Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

11

THE AFTERNOON WENT along quietly. The production staff was frantically busy getting the paper from the press and bundling up the issues to be mailed. The press broke down (it always did), and Randall had to change into a jump suit he kept handy, to help Salton Sims get it back into operation.

Few of the production troubles disturbed the reporters’ room. Catherine was profoundly thankful. She felt she had had as much emotion, other peoples’ and her own, as she could deal with for a while. She lay low deliberatly, not looking up from her desk at all, if she could help it.

The telephone didn’t ring. People in Lowfield knew that Tuesday afternoon was frantic in the production department at the paper, and they generally supposed the reporters were busy too. In fact, the reporters regarded Tuesday afternoon as semilegitimate goof-off time.

When Catherine wasn’t poking around figuring out column inches for the next issue, she was staring out the window by her desk, watching people come and go from the courthouse and the shops around the square. She was daydreaming, half-awake, lulled back into a sense of the continuity of the town by the normal sights of ladies coming and going from the grocery, storeowners and their customers chatting in front of the shops, and a town policeman working his way around the square with painstaking slowness, giving out parking tickets. The policeman was preceded by the usual flurry out of the stores and the courthouse as people saw him coming and hastily moved their cars to safety, or added more coins to the meters.

Catherine’s thoughts inevitably drifted to Melba Barnes. She wondered what Sally would say if she knew her mother had accused Catherine, her high school buddy, of having an affair with Sally’s father. Then she wondered what Jewel would say, and had an inward tremor of amusement as she imagined Jewel’s pungent comments.

Catherine couldn’t help feeling pity for crazy Melba Barnes. She tried to picture herself married and suspecting her husband of having a woman on the side. She couldn’t quite think herself into it, but she felt a strong distaste at the idea.

It was the stealthy aspect of adultery, the sneaking and concealment in the face of someone close to you, that made it seem so…slimy. Though I suppose, Catherine reflected, the sneaking is more fun than the actual bedding down, for some people.

The extension on her desk buzzed. Catherine tucked the receiver between ear and shoulder; she was gathering loose paper clips to shove them into their original box.

“I’m sorry,” whispered a voice, and the line went dead.

Melba Barnes was apologizing as abruptly as she had accused. Catherine returned the receiver to its cradle. She wondered whether Mrs. Barnes had ever called Leona and made the same accusations. Catherine wished she hadn’t had that particular idea. Perhaps Melba hadn’t stopped at words, with Leona.

No, quit it, Catherine admonished herself. When will I be able to stop assessing murderous potential in everyone I speak to? When will people stop wondering about my own potential for violence?

My life was so simple, she thought wearily. Now I’m operating upside down.

She was glad when Tom strode into the room, clutching a copy of the newly printed paper, half-wrathful and half-amused over a typo he hadn’t caught in one of his stories.

A local girl had been elected Miss Soybean Products of Lowfield County-amusing enough in itself, at least to Tom. Miss Soybean Products was in law school, which had been misprinted “lay” school. Catherine laughed over this bad joke until Tom threatened to throw water in her face.

“Extended hilarity,” Tom said sarcastically, when Catherine’s giggles had finally trailed off, “is just not your style, Miss Linton.”

That pomposity was enough to set Catherine off again. Leila, attracted by the unaccustomed laughter from Catherine’s corner, appeared in the doorway and looked questioningly until Tom smiled at her.

Leila swept back to her desk, mollified, her bare legs looking revoltingly long and elegant to Catherine’s envious eyes. Tom was transparently gloating as he watched Leila’s retreat from a rear view. He hummed and whistled the rest of the afternoon, and wasn’t as angry as Catherine had supposed he would be when he phoned the garage and found that his car wasn’t ready. In a resigned voice, he asked her for a ride home.

“Of course,” she said. “Is it time to go?”

“When are you going to start wearing a watch?”

“When I can remember to put it on in the morning,” she answered instantly.

“You never wear jewelry,” Tom observed with a note of disapproval. “You ought to; you ought to wear silver. It would look good with your hair.”

Catherine mulled that over. If she was going to buy new clothes and new curtains and a new bedspread, to say nothing of her decision to cut down the hedge, why not some jewelry? She had always been so indifferent to it that her parents had stopped giving it to her.

I have nice ankles, she thought, peering at then. Maybe an anklet. Or were anklets hopelessly unfashionable?

And that was the most serious thought she had for the rest of the afternoon.

Sometimes on Tuesday afternoons she and Tom performed necessary housekeeping chores, like cleaning the darkroom or weeding out old files of pictures, but today neither was in the mood.

Tom kept up a pretense of occupation, in case Randall walked through, by pulling out the files containing the weekly columns. Every Tuesday, he made a little ceremony out of clipping the columns for the next issue. Catherine suspected he read the monthly allocation of comic strips in a single sitting. This little task could easily have been left to the production foreman, but Tom had somehow appropriated it when he came to the Gazette; and no one cared enough to take it out of his hands.

For the rest of the lazy afternoon, with the sun cutting through the venetian blinds across the big window, casting patterns on the floor, Tom read Catherine snips from the weekly columns (“Dr. Croft,” “Harry’s Home Tips,” and “Sandra Says”) and from the mailed-in stories the Gazette received from state departments and the government.

Catherine listened with half an ear, smiled occasionally, cleaned out her desk at a snail’s pace, and watched the bars of light and shadow shift across the floor. Randall came through once, filthy with grease and ink from the press, his pipe clenched between his teeth. He reached out to pat Catherine’s hair as he walked past (Tom’s back was turned, to show the boss he was busy), and Catherine dodged his grimy hand and laughed silently as he made a mock-threatening swipe at her face.

She was glad when it was time to go. She told Tom, as they drove home, that she planned an exciting evening of house-cleaning.

“Damn, I’d better clean my bathroom,” he said, suddenly anxious.

“Got a date with Leila tonight?”

Tom grinned and said, “My lips are sealed. I have to protect the lady’s good name. But I wonder how Randall feels about staff members dating each other.”

He looked at Catherine blankly when she began to laugh.

“I swear, you’ve changed,” he said huffily. “It used to be as much as I could do to wring a smile out of you.”

Being turned upside down had brought the lightest as well as the heaviest elements in her to the top, Catherine decided, as she pulled into her driveway.

I guess when all this settles I might come out very different, she reflected.

“I never know what you’re going to do anymore,” Tom grumped.

“I don’t either,” she said. To their mutual surprise she patted him on the shoudler. “See?” she said shyly.

“Where will you stop in your mad excesses?” Tom asked dramatically. Then he grinned at her and gave her hand a squeeze.

“See you tomorrow,” he said blithely.

She watched him stalk off across the lawn. He was pulling off his tie as he went. He cast a long narrow shadow across the grass.

In six hours he would be dead.

Catherine ate a brownie. There had been a coffee can at the back door when she unlocked it, a three-pound Folger’s can full of brown bars. Even before she found the note inside, she knew they were from Betty Eakins, the Lintons’ former maid.

The note, written on a ragged piece of paper, read, “Miss Catherine, I thought you might like these right now. You use to. Come see me when you get a minute. Betty.”

Catherine’s eyes prickled when she thought of ancient Betty walking all the way to her house on arthritic legs. Then she shook herself briskly. Probably that young deputy son of hers had brought Betty in his car.

The brownies were as wonderful as Catherine remembered; but not much of a meal. She reminded herself to go to the grocery store on her lunch hour the next day. She decided to drive to Memphis on Thursday evening after work, to begin her spending spree. If Randall was taking her out to dinner and to a movie Friday…She had to rouse herself from thinking about clothes, and Randall, to begin her belated housecleaning.

She started by cutting off the air conditioning and opening all the windows. The cessation of the humming of the central-air unit made the house suddenly very quiet. Outside in the dusk the locusts had begun their nightly drone. Catherine stood at a window listening, caught herself at it, and was angry; but she checked the three doors into the house to make sure they were locked.

Catherine began her cleaning in the master bedroom. She put on her oldest jeans for the operation; she never failed to get dirty while the house got clean. She scrubbed the bathroom methodically, and then set about dusting. The house was full of bookcases and her grandmother’s bric-a-brac, so it was nine o’clock by the time she put away the dust rag and pulled the vacuum cleaner from its closet. The vacuum’s businesslike roar filled the house with a satisfying sound, and Catherine maneuvered it around the rooms with unusual care, shifting the furniture laboriously to reach every corner and cranny.

Kitchen floor next, she decided as she looped the vaccum cord. And then I’ll be through.

This evening was a little cooler than the one before, but her shirt was clinging to her back and her forehead felt wet by the time she had moved the chairs around the kitchen dining table.

The good thing about cleaning, she thought, as she turned on the kitchen-sink tap full blast, was that you could think about anything or nothing.

She chose to think of nothing, and the physical work was relaxing. But she was beginning to feel bored by the time she finished the tile floor.

She wrung out the dirty mop, rinsed, and wrung out the excess water again. Usually she put the mop out the side door to dry, but tonight she decided to put it out the back door. The last time, she had forgotten to bring it in for several days. In case she did that again, she wanted it to be out of sight from the street.

With a dirty kitchen towel wrapped around the mop to catch drips, Catherine walked quickly through the den and opened the back door to the night.

After propping the mop upright, she stood for a minute on the steps, looking up at the dark sky. It was cloudy; the stars were blotted out. Catherine hoped that meant rain, but the air didn’t feel right for a shower. It was heavy, but not pressing.

As she stood with her face raised to the night sky, she heard a rustling in the grass.

She remained quite still. Her eyes, still turned skyward, no longer saw the blackness above them. They were blind with concentration. Everything in her was bent on identifying the source of the sound, so like that of feet passing through dry grass.

She thought of the light streaming from the open door behind her; of her outline, presented clearly to whatever was out there in the night.

In that interminable moment she was reminded of dreams she had had as a child, dreams in which danger threatened. In those dreams, she could never decide whether moving with elaborate unconcern or moving like lightning would save her. Some nights she tried one thing, some nights another. Which now? she wondered.

The sound was not repeated. Whatever was out there, beyond the pool of light from her house, was standing as still as she was.

Waiting to see what I will do.

What will I do?

If I move fast, if I show fear, it will be on me, she thought.

The watcher assumed the dimensions of the phantoms of her dreams, enormously big and perpetually hungry-and too awful to have to face.

She turned very quietly and without haste, opened the screen door and stepped inside her house. Very quietly and without haste she shut the heavy wooden door behind her. Then with fingers that were not at all quiet and were extremely hasty, she locked the door and leaned against it. She slid down the door until her rear hit the floor, and there she stayed until her breathing became more regular.

Should I call the police. To say what? I heard something in the grass and I’m scared, Sheriff Galton. I heard something in the grass…

And though she was sharply and clearly glad that no one would ever know she was doing it, she crept on her knees to the nearest window and huddled below it to listen.

A dry whisper in the grass. It had resumed movement.

She raised her head cautiously and peered through the screen. In the light from the window, she saw a bird hopping through the yard. As she watched, it triumphantly pulled a bug from the grass and hopped away with its prey.

“Goddamn! Don’t you know you’re supposed to be asleep?” she asked the bird hoarsely. It was understandably startled and flew off, taking care to retain the bug even in its fright.

Catherine expelled a long breath and slumped against the wall. As she was about to give a self-conscious laugh at her panic, she changed her mind. It wasn’t funny.

I don’t care that I looked crazy as hell, she told her inward critic. I really don’t care.

She sat there for a few minutes, letting her body calm down gradually.

“Oh boy,” she said. “Oh boy.”

She had just scrambled clumsily to her feet when she heard a faint, curious buzz.

She turned her head to one side, trying to identify the source of that half-familiar sound.

The buzz came again, after she had hesitantly started down the hall to her bedroom in obedience to an obscure urging that told her it was the right place to go.

The second time she heard the sound, she recognized it.

It was the buzzer in her father’s old office.

Someone’s calling for him, but he’s not here, she thought. He’s dead.

Her skin crawled.

For a third time the buzzer made its rasping appeal.

“It’s Tom,” she said out loud. Tom. Playing a stupid joke.

But he had promised he wouldn’t. She couldn’t recall him breaking a promise. He had been so serious when she had told him never to play a joke on her with the buzzer.

Something was wrong.

When she reached the master bedroom, she half expected to see her father’s head rising sleepily from his pillow in answer to the summons from his office.

She stared at the place where the sound of the buzzer issued, by the bed on the side where her father had slept.

He’s calling me, she thought. Tom is calling me.

The buzzer fell silent.

Tom, she told herself with an effort. Not Father.

“I am not a fool,” she said. She pulled open the drawer of her bedside table, grabbed her gun, and ran back down the hall.

Catherine didn’t think of the fear that had just let go of her ankles. She was needed, and she had to go, to run, to get there before it was too late.

Out the back door. Fumble with the light switch that would illumine that terrifying yard. A quick scan after the light was on.

The yard was empty.

Running through the grass, avoiding the stepping-stones that would have tripped her in her haste. Through the hedge that seemed to clutch at her.

She was almost at Tom’s back door when she saw that it was wide open. She stopped so suddenly that she wobbled back and forth, and had to struggle to keep her balance. A faint light glowed from the open rectangle. The door ajar to the hot night confirmed her feeling that something was horribly wrong. She held her gun ready.

Not even the eerie sound of the buzzer had been as frightening as that open door was. As she crept closer, she could feel the rush of cooled air escaping from the house.

She eased open the screen door as quietly as she could. It creaked a little and she held her breath.

The doors all along the short hall were shut. The faint glow was coming from the living room, and she was looking at it so fixedly that she failed to see the red splotches against the hall’s white paint, until a thread trickled down from a larger splash. Its tiny movement, slow and hesitant, caught the corner of her eye. She stared at it and wondered if she could move.

There was no sound in the house except the hum of air conditioning behind one of the closed doors. The night, let in through the back door, held its breath.

Because she had to, she began to go forward, her hand against the wall for support. She snatched it away when it encountered wetness.

The hall resembled every nightmare she had ever dreamed. But the thing in the grass had gotten someone else instead of her.

As she moved closer to the light, closer to the living room, her scalp began to crawl.

“Tom?” she whispered.

The living room was a shambles. This disorder in what had been so neat struck her first. She didn’t see Tom for a moment; then she saw his legs, his long thin legs, extending beyond the trunk that had served as his coffee table.

Without realizing she had moved, she was suddenly standing by him, looking down. He was on his back. He was very still, but blood was still running from his wounds. She watched a drop run down his cheek, over what had been his cheekbone. She watched it very carefully until it hit the thin carpeting and was absorbed in a larger stain.

“Oh Tom,” she said, and her fear was swallowed up by her grief. She dropped the gun on the trunk, knelt on the soaked carpet, and put her fingers to the pulse in his neck. It throbbed for a second that was a lifetime, and then the faint throb died.

There was a stillness about him, the total absense of movement that belongs only to the dead, after even the tiny motions of breathing are extinct.

I’m too late, she thought. She could feel the blood soaking through the denim covering her knees. I’m too late.

He was only wearing his trousers, and Catherine wanted to cover him up. He would hate everyone to see him like that, she thought. He would just hate it. And no one should see his face; I should not have seen his face.

There was a tiny movement at the edge of her vision.

Her head snapped up, and she was staring into Leila’s face. As she watched, that face stretched oddly.

“Oh Leila, he’s dead,” Catherine said in an involuntary whisper. “He just died.”

She rose to go to the girl, and Leila’s silent scream came out in a weak strangled ache of a sound. Catherine reached out to touch her, then looked at her hand. It was bloody.

“Get away from me!” Leila shouted, her voice becoming unchained. She backed against the wall with her arms stretched out to repel Catherine. Then she realized she had put her back against a smear of blood, and her scream ripped the room apart.

Catherine suddenly realized that Leila thought she had killed Tom. She also absorbed the peculiar fact that Leila was in her underwear.

The sound Leila made affected Catherine like alcohol in a cut.

“Stop it!” she said harshly, but Leila kept on. Catherine’s exasperation was heightened by shock. She felt positive joy in applying the classical method for dealing with hysterics. With no compunction at all, she hit Leila as hard as she could, and only felt a flash of dismay when she saw the girl stagger a few feet, from the force of the blow.

I didn’t know I was that strong, she thought in amazement. I guess I’ve never hit anyone before in my life.

The blow did indeed silence Leila, but it didn’t calm her in the least. Her terror was evident in her trembling body and distended eyes.

“I didn’t do it,” Catherine said flatly.

But Leila was not in her right mind. Her eyes were empty of reason.

Catherine was irrationally angry.

“You stupid bitch! I didn’t do this! I found him like this!”

Leila seemed to return to her body. She pointed a shaking finger at Catherine’s bloody hands.

“From the hall,” Catherine explained. “The buzzer sounded.” She pointed to the buzzer on the door frame. There was red spattering the wall around it. “You remember the buzzer. To the house. That my father used. I think Tom hit it in the struggle.”

Leila looked where Catherine’s finger was pointing. Her family had gone to Dr. Linton. She nodded slowly, looking as if she finally understood. She deflated as fear of her own death left her, but she stared at Tom’s legs, her complexion changing from ashy brown to green.

“Are you all right?” Catherine asked ridiculously.

“I’m going to vomit,” Leila muttered.

Catherine was thankful for her knowledge of the house, for she swung the girl into the bathroom and over the toilet just in time. Shivering now with reaction, Catherine sat on the edge of the bathtub until Leila emptied her stomach.

“I’ve got to call the police,” Catherine said.

“Not from here,” Leila pleaded. She was a limp ghost of herself.

“No,” said Catherine, her own stomach heaving at the thought of staying there.

Catherine’s courage was fast seeping away. But the need to get the younger girl out of the house, the responsibility for someone in worse shape than she herself was, kept her mind moving.

“We have to go over to my house,” she said. “Can you walk?” A stupid question, she reflected, because Leila will just dammit have to walk, whether she thinks she can or not.

“Come on,” Catherine said, “if you’re through throwing up.”

Leila got to her feet with some assistance.

Catherine awoke to another need.

“Clothes,” she said sharply.

Leila looked down at herself and turned from green to red.

I didn’t know people could turn so many colors, Catherine thought.

“Oh, Catherine,” Leila began miserably.

“I don’t give a damn,” Catherine interrupted, “but I think no one else needs to know. Are your clothes in the bedroom?”

Leila nodded.

The bed was rumpled and Tom’s shirt and underwear were set neatly on a chair. Leila’s dress was on the floor, her shoes under it.

Dress, shoes. Underwear; Leila had that on. Hose? No, she didn’t wear them. What else? Purse, of course. Purse. For an awful moment, Catherine thought that it must be in the living room, until she spotted it by the side of the chair. She scanned the little bedroom for any other traces of Leila, but saw none. It might not hold up, but it was all she could do. Then she remembered her own possession in the house. She had to go into the living room after all. She went directly to the gun, grabbed it, and ran out.

Leila was slumped on the edge of the bathtub.

“Here,” Catherine said crisply. She helped Leila into the dress and sandals and kept charge of the purse.

“Come on.”

She got Leila to her feet. Leila was by far the taller of the two. It was awkward for both of them, in a horribly comic way. Catherine put her arm around Leila’s waist, and Leila put hers around Catherine’s neck. Somehow they supported each other down the spattered hall, out the open back door, and across the yard. They had to go slowly, tottering like two drunks through the gap in the hedge.

“I’m afraid,” Leila whispered, and the dark between the houses suddenly held ominous possibilities that Catherine had forgotten in her haste to leave the abattoir that had been Tom’s home. She was hopelessly burdened. Leila and Leila’s purse would make her too slow with the gun.

Catherine felt Leila begin to shake again, and heard the girl’s breath become more like sobbing. They would never make it if Leila collapsed. Catherine was coming to the end of her strength. I will go mad if Leila screams again, she thought.

“Come on,” Catherine hissed through clenched teeth. Leila’s arm around her neck was pinning her hair down, and the pain kept Catherine from panicking.

She had to use every muscle she possessed to haul Leila up the steps to her den. She dumped the girl on a couch and wobbled into the kitchen. She didn’t sit down while she dialed the police, but leaned against the wall. She knew that if she sat down she would not be able to get up, and something still had to be done for the girl in her den.

By now Catherine almost hated Leila.

She said something, she never remembered what, into the telephone when it was answered at the sheriff ’s office. She hung up when an excited voice began to ask questions. Then she dropped her gun into a handy drawer. Before she returned to the girl, there was something she was going to do for herself.

She fumbled with the tiny Lowfield telephone directory, opening it with ponderous care to the “G” page. She read the numbers out loud to herself and dialed with that same nerve-wracking slowness.

He answered the telephone himself.

“Randall,” she said, enunciating very deliberately. Then she was unable to speak.

“Catherine?”

“Randall…I wish you would come. Tom is dead.”

The silence was full of questions he was not going to ask yet.

“Tom is dead,” she repeated, and carefully hung up the phone, because she was afraid she was going to say it again.

She wondered what she had been planning to do next. Then she remembered Leila, and looked around the kitchen for something to take the girl. The most useful thing she could see was a roll of paper towels.

I think this is shock, she told herself. With precise movements, in slow motion, she picked up the roll of paper towels and began her slow trip back to the den.

As it turned out, the towels were a good idea. Leila had dissolved in tears by now, and she began choking out her story almost incoherently when Catherine reappeared.

Catherine handed Leila the roll, or rather simply thrust it into the girl’s lap. She debated whether or not she could now sit down, and decided she could. She sat by the weeping girl and fixed a wide gray gaze on the pretty face now fuzzy with tears.

“We had a date,” Leila choked, “but his car was in the shop, so I had to drive over to his place, but I parked the car a block away because I didn’t want anyone to tell Mama and Daddy, you know how people here tell your parents everything…”

Catherine automatically ripped a towel off the roll and stuffed it into Leila’s hands. Leila looked at it as if she had never seen one, and used it.

“Oh, I loved him so much, and he was so good-looking…You know how it is…I just couldn’t help it.” A pause for another application of the towel. “And then when we were in bed, I mean, after it was over, there was a sound in the hall-”

I hope it was good for Tom, Catherine thought clearly. It better have been good.

“-and he got up and put on his pants, and he told me to stay quiet, not to move. He just whispered right up close to my ear, I was so…scared…‘I left the damn door unlocked,’ he said.”

Leila turned her ruined face to Catherine, and her long hand gripped Catherine’s frail wrist with painful strength.

“He went out and then I heard sounds, oh God, sounds. They hit the walls and came off them, out in the hall and then in the living room. I heard things falling and turning over. I thought there must be five people out there, I swear to God. And I couldn’t keep quiet any more, I screamed. And I thought someone ran out of the house. So I waited for Tom to come get me. I thought he’d come in and say it had been a burglar. When he didn’t come back, I thought he was calling the police. And I wanted to get up and get dressed before they got there. But I couldn’t…I was too scared. I waited and waited, and I couldn’t hear anything. So then I put my underwear on, as quiet as I could. I thought at least I could start getting ready. And then I heard the screen door. And it was you. I thought it was the man coming back. I guess it was a man. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to see. I couldn’t wait for Tom anymore.”

Sirens and lights outside.

The difference was that this time Randall was there, and his mother Angel. Randall only left Catherine once, to identify Tom formally. Angel made coffee and more coffee. And she greeted Leila’s parents and led them to their weeping daughter.

Catherine observed dryly that Leila had recovered enough wits to protect herself: the girl edited her story to say that she and Tom had been sitting in the living room when they heard the noise of someone prowling, and that Tom has hustled her into the bedroom for her protection. That left open the question of why Tom hadn’t called the police from the telephone in the living room, but Catherine decided that on the whole Leila had done well.

Then it was Catherine’s turn.

She was holding an embroidered pillow in her lap. She remembered her mother’s hands setting in the stitches. She had moved it from its place in the corner of the couch, so that she could jam herself into that corner as tightly as possible. The couch protected her right side and her back, and Randall was a solid wall on her left. Her fingers went over and over the embroidery her mother had worked on for hours. While Sheriff Galton asked her questions, her fingers never quit moving, in contrast to her face, which felt stiff, as if it didn’t fit her skull very well.

Why had she not heard the screams Leila said she had given?

Because if Leila was shut in the bedroom, I wouldn’t.

Why had she gone over to the house?

I heard the buzzer, he was calling me. I was too late. I heard a rustle in the grass, before the buzzer went off.

Why hadn’t she called the police?

I thought it was a bird. I guess now it was-whoever…

She was grateful for Randall and his mother, but she had gone where Randall could not reach her. She knew he was there, she felt his warmth and knew he was supporting her. She knew Angel was smoothing the way with cups of coffee and her mere presence, for Angel Gerrard, with her erect figure and carefully tended white hair, was a strong and influential woman and an impressive ally.

Catherine desperately wanted to reach out to them, to talk to them, to touch Randall’s broad hand, but she could not. She looked at them from the corner of her eye. When they looked at her, she turned away: for suspicion hung around her like the heavy summer air.

She saw it in the eyes of the police, she saw it in the way Leila’s parents carefully ignored her.

She heard one of the deputies ask Leila if the clothing Catherine was wearing now was the same she had worn when Leila saw her kneeling by Tom’s body. She saw the deputy look at the blood dried on her knees, and at the smears on her hand.

No one would look directly at her face.

People might accept that she had happened to find one body, but not two, Catherine saw.

Not that she had been first on the scene two times.

Not that she had reported two murders. In three days.

The bruise forming on Leila’s face, where Catherine had hit her, was examined by suspicious eyes. Leila had included the blow in her recital, and she had been quite graphic in describing how she was knocked to the wall by the force of Catherine’s open hand.

Catherine saw very clearly that her frame was being reassessed with regard to its strength.

In a sideways glance, Catherine saw Angel Gerrard’s back get stiffer and stiffer during Leila’s account. A gleam entered Angel’s alert brown eyes.

“I wonder how soon you can fire that girl?” Angel said very quietly to Randall, when the room was momentarily emptied of all but the three of them.

“I won’t wait too long,” Randall said grimly. There was a rough edge to his voice that Catherine had never heard before.

“Of course she was in bed with the boy,” Angel said briskly. She looked at Catherine for confirmation.

For the first time, Catherine met Angel’s eyes directly. She nodded.

“I thought so,” Angel said. “She’s a pretty thing, but she has the brains of a gourd. I wonder that she manages to file things correctly.”

“She doesn’t,” Randall said.

“Catherine,” Angel said sharply.

Catherine kept her face averted.

“Look at me, girl,” Angel said more sharply.

Catherine did, and felt as if she had gotten a shot of amphetamine.

“Did you hit that girl?”

“Yes,” Catherine replied.

“Good. Now wipe that guilt off your face. None of us thinks you had anything to do with this.”

Randall’s arm tightened around her shoulders, and he gave her a little shake, as if to jog her circulation back into action.

She began to feel warm. The sluggishness of strain and fear were slowly draining away.

Sheriff Galton came in the back door. He looked haggard, years older. He seemed so ill that Catherine was on the verge of urging him to see a doctor, when she realized how ludicrous that would sound.

The sheriff dropped into a chair and looked at her wearily.

“Did Tom tell you that he knew anything about Leona Gaites’s murder?”

“You know how he was,” she answered. “He made big noises about digging into it and finding out something that you-all didn’t know. But I don’t think it came to anything?”

“You sure? He said nothing to you about finding something?”

“Not to me.”

“Well,” Galton muttered, passing a huge hand over his face, “there’s that marijuana in his house. Maybe something to do with that.”

Why didn’t I remember to take that with me? Catherine thought. Then she remembered that Tom had bought the dope from James Galton Junior. She exchanged a quick look with Randall and hunched deeper in the sofa. Angel caught the exchanged glance, and rose to go to the kitchen to replenish the coffeepot.

“You know anything about that marijuana?” Galton asked her.

Now she was in a corner.

“I don’t think Tom’s death has anything to do with that,” she said.

“Am I going to have to search your house, too?”

“I saw it in his house when I went there Sunday,” she said. “He told me he had bought it locally. That’s all I know.”

The sheriff might not be admitting to himself what his son was doing, but Catherine could see that he knew. When he heard the word locally, he ran his hand over his face again.

“Where’s Tom’s car?” he asked abruptly.

“In the shop; Don’s,” she said.

“It would look like Tom wasn’t home,” Randall observed.

Catherine turned and looked at him. Sheriff Galton nodded slowly.

“Especially with the lights off, just the one light on in the living room,” Galton thought out loud. “Maybe this was just breaking and entering that turned into something else when Tom came out of the bedroom unexpectedly.”

But his voice held no conviction.

“I overheard that the wounds are similar to Leona’s,” Randall said expressionlessly. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” said the sheriff. “Very similar. But then, in any homicide by beating with a blunt instrument, they would be.”

A little idea began to trickle through Catherine’s tired mind. But when she tried to focus on the tenuous thought, it dissolved. I should have let it alone, she thought. If I had let it alone, it would have formed.

“Drink,” said Angel firmly, putting a full cup on the coffee table in front of Catherine.

She looked up at the older woman, amazed that Angel could be immaculate at such an hour. Then her eyes filled with tears of gratitude that Angel had come to support her. Catherine shook her head angrily. I’m getting maudlin, she thought. She bent forward to pick up her coffee and to hide her face.

“Whoever did this would have been covered with blood,” Galton said, out of nowhere.

He looked at Catherine. Her eyes met his over the rim of her cup.

“I would not describe Catherine as exactly covered with blood,” Randall said with a dangerous gentleness. She felt his body tensing.

“No,” said the sheriff quietly. “I see that.”

“Randall, do you have the Mascalco boy’s home phone number? His parents’ number, I mean?” Angel asked in the silence that had fallen.

“Oh. Oh God.” He thought. “Yes, it’s sure to be in the file at the office. He was living with them when he applied for the job. I’ll have to go down and get it.”

“You can give it to me,” rumbled Galton.

“I’ll call them,” Randall said tightly.

“Then I don’t envy you,” said the sheriff. “I ought to do that myself.”

“He was my employee,” Randall replied.

“Okay, if you’re sure. Tell them to call my office. I guess there’s nothing more we can do here tonight. We’ve asked people for blocks around all the questions we can think of. No one saw a suspicious car, or any car except Leila’s. No one heard anything, saw anyone. Well, come to the station tomorrow morning and make your statement, Catherine.”

“Oh yes, I know the routine,” she said flatly.

Maybe by then I’ll have another dead body to report, she told herself. Gosh, maybe someone will be dead on my lawn when I go out to the car tomorrow morning. That way, I could knock off two statements at once. People should hire me as a divining rod, to find bodies.

She realized she had to get some grip on herself, or she wouldn’t be able to do anything the next day. Or for weeks. The black hole into which she had fallen when her parents died was waiting for her. An indescribable abyss of depression confronted her. She had only to take one more step and she would fall in.

The fear began to grip her. But fear would hurry her toward the hole faster than anything, if she let it overwhelm her. She wanted to lean against Randall with more than her body, but she knew from her experience during the weeks after her parents’ death that this was something she had to fight through alone.

But Randall was there. When she came through, she would have a tenuous something at the other end. She hadn’t had that before, and she had made it then. She would make it again. This time, if she won decisively, it might never happen again, she thought.

The police were gone. Angel was gone, after telling Randall without a twitch of an eyebrow that he would be staying with Catherine that night.

Only Randall and Catherine were left in the house, and it seemed empty with just two inhabitants, after the coming and going it had seen that evening.

In the house out back, there was fingerprinting dust, bloodstains, and silence. The blood, Tom’s blood, would be dry now, and brown. Catherine could feel the presence of that house at her back. She wondered what she would do with it, the old house that had seen so many uses in its long life. Who would want it now?

Randall had gone to get the Mascalcos’ telephone number after a long, quiet, tense discussion with Catherine. He had not wanted to wake the Mascalcos with the news that their son was dead. He had wanted to wait until morning. Catherine had only thought they had a right to know as soon as possible. It couldn’t be withheld from them, she had argued. They would bitterly resent being called in the morning and learning their son had been dead for twelve hours.

Catherine had not learned of the death of her parents until she had gone back to her new apartment from her new job. She remembered the guilt she had felt at having been happily engaged in something else while their corpses were in a little funeral home in Arkansas. She remembered her anger that others had known the news, more important to her than to anyone in the world, hours before she was told.

Randall had yielded to her argument. She could hear his voice in the kitchen now.

But she realized, as she huddled in her corner of the couch, that she should have said nothing to Randall, nothing at all. He, not Catherine, was the one who had volunteered to break the news. She should have left it up to him, since he had taken on the sickening responsibility.

She listened to the murmur of his voice and felt furious at her own interference. Her capacity for anger with herself was far greater than her capacity for anger with anyone else.

When Randall returned to the den, his face was gray with strain. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he finally spoke, it was not about the conversation that had just taken place.

“Catherine, take off those goddamned clothes,” he said.

She gaped at him.

Then she understood. She rose without a word. In the bathroom she yanked off the bloodstained jeans and jammed them into the garbage can. She looked down at herself and saw that the blood had soaked through her clothes and dried on her skin. She stepped into the shower and soaped and rinsed, then repeated, until her hands and legs were white again and chafed with scrubbing.

Tom’s blood, down the drain. Four people, down the drain. Gone. Snuffed out like dogs hit by careless cars, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; because they weren’t aware of the danger until it was too late.

Randall would hire a new reporter. He would doubtless start looking the next day.

Jerry Selforth was prescribing antibiotics and setting broken arms, just as Dr. Linton had done for years. He had a nurse who managed his office just as well as Leona would have. And Molly Perkins held the coffees for the bridge club every bit as well as Rachel Linton had.

Other dun-colored dogs were running through the fields, coupling with bitches to ensure more dun-colored dogs.

That was the way life went on. The thought might even be comforting, after a few years. Many years. More years than I will live, she thought.

She sprayed herself with perfume, thinking the smell of Tom’s death was still on her, and went out to join Randall.

He seemed to have recovered from the worst of his conversation with the Mascalcos. But for the first time, Catherine was fully conscious that he was twelve years older than she was. He had gotten out his pipe and was puffing away, looking more than ever like a muscular, misplaced professor.

“Can you sleep now?”

She shook her head.

“Neither can I. Let’s go over it, if you can stand that.”

She waited. She owed him this, for having urged him to call the Mascalcos.

“Leona. No-your parents. The first ones.”

A fire ignited in her tired body. He accepted her conviction. He agreed.

“Your mother. Your father. His nurse. A reporter who said he was going to pry into their murders. This started with your folks. Glenn or Rachel, as the primary target?”

“I think…my father.”

“I agree. Something he knew as a doctor.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “He was a friend to half the county, and he inspired confidences.”

“Granted.” Randall knocked his pipe out in an ashtray. “Do you think Leona could have killed your parents? Could she have been a murderer? How did she feel about your father?”

“Before she was a blackmailer and an abortionist, she was a good nurse for my father for thirty-odd years,” Catherine replied. “There was never anything between them, but I think Leona loved my father. I can see that now…Maybe I knew it all along.”

“Do you think she could have killed him, knowing she couldn’t ever have him?”

“I don’t think so. I think she was used to the companionship she had with him every day at the office. She would have been his nurse until he retired, and that was years away. And she lost her income when he died: Leona loved money, too. Last point, but not least, I don’t think she knew how to tamper with a car.”

“That’s disposed of, then.” Randall had tidied that argument away. Catherine realized that in his own way he was working off the grief and horror of Tom’s death.

“So,” he muttered, “we assume that Leona didn’t kill your parents. Do we take for granted, then, that Glenn, Rachel, and Leona were killed by the same person, for the same reason?”

Sure, why not? Catherine thought crazily. She nodded.

“Okay. That would point to something they all knew. Considering the six-month lapse between murders, it would seem that for six months Leona kept silent about something she knew, while the murderer paid her blackmail money. Something Leona discovered after your father was killed, maybe when she got the office wound up…Or maybe she realized the significance of an event or a conversation later. Something your father knew in his professional life; or something told to him in the office, as a friend.”

Catherine mulled that over.

“I didn’t express that well. Too many ‘somethings’ and ‘maybes’…But do you agree?” Randall prodded.

Finally Catherine nodded. “Leona was always at the office when my father was there,” she said slowly. “Even when someone buzzed him late at night”-she shuddered-“he would call her to come in before he even went over there. So she would have heard everything he heard, unless the conversation took place after he sent her from the room, while he talked with a patient after an examination. He would do that so she could prepare for the next patient, or pull files on whoever was in the waiting room. And all the files were accessible to her.” Catherine stopped to think. “But with something like this, Randall, I can’t imagine…We’re presuming a critical conversation, a very personal and important conversation. Father would have sent Leona from the room. I know. He always knew when people were embarrassed or self-conscious about what they had, or suspected they had. His consultations with them were always private.”

“Couldn’t she have listened at the door?”

“It would have been hard. There were always other patients around, and the office maid, and the receptionist.”

“Okay-difficult, but not impossible. However she did it, she found out. And Tom must have found out the same thing. You know what a gung-ho investigative reporter he thought he was. He wanted to solve this case before the police did. He told me so himself, Monday, while you were in Production.”

Again the little thought moved at the back of Catherine’s mind, and again she tried to catch hold of it too soon. It melted away.

“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.

Randall looked at her questioningly.

“I would swear that during the past twenty-four hours he was thinking more about the breakup with his fiancée, and getting Leila to bed, than he was about Leona’s murder,” Catherine said. She gripped the embroidered pillow and added, “He was just a boy. He was younger than I am.”

Randall touched her cheek. They sat in silence for a few minutes.

Then he said, “Just one more thing. If Leona knew who killed your father, do you think she would have kept quiet about it?”

“If she believed the person she was blackmailing was his murderer-she may not have known that, come to think of it-she might have figured, ‘Dead is dead. What good can this bring me?’ Even if she loved him. Or she might have thought she was getting some kind of vengeance by blackmailing the murderer.”

Then Catherine added, “I realize now that I never knew Leona, never understood her. At all.”

Randall stirred and looked at her. “You should be in bed,” he said. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”

She nodded.

“I’ll sleep in here,” he said, thumping the couch.

“No.”

“Catherine,” he said gently, “this isn’t the right time.”

“I know that,” she said irritably. “But you can sleep in my bed without being overcome by passion, surely, tired as we both are? Or you can have the other bed, in my old room.”

“Even as tired as we are,” he said, “I think I’d better take the other bed.”