“Right after six o’clock it was when the telephone started ringing and woke me spang up out of the soundest sleep I’d had all night. I just knew it was terrible news. Like a premonition, I guess you’d say. I’ve always been real sensitive like that, you know, ever since I was little. It was like it wasn’t the telephone at all, but the shrill screaming of a soul in deadly agony that woke me up. But I was out of bed and on my feet before I had time to think, and Harry just lying there on his back snoring peacefully through it all.
“Well, I tell you I just flew into the other room and grabbed up the telephone and said hello, and then I heard this tiny, little voice that seemed like it came from a far distance off, almost like it wasn’t real but came from some place not on this earth.
“And it said ‘Aunt Minerva’, and it was like it was crying but not quite crying either, but choked up and frightened and, well… tragic, that’s what it was. I can tell you it gave me a turn. I wasn’t quite all awake, I guess, and it was like it was part of a dream, but I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I remember standing there and distinctly thinking to myself, ‘I wish it was a dream, but I know it isn’t,’ and then this little voice said, ‘This is Sissy, Aunt Minerva. Mommy’s hurt bad. She’s sick, I guess. She’s lying in bed and won’t talk to me.’ That poor, dear lamb. Can you imagine?
“And I knew right then. I tell you I felt it in my bones. Don’t ask me how. I’m just psychic, I guess. And I said, ‘You stay right there downstairs to open the front door and let me in, Sissy,’ and then I hung up the phone and scooted back to the bedroom and didn’t even take time to get dressed, but put on my slippers and a robe, and Harry sort of woke up and rolled over to look at me and he asked, half-asleep, ‘Was that the telephone?’ And I said to him, ‘That’s what it was, all right. It’s Ellie Blake. She’s dead, Harry.’ That’s exactly what I said to him, right out, without any ifs or ands or buts. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I did. And I said, ‘You get up and put on a pot of coffee. I’m going over to bring Sissy back home with me,’ because I remembered that Marvin was at that convention in Miami and wouldn’t be home until this afternoon and there was that poor child all alone, and I ran out the back door in my robe and slippers and drove as fast as I could to the Blake house, and there was dear, little Sissy, standing in the front door like I’d told her, bare-footed and in her little nightgown with her face all screwed up trying not to cry and her great, big eyes pleading with me, it looked like, to wake her mamma up and tell her it wasn’t so.
“I just dropped down to my knees there on the doorstep and held out my arms to her, thinking to myself, but not saying it out loud, ‘You poor, motherless lamb, you,’ and she flung her arms around my neck and pressed her face up against me, but not a word out of her and not a tear in those sweet, big eyes.
“And I carried her inside and put her down gentle-like in the living room, and I said as brisk and businesslike as could be, ‘You stay right here, honey, while Aunt Minerva goes up and sees about your mamma.’
“And she stood there and she looked at me, sad-like and understanding ’way beyond her years, and she folded her little hands in front of her and she said, ‘Mommy’s dead, isn’t she, Aunt Minerva? God took her up to heaven in the night last night while I was asleep, didn’t He?’
“Well, I tell you it was all I could do to keep from bursting right out and crying my own self, but I said, ‘You just let me go up and see,’ and I turned away and went up the stairs, dragging my feet and slow because something just told me what I was going to find when I got up there.
“Poor Ellie! She has been running to fat this last year, you know that, and there she lay. Lumpy and shapeless, you might say. Right in the middle of that big bed without a stitch to cover up her nakedness, and those terrible black and blue bruises all around her throat and her tongue hanging out, all blue and swollen, and her eyes open and staring like they’d looked down into the bottomless pit of hell before Death mercifully drew the veil over whatever it was she looked at before she died.
“And you knew right then that some vile man-creature had had his way with her before he choked the life out of her. The way she was twisted up like her limbs had been writhing and she’d fought him off as best she could.
“Because you can say what you will about Ellie Blake, but you know mighty well she was a fine, Christian woman in every respect, and maybe she was considered sort of fast and loose when she was in high school and all, but, after she and Marv started going steady and certainly after they got married and had Sissy, there’s nobody can say she ever looked at another man.
“You mark my words, and I guess I was closer to Ellie than any other woman friend in the whole of Sunray Beach, you’ll find out it was pure rape, that’s what it was. Some man that got the wrong sort of ideas about Ellie because she was so friendly and it wasn’t her fault if the good Lord gave her a pair of hips that twitched from behind whenever she walked down the street. It wasn’t that Ellie intended it that way. Not the way I see it. She did like to attract attention from the men, maybe, and many’s the time I’ve kidded Harry when I saw his eyes sort of bugging out when Ellie walked past, but shucks, Harry knew right well, just like every other man in town, that Ellie didn’t mean anything by it.
“I knew right off there wasn’t anything I could do, and I never even went into the room. All I could think about was that poor motherless lamb downstairs and how I had to get her away where she wouldn’t have to see Ellie again, and about Marvin, poor soul, having himself a good time in Miami at the convention without ever dreaming what he was going to come home to.
“So I went on into Sissy’s room and grabbed some clothes for her and then I hurried back downstairs and there she was standing right there in the doorway to the living room where I’d left her, and still not a tear on her cheeks. And she looked at me with those big eyes that seemed like she knew everything, and she said, ‘She is dead, isn’t she, Aunt Minerva?’ and I lied to her. I said, ‘Land’s sake, child, how can we tell till we get a doctor?’ and I pushed the bundle of clothes into her arms and went past her to the telephone and called Doctor Higgens and woke him up out of bed and told him to get over there fast, and then I called Police Chief Ollie Jenson at his home and woke him up, and I said into the telephone, real low so Sissy wouldn’t hear me, standing back in the doorway like she was, I said:
“‘I’m at Ellie Blake’s house and she’s been murdered and raped in the night.’ That’s just what I said to him, right out. ‘Murdered and raped,’ I said. ‘And you better get over here. I called Doctor Higgens,’ I said, ‘though Lord knows there’s nothing he can do for poor Ellie now, and I’m taking the little girl home with me.’
“And I hung up fast and turned back to Sissy and she was looking at me with the strangest look on her face and she asked, ‘What’s raped, Aunt Minerva?’ Well! You can imagine. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I never thought she could hear me. What could I say to the poor lamb? So I just pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I bundled her up in my arms and carried her out to the car and brought her straight on home with me, and I put her right to bed in the spare bedroom, and that’s where she is right now. She doesn’t say a word and she hasn’t cried a single tear yet, just lies on her back staring up at the ceiling and she doesn’t want anything to eat or drink. I asked Doctor Higgens, but he said it was best just to leave her alone. Let the shock wear off, you know.