Jennifer Honey was normally a very sound sleeper. Usually, only the loudest shouts at her door performed by her aunt could bring Jenny out of her dreamland. However, an entirely different sound jerked the small girl out of sleep one dreary winter morning. It definitely wasn't Agatha Trunchbull screaming herself silly. It was something more awful than the kicks Jenny's aunt administered to the little girl's door on a daily basis, although the sound was rather similar. Jenny lay awake on her terribly thin mattress, trying desperately to figure out what exactly was it that had jerked her awake. Her strawberry blond curls spilled over the curving edge of her pillow as she furrowed her brow in thought.
Eventually, she decided that she would have to figure out what the sound was for herself and she reached for her small, circular glasses set carefully on a book right next to the mattress. She slipped these on and stepped carefully to the door. Just as she neared the door and started reaching for the knob, she heard a very familiar voice moan near her room. And then she jumped as she heard a blood-chilling scream, the likes of which she had never heard nor hoped to hear. Rooted to the floor with fear, Jenny froze.
Slowly, Jenny regained her courage and began her approach to the door again. But she was spared the difficulty of reaching to the high-placed doorknob as it flew open. Jenny staggered back, taking in the scene. Agatha Trunchbull, Jenny's aunt, stood in the doorway, an imposing figure, tall and broad. Little Jenny steeled herself as best she could for the inevitable verbal assault. But she didn't get the stinging words she was expecting. She got something more shocking.
A trembling voice, soft and afraid. A voice Jenny never expected, in all her days, to hear from Auntie Agatha.
"Jenny...Jenny..." she began shakily. Another shock. The Auntie Agatha Jenny knew was always quick to the point.
"What is it, Auntie? Are you all right?" Jenny asked hesitantly.
"Jenny..." Agatha Trunchbull tried to settle her nerves. "Jenny, your father..."
Jenny's heart plummeted like she thought her mother's might have when she had been forced, even though she was pregnant, to perform the most dangerous feat ever known to man. "What happened, Auntie?" she asked softly, her small voice wavering.
"Jenny, your father...your father is dead."
All the light, all the good in Jenny's world went out for a split second as she screamed. She screamed as she had never screamed before, a scream that no one but yet everyone heard. Jenny collapsed to the floor. She was an orphan! The one protector in her short life had died! No comforting arms encircled her now. Auntie Agatha stood in the doorway, heart warded against the little girl's calls for comfort, for help.
"Noooooooooooooo!" Jenny screamed once she had gotten another breath. "Auntie, Dad can't be dead!"
"I'm sorry," Agatha told the weeping girl stoically. Her heart had re-hardened again, and there was no more of the wavery woman from earlier. "Mag-I mean your father...killed himself, Jenny. There is simply no other way that this could have happened. He shot himself, Jenny...shot himself in the chest. There's no way he could have survived, Jenny."
The small girl stared up at Agatha in tears. Her eyes were dull. It was obvious that she hadn't much to live for now that her father was gone. "It can't be," she whispered, although she knew that the opposite was really the truth.
"It is, Jenny. I saw him, you know...you probably heard me scream. He knocked on my door and he said he needed to talk with me. We went down to the kitchen and sat down. He was fidgeting, he was. And then he pushed a paper towards me. He looked around in his pockets and said there was something else he wanted to show me, and then he walked upstairs."
Jenny could only imagine what would have happened next, but Agatha went on.
"And then I heard the gun go off, and I knew it was all over. I crept upstairs and I saw him lying on the floor in his room, with a pistol in his hand. That's when I screamed. And then he sort of moaned and whispered someone's name...Andrea, I think he said. It was your mother's name, you know. And then, he died."
Agatha hurriedly exited the room, and Jenny tottered over to her mattress, sat down, and thought only one thing. It would be the last conscious thought she would have before the funeral and the mourning, both passing by in blurred flashes.
Daddy didn't pull the trigger. Auntie did.
For one, she had never heard Auntie go up the stairs...she would have heard her, anyway. Secondly, her father never owned or wanted a pistol. He'd always told Jenny that he never wanted to take a single life, ever. And third, the most chilling piece of evidence of all, the one that made Jenny quiver in fear the most.
Auntie Agatha's scream wasn't one of shock. It definitely wasn't one of grief.
It was a scream of triumph.
Daddy didn't pull the trigger. Auntie did.
And this piece of knowledge was never proved nor disproved during Jenny's childhood, but it took a little girl, a lot like Jenny herself, to back up the suspicion, to back up the hunch.
And it took a little girl to avenge the chilling murder performed on an equally chilly morning.
Magnus Honey didn't pull the trigger. Agatha Trunchbull did.