Heavy, Heavy hangs

Jenny protested that Adelaide would never have killed herself. She remembered her sister, before her marriage to Dennis Holland, as an attractive, vivacious girl. Yet the Hollands described a hysterical, unhappy woman who slipped away while her son was sleeping and hanged herself from an attic beam. In fact, these in-laws seemed to share a sense of relief that poor Adelaide was no longer with them, and that Sandy, the child, would soon be departing with his aunt. Then Jenny stumbled on several peculiar bits and pieces which hinted at murder. Seven-year-old Sandy reported two sets of footsteps in the attic and told her about the dark figure with the spade in the yard at night, and she found the Army medical kit buried behind the barn with the atropine missing. As she pursued her search for evidence, tension mounted in the Holland household. This tension exploded in a revelation of terrible facts, but not before Jenny herself faced death on which the coroner’s verdict might also have been “suicide while of unsound mind.”