“It’s like this,” she said. “My second husband used to beat on me every time he got a snootful. I was smart enough not to keep any liquor in the house, but he went down to the Municipal on Saturday nights. There was nothin’ I could do to keep him here on the farm. Lord knows I tried.”

Hannah frowned slightly, but she didn’t interrupt to ask the question that had occurred to her the moment that Winnie mentioned her second husband. If she had the chronology of succession correct, his name was Red and he’d left one morning to buy a pack of cigarettes and never come back.

“Anyways, the night my first boy was born it was a Saturday and Red was down at the Municipal. I knew I had some time, but I called my brother Arnie, he lived in town, and asked him to go fetch Red so he’d be home to take me to Doc Knight’s.”

“Go on,” Mike encouraged her.

“Well Red didn’t want to come home that early, but Arnie got tough with him and brought him out here. Red wouldn’t let Arnie in. He told him to go home and slammed the door in his face. But Arnie was afraid to leave me alone with Red when he was drunk, so he walked around the house and looked in the window. By the time Arnie got to the kitchen window, Red was already slapping me around pretty good.”

Hannah felt sick just hearing about it and one glance at Norman told her he felt the same. She glanced at Mike. He was managing to keep his emotions in check, but she saw him swallow hard.

“What did you do when your husband slapped you?” Mike asked.

“I took it for a couple of minutes, but then I fought back. I thought he might hurt the baby. Hitting with my hands didn’t do any good, so I looked around for something else I could use. I always kept a coffeepot on the stove, a big one about twice the size of the blue-and-white one I got now. It had two handles like this one, see? And it was full of coffee.”

Winnie pointed to the handle on the back of her current coffee pot, and the wire bail that was attached to both sides near the top. “You need two handles when you got a big pot. You hold the top one in one hand and tip the pot up with the handle on the back, just like I did when I poured your coffee.”

“Which handle did you grab that night?” Mike asked her.