Sweet and Deadly Page 4

Randall accepted.

  It seemed to Catherine that she took forever pulling out the tabs on three cans, pouring them, and putting the glasses on a tray.

  Pouring them out seemed an unnecessary refinement, but she was determined to do everything right.

  When Catherine came in with the beer, Randall and Tom were discussing rearrangement of the front page to handle the murder story. The paper only came out on Wednesdays, so there was plenty of time to think about it.

  After she had handed the glasses around and resumed her seat, she realized the men were eyeing her with longing—for her story. Randall Gerrard and Tom Mascalco had print in their blood—the only thing they had in common, Catherine thought.

  Randall had inherited the Gazette when his elder brother, for whom it had been intended, had shaken that dust of Lowfield off his shoes and headed for the fertile fields of Atlanta. In fact, Randall had abandoned a promising career doing something in Washington (Catherine couldn’t remember exactly what), to come home when his father died.

  However deep Randall’s regret over that lost career might be, his raising had implanted in him enough of the newsman’s passion for a story, and enough love for the Delta, to bend his will toward building up the Gazette.

  Tom had worked for Randall for three months. He was younger than Catherine. The recent glut of journalism majors had made him glad to accept a job, even at the Gazette.

  Tom was possessed, Catherine had observed, by a Woodward-and-Bernstein complex, which had led to some interesting clashes with Randall. Tom was restless with hunger for big stories, scandals. Catherine sometimes felt she had a tiger in her backyard since she had rented Tom her father’s old office to live in.

  “I’m all right, if you want to ask questions,” she said with a sigh. After all, she thought, I’m a newspaper person myself. In a rinky-dink kind of way.

  “You sure?” Randall had the grace to ask.

  “Yes.”

  Catherine knew that Tom had only been held in check by Randall’s presence. His pad and pencil had been ready in his hand when he knocked on the door.

  In a clear monotone, she went through her story again. She wished it were more exciting, since she had had to tell it so often.

  “Galton. Jerry Selforth,” Tom mumbled when she had finished, scribbling a list of people he wanted to interview.

  “Who were her friends, Catherine?” he asked, pencil poised to write.

  He looked up impatiently when she didn’t reply.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly, surprised. “I don’t think Miss Gaites had friends. She didn’t go to church or to the bridge club, or anything like that. She told my father she saw enough people at the office every day to make her sick of them.”

  And Catherine had to admit at that moment that her own attitude was much the same.

  The thought of becoming a Leona Gaites frightened her.

  “When was the last time you saw Leona?” Randall asked in his slow voice.

  “When she helped me go through the things left in Father’s office; things Jerry Selforth didn’t want to buy. They had to be moved out of the house before Tom moved in. We put them up in the attic over there. Some old filing cabinets. I think a few other things.”

  “Not since then?” Tom asked. “I thought you had known her for years.”

  “Yes, I have—had. But that doesn’t mean I liked her.”

  The two men seemed startled by this statement, which Catherine had delivered with bland finality. She returned their look impassively. They had not expected this from her, she saw. She really must have presented a skimmed-milk image.

  “Have you talked to Jerry Selforth, Tom?” Randall asked.

  “Just for a second. He hasn’t done the autopsy. The pathologist in Morene won’t get here till late this afternoon. From a preliminary examination, he doesn’t think she was raped. She wasn’t killed at the shack, either. She was already dead when she was dumped there. He thinks she’d been dead since early last night.”

  “Why?” Randall asked himself.

  Catherine’s head swung up. She stared at him blindly.

  A reason formed in her head. It caused her such pain that she couldn’t recognize it for a moment. Something thumped and shuddered inside her. An enormous wound, compounded of deep grief and unreleased anger, just beginning to heal, broke open afresh.

  “Did she have money?” Tom was asking. He sounded far away.

  “Oh no,” Randall said. “If she had, she kept it a secret and lived like a woman who has to be careful.”

  Shuddering and screeching, about to be born.

  “My parents,” Catherine whispered.

  “What, Catherine?”

  “My parents.”

  “What did she say?” Tom’s voice; an irritating buzz, like a horsefly.

  A murmur from Randall.

  “I thought they died in a car wreck.” Tom, clearer now.

  “They were murdered,” said Catherine.

  “And you think Leona’s death ties in with theirs?” Randall asked quietly.

  His voice steadied her.

  “Oh yes, I think it has to be connected,” she said.

  Tom looked bewildered, and angry about his bewilderment. They were talking about something he hadn’t found out yet.

  “Their car was tampered with,” she told him. “They were on their way to spend the weekend with me. I was working at a weekly paper in Arkansas, my first job out of college…After they crossed the bridge into Arkansas, their car went out of control. Something—” and here Catherine, incurably machine-stupid, shook her head helplessly—“something was loosened with a wrench, deliberately. The Arkansas police investigated the service station they had stopped at there. Sheriff Galton looked here.”

  “They never caught who did it?” Tom was incredulous.

  “No,” she said bleakly. “How could they? Anyone could have gotten into our garage, Father didn’t lock it. And it must have been done here. Why would a service-station attendant in Arkansas do anything like that? They were nice people…I met them.” She closed her eyes and leaned back against the couch.

  She heard Tom rise, and knew it was because he was too excited to sit. I’ve made one person happy today, she thought.

  “I’m going to call Galton,” he said eagerly. Without another word, he stalked out the back door.

  She forgot him as soon as he was gone.

  I’ve been waiting for this, Catherine realized. Somewhere in this little town he’s been waiting, too, free and alive. Everyone forgot about my parents after a while. But now that he’s killed again, he’s drawn attention to himself. I’ve been waiting…She knew it now and was amazed she had not known it before. She was frightened to discover that this blood lust existed in quiet Catherine Linton.

  But it was anger released. It felt good.

  She opened her eyes to meet Randall’s. He looked thoughtful.

  “Go to bed,” he advised gently, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll come by tomorrow.”

  She could hear him let himself out as she went obediently to the soft waiting bed. She didn’t wonder at his sliding into the position of man to her woman, instead of employer to employee. She accepted the transition without question. As she turned over on her stomach and wrapped her arms around the pillow, she was able to forget her parents, forget Leona Gaites, for the moment before sleep swamped her.

  5

  C ATHERINE SLEPT DREAMLESSLY until morning.

  She woke slowly; saw early morning light seeping through the curtains, heard birds twittering faintly outside.

  She felt weak but at peace, the way an invalid feels after a long and debilitating illness has passed its crisis. She turned on her side to peer out the gap in the curtains, and when she had absorbed what she could see of the morning, her gaze transferred to the curtains themselves.

  They were an olive green to match the bedspread. It dawned on Catherine that she didn’t like them, had never liked them. In fact, she hated olive gre
en.

  She would pick out new curtains, drive to Memphis and debate her choice with a saleswoman at an expensive shop.

  I’ll buy something light and striped and open-weave. I’ll do it this weekend, she resolved. She swung out of bed and went to the louver-doored closet lining one wall of the bedroom. Her supply of clothes, most dating from her college days, barely filled one side of the vast closet.

  And I’ll buy new clothes, too, she thought. Shoes. She eyed her bedroom slippers with disgust. How could she have kept those for so long?

  She went down the dim hall to the kitchen, looking forward to her breakfast. It wasn’t until she saw the coffee pot, still dirty from the previous morning, that she remembered.

  She sat abruptly on one of the bamboo chairs grouped around the breakfast table. She saw a hand lying in a pool of sunlight. Taking several deep breaths, she focused on the pattern of her robe until the worse had passed. With an immense and grim effort Catherine washed the coffee pot, filled it, and plugged it in. From the pile of library books in the living room, she picked an innocuous biography of an Edwardian lady and sat at the glass-and-bamboo table reading the first paragraphs very carefully until the coffee had perked. After she had poured her first cup, she returned to the book.

  She staved off the image of Leona’s hand until she had finished three cups of coffee, two pieces of toast, and fifty pages of the lady’s opulent childhood.

  Then she moved to her favorite chair at the bay window and set herself to think.

  If Leona’s death was connected with the murder of her parents, what could the connection be? Leona and her mother had never been friends. So Leona and her father, nurse and doctor, must have seen, or found out…something to be killed for.

  If that was so, if the two had died because they knew the same thing, had seen the same thing (whatever), why the gap in time between the murders? Catherine asked herself. Could Leona have been so difficult to kill that six months had lapsed before the murderer had had another chance?

  She shifted restlessly. Hers was not the kind of intelligence that asserted itself in orderly trains of reasoning but the kind that mulled in secret and then presented her, so to speak, with a conclusion.

  Instead of undertaking the calm application of logic she had set herself to perform, she found herself dwelling with resentment on the suspicion in James Galton’s face when he told her that the dead woman was Leona Gaites. When Catherine’s restlessness goaded her into the bedroom to begin dressing, she was still gnawing at the shock that suspicion had made her feel.

  While she was brushing her teeth, Catherine decided she was arrogant.

  Why should he not suspect her? In all the mystery novels she had read, the finder-of-the-body was suspect.

  I never realized how much pride I take in being who I am, she thought. I expect my lineage to speak for me; I think “Scott Linton” means “above reproach.” The “Catherine”—that’s the important part. That’s just me.

  She looked in the mirror over the sink and surveyed the toothpaste surrounding her mouth in a white froth.

  “Gorgeous,” she muttered. “Like a mad dog.”

  The word mad triggered another train of thought. Perhaps Sheriff Galton thought she was seriously crazy? Not just neurotic, but psychotic?

  The anger she felt at the possibility was another confirmation, to Catherine’s mind, of her own arrogance. She rinsed out her mouth with unnecessary force.

  Of course, she brooded, she had reacted drastically to her parents’ deaths. Who wouldn’t? Especially when that loss was simultaneously double, untimely, and violent. A period of grief; natural, expected.

  But people had begun to wonder—she had seen it in their faces, in their careful selection of topics—when the way she lived, holed up in her family home, became permanent. No invitations in, no invitations out. And by the time she realized how she had isolated herself, she had gotten used to it.

  I’ve been working on it, she thought defensively.

  The terrible jolts of the day before had shown her how far she had come and how far she had to go.

  Like an arrogant fool, I didn’t think anyone else would ever hold it to my discredit, she told her reflection silently (she was by now putting on her makeup).

  Catherine glared at the mirror and made a horrendous crazy face at herself.

  But Randall likes me, she reminded herself.

  She picked delicately at the edges of that undeniable fact, half frightened. She mulled over the unexpected feeling that had passed between them.

  Then she scolded herself, You’re mooning like a fifteen-year-old. And she smoothed her face out and gave the mirror her best, her Number One, smile. It had been a long time since she had used it; it made her cheeks ache.

  Instead of donning a long-ago boyfriend’s football jersey, which lay at the top of the pile, she rooted deep in a drawer and pulled out something that fit quite a bit better.

  The bells of the Baptist church were pealing for the eleven-o’clock service as she put in her earrings.

  The church bell chimed in with the doorbell. Catherine opened the front door uncertainly, half doubtful she had heard it.

  She had tentatively hoped it would be Randall. It was a dash of cold water in the face to see Sheriff Galton.

  Oh, go away, she told him silently. I had gotten all settled, and here I am mad again.

  “I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, Catherine, but I’ve thought of a few more questions I want to ask you.”

  Galton looked as immovable as a transport truck.

  Suddenly Catherine was no longer angry. She felt flat and depressed. She saw in James Galton the grinning man who had swept her to the ceiling in a deliciously frightening game, when he and his wife came to visit Glenn and Rachel Linton.

  There was nothing fun about being frightened now. There was nothing fun about being the sheriff, either. James Galton’s face had been sanded down with exhaustion.

  “Please come in,” she said quietly, standing aside.

  He sank down onto the couch with a barely audible sigh of relief. Catherine took the chair Tom had occupied the afternoon before.

  For a minute or two they were silent. Galton was lost in some dark alley of thought. Catherine watched him, lit a cigarette, tried to relax. The feeling of being fifteen and in first crush had utterly died away, leaving her hardened, old, and alone. She resolved to behave like a normal, sane, balanced woman—a resolution that immediately made her nervous and fidgety.

  “Well, I’ll keep this as short as I can,” the sheriff began. “I know you probably want to be by yourself”—and Catherine winced as her idea of her image in Lowfield was confirmed—“but you know, Catherine, I don’t enjoy this.”

  She felt remorseful, receptive, and wary, all at once.

  “Now, when you were driving to the shack yesterday, did you see anyone you know, anyone at all?”

  Catherine reflected obediently.

  “No. Well, yes I did,” she said, surprised. A blue pickup had been coming toward Lowfield as she was going to the shack. She remembered a friendly wave through a bug-spattered windshield.

  “I saw Martin Barnes,” she said without thinking, still amazed that she had forgotten, especially since the sheriff had asked her who rented the land. Was she getting Martin Barnes in trouble? He was a pleasant, not-too-bright man with a married daughter, Sally, who was Catherine’s age.

  Well, Mr. Barnes is old enough to watch out for himself, Catherine decided with a new tartness.

  “What was he driving?” Galton asked.

  “His blue pickup. I don’t know makes and models. But it was him; he waved at me.”

  “Where do you reckon you were when you saw him?”

  Catherine thought back. Her morning before she had entered the shack was blurry to her now.

  “He was fixing to turn onto the highway, just as I was turning off,” she said. “You know, there are a couple of houses there. One that Jewel Crenna rents. The other one�
��s empty now.”

  “The turn-off to the shack,” Galton observed mildly.

  “Yes,” said Catherine and took a deep breath. Despite her every-man-for-himself resolution, she was still dressing things up. She didn’t want to point any fingers.

  Galton said intuitively, “Catherine, someone did this. Maybe someone you know.”

  “And maybe it was you,” whispered the silence that fell after he spoke.

  “How long since you saw Leona?” he asked abruptly.

  “Tom and Randall asked me that yesterday,” she said nervously. “I honestly don’t remember.”

  Do drag in the word “honestly,” she congratulated herself savagely. By all means.

  “If you mean saw her around town,” she rattled on, “I guess a couple of weeks ago in the drugstore. If you mean saw her to speak to, it was a few months ago—about three months—when Tom was going to move into the house in back, Father’s old office. She called me—” Catherine stopped short.

  “She called you?” nudged Galton.

  “Yes,” Catherine said slowly. “It was really kind of strange. Miss Gaites said she had heard that someone was moving into the old office, and she knew there were some things in there that Jerry Selforth hadn’t wanted to buy. She wanted to know if I needed help moving them.”

  Catherine remembered smothering her dislike, to preserve the false face of friendliness she and Leona had always worn when they dealt with each other.

  A waste of time, Catherine thought now. And it had been funny-peculiar, her calling like that.

  Catherine really had needed help getting those filing cabinets up the collapsible folding stairs that let down from the attic in her father’s old office. And she had still been suffering from the “be nice to Leona, she has no family” syndrome. So she had accepted Leona’s help with protestations of gratitude.

  Though why someone with no family would care to haul heavy things up flimsy stairs, any more than a person with seventy relations, is more than I can figure out, she said to herself.

  “What did you talk about that day, Catherine?” asked Galton.

  “Well.” She hesitated. “The largest things that had to be moved were filing cabinets that Father kept patient files in. Some people still haven’t asked for their files, to take over to Jerry’s new office. Leona was saying how nice it was that some people were so healthy that they hadn’t needed their records for such a long time; that now that the files were going up in the attic, it would be a lot of trouble when someone finally got sick and realized she had to have her records…I think I asked Leona if she had applied to be Jerry’s nurse; and she said no, she had heard he had a friend who was getting the job, a girl who was going to commute from Memphis. That’s all I remember.”