The White Lilly - Page 18/58

Ellis aged 35, was six feet tall, 190 pounds, black hair, hazel eyes, pale skin, attractive face, looked like a cowboy movie hero, a good guy, matinee idol, charming manners, deep voice, quiet, said little, wore neat suits, lace up leather shoes, a white shirt with a tie, and a hat. Near his apartment was a large vacant lot. Several large houses had been removed leaving an open grass field. Some neighborhood boys played baseball there in the late spring and through the summer. Ellis walked over to the lot and watched the games from time to time. He had liked baseball in his younger school years.

Ellis had an Uncle Bruce that owned a dairy farm just south of Monroe in Union County.

He would go there several times a year for a visit and to go fishing. This farm had 100 yellow belly Guernsey cows on about 130 acres. Ellis drove his Buick over state roads, secondary roads, a rural road, then a dirt road and reached the farm. Slowly he rolled the Buick onto the farm house’s front yard and stopped to park there. This left the driveway to the left open. The house was one story being whitewashed and trimmed in black. To one side was corn field. To the other was a vegetable garden with a lot of strawberries. Around the rear of it was a one car garage, a pump house, a smoke house, an out house, a tin roofed wood shed, trellised up muscadine vines, four chicken houses, and two hog lots. Across the dirt road was a barnyard with an unpainted granary that had a corn field behind it, a white washed barn with a shed addition for cows to one side, a pasture behind