“She was divorced and living in Mobile, Alabama. Ellen was about your age now, I guess. Dating a guy there. He was a year or two younger than she was. Name was Hillman. Don Hillman. Your mother and I didn’t know it at the time—at least I didn’t—but Hillman was abusing Ellen. Beating her, controlling every word and action. Your mother finally convinced her that the relationship was going to end badly no matter what she did, and Ellen tried to break it off. Hillman didn’t take it well. I advised Ellen to go to the police. Then I found out Hillman was the brother of a cop over in Mobile. A detective. This was 1973. Nobody’d heard of stalking laws.”

“I hope you brought her here.”

“Of course. She stayed with us for a summer. You remember, don’t you?”

I do. For most of one summer our hall bathroom became an exotic world of hanging stockings, lacy underwear, cut-glass perfume bottles, and blue Noxema jars.

“Hillman called the house a few times after the breakup. Late, drunk out of his mind and railing, or else hanging up. One night when he didn’t hang up, I told him if he came to Natchez making trouble, he’d be a long time getting back to Mobile. The calls stopped. After a while Ellen wanted her own place, so I rented her an apartment at the Windsor Arms and got her a job at the Jeff Davis.”

He takes another slug of Dr Pepper. “As soon as she got her own place, strange things started happening. Slashed tires, eggs on her door, more juvenile crap. One morning she found her cat at her door with its throat cut. I called the Natchez police, but they couldn’t find Hillman anywhere in town.” He closes his eyes and sighs. “Then he raped her.”

A shudder of horror accompanies my amazement. Families are mazes of secrets, and none of us ever knows them all.

“Hillman was waiting inside her apartment when she got home from a date. He beat the hell out of her, raped her, sodomized her. Then he disappeared. Ellen was too shaken up to swear out charges. I had to sedate her. I got the Natchez D.A. to call the Mobile D.A. and make a lot of noise, but Ellen would have been a shaky witness at best, even if I could have gotten her to press charges. And Hillman’s brother was a cop, remember? The Mobile D.A. didn’t sound excited about making trouble for him.”

I nod in sympathy. The old-timers in Houston told me a thousand times how tough it was to get rape convictions before feminists changed public perception of the crime. And the cop angle was a serious complication. Nothing is more incestuous than Southern law enforcement. Everything is personal relationships.