Sweet and Deadly Read online

  “Well, come on,” Galton was saying in a more relaxed voice. “The coroner’s jury is here. You have to testify.”

  Catherine lost that portion of the day. While she automatically delivered her simple account to a ring of sober faces, she was remembering Miss Gaites.

  The incongruity of seeing starched, immaculate Leona Gaites in such a state!

  She must have given me a hundred suckers, Catherine thought, her childhood crowding around her.

  The suckers had been a bribe to convince Catherine that Leona liked her.

  It hadn’t worked. Leona hadn’t liked children at all.

  So Catherine had disliked Miss Gaites, had not even accorded her the courtesy of “Miss Leona.” She had disliked the way the starched uniform rattled when the tall woman walked, had disliked the hair that seemed set upon Miss Gaites’s head instead of growing there.

  Most of all, Catherine had disliked the pity she was obliged to feel for Miss Gaites, who had no family.

  Her father had always praised his nurse highly to his wife and daughter, insisting with overdone joviality that Leona kept his office together. The forced note in his insistence told Catherine that even her amiable father could not find it in him to wholeheartedly like Leona Gaites.

  Catherine remembered the tears sliding down Leona’s square handsome face at the double funeral.

  She shouldn’t have died like that, Catherine thought, as she watched the coroner’s jury being heaved across the porch and into the shack. A dog shouldn’t die like that. Then Catherine remembered the dog’s corpse she had passed that morning. The same person killed them both, she thought with surprising certainty. Driving too fast, to get away from what he did to Miss Gaites.

  The coroner’s jury viewed the body and came to the obvious conclusion. Murder, they found.

  Catherine cast a last look at the covered figure, now bundled onto a stretcher borne by the two sweat-soaked cursing attendants, on its way to Jerry Selforth’s eager knife.

  As she watched the load sliding into the back of the ambulance, she saw one of the attendants gag from the smell.

  Leona had always been so clean.

  Catherine began to walk down the baked dirt road toward the sheriff ’s car. The coroner, Carl Perkins, fell into step beside her.

  She looked at him with new eyes. Familiar people were no longer familiar. The anger and suspicion in Sheriff Galton’s face had shaken her out of taking for granted people she had known since childhood.

  “Terrible thing,” Perkins muttered. He was obviously upset. His big hands were shoved into the pockets of his working khakis.

  He must have been gardening when Mrs. Cory phoned him, Catherine thought dully. She watched Carl and Molly Perkins working in their yard every weekend, provided she herself had remembered to have her hedge trimmed.

  “Yes,” Catherine replied belatedly.

  “I’m sorry for you, that you had to find her.”

  There was real regret in his voice, and Catherine warmed to him. “If I hadn’t happened to shoot cans this morning—” she began, and stopped.

  Perkins wrinkled his forehead inquiringly.

  His eyebrows are too sparse to count, Catherine noticed. He’s really getting old.

  She spoke hastily to cover her stare. “She wouldn’t have been found for a long time, if no one had worked in those fields until—” “Until the smell was gone,” she meant to say, but couldn’t.

  “You’re right,” he said. He was angry: his voice sounded hoarse and strained. “Wonder if Galton can handle this? All he’s used to are Saturday night cuttings.”

  They had reached the sheriff ’s car, where Galton was directing two deputies to stay behind and continue to search.

  “Now, you come over and see us,” Perkins said earnestly. “You’ve been a stranger since your folks have been gone.”

  Yes, she thought. I’ve been a stranger.

  “Is all your father’s business tended to?” he asked into the blank wall of her silence.

  “Yes,” Catherine replied, shaking herself. She would have to say more, she realized after a second. “Jerry Selforth bought almost all Dad’s equipment. We were lucky to get another doctor in town so soon. Dr. Anderson’s so old that I know having Jerry take the practice is a relief to him.”

  “It was a surprise,” said Mr. Perkins. “Not too many young men want to come to Lowfield.”

  His bleak tone made Catherine raise her eyebrows. She didn’t like Jerry Selforth much as a man, but the town had desperately needed him as a doctor. What had Jerry done to offend her neighbor?

  Just then the ambulance started up, and the people by the cars had to step between them to let it edge by.

  Catherine’s thoughts flew back to Leona Gaites, and she scarcely noticed Carl Perkin’s farewell nod as he went down the road to his Lincoln, in the wake of the ambulance.

  The narrow dirt road became busy with flying dust and confusion as the accumulated vehicles reversed to point back to the highway. The cars formed a train like a funeral procession behind the hearse of the orange and white ambulance.

  The black deputy was detailed to take Catherine’s statement.

  “Then head on over to Leona Gaites’s house,” Sheriff Galton added when he was halfway out the door. “Bring the camera.”

  The young black man nodded briskly and turned to Catherine, who was huddled in a corner hoping she was out of the way.

  “Miss Catherine, would you come over here, please?” he said, indicating a straight-backed chair by a scarred desk.

  Catherine could tell from the set of Mary Jane Cory’s back that she disapproved of this black policeman. The unnatural brightness of Mrs. Cory’s voice as she spoke to him contrasted sharply with the natural tone in which she spoke to a couple of blacks who entered the station as supplicants.

  Catherine was beyond caring who took down her statement; but she was less comfortable with blacks in her own town than she was with blacks anywhere else. Upon taking up her life in Lowfield after her parents’ death, she had found sadly that the old attitudes caught at her and strangled her attempts to be easy in an uneasy situation.

  The deputy’s name tag read “Eakins,” Catherine noticed for the first time. Now she could place the familiarity of the man’s face.

  “Your mother is Betty, isn’t she?” Catherine asked, as he rolled typing paper into the machine.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he said reluctantly, and Catherine felt a pit-of-the-stomach dismay.

  Betty Eakins had been the Lintons’ maid for years, until she had grown too old and arthritic to work any more.

  Catherine had never called their maid anything but “Betty”; and she had decided, after a year away in college, that that was a shameful thing. Catherine had not even known Betty’s last name for the first years of the woman’s employment. Catherine’s visits home had been more and more awkward as her awareness of what lay around her became acute, to the point that Catherine was secretly glad when Betty grew too infirm to iron the Lintons’ sheets. Catherine’s parents had died before they could replace Betty with another maid.

  “How is she?” asked Catherine. She had to say something, she felt.

  “Mama’s fine,” he said curtly. Percy Eakins’s face rivaled Catherine’s for blankness.

  “She’s a very old woman now,” he said more gently—whether out of fear of being rude to a white woman or because he sensed Catherine’s misery, she couldn’t tell. She chose to regard his softened tone as absolution for the sin of having offended racially.

  “I’ll tell her I saw you. She talks about you all the time,” he said finally.

  And their personal conversation was closed.

  He took her statement in a meticulous professional manner, in question-and-answer form.

  “Your full name?”

  “Catherine Scott Linton.”

  “Your age?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Place of employment and position?”

  “
The Lowfield Gazette. I’m the society editor.”

  “Your present place of residence?”

  “Corner of Mayhew and Linton.”

  No one in Lowfield had ever felt a need for house numbers. The street her house faced had been named for her great-grandfather, when the town was bustling and the river was close. Now the river was two miles away, held in check by the levee, and Lowfield’s population had not fluctuated appreciably in her father’s lifetime.

  “On the morning of July 11, what did you do?”

  “I went out to some land I own, north of Lowfield.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To practice target shooting…”

  4

  S HE CAME IN the side door from the garage. Her coffee cup and the empty percolator still stood on the counter, waiting to be washed. The hands of the kitchen clock glided electrically smooth on their course.

  She was almost surprised that the house was the same, so much had passed since she had left it that morning.

  She stood in the middle of the bright tiled floor and listened. She had never done that before.

  Catherine shook herself when she realized what she was doing, and started down the long hallway that divided the house, beginning at the kitchen and ending at a bathroom.

  But she looked quickly into each doorway as she passed. She saw only the big familiar lifeless rooms, lovingly (and lavishly) redecorated by her mother. She paused in the doorway of the formal living room, where her parents had entertained, and suddenly recalled her father half-ruefully telling guests, “Rachel’s rebuilt this old house from the inside out.” It was the only room Catherine had changed.

  At the end of the hall Catherine almost went right into her old bedroom. It’s been months since I did that, she thought.

  She went straight through the master bedroom to its cool tiled bathroom and shed everything she had on. She stepped into the shower, but not before self-consciously locking the bathroom door.

  She had never done that before, either.

  The shower was bliss. With cool water shooting over her, washing off the layers of dust and sweat, she was able to forget the shack for a few minutes.

  She dried herself and combed out her wet hair slowly. She lay down on the big bed and hoped for sleep, but her body hummed with tension like a telephone line. Finally she quit hoping and got up, padding across the heavy carpeting to the closet and folding back a mirrored door to pull out a long loose lounging dress, pale gray and scattered with red poppies. She yanked it over her head and went down the hall to the kitchen, where she began searching the refrigerator.

  Good. Beer. With one of those in me, I bet I can sleep. I’m glad Tom left some.

  Armed with the beer and a fresh pack of cigarettes, Catherine wandered into the living room. She settled in her favorite chair, which she had pulled out of its original spot so she could look out the bay window. She had arranged beside it a heavy round table, and, some time later, another chair to keep the first one company. It was her own little base in a house too big for one person; a house still echoing with loss.

  The old home across the street had been renovated into the town library. It closed at eleven on Saturday, so Catherine was just in time to see Mrs. Weilenmann, the librarian, lock the front door. Mrs. Weilenmann was the town wonder: an educated northern black woman, who spoke with no trace of the heavy accent white Southerners associated with blacks. And, rumor had it, Mrs. Weilenmann, a widow, had acquired her name by marrying a white man. It was a bandage to Catherine’s conscience that Mrs. Weilenmann had gotten the librarian’s job. The only wonder, as Catherine saw it, was that she wanted it.

  I meant to go to the library today when I got back, Catherine recalled, glancing down at the heap of books on the floor as Mrs. Weilenmann maneuvered her Toyota out of the library parking lot.

  Catherine reckoned she had enough to read to last until Monday. And took a swallow of beer to celebrate that minor goodness.

  A possible diversion occurred to her. She craned forward to see if Mr. Drummond next door was holding true to form in his late-Saturday-morning grass mowing. But the lawn beyond the hedge that bordered Catherine’s yard was empty. She was disappointed and puzzled. She faithfully witnessed Mr. Drummond’s ritual each summer Saturday. After a moment, she remembered that the Drummonds were still in Europe, and shook her head at her forgetfulness.

  Perhaps she could move her chair to face a side window. She could look across Mayhew Street, see if the Perkinses were back at work in their yard.

  It didn’t seem worth the trouble.

  I’ll just sit and drink my beer, she decided. Maybe I’ll think of something to do to use up this blasted day.

  Her eyes fell on a half-finished book. She considered reading, but decided she couldn’t concentrate enough. The book was a murder mystery. Not such a good thing to read today. Her mouth twisted wryly.

  After a moment Catherine wriggled deeper into the big chair, stretching her legs to rest them on its matching ottoman. She drank some more beer. She was profoundly bored, yet very tense. She decided it was a horrible combination.

  “Toes, relax,” she said out loud, suddenly recalling an acting-class exercise. “Feet, relax.”

  She had worked up to her pelvis when she was diverted by a car pulling onto the graveled apron at the end of the walkway in front of the house. She suspended her exercise in astonishment.

  The car was familiar, but she couldn’t place the owner. Not Tom, her only occasional visitor. He would merely stroll across to her back door from his own.

  “It’s Randall Gerrard!” she muttered. Her employer had never come to see her before.

  She didn’t realize the impact the beer had had on her empty stomach until she got up.

  Instead of straightening up the pile of books, instead of fluffling out her damp hair, Catherine stared at Randall as he came up the walkway.

  She itemized his heavy shoulders and thick chest, surprising on a man of his height. Especially surprising on a man who had, Catherine told herself, no butt at all.

  The sun glinted on the thick reddish-brown hair of his head and beard, and winked off his heavy glasses.

  How old must he be now? she wondered. Thirty-five?

  She stood riveted and staring. Like a fool, she told herself when she finally roused. She had just begun to move when he knocked on the door, and she could only be grateful he had not glanced at the window.

  “Please come in,” she said. The beer soaked her voice with a duchesslike formality. She blinked in surprise.

  Randall’s face, which had been grave, lit with amusement. She followed his glance down to her hand that had gestured him in with a gracious flourish. She saw, appalled, that she was still clutching the beer can. Her elaborate sweep had slopped beer all over her hand.

  “Oh damn!” she muttered.

  He said gently, “Catherine.”

  To her horror, that note of kindness tipped her into collapse. She began to cry. She twisted away to hide her face, covered her mouth to muffle the ugly sound. She hated for anyone to see her crumple.

  A heavy arm went around her, and she instantly twitched away. But she didn’t move when the arm firmly encircled her again.

  She was somehow deposited on a convenient couch. She dimly heard footsteps crossing the floor and going purposefully down the hall. She looked up as Randall reappeared with a box of tissues. She blessed him mentally, and lowered her face. She was acutely aware of how dreadful she looked when she cried. As she cleaned her face, she felt the tears dry up inside her.

  Catherine waited until she could hope that her nose had returned to its normal color before she brushed her hair back and looked sideways at him…and surprised something in Randall’s face that amazed her, something unmistakable; though it had been a long time since she had cared to recognize it in a man’s face.

  Empty and giddy, Catherine felt a pleasant little jolt of lust. She had seen and thought too much of death to deny that positive cele
bration of life.

  “Better?” Randall asked, with a fair assumption of gravity.

  “Yes, thank you,” she answered with dignity.

  He handed her the beer can. Catherine took a sizeable swallow. Her eyes were on his face—a Slavic peasant face, she thought darkly—as he looked around the room, zeroed in on her arrangement in the bay window. The soft chair with the dent her body had left, the paperback with a bookmark thrust inside, the lamp pulled over close to her chair surrounded by a litter of books: it looked like what it was, the habitual den of a solitary person. From where she was sitting now, Catherine thought, it looked pitiful.

  “If you heard so fast,” she said hastily, “then…”

  An impatient knock on the back door finished her sentence.

  “Tom,” Catherine said simply.

  She was regretting the end of a promising moment as she went through the den at the rear of the house to answer the knock.

  As she had predicted, it was Tom, her only full-time fellow reporter. His long lean frame bisected the doorway.

  “Are you all right” he asked perfunctorily. His mouth had already opened to begin firing questions when Catherine cut him short.

  “You might as well come on in the living room, Randall’s in there,” she said.

  Tom looked almost comically taken aback.

  Catherine, bowled over by giddiness, nearly laughed as she preceded Tom into the living room.

  “Hey, Randall,” he said casually, folding his length into an uncomfortable Victorian rosewood chair. Then he forgot to be offhand. “The coroner’s jury said murder, of course. And a Gazette reporter found the body! Jesus, what a story!” He yanked his fearsome Fu Manchu mustache so fiercely that Catherine thought he might pull the hair out.

  “Calm down, Tom, it’s not like there was another paper to scoop,” Randall said. He took his pipe from his pocket.

  “Hey Catherine, is there any of that beer left?” Tom asked, sidetracked into showing Randall that he, Tom, had been there first.

  “Three or four,” Catherine said. “Randall, would you care for a beer?”