Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog Read online

  “It’s better at night,” Randall observed after a peaceful interval.

  She remembered. The lights, shining over the dark water until the barge was out of sight around the bend in the river.

  “We’ll stay until one comes,” he said.

  He inched back on his rear until he was behind Catherine, his legs on either side of her. His thick fingers began to work gently in her hair, separating strands, combing them through. Catherine was catlike in her pleasure, her eyes half closed, delight running down her spine.

  “It’s like a bowl, the rim of a bowl,” she murmured. His fingers brushed her scalp and she shivered. “No beginning, no end. The river goes on and on. And kids come out to watch it in the night.”

  “And barges come down with lights on.”

  “The cotton grows,” she said, “and they harvest it and plant more.”

  “And there are the same roles to be taken in the town,” he said. “Different people assume them. But they all get taken and worked, over and over-mayor, town drunk, planter. Newspaper editor.”

  “Dogs get hit by cars,” she said, her voice sharpening, losing its drowsy dreamy pitch.

  “And there are other dogs,” Randall said quietly. His hands rested in her hair, still, waiting.

  “Other dogs,” she agreed after a moment, and his hands began moving.

  She had almost lost their moment when she once again saw a large dun-colored dog lying by the side of a dusty road. But the continuity of the river, mirroring the continuity of their town, washed away that picture in its current.

  They moved into the shade when Catherine’s skin began to prickle. Randall lay under a dilapidated picnic table, reckless of ants and other interested insects. Catherine lay on her stomach on top of the table, peering down at him. She was not afraid of ants, not today, but she wanted to see his face.

  “What did you do in Washington?” she asked lazily.

  “I gave out the senator’s press releases. I told people things. I leaked information on request.” He laughed.

  “Did you want to come back?”

  “Not at first. I had forgotten how it was. I was proud I was a citizen of the bigger world.”

  “And later?”

  “Well,” he said more slowly, “I didn’t resent the family-legacy thing after a while. Once I got back into living in Lowfield, it all seemed right and natural.”

  “Do you miss Washington, and being in the center of things? A citizen of the bigger world?”

  He thought. Catherine watched the ripple of his muscles as he put his arms behind his head.

  “When I’ve been in Lowfield for a while,” he answered slowly, “it seems like the center of things.”

  “Can you see without your glasses?” Catherine asked solemnly.

  “No,” said Randall and smiled. He took them off and blinked at her blindly. “Do you get tired of writing up weddings?”

  “They’re all the same: only the names have been changed,” she said. “I like it mostly. It needs to be done, and it keeps me busy. It makes people happy…Did you want to hire me?”

  “I knew you could do it,” Randall said. “I just wondered why you wanted to. Then I talked to my mother, who still has half-interest in the paper. She was absolutely sure that you were exactly what the Gazette needed. I think she had designs on you.”

  Catherine raised her eyebrows.

  “She was tired of my catting off to Memphis bars.”

  “Oh.” Catherine blinked.

  “Time coasted by, and I was busy and you were quiet and did your work and went home.”

  Catherine said, “Um.”

  “And gradually, as I began to remember the reason I thought she wanted you at the paper, I began to look at you.”

  “I didn’t realize.”

  “I know, and I was mad as hell. I said, ‘Randall, you’re twelve years older than this girl, and you prance by her desk a dozen times a day, and she doesn’t look up. When you talk to her, she just nods and goes back to work.’” He opened his eyes to cock a look at Catherine. She kept her face still. “‘And she looks at you blankly,’” he said.

  Catherine laughed.

  “I practically doubled my running time in the evening and added five pounds to my weights.”

  She reached down to touch his shoulder appreciatively.

  “And I was scared to ask you out, because you were an employee, and how would you feel you could refuse? I didn’t know how you’d react.”

  “You came when I was in trouble,” she said. “I see you now.”

  “This isn’t how things usually go,” he said.

  “I know.”

  They saw their barge.

  It swept around the bend in the river, majestic in the night. Its lights shone across the water.

  Randall shouted, and the answering sound of the horn drifted, melancholy and beautiful, over the dark moving river.

  “I have gumbo,” Catherine said, on their way back into town.

  “It was contributed by Mrs. Perkins; she’s from Louisiana, and I’m sure she’s an excellent gumbo cook.”

  “Is that an offer?”

  “Yes,” she said, shy again since they had left the levee.

  “I’m hungry.”

  The gumbo was excellent.

  “Shall I stay?” he asked.

  The weight of the next day descended prematurely. They would become employer and employee again. Then she couldn’t stand herself for letting the thought cross her mind.

  She was tempted to say yes, to get all the good out of this day she could, fearing it might not last, might never happen again. She had not trusted tomorrow for a long time.

  She gambled.

  “No, let’s wait,” she said.

  8

  AFTER THE SHOCK, fear, and joy of the weekend, Monday began badly. Catherine wanted to wear something she had never worn to the office before, in Randall’s honor. But her closet held only the unexciting shirtwaists she had worn as a freshman in college, when girls still wore dresses to class. She had worn them all scores of times.

  If Randall and I go out this weekend, I’ll have to go to Memphis one evening this week and buy something to wear, she thought cautiously. I’m damned if I’ll wear one of these.

  She pulled on her least-faded dress, in a snit of anger at herself.

  “Morning,” she said curtly to Leila Masham as she entered the Gazette’s front door, which faced onto the town square. Her temper was not improved by the sight of long-legged Leila in a brand-new summer dress that bared Leila’s golden shoulders. The girl flagged her down with an urgent wave, so Catherine had to stop instead of marching through the reporters’ room.

  Catherine expected inquiries about the weekend’s big incident, but single-minded Leila whispered theatrically, “Tom came in early this morning!” The girl’s brown eyes were open wide at this unprecedented beginning to a Monday.

  “He didn’t have to drive down from Memphis,” Catherine whispered back, reminded of Leila’s infatuation in time to stop herself from saying, “So what?”

  “Was she down here?”

  “She” must be Tom’s fiancée.

  Leila would have to find out sooner or later.

  “They broke up,” Catherine said expressionlessly.

  She had given Leila the keys to heaven.

  “Ooh,” Leila said, as if she had been hit on the back.

  Catherine shook her head as she crossed the reporters’ room to her desk. Tom was hard at work already, typing furiously, taking swift sideways glances at the notes by his typewriter. He acknowledged her with a look and a nod that said he didn’t want to be interrupted, and hunched back over the keys. His long thin fingers flew.

  “Such activity on a Monday,” Catherine muttered, whipping the plastic cover from her own typewriter. Then she realized that Tom was writing what would be the lead story, about Leona’s murder. She paused with her hands in her lap, the cover clutched half-folded between her fingers.

>   I have a lot to do, and this can’t get in the way, she told herself sternly. She stuffed the cover into its accustomed drawer with a resolute air, and pulled out a sheaf of papers from her Pending basket. As she flipped through them, she kept an ear cocked for Randall’s voice.

  Gradually, as she became caught up in her work, she forgot to listen. When that dawned on her, she thought, All to the good.

  She was studying the layout of her society page-which she briefly sketched out as it filled up-when she realized with a jolt that Randall was standing at the other side of the desk.

  I’m as bad as Leila, she thought ruefully.

  “Movie in Memphis Friday night?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Won’t you smile, Sphinx?”

  She smiled.

  As he walked through Leila’s room into his office, she typed cheerfully, “The mother of the bride wore beige silk…”

  Catherine polished off two weddings with dispatch. She was glad she didn’t have to actually attend the ceremonies. She usually dropped by the bride’s house and extended her regrets, leaving a form to fill out that made writing the stories practically automatic.

  Bridesmaids’ names and places of residence, descriptions of everyone’s dress, and details of the decorations at the short Southern reception. Groom’s employment, bride’s employment (this last recently instituted). Honeymoon itinerary.

  Summer and Christmas were the wedding seasons. May was parties for graduates. Obituaries and children’s birthday parties, anniversary celebrations and dinner parties, trips and out-of-town guests filled up the rest of the year. All of these appeared on Catherine’s society page except the obituaries, which were scattered through the paper as fillers. Catherine wrote those as well-unless the death was unusual in some way, in which case Tom picked it up.

  Leila buzzed Catherine’s extension more often than any other. At the little paper, Monday and Tuesday were the busiest days, the two days before the paper came out, when people realized they had to contact her before the weekly noon deadlines. The Gazette was printed on Wednesday morning, distributed Wednesday afternoon.

  This Monday was no exception. Catherine worked steadily through the morning, taking notes from callers and typing them up as soon as possible.

  By eleven, her desk was an impossible clutter. It was time to review what she had done and what she had left to do. Four weddings. One for this Wednesday’s paper, three for the next issue. She carefully dated them. She had taken two more weddings back to the typesetter the previous Friday. She checked: yes, the accompanying pictures were attached to her new copy.

  She put the copy in a basket and sorted through the other sheets of flimsy yellow paper. A little social note about the Drummonds’ progress in Europe: that should please the old couple when they returned and read the back issues. A bridal shower. A baby shower. And two children’s birthday parties. Catherine wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  The last society editor had started this practice, and it was a sure-fire paper seller, but Catherine had always felt it horribly cutesy to write up infants’ birthday parties. The stories were invariably accompanied by amateurish pictures taken by doting grandparents: pictures featuring babies sitting more or less upright in highchairs, often with party hats fixed tipsily to their heads. Catherine had long wanted to discontinue this feature, but in view of the papers it sold (every child having multiple relations who were sure to want a copy or two), she had never discussed it with Randall. The Gazette needed all the revenue it could get.

  The Gerrard family was well enough off, but only because a wise forebear had made it legally impossible to put family money into the paper. Several generations of Gerrards had gotten ulcers achieving solvency for the Gazette.

  One of the birthday stories for the upcoming issue was complete, with story written and picture attached. The other was written, but there was no picture. Catherine remembered as she read the first line of copy that this was Sally Barnes Boone’s baby’s party. It had been held at grandfather Martin Barnes’s house; and Catherine recalled that Mrs. Barnes had assured her that she would bring the picture in before Monday noon.

  Catherine glanced at the clock. Damn, she should call. But she felt awkward about phoning the Barnes home. They might resent her telling the sheriff about Martin’s proximity to Leona’s dumped body. Barnes’s wife Melba had a reputation for being unpredictable.

  I guess she’s one of those well-known Delta eccentrics that Sheriff Galton was so proud of, Catherine thought sourly. I’ll wait until tomorrow, she equivocated. Maybe someone’ll show up with the damn picture.

  She hadn’t had time to pay attention to what Tom was doing. Now she saw him through the picture window that made the reporters’ room a sunny fish-bowl. He was striding toward the courthouse, which sat in the center of the square, his camera in hand.

  That meant he had already turned in his Leona Gaites story to Jewel Crenna, the typesetter. Catherine wanted to read it, and she had to take her copy back to Production anyway. She gathered up a sheaf of yellow paper and went through the swinging door to the big production room.

  It was not exactly silence that met her as the back-room staff observed her entrance, but there was a definite, abrupt halt of activity. Catherine stopped right inside the door, surprised.

  They want to ask me all about it, she realized after a second. No people on earth were as curious as people working in any capacity for a newspaper, she had found after she had started work at the Gazette.

  Now Catherine straightened her shoulders, set her lips, and refused to meet the glances that sought to stop her.

  Garry, the foreman, and Sarah, the senior paste-up girl, wouldn’t have the face to accost her directly, Catherine figured rapidly, but she dreaded encountering Salton Sims, the pressman. He would ask anyone anything he wanted to know.

  Catherine nipped quickly into the typesetter’s cubicle. Jewel Crenna was hard at work and notoriously temperamental on Mondays and Tuesdays, so Catherine leaned against the wall behind her without speaking, and scanned Jewel’s In basket. It was full to the brim with additions to ads, and last-minute amendments to stories Jewel had set the previous week. Catherine added her own sheaf to the pile and began searching the hook that held processed galleys of type. Jewel would have set Tom’s story as soon as it came in, so the staff could read it.

  Jewel glanced up once to identify the intruder in her bailiwick, and then her eyes swiveled back to the typed page held by a clamp in front of her, her fingers moving surely and with a speed that Catherine envied.

  Jewel was a tall woman with suspiciously black hair and clear olive skin. She was a handsome woman with strong features and a tart tongue that knew no hesitation, a tongue that was widely supposed to be the cause of her two divorces.

  Catherine had always had a sneaking admiration for Jewel, well mixed with a healthy fear. Jewel was an uninhibited shouter when she was irritated, and shouting people had always cowed Catherine completely.

  Catherine skimmed through the justified type, getting the gist of Tom’s well-written account. She raised her eyebrows when she found herself quoted. She hadn’t said anything like what Tom had blithely invented. He must have felt free to take liberties since he was quoting a fellow reporter.

  Oh well, she shrugged. The quotes were undoubtedly better copy than anything she had actually said; and they were truthful in content, if not in source.

  She was so absorbed in reading that it was a while before she realized that Jewel’s fingers had stopped moving-an incredible event on a Monday. Catherine looked up to find Jewel facing her, broad hands fixed on her knees.

  “I hope I haven’t bothered you,” Catherine said instantly. She didn’t want Jewel to let loose with one of the pithy phrases she used to blast disturbers of her peace. Jewel was aware that she was indeed a gem to Randall and the Gazette.

  The whine of the press, stopping and starting as Salton Sims overhauled it, made Jewel’s cubicle a little corner of iso
lation.

  “I hear you told the police you saw Martin close to where they found that Gaites woman,” Jewel said abruptly.

  “Yes,” Catherine admitted cautiously, wondering at Jewel’s interest.

  “Now Melba Barnes has got it in her head Martin was out at that shack meeting Leona Gaites for some fun, and found her dead,” Jewel said contemptuously. “As if Martin would have anything to do with a plucked chicken like Leona Gaites! That Melba hasn’t got the brains God gave a goat.” Jewel paused invitingly, but Catherine prudently kept her mouth shut. The light was dawning about Martin Barnes’s presence on that road Saturday morning. He hadn’t been riding his place at all: he had been at Jewel Crenna’s house by the highway.

  “Martin’s a little upset about your telling Jimmy Galton you saw him,” Jewel said amiably. “But he knows you had to do it; why the hell wouldn’t you? Course, he was out to my place, not riding his land. Melba still ain’t put two and two together-Martin and Leona, ha!-but she decided there was something fishy about Martin being out that morning. Up in the air she goes, stupid bitch! ‘Martin,’ I says, ‘just ignore her.’ When he comes home from church yesterday, she busts out crying and tells him now everybody’s gonna know that he’s cheatin’ on her, how can she hold her head up, what about the kids (and them all grown), and so on and so forth.”

  Jewel’s voice had risen in a whiny and accurate imitation of Melba Barnes. Now she resumed her normal robust tone. “But I told Martin that Catherine Linton, she was smarter than Melba, she might figure it out; though of course,” and Jewel raised an emphatic eyebrow, “she wouldn’t tell no one. ‘She’s a good girl,’ I said, ‘she’s always kept her mouth shut tighter than a clam.’”

  Jewel gave Catherine a firm nod of approval and dismissal, and Catherine silently replaced Tom’s story on its spike and sidled out of the cubicle. She walked through the swinging door back into her own domain, knowing she had gotten a direct and forceful order to keep her nose out of Jewel’s business.