Lottie May vomited again. Her mother Rebecca and her Father Daniel held the hair out of her face for what seemed like the twentieth time this evening. They were exhausted, and they knew that their daughter was too. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in two weeks. They had Doctor Chandler out to the house several times already. He had mixed up a tincture or two for her to help her sleep and she would get better for a few days and then revert right back to whatever this ailment was that was wreaking havoc on her poor tiny body.
She had always been thin as a rail, which wasn’t surprising since she was always active and ate like a bird on a good day. Staying outside from sun up until sun down on the days that she didn’t have chores to do or arithmetic homework to finish, she was always moving. Rebecca, her Ma, was good with numbers and was able to help her with that, but Daniel, her Pa much preferred reading about history and stories when they were teaching those subjects down at the Patton Creek schoolhouse. Lottie May was the ‘Roast Beef Piggy’ as they liked to tease her, alluding to the middle toe on a foot playing the little piggy toe counting game. She was the middle child of three. Her younger sister Ellie was just a baby and had just started walking this summer, and her older Brother Timothy was off working on the railroad on a temp position, busting his tail in order to hopefully make a good enough impression on the bosses to earn him a permanent spot. The hours were long but the money was good.
Lottie May loved the bugs and the creatures that jumped, ran and slithered outside in the creeks and shadowy places in the woods. She had been scolded time and time again for bringing them home, sometimes even hiding them in a basket or a sock trying to keep them as pets. Daniel remembered the last time that he had scolded her for having a field mouse eating her table scraps that she snuck away from the dinner table inside of a makeshift home she had created for it on the inside of a coffee can. He told her in the most stern but compassionate way that he knew how to that some of God’s creatures belonged in the outdoors, and if you tried to tame them it would just kill them with too much love. Sometimes he wondered if that sage fatherly advice that he had come up with off of the cuff didn’t apply to his daughter as well, little wild thing that she was. So he supposed that he let a piece of her stay wild for that reason. It just felt right to let a feral girl stay a bit feral. She was always wearing sun bleached hair and sun browned skin, happy to travel anywhere that the birds sang wearing no shoes at all. She played hell on her clothes, too, drawing the ire of Rebecca every time she had to patch a tear in a dress hem. She was happier in a pair of Timothy’s old hand-me-down overalls and nothing else, but that wasn’t exactly the proper way to dress when you were in the company of people who expected you to be more ladylike than savage.
Daniel loved that about her, but he kept his adoration to himself and his laughs under his breath when she was caught up in one of her shenanigans or another. She drew Rebecca’s frustration and his adoration with every skinned knee or mussed and tangled pile of blonde hair that she came home with in the evenings. He smiled gently and with worry as he held that same hair out of her face as she expelled the evening’s meal into a galvanized metal pail. His first thought was that she had taken a cold from walking barefoot in the creeks when the weather was starting to turn cold, but that was before the fitful dreams and the nausea that came several days later. Of course the natural next thought that came to his mind is that she ate something pretty from the ground or was bitten by something in the shadows when she was out on her adventures outside, but she had sworn to him sweetly that none of that had happened.
Lottie May and Daniel had an understanding. She wouldn’t get scolded too harshly when she showed up at home covered in some form of dirt or detritus from her wanderings, but she had to tell him the truth about what she had been doing. He had helped her hide the worst of her disheveled homecomings from her mother, and promised to continue doing that as long as she told him the truth. They had both kept their word so he had no reason to believe that she would lie to him about eating a strange fruit or mushroom or being bitten by a wild creature. Doctor Chandler had concurred after he examined her all over for bites or rashes or any other number of tell-tale signs that she had gotten into something that she shouldn’t have. He had filled a little glass vial with a little of her blood on his visit yesterday to send off to the university and see if anything telling came back in the results, but for now they were both left to worry and pine over the mystery of their daughter’s illness. So they soothed her the best that they could, and kept her warm when she got a chill.
“I think I’m okay now, do you mind if I go to bed now Papa?” She said to him meekly after rinsing her mouth out with water from a cup on her bedside table. “I’m awful tired”. The dark circles around her eyes told that tale without her having to say a word. “As soon as you take your tincture.” Rebecca said tapping the spoon on the side of the brown glass bottle. “Please Mama, it’ll make me throw up all over again. It tastes terrible!” Lottie May protested. Rebecca’s brow furrowed and she looked over at Daniel with that look on her face. He wasn’t sure if she was looking for support in her insistence on the acrid medicine, or if she was looking to him for permission to forego this evening’s dose in light of the events that they had just endured. “Come on honey bear, take it for us so we can get you over this mess. I know there are plenty of creeks and hollers you are missing out on, and I’d like nothing more than to see you well enough to go explore them again, but I’m afraid we can’t get you there if we can’t get you well.” Lottie May’s expression softened from the grimace of distaste she wore on her face after her mother mentioned having to take the medicine.
“Okay, but I’m going to hold my nose. And give me that glass of water to take the taste out of my mouth when I take that awful juice!” Daniel tried to hide his look of worry and said “Deal, but you have to swallow the water. No spitting it out!” She agreed to that truce over the medicine conundrum and followed those steps to a tee, finishing off the glass of water after she gagged on the spoonful of brownish liquid. “Now then, window open or closed?” Daniel said gesturing at the wooden bedroom glass. “Cracked open please, I want to listen to the outside.” Daniel cracked the window open and the soft symphony of an owl and crickets and cicadas greeted the interior of the room. “Alright now, try to get some rest.” With that they snuffed out the candle and pulled the quilt up tight to her chin. They both kissed her on the forehead and walked out of the room pulling the door behind them closed.
Rebecca didn’t make it more than three steps from Lottie’s bedroom door before she let the weight of her collapse into Daniel’s arms as she let the burden of remaining stoic from her stubborn child fall on his shoulders. He felt a couple of soft and silent sobs vibrate against his chest before she wiped her eyes, looked up at him and said “It’s good to see her personality still in there despite her taking ill, isn’t it?” Daniel smiled and wiped a stray tear that she had missed from her cheek and said “Of course it is, she’s full of spitfire and stubborn, as long as that fight is in there, there’s hope. Doctor Chandler will have some answers soon, we just have to be patient.” Rebecca nodded softly and walked past him and toward their bedroom.
Daniel’s mind was restless so he went to the back porch to have a smoke on his pipe and think for a while. He rocked in his chair and puffed with contemplation on his well used corn cob pipe hoping to make some sense of the thoughts and worries that were rattling around in his head. He ran through all of the possibilities that he could fathom and nothing he could think of would give him any peace about Lottie May’s illness. He was sick with worry like any good parent would be, and he found it frustrating having to wait around for another man to find a solution to his worries. That was the hardest part, as he was used to solving his own problems when they came around. He didn’t like having to rely on other people, and as much as he liked old Doctor Chandler, it made him feel somehow a little less like a man for having to call him out. He knew deep down that this was silly considering he wasn’t a doctor, but he had to admit that it bothered him.
The rocking chair creaked softly against the planks on the porch, and he thought that he had caught a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of his eye. Suddenly startled, Daniel jerked his head in the direction of the movement but saw nothing there but the evening twilight and the shadows flickering off of the planking on the floor from the still lit oil lantern that was emanating light through the kitchen windows. His heart settling down, he began to slowly rock again until before he knew it, amidst the cool autumn breeze and the sounds of the night time woods echoing in the backdrop of the evening he was soon fast asleep. It wasn’t the first time he had done that. In fact they all slept out here some nights in the summer time considering how sweltering the heat could get. Daniel was exhausted with worry and the recipe for a good slumber wasn’t hard to find when your mind was weary.
The next morning, he was awakened with soft whispering. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Daniel looked over to find Lottie May crouched down in a seated position with her back turned to him. He almost spoke up and asked her what in the world she was doing out of bed much less out here in her nightgown with bare feet in the early morning crisp and cool but he stopped himself and thought better of it as the fog of sleep was evaporating off of his mind. He stayed still, pretending to be asleep still so that he could observe what in the world was going on. He craned his ears toward her to hear her whispering trying hard not to make a noise that would alert her to him being awake. “I brought you some food, just like you asked. Hope that milk and cornbread is good, that’s what we had for breakfast this morning so it was easy to sneak some out to you. That’s good, I’m glad you like it. No I didn’t eat any, I am not hungry. I’m afraid it will make me throw up. As long as you’re happy, it makes me happy.”
It was as if Lottie May was having a conversation, but despite how hard Daniel tried to find another person there, there was none to be found. She was whispering to keep quiet and not wake him, but to Daniel it felt like she was keeping a secret that he wasn’t privy to knowing. It looked to him like she was talking to the floor. He had heard about imaginary friends, Clyde’s son swore he had an old man as a friend several years ago and he nearly had to whip it out off him to convince him that he didn’t exist. They couldn’t afford the extra food that he insisted his old man friend needed. That didn’t seem like Lottie May though. She had a big imagination, but she never pretended that somebody was there that wasn’t. Maybe she was suffering from the fever and it was making her mad and foggy headed. It had to be the illness, but, he could tell there was some sincerity in her voice and a pit of worry started opening up inside of him the further down the mental rabbit hole he went in his head.
Just as he was about to speak up and ask her who she was talking to, she stood up and walked back toward the kitchen door and closed it behind her. As she walked away, his heart sank and he became nauseated as he realized what she was talking to. Retreating into a knot hole in the pine planked floor of the back porch he saw a snake. It was black as midnight and it slowly retreated back into the dark underbelly of the porch, staring at him, its black tongue flicking at him like it was mocking him. Daniel stood up and hastily made his way to the hole, but by the time that he got there, the snake had receded into the darkness under the porch. His mind wavered between anger and worry, teetering like a see saw, unable to decide which emotion was appropriate for the situation. The overwhelming sensation that he couldn’t get past was fear. He was afraid for what Lottie May was doing and why she was doing it.
Standing up and heading inside, the thoughts of hunger that were there moments before had vanished and had been replaced with necessity. He needed to find his wife and tell her what he had seen. Her judgement had always been better than his, and he was letting this get to him. He needed her cool reasoning to talk him back from the ledge, but the fear remained.
Rebecca was sitting at the kitchen table rolling out dough with her well used rolling pin and she beamed a smile at him when he came through the door. “Oh Daniel, did you see Lottie May outside? She looks better this morning I think. She said she wanted to breathe in some fresh air so she took her cornbread and milk outside to eat. It does my heart good to see her asking for food, that means she has to be getting better, right?” Her beaming and happy face sank into a frown and the crease between her eyebrows thickened into a cavern in comparison to the smoothness of her skin that she wore when all was well. “What’s wrong?”
Daniel kept looking her in the eye as he pulled a chair up close to her, stealing one cautious glance around the room before sitting down to make sure that Lottie May wasn’t in there with him. He took Rebecca’s flour whitened hands from the rolling pin and held them between his pulling himself close and watching her blue irises widen in worry. “Oh Rebecca, she didn’t eat. She didn’t eat at all. She was outside and I didn’t realize it because I had been asleep in the rocking chair as I’m sure you noticed already. She had her back turned to me and I heard her whispering, it must’ve startled me out of a dream. She was talking to something about how she hoped that cornbread and milk were okay and she hoped that it liked those things for breakfast. She didn’t see me, her back was turned to me. It wasn’t until she stood up to come back inside that I saw it. In a knothole in the floor of the porch it was there, a snake black as night. Sent a chill down my spine. She had been feeding the snake her breakfast and talking to it Rebecca. I had to tell you right away.”
He sat back in his chair as if he had just finished confessing a crime. Worry and confusion was written all over his face. Rebecca sat there for a short while, her mouth handling slightly agape and feeling like someone had just dumped a cold bucket of water over her head. She could see how upset this made Daniel, so she let her mind settle on the facts that she knew so that she could figure out how to proceed. “So let me get this straight, Lottie May was outside and talking to and feeding a snake in the floorboards. She was hiding it from you of course, she would be mortified if she knew you had seen her doing it, but she always likes to feed the critters outside, you know that.” Daniel twisted his expression into a deeper advertisement of worry on his face. “I know it sounds innocent. I thought it might be too until I saw its eyes. It knew that I had seen her feeding it. It’s gaze was scathing. It’s like it was glad that I had caught them. It felt like…well it felt like it was mocking me. Like it was in control. I know you’ve heard the stories too. People being charmed by serpents. And Rebecca she has been so sick. You know that this isn’t like her. If I hadn’t seen how thorough Doc Chandler had been looking for bites and sores, I wouldn’t thought maybe it had bitten her and poisoned her, but you saw as well as I did that her skin was untouched. What if that snake has charmed her and that’s what is making her sick? People wouldn’t talk so much about it if it hadn’t happened before, right?!”
He was speaking in hushed tones so that he didn’t alarm Lottie May into knowing that he knew the secret. He didn’t want to approach her about it, because she had been out of her head a few times with the fever she had been burdened with and he didn’t want her to see how unstable he was upon learning what she had been doing. It felt wrong to confront her about it. “Oh Daniel” Rebecca said with an endearing intonation “I don’t know. I have heard the stories before. Mamaw used to talk about having to coax the charm out of a person when they were ill, and they for sure killed every snake that they found around the old homestead, but I don’t know. It seems far fetched…” Her voice trailed off seeing the disappointment on his face. “You didn’t see the way it looked at me Rebecca. It had hatred in its eyes. We will watch her and see if she does it again. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but if it’s what I think it is, I have to put a stop to it.”
Rebecca patted his hands sending flour puffing into the air and catching the sunlight that was now streaming through the window to make little white dust motes flicker briefly between them. “It doesn’t hurt to be sure. We can’t let her know we are watching her though. We will watch her close and see if she keeps feeding the snake.” Daniel’s face relaxed and he held her hands tighter. “Thank you, we will watch her together.”
It was just then that they could hear moaning and mumbling coming from the direction of Lottie May’s bedroom, and without a word being said they were both to their feet and headed to her room. They opened her door and found her back in bed, writhing under the blankets and fighting a fever dream. At first she was only making noises, but then they formed into at first only words like “Yes” and “Okay” but then into small sentences like “I’ll do my best.” and “You’re so pretty, of course I will”. Rebecca and Daniel stared at each other worryingly for a few moments until finally they heard her say “As you wish, I’ll bring it tonight master”. Rebecca clutched her mouth in fright to keep from screaming and tears formed in the corners of her widely stretched pupils. Daniel instinctively drew her close to him in a hug and he heard her say quietly but matter of factly under her breath “We’ve got to kill that snake.”
Lottie May settled down and slept through the day. Occasionally she would say another word or two in her fever dreams but eventually she settled into a deep sleep so her parents let her rest. They both busied themselves with chores. Daniel spent the day splitting wood. If he didn’t stockpile now they’d freeze through the incoming winter months, and Rebecca was cooking down pork belly into lard so that they could use it to supplement the canned vegetables and wild game through the cold months. Preparing for winter was always a full time job every year. Daniel went to the barn and milked the old Jersey heifer that Lottie May called Annabelle. She was full udder and he was able to get 8 quarts out of her in the milk pail this particular afternoon. He put a piece of cheese cloth over the mouths of his fresh milk bottles that he kept hanging on the wall and filtered the fresh milk through it and into the glass vessels. He took 6 of the quarts and corked them and carried them down to the stream, putting them in the cold water where it ran shallow to keep them fresh. The remaining two quarts he took to the house for Rebecca to use. Walking up the porch steps he could hear Lottie May talking inside.
The sun was going down and there was a bite to the air. He could smell wood smoke coming from the chimney as Rebecca had already lit a fire. When he walked into the kitchen, Lottie May was sitting in a chair by the wood stove with her bare feet turned toward the cast iron warming them. The screen door creaked and slammed behind him on its spring and Lottie May turned toward him and beamed a weary smile at him. “Hey Pa, whatcha got there?” He looked down at his hands that were still holding the fresh milk pints. He looked back at her and realized his silence was a tell and he had better speak up to not come across as odd. “Oh, Annabelle gave us some milk today, thought I’d bring a couple of fresh ones in to Ma to use to cook us some good supper. You feeling better? Hungry?” He looked hopefully at his daughter but could see the grimace before she spoke. “Not right now Pa, but maybe later?” he slumped the hope out of his shoulders and Rebecca intervened. “Just eat when you feel like it honey, I’ll leave some biscuits and milk in the pie safe for you should you strike up an appetite. Try to eat when you feel like it though, we need to get your energy up. I feel better knowing you ate a bit of breakfast this morning and didn’t throw it up, so keep doing that the best that you can, okay?” Lottie May painted a faint smile on her pale lips and replied “Okay Mama.”
Daniel looked worriedly at his wife and she used the shape of her eyes to hush any possible retort that he may have come up with. “Pa, let me help you with the rest of that milk” Daniel began to protest “But I’ve already…” “Hush now, I won’t hear of you turning down my help, now come on.” And with that she pulled him by the elbow out of the back door and toward the barn. When they got there, she felt like she could speak openly and said “I did that on purpose. I figured if I left food in the pie safe for her, then if she takes it out to feed that serpent under the porch again, we will be able to catch her in the act again. If that snake is what you think it is, then it may be the only way we can catch it off guard.”
At that moment, Daniel remembered as he was reminded almost every passing day that he had married a woman with more wit and savvy than he could ever hope to have for himself. She had devised a plan while he mulled over repeatedly his worries and doubts. She was right and he told her so after kissing her on the mouth with a smile. “You’re right of course, how did I ever find somebody as smart as you to fall for a simple man like myself? I don’t know what I’d do without you.” He meant it when he said it, too. “Oh you have your uses too. Now get that hatchet off of the wall and go hide it somewhere on the porch. We are gonna have to wait and let Lottie May make the next move. Until then, there’s some fresh biscuits cooling on the stove. And a leftover pork chop from my canning if you feel so inclined.” Daniel’s stomach grumbled and he was just now aware that the worry was momentarily replaced with hunger for the first time in a few days. He took the hatchet down from the nail on the wall. He kept it sharp for dispatching the chickens when the time came, carried it to the porch, and hid it under the cushion in the rocking chair.
After eating dinner without Lottie May since she said she still wasn’t hungry, Rebecca retreated to bed to try and conjure some sleep. She eventually dozed off at some point because the startle that she received from hearing the screen door close wrested her from the fitful dreams that she was having. Daniel had gone to sleep in the rocking chair again, telling Rebecca that he felt like it was a place to act as a sentinel for the evil that he perceived to be living under the porch. He stood watch until the crickets and the whippoorwill lulled him into slumber. Rebecca tiptoed to the kitchen and peered out the window and saw that Daniel was asleep in the rocker. She didn’t know, but he was feigning sleep, the same screen door creak had awakened him that roused his wife from bed.
He pretended to sleep and he could feel Lottie May’s eyes on him as he assumed she was checking to make sure that she hadn’t awakened him. He heard her tiny bare feet tapping across the wooden planks of the porch decking first toward him, followed by a pause, and then away from him before he finally stole a glance through falsely closed eyelids to observe the scene. Just as before, Lottie May had her back to him as she walked away from him on the porch before eventually squatting over the knothole in the old pine board. She placed a dish rag and a bowl on the floor next to her, then unwrapped the cloth to reveal two biscuits nestled within its folds. She knocked three times on the floor softly and whispered “I’m here, you can come out. He’s asleep. Yes I’m sure, its safe. I checked, he’s still asleep.” Daniel mocked a snore as if he was adding a period to her last statement and making it true at the same time. Daniel couldn’t see the hole in the floor as Lottie May’s little body was blocking it, but he could hear the faint hisses becoming louder as the snake climbed outward through the hole. Lottie May broke the biscuits up into pieces on the cloth next to her.
Rebecca could see the whole thing transpire, as she was crouching behind the wash basin next to the window in the kitchen. She only allowed enough off her head to inhabit the window to get a good view of what was happening outside. She watched her frail daughter knock on the porch and to her horror a snake, black as pitch emerged as she whispered to it. From inside she couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she could see her lips moving. First a black pointed head sniffed the air around the hole in the porch, black tongue flicking to and fro before it climbed partly out, revealing about twelve inches of its shiny scaled body. As it emerged she could see Lottie May’s eyes glaze over into a milky haze. She nodded as if it were talking to her but she could hear nothing as she held out a handful of crumbled biscuit to the serpent. The snake flicked its tongue across the browned and fluffy white baked flour and milk before consuming what she had held out to him. She saw movement beyond her daughter and caught the flash of light reflected off of the hatchet head that her husband had slid from underneath the cushion in the chair that he was sitting in. He was awake and aware after all.
Daniel took great care to climb out of the rocking chair, gripping the well worn hickory handle of the hatchet as he did so, ever so carefully as to not make a sound. He slowly stood, steadying the rocking chair as he did so that it didn’t make a racket in the darkness. Once he was on his feet, he slowly crept toward his daughter whose back was still turned to him. He built this porch and he knew where to step without making a creak in the rough hewn lumber that was nailed in place. Slowly he made his way to the back of his daughter, staying crouched low so that the serpent couldn’t see his approach.
Rebecca watched, holding her breath against the lump in her throat as her daughter continued to feed the snake, and her husband creeping slowly up behind her taking great care to remain undetected. The snake was nearing the end of the crumbled biscuits when it adjusted its position and Lottie May nodded in a trance as she slid the wooden bowl of milk in front of her where the snake began to drink. It’s head was low and its unblinking eyes looked content as it lapped up the warm milk. Lottie May stared ahead in a daze, her milky pupils staring into nothing, mouth slightly open as if awaiting instructions before she could move. Their fears had been justified, this snake had charmed their daughter. A flash of anger roiled through her mind and a sense of justice perched on the tip of her hopes as she knew the deed that her husband was preparing to do.
Daniel was at his daughters back now, still unable to see what was in front of her. He was steeling his nerves and slowing his breath in preparation to do what he had come to do. He clenched the hatchet’s smooth wood, steadying himself and coiled the muscles in his arm holding the soon to be weapon of execution behind him in a stance ready to strike. Daniel was a big man, his coarse muscles and sinewed tendons coiling across his arm. Years of splitting wood and other hard work had calloused his hands and had hewn him into a stout stump of a man. It didn’t take much effort for him to grab his daughter’s collar of her nightgown and lift her in one swift motion off of the ground and simultaneously pushing her behind him out of harm’s way. Lottie May hung like a rag doll in slow motion for a split second before her feet found the solid surface of the porch again, but the momentum tumbled her to the ground onto her buttocks before she snapped out of her trance and started comprehending what what’s happening. She saw her father hulking in front of her, hatchet reared behind him prepared to strike as he lunged forward.
Rebecca watched these events transpire, still holding her breath as they played out. The look of half anger, half stoicism was on Daniel’s face like a mask. She watched him gently yet firmly put himself between the daughter and the snake in a fraction of a second and watched as he simultaneously lunged forward grabbing the snake around its throat mid-drink in the bowl of milk. Lottie May scrambled to her feet and ran toward her father looking like a comically microscopic shadow of her father as she screamed out “Papa No!” And lunged at him. But it was too late. Daniel had a firm hold on the black snake and jerked it, his muscles coiling, out of the knothole in the porch. It was seven feet long if it were an inch as its whole body reeled and coiled fighting helplessly against Daniel’s determined strength. Its shiny scales caught the light from the kerosene lamp burning in the kitchen as he ripped the snake from its hiding place and began to wrap itself around the arm that Daniel was using to force it from hiding. It was helpless against his determined strength. It hissed and jerked against him as he forced its head against the rough pinewood floor. It gnashed its mouth to no effect in protest. Lottie May was hitting Daniel in the back with her fists screaming “No no no!” But he barely felt it as he raised the hatchet, its sharpened edge glinting in the firelight above his head.
Rebecca covered her mouth and stood up from her crouched position trying to stay quiet, for a reason she didn’t understand except that it was habit after trying to remain undetected in the kitchen. From her standing position she could see her daughter’s body wailing against her husband as he crouched above the now revealed snake as he pinned its head helplessly against the floor of the porch. She saw Daniel raise the hatchet above his head, and in one swift motion he severed the snake’s head from its body. It’s blood was black as it escaped from the newly beheaded neck and pooled against the floor of the porch. He jerked at the hatchet but it had buried in the pine boards and had become lodged there so he left it as he stood up and kicked the snake’s head off into the darkness of the field beyond the porch steps. Rebecca watched in horror as her daughter froze stiff at the strike to the snake and then collapsed like a pile of laundry to the floor. Rebecca Screamed as Daniel looked back toward the window at his wife that he hadn’t realized was there and saw the blood run out of her face as she pointed to the limp form of her daughter lying flaccidly on the floor behind him. He turned toward her as Rebecca ran out of the door, screen door springs groaning in protest as she forced her way through it and toward her daughter. Daniel watched her run out of the door and past him, following with her gaze where he saw his daughter’s body lying on the floor for the first time. His heart sank as he ran to her side at the same time that Rebecca had gotten to her. Rebecca lifted her into her arms but she was limp and pale. No marks were on her, but her lips had blued and her eyes were open, dilated pupils staring lifelessly.
Lottie May was dead.