Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

13

CATHERINE WAS IMMEDIATELY aware of the eyes. They peered from the door of the production room, and from the reception area. Two people were waiting there when she came in. They were obviously at a loss for what to do, without Leila at the desk to direct them. The door to Randall’s office was shut, and the sound of typing came from behind it.

She felt a glaze harden on her face. She moved stiffly. One of the two visitors was an advertiser, delivering his ad for the next issue. He was startled by the sight of Catherine. Perhaps he had hoped to go back to the production room and have a good chat with the staff. Catherine took the ad and calmly assured him that she would deliver it herself.

The second visitor was the librarian, Mrs. Weilenmann.

“I couldn’t reach you at home,” she told Catherine. “I just wanted you to know how much I’m-thinking of you.”

“Thank you,” Catherine said stiffly. “I can’t talk about it, please.”

Mrs. Weilenmann patted her on the shoulder, then left.

Randall’s door opened.

“I thought it was you,” he said. “Come in here.”

She gestured toward the empty desk. “I ought to be out here.”

“Mother’s been handling it. She had to go out for a minute, but she’ll be back.”

When he had closed the door, he held her to him. Catherine looked past his ear blindly.

He released her and looked into her face. She slowly reached up to touch his cheek.

“You should have stayed at home,” he said gently.

“No, no point in that.”

“Things here are pretty unpleasant,” he said.

He looked so depressed and so much older that Catherine was jolted into remembering something she had, incredibly, forgotten: that Randall feared Leona Gaites had been blackmailing his mother.

“Randall,” she said tentatively, “surely you’re not worried about Miss Angel?”

He looked at her uncomprehendingly.

“What? Oh, no. I did what you suggested. I just asked her. You were right. She said, ‘No, if Leona Gaites had approached me with any such proposition, I would have told her to publish and be damned, and that she was welcome to use my paper to publish in!’ I can’t understand now why I even worried about it. I guess just knowing we had a skeleton in our closet, knowing Leona had been taking advantage of skeletons to make money…”

“Is there something else you’re worried about?”

“Aside from hiring Tom’s replacement, and wondering when I can expect that bitch Leila to come back, so I can get her to train a new receptionist?” he asked sharply. Then he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Catherine. I’m just tired. I want all this to be over. I want this town to return to normal. I want to have time to see you in a regular relationship, without the stress and blood all around us.”

She wondered whether they would have become as close, if it hadn’t been for those very conditions of stress and blood. She thought not.

“We can’t worry about that now,” Catherine said. “We have to wait for this to end. Then there’ll be time to lie in the sun and go back to the levee. There’s something I want to tell you, something I just found out.”

Randall’s extension buzzed at that second, and he bent over his desk to pick it up. He gave Catherine an exasperated look of apology.

While he spoke into the receiver, Catherine’s gaze wandered over the collection of framed pictures and certificates covering the walls of his office. Four generations of Gerrard editors had occupied the room, so a great many of these mementos were yellowed. One piece of paper still white with freshness caught her eye.

“In appreciation of the services of Randall Gerrard and Dr. Jerry Selforth,” Catherine read with difficulty, “from the Junior Baseball Club of Lowfield County.”

I didn’t know Randall and Jerry were coaches, Catherine thought idly.

She pictured Randall in uniform at the plate, hitting a ball over the bleachers, throwing down the bat and heading for first base.

Throwing down the bat…She stiffened. Before she could stop herself, another image arose: Randall’s powerful arms swinging the bat at a blackmailing nurse, and at Tom. Maybe Leona hadn’t approached Angel Gerrard. Maybe she had approached Randall instead.

You fool, she lashed at herself savagely. Don’t you dare think for one minute…After all baseball bats are hardly rare or hard to buy.

But how accessible the weapon was to Randall. How easily he could obtain that heavy length of wood, if he needed a weapon.

She knew her judgment was clouded by physical exhaustion and grief. She stared at Randall while he wrangled with the advertiser on the other end of the line.

If I’m wrong (and of course I’m wrong), he will never know I thought for one minute that he was connected with murder, she told herself.

Catherine lowered her eyes so they wouldn’t meet Randall’s inadvertently.

Maybe, just for now, I shouldn’t tell him what Betty said, she reflected hesitantly. After all, her story is only confirmation of a half-baked theory of his, about Leona overhearing something at Daddy’s office. It may not mean anything, right? And everyone who might have known something about this case is dead. Everybody but me…and Betty. Betty is the only possible living eyewitness to any portion of this whole chain of deaths.

Catherine realized she had just talked herself out of telling Randall about Betty’s little story. She had reached a test of faith she couldn’t pass.

Randall was still involved with his caller. Catherine tried to assume a natural expression and rose from her chair. When Randall glanced up inquiringly, she made typing gestures with her fingers. He nodded that he understood, and she eased out of his office. She moved toward her desk like an automaton and, once settled in her chair, folded her hands stiffly in her lap and stared at the wall. She was as miserable as she ever had been in her life.

When Randall’s mother passed through the room, Catherine had to force herself to speak.

“Miss Angel,” she said in a lifeless voice, “if you’d get me Tom’s personnel file I’d appreciate it. I have to write a story.”

Angel eyed Catherine sharply and then nodded briskly. She brought Tom’s file to Catherine’s desk, along with Randall’s notes from his conversation with Jerry Selforth and the sheriff. Randall had been prepared to write the story if she had not come in, Catherine realized dully.

She rolled paper into the platen, flexed her tense fingers, took a deep breath, and began to type.

“Tom Mascalco, 21, a reporter for the LowfieldGazette, died Tuesday night as the result of wounds sustained in a struggle in his home.”

When the story was almost finished, she had to buzz Randall to ask when Tom’s funeral services would be held.

“Friday,” he said wearily. “Holy Mary of the Assumption, in Memphis. Ten o’clock. We’ll have to go.”

It was the only time she spoke to him for the rest of the day.

During the afternoon, Sheriff Galton sent Deputy Ralph Carson to go through Tom’s desk, to see if it contained any notes that might be regarded as clues. Ralph was courteous but remote. They might have barely known each other, instead of having dated off and on through high school, sharing hayrides, dances, and drinks. He was married now, with two children, Catherine remembered. But the gulf between them was far wider than the gap in time and circumstances.

He’s definitely keeping his distance until he sees which way the cat jumps, she thought. But he has to be polite. After all, what if I didn’t do it?

And provoking that courtesy, making him speak when he wanted to finish his job and leave, gave her an awful enjoyment.

The notes Tom had made on Leona’s murder contained nothing that was not commonly known.

While Catherine identified items and notes to help the deputy, she also transferred Gazette material-sheets of columns and comic strips-to her own desk. She would have to handle that now.

As she gathered up the columns, she saw Tom leaning back in his chair, reading them with lazy interest, trying to decide which ones should be in next week’s paper…pulling on his mustache, smiling, as he no doubt thought about persuading Leila to bed that evening.

For a moment her grasp weakened, and the sheets almost cascaded to the floor; but the next second she had hold of them again, and put them on her desk.

Then there was Tom’s camera, in a bottom desk drawer. He had preferred to use his own, instead of the Gazette’s. It had film in it, she saw, and she realized she had to remove and develop the film before the camera could be returned to Tom’s parents.

She thought of a question to ask Ralph Carson.

“About the house,” she said abruptly.

He looked surprised.

“The one Tom rented from me,” she explained. “What can I do about getting it cleaned? His parents will have to get in there to get his things out. They can’t see that.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you could see if you could hire some prisoners from the jail to do it. Some trustees, maybe. They might be glad to do it for the money. Why don’t you ask the sheriff?”

“I’ll do that,” she said, and they continued their fruitless sifting. All they found were a couple of magazines that made Carson turn red and caused Catherine to lift her eyebrows. She pitched them into Tom’s wastebasket.

It was just as well, she decided, that she had gone through the desk instead of someone else.

When Carson left, his hands empty and his face glum, Catherine sat down at her desk and looked around aimlessly. She had to do something.

Her eyes lit on Tom’s camera. She would develop the film in it. No one would bother her in the darkroom.

The reporters’ tiny darkroom was to the left of the door that led to the production department. Catherine grabbed up the camera, buzzed Angel to tell her she was still incommunicado, and dived into the little room, turning on the red light that shone outside when film was being processed. Now no one could talk to her for a good length of time.

The smock she wore to protect her clothes from chemicals was hanging in its usual place on a hook on the door. Tom’s heavy denim work apron was beside it. On an impulse, she ran her hands through the pockets of the apron. There was nothing in them, and her mouth twisted in self-derision as she let it fall back against the door.

She pulled on her smock, snapping it down the front, and looked around the darkroom to make sure where everything was before she turned off the lights.

While the film developed there was nothing to do but wait. Catherine lit a cigarette and propped herself against the high counter.

This was the nicest moment of a jarring day. She lounged in the eerie red glow, safe from intrusion because of the light shining outside the door. The Gazette’s little darkroom satisfied her catlike fondness for small places.

The “bing!” of the timer roused her from her reverie. She finished developing the film, her mind at ease and refreshed by the isolation and darkness.

Other places had big beautiful dryers, Catherine thought enviously. The Gazette had a clothesline and some clamps and a fan.

While the film was hanging from the clothesline, drying, Catherine switched on the light and examined the half-used roll of film. The pictures were, as she had supposed, Tom’s shots of the Lion’s Club meeting, featuring its guest speaker, the lieutenant governor. In reversed black and white, Catherine saw shots of a speaker at a podium, and men seated in rows at a U-shaped collection of tables, the plates in front of them showing up as black circles.

Somehow, Tom’s last pictures should have been of something more memorable, Catherine thought.

He had been by far a better photographer than she, but he had been too impatient to enjoy darkroom work. She had often developed his film while she did her own.

He made me feel like a regular Martha, Catherine thought: and despite her weariness and confusion, the peace of the little room relaxed her so that she could smile at the recollection. She was beginning to assimilate the fact that Tom was gone.

She decided to enlarge all the shots. It would take up time, while keeping her busy with something she enjoyed. And besides, she was not a good interpreter of negatives. Tom had been able to run a look down the film and choose this one or that one, as the best shots. Catherine had to put much more time and thought into picking out pictures.

She let out a sigh and set about enlarging the five shots Tom had taken. The Gazette’s enlarger was old and cranky, had been secondhand when purchased. But she had always felt she had a kind of silent understanding with the enlarger. And sure enough, today it cooperated.

As Catherine rocked the pictures in the developing tray, she decided that there was something romantic about photography. She watched, enthralled, as the faces began to emerge from the solution.

There was a dramatic shot of the speaker, bent over the podium, one arm extended in a point-making gesture. And operating on the theory that faces sold papers, Tom had taken several shots of the assembled Lions listening, with greater or lesser degrees of attention, to the address.

There was Sheriff Galton, looking bored. These past few days had made an awful difference in the man. Catherine focused on the face beside his: Martin Barnes, obviously daydreaming, perhaps about Jewel and her little house by the highway, she thought wryly. The mayor’s face materialized. He was staring at a roll on his otherwise empty plate, perhaps wondering if anyone would notice if he ate it (he had been battling his paunch for years.)

There was Carl Perkins, smiling broadly, either at the lieutenant governor’s speech or at some private thought. Randall was beside him, pipe in hand. Then Jerry Selforth’s smooth dark head appeared, his face all eagerness and attention. Jerry would marry a Lowfield girl, she decided, and stay there until he died.

When the pictures were ready, Catherine no longer had an excuse to linger in the darkroom. She emerged reluctantly, found Tom’s copy of the story, and attached the picture of the lieutenant governor. She wrote the cut line and attached that. Then she typed in Tom’s byline.

Once again she cast around for something to do.

There were the weekly columns she had lifted from Tom’s desk. Clipping those columns was definitely necessary, and easy to do.

She got out her scissors and in a very few moments had cut out the comic strips indicated by date for the following week. The handyman column was easy, too. She imagined that the one about building rose trellises was suitable for summer, and her scissors snipped it out.

To prolong the little task, Catherine read all the Dr. Croft columns. There were seven left in this batch. The one in the previous week’s paper had been on appendicitis. Catherine remembered that it had made Tom a little nervous, since he still possessed his appendix.

Well, here was one on Crohn’s disease. What about that? Catherine scanned it and decided it didn’t appeal to her.

Some of these are really exotic, she thought. Dr. Croft must be running out of ailments. My father would be glad of that.

Then her eye caught the word Armadillo.

She read the column through once, twice. Pity and loathing made her heart sick.

When she was able to rise, she went to the darkroom and upclipped Tom’s Lion’s Club group picture. She unearthed photo files from ten years ago, five years, two years. She leafed through them and laid a number of pictures side by side.

She understood now why her parents had died, why Leona and Tom had been beaten to death.

Her father had been an innocent. Leona had been foolish, criminally and fatally foolish. Tom had just been in the way.

The day of her parents’ funeral passed drearily through her mind again…And the day she and Leona had moved the filing cabinets into the attic of the old office. Leona hadn’t taken a file from the cabinets that day, as Catherine had vaguely suspected after hearing Betty’s story. Instead she had put something in; had hidden it there for safekeeping.

She had to produce it at least once, Catherine thought dully. To prove she had it; so she could get her damned money. She hid it because she was scared he would break into her house to steal it…She wouldn’t have had any leverage after that. Didn’t Leona know how desperate he was? Or was she blinded by greed? Maybe she did see blackmail as a way to avenge my father’s death. She paid…He did break into her house to steal it, and he killed her in the process. He came prepared to kill her, with a baseball bat. What a convenient and appropriate weapon.

Catherine twisted her hair in a knot and held it on top of her head. She closed her eyes and thought of all the questions she had answered in the past few days without even being aware they had been asked. Her ignorance had caused Tom’s death. That would be lodged in her conscience for the rest of her life.

Give the devil his due, she thought savagely. He didn’t kill Leila. But then she was screaming, and he thought someone would come…Not enough time to kill Leila or search those cabinets…What a shock he must have had when she began yelling. It was bad enough that Tom was there, when he thought Tom was out on a date with Leila.

And of course he hasn’t killed me, Catherine thought. He has tried every route in order to avoid killing me. He doesn’t want to…He’s fond of me. And he’s probably very very sorry about Mother and Father. And Tom, my friend-too bad about Tom Mascalco. He was in the way. Of course, Leona asked for it.

Catherine shuddered.

Yes, very very sorry about Glenn and Rachel Linton.

It was a matter of pride and vengeance that she finish the thing herself. And a matter of habit: she had done things for herself for so long.

And then there was the fact that she had caused Tom’s death. In the first place, she had given the murderer information indicating that Tom was an obstacle in his path; in the second place, she had not called the police when she had heard the rustling in the grass.

Her rational mind told her she had had nothing to do with the car troubles that had caused Tom to remain in the old office instead of going out with Leila; or with the couple’s going to bed instead of using Leila’s car to go to a movie, for example. But her rational mind also told her that words from her own mouth had led, however indirectly, to Tom’s death.

Perhaps she could have saved Tom; nothing could have saved her parents.

When she thought again of the reason they had died, rage came over her. It had been gaining strength, quenching the pity and revulsion, while she sat brooding. The rage shook her as nothing had ever shaken her before. She felt as if she was being burned from the inside out.

She looked at the clock. She had forgotten about the time. Now she saw it was 5:30. Most of the staff must have gone by while she sat deaf and dumb.

Time to go, Catherine, she told herself.

She covered her typewriter and picked up her purse. She put the Dr. Croft column on Randall’s desk, in silent apology. She thought of trying to find him. She was sure he was somewhere in the building, maybe in the production room working on the press with Salton. But a rising sense of urgency carried her out to her car.

She drove the short distance home with special care. She didn’t trust herself.

She was so fixed on her course that she was bewildered when she saw a strange car with two people in it parked in front of her house. She saw two heads turning to follow her car into the garage, and realized she couldn’t avoid finding out who they were and what they wanted.

As she walked across the lawn to meet them, she noticed the Tennessee license plate on their car. A man and a woman, middle-aged, attractive.

It was hard for her to understand what they were saying. Her ears weren’t at fault, she discovered slowly; their voices were choked and hoarse. The pretty dark woman, still young, with the red-edged eyes, was Tom’s mother, Catherine gradually realized; and the man with olive skin and light hair was his father.

Catherine’s ingrained training triumphed in her handling of these newly bereaved parents. She acted out of sheer reflex, rising out of profound shock. She simply could not think of how to ask them to go away.

“Won’t you come inside?” she asked.

“We don’t want to trouble you, but we would like to ask you some questions,” said Mr. Mascalco.

“Of course,” she said blankly.

As she preceded the Mascalcos into the house, she felt as if she was walking through water. It was an almost physical sensation of pressure, a buoyant feeling of absolute unreality.

While the Mascalcos sat on the couch where Catherine had huddled the night before with their son’s blood on her clothes and hands, she made coffee and carried it in to them.

The couple touched her so deeply that a little of her drifting sensation ebbed away. She felt her rage dissolving at the edges as she responded to their grief, their bewilderment at the death of their oldest child and only son.

Mrs. Mascalco wept and apologized for weeping. Her husband sat with his arm around her, his face distorted with emotion.

They asked her questions.

I must be careful, she told herself repeatedly.

It would shock them, and they might well hate her, when they discovered their son had died not because he possessed information dangerous to the murderer but because he had rented a house from Catherine.

“We would like to go into the house,” Mrs. Mascalco said finally. “We need to get some of his things for the funeral. One of his suits.”

“No,” said Catherine sharply, jolted back into complete awareness. They couldn’t see the old office the way it was. She could hardly bear to think of walking through the spattered hall herself, though that was where she must go as soon as they left.

“His brown suit,” Mrs. Mascalco said. “A tie.”

“I want to see where my son died,” said her husband.

“No,” Catherine said firmly.

Tom’s father, she saw, was passing from grief to anger, ready to take issue with anything.

Catherine got blanker of face and firmer of voice. She remembered what the scene of her parents’ crash had looked like. She had seen the car, too.

She promised to get them the suit. No, not now, later. The sheriff had sealed the house, Catherine told them. She wondered, after she said it, if that was true.

Go, she urged them silently. Go.

But they wanted to know more details about the night before. They wanted to linger with Catherine. After all, she had been with their son when he died.

Catherine finally thought of offering them food, but she could think of nothing she had in enough quantity for three people. As if she could eat-but she would have to put up a pretense.

At last Mr. Mascalco looked at his watch.

“My God, Elise, we have to go,” he said.

After many leave-takings, they departed, obviously puzzled by Catherine’s increasingly tense manner. They couldn’t reconcile the time and effort she had given them with the chilly, fixed blankness of her face.

“I’ll get the suit tomorrow,” she told them. “I’ll send it up the fastest way I can.”

She took their address. Reassured by her sincerity, Tom’s parents were finally out the front door and into their car.

After she made sure their headlights were pointing in the right direction, toward the highway, she shut the door.

Headlights, she thought. It’s dark. It’s night.

She had to move, and move fast. The murderer would act tonight, too.

Perhaps the evidence had already disappeared from its hiding place. He would not have to wait very late. After all, he knew that tonight Tom really wouldn’t be there.

Moving swiftly, clumsy in her urgency, she rummaged through a kitchen drawer for the extra keys to the old office. The police had Tom’s, but she had a set of her own. While searching, she found her gun where she had thrust it the night before.

“Always check your gun before you use it,” her father had said.

She hadn’t last night, but she did now. She had reloaded Saturday morning, before she found Leona’s body. The gun was ready.

She had started out the back door when a new thought struck her. If anything happened to her-No, she said. Face it. If I am killed, no one else will know what I know.

She had left the Dr. Croft column on Randall’s desk, but she hadn’t told him about Betty’s account of the mysterious interview in Dr. Linton’s office shortly before the fatal accident. Betty’s story was not essential, but it was corroborative-though Betty hadn’t seen the man’s face.

The only solid proof was in that file in the attic. She must at least tell someone else that it existed, and then move as fast as possible.

She went back to the telephone, and dialed the Gazette number. Randall answered.

“Listen,” she said. Then it was too much like her call the night before. She had to wait for a wave of dizziness to pass.

“Catherine, is that you? What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I’m at home, Randall. I have to tell you something. Have you read that column?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“This is what I’m going to do,” she said. “And why.”

“Wait for me!” he was saying almost before she finished telling him.

“No,” she replied. “I have to go now.”

She hung up before he could say anything else.

The Mascalcos’ departure had given her back her rage. She was across the moonlit yard, through the hedge, walking up to the back door. Carried along by her anger, she felt strong as a lion. But her body was telling her something quite different, she found as she approached the old office. She had to stop and wait for a wave of weakness to pass, before she could go on.

I should be afraid, she realized. I should be afraid.

She had to fit the rage somewhere in her tired body, shift it so it could be borne. It was threatening to dispose of her.

With difficulty she fit the key in the lock. The moonlight made her arms look eerily gilded. She thought of how clearly she could be seen if anyone was watching.

But still she was not afraid.

The back door swung open. The moon shone in on the white walls covered with dark splotches. A tiny shiver edged along her spine.

The attic door was in this hallway.

She switched on the light and looked up. There was the dangling cord. She laid her gun on the floor, so she could use both hands to reach it. But the old house was high-ceilinged, and she couldn’t stretch far enough to grasp the cord.

Leona had pulled it down for her the last time she had gone up in the attic.

Catherine remembered the stool that had been in Tom’s kitchen on Sunday. She went to fetch it.

At last she could reach the cord. She pulled, and the rectangular wooden slab that fit into the ceiling descended. She pulled out the flimsy stairs that lay folded against it.

The single railing was weak, and Catherine remembered worrying that it might give way while she and Leona were maneuvering the filing cabinets up those narrow folding stairs.

Almost as an afterthought, she picked up the gun. Then she ascended into blackness.

The only light in the attic was a bare bulb in the middle of the sloping roof. She yanked the string dangling from it, and the attic was flooded with light.

She had played there as a child. Then it had held trunks of her grandmother’s old clothes. Now it only contained two filing cabinets, sitting close to the top of the stairs in the only area where a person could stand upright.

The slots no longer had labels, so Catherine had to go through each drawer looking for the file she wanted. There weren’t many left. That helped. Few people were so healthy they hadn’t needed to see a doctor at least once since her father’s death.

Of course, the murderer hadn’t dared to.

When she opened the second cabinet she found what she wanted in the top drawer. She saw immediately that this was the file she was looking for. It had been sealed around the edges with heavy tape. On one side of that tape, there was a slit.

Father did his best to keep Leona from finding out, Catherine thought sadly.

She slid the contents of the file through the slit that Leona Gaites had made in the tape.

She turned to the last entry on the medical record.

“Biopsy taken,” her father had written. “Results: saw Mycobacterium leprae. Evidence of Hansen’s disease.”

Carl Perkins was a leper.

“He didn’t have to do it,” she whispered. She rested her head against the metal of the cabinet.

It wasn’t readily infectious, Dr. Croft had pointed out, deriding medieval prejudices. It needn’t result in the deformities people associated with the word leprosy. It could be treated very effectively now. According to Dr. Croft, researchers had found the nine-banded armadillo very useful in their tests to determine even better treatment.

Four people had died because of a man’s fear of exposure-a family-proud man from Louisiana, where leprosy was endemic; a man who had established himself in the town and enjoyed its respect and admiration; a man who could not bear to see that town, and more crucially his precious, insensitive son (Josh the athlete; the baseball player) turn from him in revulsion.

Had her father ever realized how dangerous Carl Perkins was? Dr. Linton had read up on the disease-had read books on how to perform the biopsy, how to look for Mycobacterium leprae-all to save his old friend Carl Perkins the humiliation of going to Memphis to a doctor he didn’t know. Catherine could read that in the lines of the file, and she knew her father would do that for his neighbor. But her father wouldn’t have flouted the law. Cases of leprosy had to be reported to the Public Health Service.

His eyebrows, Catherine thought. That’s what happened to Mr. Perkin’s eyebrows. That was why he wore long-sleeved shirts. She shuddered as she recalled glimpsing the dark macules his rolled-up sleeve had revealed. That was why he hadn’t felt the scalding coffee spilled on his hand. The feeling in the hand was gone, eaten away by a little bacillus.

She recalled her walk home in the dark with him. It was then that he had found out where the files were, under the pretense of needing Josh’s. Mr. Perkins had walked her home for her protection and safety, she remembered dully.

The next day, at the Gazette, he had checked to make sure she was not involved with Tom. Why? He would have killed Tom anyway, she thought. Maybe he would have been sorrier if I had said Tom was my boyfriend…He had just heard Tom talking to Leila there in the office. I guess he did think Tom would be out of the house; if not with me, then with Leila. Did he hear Tom make a date with Leila? No, he must not have been sure, since he tried to get me to ask Tom to have dinner with them. If I had accepted, I guess he would have made some excuse to slip out for a while…Then he would have come here.

Catherine roused herself and shut the filing cabinet with a definite thud that marked an end. She tucked the file under her arm and switched out the attic light.

Time to go home and wait for Randall, who would be coming. It was all over.

She would tell him everything she had thought of that afternoon while she was staring blankly at the office wall. Carl Perkins had known far in advance that he would kill her father and mother. He had already made the plane reservations to visit Josh in California, because he didn’t want to go to the funeral of two people he had murdered. A strange nicety. He had been upset when he found that during his absence Lowfield had acquired a new doctor much faster than anyone could have expected. The presence of a new doctor muddled the question of where the records would be kept and who would have charge of them. And then Leona Gaites stepped in, with the damning file. Who would ever know what had tripped her memory, what had made her search those filing cabinets while Catherine was downstairs preparing the old office for Tom’s rental? How long Carl Perkins had paid for her silence, until, in the frenzy of a man driven too far, he came into her home and killed her…and after a desperate search found that the file was not there.

Where could it be?

Why, the old Purloined Letter ruse.

It was with the other files.

Or maybe he made Leona tell him before she died, Catherine thought for the first time, as she slowly descended the attic stairs.

Catherine slowly refolded the wooden stairs. As she was about to go out the door, she remembered she had promised Tom’s parents she would send them his suit.

The bedroom had been left just as it was the night before. Averting her eyes from the rumpled bed, evidence of Tom’s last moments of life and Leila, she searched through the closet until she found the suit. A matching tie was conveniently looped around the hanger.

She had turned out all the lights just before she heard the noise.

She froze with the gun in one hand, the file and suit encumbering her arm.

She didn’t for one minute try to deceive herself into thinking it was Randall. She knew it was Carl Perkins.

He must have seen the light in the attic, from across the street. He knew what she had been doing. She had found the file for him. He still wanted it. He had killed four people to get that file and destroy it.

And she had left the back door unlocked, so Randall could enter.

It opened slowly.

She could see his silhouette against the moonlight streaming gently through the open door. She knew that her own white face was bathed in the same light.

“I never wanted this to happen,” said Carl Perkins.

Sorry. He was sorry. And he would kill her, in this house, where she couldn’t run.

The pang of fear she had first felt when she heard the scrabbling at the door was growing. It would do her in, if she didn’t act. It was already slowing her, she tried to summon up her rage, but it wouldn’t come. She was swamped by the unreality of the situation. A man she had known all her life was prepared to kill her, end her existence.

She saw the long dark shape in his hand. It was Josh’s baseball bat, she knew; discarded when Josh left behind him high school sports, Lowfield, and his father.

She must act now or she would die.

She threw Tom’s suit in his face. She wheeled and ran through the dark living room. She was saved only by the stool she had left in the hall, and by her knowledge of the house. The stool tripped him up, and the suit blinded him for a second. The lock at the front door was familiar, and her fingers worked it automatically.

Then she was outside in the night. She was down the sidewalk before he came through the door.

She almost ran across the road and out into the fields, but the instinct to seek help made her turn left, round the corner, and run back toward the town. She ran between the side of her own house and the front of Carl Perkin’s mansion. Would Molly Perkins protect her if she dashed up the sidewalk and slammed down the brass knocker? It was too risky to try, and her legs picked up their speed again after a brief hesitation.

Run, run, don’t look back. Her breath was loud and ragged. She was lighter than Perkins; not very swift, but then he wasn’t either. His arms were strong enough to wield a baseball bat, but his legs weren’t used to running.

Passing her front yard, the temptation to swerve in was almost irresistible. But she had left the front door locked, and it would take too much time to open it. Run, run farther, don’t get trapped.

The gun. I have a gun.

It had just been something she was clutching along with the file.

She was now under the streetlight a block past her house. She wheeled, dropped the file.

Her knees bent slightly, her head snapped back, her left arm came up to grip her right forearm, and she fired. The sound ripped the night in two.

He kept running toward her.

He doesn’t think I can hit him, she thought, with an odd cold rush of amusement.

She took careful aim and fired again.

She killed him.

For a long second she didn’t understand the significance of the emptiness beyond the barrel of the gun. Then her arms fell to her sides. She straightened. For the moment of detachment she had remaining, she felt considerable pride in that shot. Her father would have been proud.

Then the detachment melted away forever, and she was Catherine Linton, shivering with cold in the oppressive heat of the summer night. The locusts were singing.

She walked toward the sprawled figure in the middle of the street. She stood over Carl Perkins’s body. The file, with its contents spilled out onto the pavement, lay forgotten behind her. She felt for a pulse she knew she would not feel.

Doors were opening down the street. There were shouts of alarm.

Then there was the sound of rapid light footsteps moving toward her. Molly Perkins was running down the street.

Catherine flinched away from the body, and took four rapid steps backward to stand under the streetlight. She turned away. She didn’t want to see Miss Molly’s face. She heard the sound of the woman kneeling by her husband’s body.

Then she looked. Molly Perkins was gazing at the face of her dead husband. She did not look up at Catherine. There was no indication of surprise in the woman’s posture; she had been waiting for her husband’s death for a long time. Maybe her grief was all spent.

A car pulled up behind Catherine. She didn’t move.

Running footsteps, heavier this time.

Randall held her to him fiercely.

She let out her breath in a light sigh. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides, the gun still clutched in her right hand.

Then there were many voices, many footsteps. She kept her face buried against Randall’s chest. There was a siren, and Sherriff Galton’s voice. She didn’t move.

Her fingers relaxed, and the gun fell to the ground, slid across the pavement, and went into the ditch. Her arms went up, anchored around Randall’s waist.

In the noise and movement that disturbed the clear hot night, they stood joined under the bleak glare of the streetlight.

The locusts sang.

A few miles outside of Lowfield, up the highway that led to Memphis, a little boy cried over his supper because his dun-colored dog had been missing for four days.