“It was a while before we noticed they weren’t around at all. Must have been January or so before somebody said, ‘Say, McAllisters haven’t been in at all this year, have they? Winter hasn’t been so bad, you’d have thought they’d have been in by now. Anybody seen them?’ Nobody had, and we chewed that over for a few days, until it came to us there might actually be something wrong, we hadn’t thought of that, but once somebody mentioned it, it was in everybody’s mind. So somebody rang up the fellow on the farm next to theirs and asked him to take a wander over, see if things were all right. He said he’d get to it as soon as his chores were done.

“Well I guess it was about eight o’clock when the call came in, the fellow was all out of breath and the police couldn’t make head nor tail of what he was saying for a while. When they finally got it straightened out, they took off like sixty for the McAllister place. Although Lord alone knows why, because there wasn’t anything rushing was going to help.

“What happened was, they found McAllister himself in the kitchen, sitting on a chair right inside the door, sort of tilted over and his shotgun at his feet. The place stank so bad, they said, one of them had to go right back outside and throw up. Real bad, they said. Back in the living room they found Belle, or what was left of her. Most of her head was gone, they said — just shot away. Of course they knew what was going on by then, they knew the little girl wouldn’t be alive, and they went back outside again. For fresh air. Figured he’d shot Belle and the child, then killed himself. People do that, I know, but it’s never been somebody around here, and it just didn’t seem possible. I don’t think those fellows had ever seen anything like it before. They radioed back into town and then sat around the police car for a while. They were both dead sick, they said.

“Next time they went in, they kept going and found the little girl in the second bedroom, all curled up like she was asleep, even had a pile of blankets on her, they said. Just for a minute, I think maybe they thought they’d been wrong and she was all right, but then they pulled the blankets away and they were all stuck to her with blood. I guess he hadn’t wanted to make her look ugly like Belle by shooting her in the head, so he shot her in the stomach instead, ripped a hole right through her.