map. The football team? You used to have to go to Roanoke to do any shopping at all. After the football team got really good, everything changed."

(This is true. Tillar cites a surge in student applications after the electrifying quarterback led the Hokies to the national title game in 1999.)

Outside, darkness is falling. It's raining and cold.

Around town, on campus, there are orange and maroon ribbons, the school's colors, tied in bows around lamp posts, parking meters, trees. By morning, a thick fog will blanket this little community set back near the mountains, a place where dozens of television trucks thrum into the evening, where reporters with credentials dangling from their necks fill the hotel rooms, where police and federal agents in windbreakers ride around campus. Each group is looking for something that isn't there: clues, answers, anything that might be an explanation for heartbreak and loss and mass murder.

Schmid wanders over for dinner -- sushi and a cold beer -- with Cary Hopper, the amiable owner of Kent Jewelers.

"Everyone in town feels really close now, but it will dissipate," Hopper is saying, talking about the nation's "nanosecond attention span" and passing fascinations -- Don Imus or Anna Nicole Smith or Britney Spears's shaved head. "Things will be fine. They'll still play football games in the fall, basketball games in the winter. Sooner or later, all this will just be something people who live someplace else will associate with Blacksburg. The school, the town, the kids, they'll recover. They'll be fine."

That feels right. That feels fair. That feels like, in a warm restaurant in a small town, with loud voices and laughter and familiar faces, what passing time may bring.