CHELSEA, Vt. – Soon after two hometown boys were charged with murdering a pair of Dartmouth College professors, Jil and Andrew Pomerantz got an e-mail from their 29-year-old son in Cincinnati.

The worst crime when he was growing up, Oded Pomerantz wrote his parents, was when someone stole a stereo. If two stereos disappeared, it was called a crime wave. Sure, kids in this village of 1,200 sometimes skipped school to drink beer, or worse – but nothing that couldn’t be cured with “a little ‘town’ understanding.”

Now – more than a month after the killings – the town is trying to understand. People in this hamlet nestled tight in the White River Valley watch out for each other. They keep an eye on the kids. Seventeen-year-old Robert Tulloch and James Parker, 16 – the accused killers of Half and Susanne Zantop – were known to everyone in town. How could two boys from Chelsea have allegedly committed such an unthinkable act, right under the nose of this placid, protective town?

“We’re all just wondering,” said Ashley Lyford, 24. “What in the world?”

With the two youths held in separate New Hampshire facilities, the Jan. 27 slaying of the two respected academics in their Hanover, N.H., home remains a consuming topic here. You could order a sandwich at Dixie’s, the one real restaurant here, and you would hear people pondering what connection Tulloch and Parker might have had to an Earth scientist and a German professor. At Will’s variety, or next door, at Chelsea General Store, shoppers remembered Tulloch as the honor student and Parker as the irrepressible class clown. Mothers stopped by the town clerk’s office after dropping their kids at school to wonder how these boys could have vanished when Chelsea wasn’t looking, only to become the objects of a nationwide manhunt that ended at an Indiana truck stop.

“Kids get into trouble in this town,” Town Clerk Diane Mattoon said. “But nothing like this.”

The children of Chelsea are, after all, widely viewed as its most important residents. Chelsea students – Tulloch and Parker included, until recently – attend a single school, kindergarten through 12th grade.

“People can chuckle when they find out how small my school was, or how small my town is,” said Lyford, descendant of a long line of Chelsea dairy farmers. “I just think I’m lucky because I got to grow up in a town where everybody looked out for me.”

Long before fingerprints at the crime scene linked him to the murders, it seemed everyone in Chelsea knew Jimmy Parker could make a laugh out of anything. They knew he loved to snowboard, even before they learned he sold his board for $300 – apparently to raise escape money. Before the town found out that Parker ordered a military-style knife on the Internet that appears to match the weapon used to kill the Zantops, they knew that he and Tulloch were just about joined at the hip.

The town knew Tulloch as a strong student and one smart kid: “Maybe to the point where he was too smart,” said Mattoon, who lives near both families.

Tulloch was a top-notch debater. In his junior year, he was student body president. Early in his senior year, he completed graduation requirements. Some students in that situation took off to attend classes at close-by community colleges. Tulloch – though still enrolled – simply took off.

No one remembers seeing him or Parker the weekend the Zantops were fatally stabbed in broad daylight at their home in Hanover, 45 minutes away. The old silver Audi that Parker drove also was out of sight that weekend.

The pair were back in school the Monday after the killings. But by Wednesday, they were gone, telling friends that they were headed to Colorado to go rock climbing.

In fact, the boys bolted for the bus station. They told the clerk that they wanted tickets to Syracuse, Calif., a town that doesn’t exist. Saying they just wanted to go somewhere warm, they then each plunked down $139 for tickets to Amarillo, Texas. They got as far as St. Louis before turning back – apparently after calling home and getting the riot act read to them by their parents. Nearly three weeks after the Zantops were slain, the teen-agers fled Chelsea once again after they were fingerprinted in connection with the crime. By the time they were picked up in Indiana after grabbing rides with truckers, warrants for their arrests had been issued.

But in retrospect, people here say the town should have taken notice when Tulloch and Parker left on their erstwhile rock-climbing expedition. Two kids just up and left town, in the middle of the week, in the middle of school.

“We’re all still blown away by that. We’re all wondering why they left and what they were doing,” said Trish Rick, who with her husband, Caleb, runs a consulting company in Chelsea.

The Ricks are part of “new” Chelsea: transplants from San Francisco who sought out the solidity of rural New England. They chose Chelsea because they wanted four seasons and real neighbors. Beyond their friends out West, they joke, the things they miss most are food and culture.

Haute cuisine may be baked, boiled or fried, Trish Rick said, but in Chelsea, “we are the American dream. But I don’t want anyone to know that, because I don’t want everyone to move here.”

With Tulloch and Parker awaiting trial, Chelsea circled around both boys’ parents. Adults from a benevolent group, the Friends of Chelsea, set up shop at the school to help the kids feel safe. The town offered free counseling for anyone who wanted it.

But what Chelsea couldn’t offer was answers.

“We don’t know any more than you do,” Lyford said. “We’re all like, give us some facts, please, give us some details.”

But information has been slow in coming. A Vermont judge refused to release search reports from the Tulloch and Parker residences. Authorities in New Hampshire handed out scraps, with no clues about any connection between the victims and the suspects and no hint of a possible motive.

As the uncertainty went on, Chelsea continued to ache.

“Apart from that,” Lyford said, “we’ve come together even more.”