Sweet and Deadly Read online

  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.