“Well, just the outline.” He took a moment to frame what he wanted to say. “The paper was losing money. Crusaders lose advertising revenue. Even though this is the only paper in the county, some people would rather rely on word-of-mouth, or advertising in the Memphis papers that everyone here takes, than pay money to the Gazette; at least while Dad was running it. And you know our family money was tied up by my great-grandfather; we can’t pump it into the Gazette. So at a critical point my father accepted some money from someone running for office, to keep the paper going. The candidate didn’t want one of his activities made known. My father was the only newspaperman who knew of this-activity.” Randall pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
Catherine was trying to hide her shock Randall’s father had been one of her heroes.
“My mother found out after he died, when she went through his personal papers. I reckon she thought she had hidden all the traces, but I found them when I took over the paper, and I asked her about it. She told me, finally. And I know she would give anything to have no one else on earth know.”
Catherine felt honored that Randall had shown confidence in her.
“I don’t think you should worry,” she said gently. “I don’t see how Leona could have known-unless your father told mine at his office, where she could have heard.”
“It’s possible. They were friends. Close friends.”
“You’ve been brooding about this.”
“Not yesterday,” he said, with the ghost of a smile. “But today, yes, I have. I heard rumors Saturday night, about Leona’s-sideline. One of the deputies couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the blackmail material and money they found in Leona’s house. Or maybe Galton wanted that leaked, to stir things up and see what rose to the surface.”
“Miss Angel,” Catherine began, and faltered. “You know your mother better than anyone else, I’m sure. But from what I know of Miss Angel, I’d just out-and-out ask her if she had been paying Leona to keep quiet. Your mother’s that kind of woman. I think if she’d wanted to do away with Leona, she would’ve shot her on the courthouse steps at high noon.”
“I think so too,” Randall said, and grinned at her. “Now that I’ve spilled my guts, what about yours?”
With no hesitation, she told him about Jewel Crenna and Martin Barnes, and about Sheriff Galton’s son.
Randall whistled.
“Sounds like the entire population of Lowfield might have had excellent reasons to want Leona dead.”
“I know,” Catherine said. “I was so positive that the reason Leona died was the same reason my parents died. Now, I’m not sure.”
“Does it eat at you? Your parents?”
“How could it not? Vengeance sounds melodramatic, the very word…but that’s what I want. I want vengeance.” She stopped. “This may not be what you want a woman to say to you, or what you want a woman to be.” She clenched her fists and tried to pick her words with absolute accuracy. “But at my core, where I really live, I want vengeance on whoever killed my parents. My mother and father should not have died like that. It has altered me.”
“I would wonder,” he said quietly, “only if you didn’t feel that way.”
They stirred, shaking off the grip of strong emotions, ready to turn to light things, normal subjects.
“Pick out a movie you want to see Friday,” Randall said.
“Early showing or late?”
“Late. We’ll have dinner first, if that suits you.”
He opened her car door with an exaggerated flourish.
“I declare, sir, how kind of you,” Catherine said with an extravagant drawl and a simper.
Randall choked a surprised laugh.
“I am your servant, you sweet flower of Southern womanhood,” he responded instantly.
She gripped his hand for a second and then started the engine. She watched him walk back into the office before she pulled out to go home.
It was a lackluster evening. Catherine found herself wandering around the house in search of something to do.
I’m completely shaken out of pattern, she reflected. And a good thing, too. Not much of a pattern to stick to.
There was dust on the furniture, and the bathroom needed a thorough scrubbing. This lack of order made Catherine irritable, but she was too restless to begin clearing it up.
When she started putting the clean dishes back into the kitchen cabinets, she came to a stop as her hand fell on an unfamiliar shape. Mrs. Perkins’s casserole dish. Returning it was something concrete and necessary. She marched out her front door in a glow of virtue.
I’ll thank her so nicely and be such a lady she won’t be able to say a word about me, Catherine resolved.
The long summer day was fading as she left her house. She stopped on her doorstep to drink in the evening. The sky in the west was stained a dark strawberry-juice pink. The locusts were in full voice, their drone rising and falling in hypnotic rhythm. The humid warmth made her skirt limp against her legs, but the air was no longer stifling. As she moved on with a slower step, the grass rustled around her feet.
The streetlights were on. Catherine emerged from her yard onto the silent street, passing under the lamp at the corner. As she crossed the pavement, she barely bothered to glance right and left. It was a time for quiet in Lowfield.
She was embraced by the dusk, cast back for a few minutes into the time before Saturday, when she had felt shielded by the safety of her own town, street, and house, her unassailable heritage of land and good family.
Catherine sighed as she walked up the gleaming white concrete to the Perkins’s pillared verandah. As she lifted the polished brass knocker, she returned to the present.
It was a signal of her intention to be formal that she went to the front door, instead of to the back as a good neighbor would.
Carl Perkins answered the door. Catherine had been expecting Miss Molly, for some reason, and for a moment she was startled as his thickened frame filled the doorway. She wondered how he could endure the long sleeves he always wore. As a gust of air from the house rushed out to meet her, she decided she understood his preference, at least in his own home. The air was not only cooled, it was refrigerated.
“Catherine Linton! Come on in,” he said, with no trace of surprise, only welcome.
He ushered her through the two-story entrance hall and into the living room. Miss Molly, dwarfed in the corner of an enormous beige couch, rose as Catherine entered. The little woman had some knitting in her hand, and she carefully set it down before she advanced to greet Catherine.
“I enjoyed the gumbo so much,” Catherine said, smiling her most correct smile and extending the casserole dish to Miss Molly, who looked mildly flustered.
“So glad you enjoyed it, just some leftovers really,” Molly Perkins deprecated properly. She took the proferred dish and went full tilt toward the back of the house, where, Catherine remembered, the enormous kitchen lay.
“Bring our neighbor some coffee,” Mr. Perkins called after the dumpy retreating figure.
Catherine raised a hand in protest, but it was too late.
“Come on, have a seat. Been a while since we got to visit with you,” Mr. Perkins urged.
She thought he was lonely. She managed another smile and sat reluctantly in a deep armchair facing the couch. As she sank farther and farther into it, she wondered how she was going to get up with any grace, with her short legs thrust out at such an angle.
Miss Molly came back in, burdened with a tray. Mr. Perkins was on his feet in an instant.
“You shouldn’t carry things like that,” he chided. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I can carry this perfectly well, I’m not made of glass,” she scolded him.
Mr. Perkins peered over Miss Molly’s curly gray hair to give Catherine a wry shake of the head.
“How do you take yours, Catherine?” Miss Molly asked as she settled back on the couch.
“Black, please,” Catherine answered. “I hop
e this wasn’t any trouble for you.”
“No, no,” disclaimed Carl Perkins. “We always have a pot on at night until we go to bed.
“I saw you through the window at the Gazette today,” he resumed, as Miss Molly poured, “and I started to come in and speak, but you looked so busy I thought the better of it.”
“Mondays are mighty busy at the paper,” Catherine responded. She disliked being reminded of how “on view” she was, with her desk right by the big window. It had bothered her when she first began working at the Gazette, but now she wasn’t conscious of it most of the time.
Miss Molly handed Catherine her cup. A lot of wriggling was required before Catherine could work herself forward in her chair to reach it. Miss Molly’s hand had a definite tremor, which didn’t make the little transaction any easier.
Oh dear oh damn, Catherine thought. She wished she had just handed over the dish and gone right back out the door. Her intention of impressing Miss Molly with her sterling character and imperviousness to gossip seemed childish now.
Carl Perkins had just started to comment on the effect the rainless summer was having on the cotton when Molly Perkins’s shaky hands caused an incident. His attention on Catherine, Mr. Perkins held out a hand for his coffee cup. When Molly extended the cup to him, some of the steaming liquid spilled on his hand. For a long moment, as Catherine held her breath in sympathy for his pain, he kept his eyes on her face as if he felt nothing. Then Mrs. Perkins’s eyes teared as if she were going to cry over her mistake.
“Oh, Carl!” she said in a trembling, guilty voice. He looked at her, then down at the coffee that had run off his hand and stained the beautiful beige material of the couch.
Mrs. Perkins somehow kept hold of the cup, rescuing it before it spilled completely. Then there was the fuss of Mr. Perkins’s retreat to the bathroom to put cold water and ointment on his burned hand, Mrs. Perkins’s agonized exclamations, and Catherine’s attempt to leave, which was firmly crushed by Mr. Perkins as he marched off to the bathroom.
As all this was being settled, Catherine passed from being uncomfortable to being miserable. She obviously disturbed Miss Molly for some reason; and she had no business sitting around frightening an old lady into burning her husband and staining expensive upholstery. But to extricate herself from this little visit without being out-and-out rude would have required more dexterity than Catherine could muster at the moment.
The scene jelled again as Mr. Perkins entered and sat down as though nothing had happened, quieting his wife’s attempt at yet another apology with a soothing, “Now don’t fuss any more, honey.” Mr. Perkins was stoically controlling the pain he must have felt from the burn.
How kind he is to act as if it doesn’t even hurt, Catherine thought. They must have a good marriage. They’ve come a long way together.
After Carl Perkins had come to Lowfield from Louisiana, he had climbed in the town and bought a business; then climbed more and bought more, with Miss Molly joining clubs right and left, working in the church, entertaining. The Perkins’s only child was their son Josh. There were mementos of Josh everywhere: football trophies, baseball trophies, 4-H medals, and framed certificates. Catherine hadn’t seen Josh in years. She recalled him as arrogant and insensitive, but intelligent in a graceless way. He had been one of Lowfield High School’s golden boys.
Now he was married, about to become a father; and far, far away from Lowfield, Mississippi. Los Angeles, hadn’t Miss Molly said?
Catherine was craftily preparing a lead-in to the subject of Josh, aware that little would be required of her if she could get Mr. Perkins launched, when Mr. Perkins himself jumped the conversational gun.
“I went to the Lion’s Club meeting today,” he observed. “Sure am glad I’m not running that outfit anymore. It’s nice to take a back seat and let somebody else do the work.”
But you have to mention that you were the president, Catherine commented silently. She remembered that after the inaugural party for the Perkins mansion, her mother had said with despair, “Self-made men are the proudest men on earth!”
“How was the lieutenant governor’s speech?” asked Catherine brightly.
“He’s campaigning now, so it was pretty agreeable,” Mr. Perkins replied, smiling.
“What did he have to say?” Catherine murmured, relieved to have found such an innocuous topic.
“If he had had a lot to say, he wouldn’t be lieutenant governor!” answered Mr. Perkins cheerfully.
Catherine laughed without much effort. Mrs. Perkins gave the tolerant smile of someone who had heard the same remark before.
The older woman had finally relaxed. She picked up her knitting and began to work on it expertly. Catherine saw that it was something tiny.
“For your grandchild?” she asked.
“Yes,” Miss Molly admitted with a proud smile.
“Josh and his wife say it’ll be here in December,” said Mr. Perkins eagerly, and Catherine had only to smile and nod for the next ten minutes.
“Of course, I had counted on Josh living here with us,” he wound down. “Now Molly and me are just rattling around in this big house like peas in a hollow pod. I got all these businesses here, and no one to run ’em after I’m gone.”
Catherine felt sorry for the aging man, who had come to Lowfield practically penniless, her father had told her. Now there was no one to share the comfort of the easy years. The dynasty he had wanted to found had taken off for the golden coast.
Catherine rose awkwardly and evaded the obligatory urgings to stay, have more coffee, talk longer.
On her way out, she passed a bank of photographs on a wall. She stopped to comment on a wedding portrait of Josh’s wife, whom she had never met.
“Very fine family,” Carl Perkins said with satisfaction. “Been in Natchez forever.”
After Catherine agreed that “Josh’s wife” was lovely (what is the girl’s name, Catherine wondered, or do they just call her “J.W.”?), she was obliged to look at the rest of the pictures. Josh at all ages, in all varieties of sports uniform; Mrs. Perkins with a prize-winning flower arrangement; Mr. Perkins being sworn in to several offices.
One of the pictures had a duplicate in the files at the Gazette. Whatever past reporter had snapped it must have presented Mr. Perkins with an enlargement. In the framed copy before her, Catherine saw him breaking ground for a new store. Heavy dark brows gave his rough face distinction, and upright shoulders lent an impression of vigor.
She looked at the man beside her now, and for a moment the hand of time lay heavy on her shoulder. Carl Perkins’s skin had a curious patched look, his hair was thinning, and his eyebrows were almost nonexistent. His sleeve, rolled up for the bandage over the burn, revealed an arm marked by irregular dark spots. This pleasant, hearty, proud man was going, bit by bit.
Miss Molly, in her own yellowed wedding portrait before Catherine on the wall, was small and smiling in her old-fashioned veil. Now her face was tracked with fine wrinkles. Instead of a wedding bouquet, she was clutching a bundle of knitting intended for a grandchild.
For a rotten moment, Catherine thought of the single gray hair she had pulled from her own dark head that morning, and remembered the tiny lines she had spotted at the corners of her eyes. She thought of Leona Gaites, grimly independent and dignified, performing cheap abortions in her little house and listening carefully for other peoples’ cheap secrets, in order to finance an old age that would never come.
Then the room, gracious and overdone, came into focus again, and Carl and Molly Perkins were a kind couple with many years left to them-years that promised the pleasure of seeing in babies’ faces traces of their own genes.
“Now you take care of yourself,” said Mr. Perkins with a smile. “Don’t you go getting into any more trouble. Remember, we’re always here when you need us.”
In the face of his kindness and concern, Catherine felt a sharp pang because of the fun she had poked at his ostentatious house. Her goodbyes were
guiltily warm. Mr. Perkins offered to walk her home.
Catherine said, “It’s just a few feet. No need to go to all that trouble.”
“Honey,” said Mr. Perkins with sudden gravity, “you, of all people, should know that things aren’t safe around here.”
Without waiting for an answer, he stepped out onto the verandah.
It was fully dark now. No strawberry-juice stains in the sky, but blue darkness. The moon was full. The locusts were still chorusing throughout the quiet town. The streetlight at the corner of Catherine’s lot seemed brighter against the full night.
And suddenly she was glad for the firm feet of Carl Perkins walking beside her, for the easy commonplace observation he was making about the need to repave Linton Street.
Then he said abruptly, “You’ll have to excuse Molly, Catherine. I know you noticed how shaky she is.”
“Is she ill?” Catherine asked gently. He doesn’t need to explain, she thought. Miss Molly believes I killed Leona, somehow. And she’s scared of me.
“No, she’s just plain scared.”
That fit in so neatly with her thoughts that Catherine stopped to stare at Mr. Perkins. Was he going to tell her to her face that Miss Molly feared her?
Mr. Perkins was waiting for Catherine to say, “Of what?” When she didn’t, he stopped too, and looked back at her.
“Why,” he said, just as if she had supplied the expected words, “she’s scared for you.”
“For me?” Catherine asked cautiously. That preposition made a world of difference.
“Well, sure, honey. After all…” and here self-assured Carl Perkins floundered. “I mean…several people close to you have…”
“Been murdered,” Catherine said impassively. I don’t know but what I’d rather be a suspected killer than a potential victim, she reflected.
“Yes,” said Mr. Perkins, as if the sad truth had to be admitted at last. “If you knew why they died, it might be mighty dangerous for you.”
“I wish I knew,” she said slowly. “Sheriff Galton said he thought the motives were separate.” She had no desire to talk about what the sheriff had found in Leona’s house. Leona had been a blackmailer, an abortionist, and Catherine knew her father had been none of those things. She didn’t think anyone who had known him would suspect for one minute that he had been involved in Leona’s evil. No, Leona’s brief life of crime had started after Dr. Linton’s death; and it was for one of those crimes, surely, that Leona had been killed. So the murders must not be related. That was James Galton’s line of reasoning.
Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog Page 9