And, of course, there were Martin Barnes and Jewel Crenna, the illicit couple.
This has gone far enough, Catherine told herself savagely, trying to arrange her face so it would have some semblance of normality for Mr. Perkins, who had dropped off his folder at Leila’s desk and was coming toward her. I could add Carl and Molly Perkins, Salton Sims…Maybe I have blackouts and did it myself…Maybe the Drummonds aren’t in Europe at all, but hiding out secretly in their house!
“Are you all right?”
Or none of the above, Catherine concluded before she looked up.
“Yes sir,” she said. “I just had some bad thoughts.”
“I guess we’ve all had them lately,” Mr. Perkins said sadly. “Molly and I just wanted to know if you’d come over to supper at our house tonight. You can bring your boyfriend if you want to. Molly and I would sure like to get to know him better.”
“Know him better?” Catherine was sure her jaw had gone slack with astonishment. What was this new kite of rumor sailing through the Lowfield sky?
“Your tenant,” said Mr. Perkins with a trace of uncertainty in his voice. He bobbed his head backward in Tom’s direction.
“He’s just my tenant,” Catherine said definitely. She smiled one of the killer smiles Southern women are taught. “I’m so sorry I won’t be able to come over tonight. I’m way behind on everything I have to do at home.”
“We’re sure sorry you can’t come,” Mr. Perkins said, flinching almost visibly, unable to apologize for fear of getting in deeper. “But if you get nervous about being on your lonesome, you just come right on over.”
“Sure will,” Catherine responded with absolute insincerity.
She watched her neighbor walk away. I guess I nipped that in the bud, she thought with some satisfaction.
The reception area had emptied while Catherine was talking with Mr. Perkins. She was glad. She wanted no more talk, no more suspicion. She wanted to work and be ignored. She quickly delivered baby Chrissy’s picture to the darkroom, earning a glower from the camera operator because of its late arrival.
Leila was at her desk humming as she stapled statements to checks when Catherine passed through on her way to lunch. The girl looked almost elevated, as if she had received a call to a higher duty. Tom was evidently living up to his image in Leila’s eyes. Catherine paused, wondering what Tom was going to do about lunch, since his car was in the shop; but she saw him through the plate-glass window crossing the courthouse lawn, headed toward the sandwich shop on the other side of the square. She supposed he was getting lunch for himself and Leila.
Catherine decided to go home rather than buy a sandwich. She would definitely be a third wheel.
As she drove, she tried to remember what the refrigerator contained that she could fix quickly.
The only raw ingredient around was lettuce. After eating a limp and unsatisfactory salad, Catherine was assembling a grocery list at the kitchen table when the telephone rang. As she reached up to answer it, she wondered who would be calling her at noon.
The voice that came over the line was so choked as to be almost unrecognizable.
“What are you doing with Martin, you little bitch? What do you mean, getting him into trouble?”
“Mrs. Barnes?” asked Catherine unbelievingly.
Her only answer was a few hiccuping sounds that could have been sobs.
My God, Catherine thought blankly.
“What are you talking about?” she ventured, into a silence so taut she imagined she could feel it vibrating. Melba Barnes, my fellow colorful Southern eccentric, Catherine thought wearily.
“I wanted to catch you at home, you little sneak, not down at the paper office where your little friend Tom Mascalco could listen in and laugh at me, too.”
By now Catherine was recovering from her initial shock. Anger made her blood pump faster.
She had had enough.
Enough of Sheriff Galton’s admonitions; enough of Jewel’s hints about keeping her mouth shut, and Leila’s nasty little confidences; enough mysterious half-threats from Martin Barnes; enough of the dark dealings of Leona Gaites.
In a careful low voice, she said, “I don’t know what the hell you are implying, Mrs. Barnes. But I can tell you that I resent your tone and this entire conversation. Now if you have something to tell me, tell me and then shut up. Because if you ever repeat your suspicions to anyone else in this town, I will slap a lawsuit on you so fast your head will swim.”
Another awful hiccup-sob.
“What were you and Martin doing in that shack, anyway? You told the police you saw him out there. I saw him in your office today, through that big window. I saw him talking to you. I knew then he had been lying about riding around the place. I’ve known for a long time he’s been carrying on, but I never thought it would be with a girl his daughter’s age!”
Catherine closed her eyes and leaned against the wall by the telephone. Yesterday, according to Jewel, Melba Barnes had suspected Leona; today, it was Catherine.
“I can’t believe this,” she said, unaware that she had spoken out loud, until Mrs. Barnes gave a snort on the other end.
“Mrs. Barnes,” Catherine said, in a voice so controlled and furious that she almost frightened herself, “I have no interest in your husband at all. I have never met him anywhere by prearrangement. I passed him by chance on a dirt road Saturday morning.” Catherine had to resist a powerful temptation to tell her where her husband had been (Jewel should be the recipient of this blast, not me!). “When Sheriff Galton asked me if I had seen anyone, I told him I had seen Mr. Barnes. He was in his pickup and I was in my car. We were going in opposite directions. This morning he came by the office to give me your grandchild’s picture to put in the newspaper. I think,” Catherine ended heavily, “that you are crazy, and this whole conversation, if you can call it that, is disgusting.” Then she hung the phone firmly on the wall.
The whole thing struck Catherine as being so sordid that she shook her fingers, as if to shake off the dirt transmitted by the telephone.
Catherine Linton, femme fatale, she thought wryly, when she had become a little calmer. Leila thought Tom and I were lovers; Carl Perkins, too. Now Mrs. Barnes thinks I’ve been screwing her dumb husband on the floor of a shack, with a dead woman beside us.
As she locked up the house, Catherine decided that today she didn’t like anyone very much. She included herself in the group.
Leona’s murder is like kicking over an anthill, she thought. Everyone is scurrying to get under new cover, treading over each other in their haste to escape exposure.
11
THE AFTERNOON WENT along quietly. The production staff was frantically busy getting the paper from the press and bundling up the issues to be mailed. The press broke down (it always did), and Randall had to change into a jump suit he kept handy, to help Salton Sims get it back into operation.
Few of the production troubles disturbed the reporters’ room. Catherine was profoundly thankful. She felt she had had as much emotion, other peoples’ and her own, as she could deal with for a while. She lay low deliberatly, not looking up from her desk at all, if she could help it.
The telephone didn’t ring. People in Lowfield knew that Tuesday afternoon was frantic in the production department at the paper, and they generally supposed the reporters were busy too. In fact, the reporters regarded Tuesday afternoon as semilegitimate goof-off time.
When Catherine wasn’t poking around figuring out column inches for the next issue, she was staring out the window by her desk, watching people come and go from the courthouse and the shops around the square. She was daydreaming, half-awake, lulled back into a sense of the continuity of the town by the normal sights of ladies coming and going from the grocery, storeowners and their customers chatting in front of the shops, and a town policeman working his way around the square with painstaking slowness, giving out parking tickets. The policeman was preceded by the usual flurry out of the stores and the courthouse
as people saw him coming and hastily moved their cars to safety, or added more coins to the meters.
Catherine’s thoughts inevitably drifted to Melba Barnes. She wondered what Sally would say if she knew her mother had accused Catherine, her high school buddy, of having an affair with Sally’s father. Then she wondered what Jewel would say, and had an inward tremor of amusement as she imagined Jewel’s pungent comments.
Catherine couldn’t help feeling pity for crazy Melba Barnes. She tried to picture herself married and suspecting her husband of having a woman on the side. She couldn’t quite think herself into it, but she felt a strong distaste at the idea.
It was the stealthy aspect of adultery, the sneaking and concealment in the face of someone close to you, that made it seem so…slimy. Though I suppose, Catherine reflected, the sneaking is more fun than the actual bedding down, for some people.
The extension on her desk buzzed. Catherine tucked the receiver between ear and shoulder; she was gathering loose paper clips to shove them into their original box.
“I’m sorry,” whispered a voice, and the line went dead.
Melba Barnes was apologizing as abruptly as she had accused. Catherine returned the receiver to its cradle. She wondered whether Mrs. Barnes had ever called Leona and made the same accusations. Catherine wished she hadn’t had that particular idea. Perhaps Melba hadn’t stopped at words, with Leona.
No, quit it, Catherine admonished herself. When will I be able to stop assessing murderous potential in everyone I speak to? When will people stop wondering about my own potential for violence?
My life was so simple, she thought wearily. Now I’m operating upside down.
She was glad when Tom strode into the room, clutching a copy of the newly printed paper, half-wrathful and half-amused over a typo he hadn’t caught in one of his stories.
A local girl had been elected Miss Soybean Products of Lowfield County-amusing enough in itself, at least to Tom. Miss Soybean Products was in law school, which had been misprinted “lay” school. Catherine laughed over this bad joke until Tom threatened to throw water in her face.
“Extended hilarity,” Tom said sarcastically, when Catherine’s giggles had finally trailed off, “is just not your style, Miss Linton.”
That pomposity was enough to set Catherine off again. Leila, attracted by the unaccustomed laughter from Catherine’s corner, appeared in the doorway and looked questioningly until Tom smiled at her.
Leila swept back to her desk, mollified, her bare legs looking revoltingly long and elegant to Catherine’s envious eyes. Tom was transparently gloating as he watched Leila’s retreat from a rear view. He hummed and whistled the rest of the afternoon, and wasn’t as angry as Catherine had supposed he would be when he phoned the garage and found that his car wasn’t ready. In a resigned voice, he asked her for a ride home.
“Of course,” she said. “Is it time to go?”
“When are you going to start wearing a watch?”
“When I can remember to put it on in the morning,” she answered instantly.
“You never wear jewelry,” Tom observed with a note of disapproval. “You ought to; you ought to wear silver. It would look good with your hair.”
Catherine mulled that over. If she was going to buy new clothes and new curtains and a new bedspread, to say nothing of her decision to cut down the hedge, why not some jewelry? She had always been so indifferent to it that her parents had stopped giving it to her.
I have nice ankles, she thought, peering at then. Maybe an anklet. Or were anklets hopelessly unfashionable?
And that was the most serious thought she had for the rest of the afternoon.
Sometimes on Tuesday afternoons she and Tom performed necessary housekeeping chores, like cleaning the darkroom or weeding out old files of pictures, but today neither was in the mood.
Tom kept up a pretense of occupation, in case Randall walked through, by pulling out the files containing the weekly columns. Every Tuesday, he made a little ceremony out of clipping the columns for the next issue. Catherine suspected he read the monthly allocation of comic strips in a single sitting. This little task could easily have been left to the production foreman, but Tom had somehow appropriated it when he came to the Gazette; and no one cared enough to take it out of his hands.
For the rest of the lazy afternoon, with the sun cutting through the venetian blinds across the big window, casting patterns on the floor, Tom read Catherine snips from the weekly columns (“Dr. Croft,” “Harry’s Home Tips,” and “Sandra Says”) and from the mailed-in stories the Gazette received from state departments and the government.
Catherine listened with half an ear, smiled occasionally, cleaned out her desk at a snail’s pace, and watched the bars of light and shadow shift across the floor. Randall came through once, filthy with grease and ink from the press, his pipe clenched between his teeth. He reached out to pat Catherine’s hair as he walked past (Tom’s back was turned, to show the boss he was busy), and Catherine dodged his grimy hand and laughed silently as he made a mock-threatening swipe at her face.
She was glad when it was time to go. She told Tom, as they drove home, that she planned an exciting evening of house-cleaning.
“Damn, I’d better clean my bathroom,” he said, suddenly anxious.
“Got a date with Leila tonight?”
Tom grinned and said, “My lips are sealed. I have to protect the lady’s good name. But I wonder how Randall feels about staff members dating each other.”
He looked at Catherine blankly when she began to laugh.
“I swear, you’ve changed,” he said huffily. “It used to be as much as I could do to wring a smile out of you.”
Being turned upside down had brought the lightest as well as the heaviest elements in her to the top, Catherine decided, as she pulled into her driveway.
I guess when all this settles I might come out very different, she reflected.
“I never know what you’re going to do anymore,” Tom grumped.
“I don’t either,” she said. To their mutual surprise she patted him on the shoudler. “See?” she said shyly.
“Where will you stop in your mad excesses?” Tom asked dramatically. Then he grinned at her and gave her hand a squeeze.
“See you tomorrow,” he said blithely.
She watched him stalk off across the lawn. He was pulling off his tie as he went. He cast a long narrow shadow across the grass.
In six hours he would be dead.
Catherine ate a brownie. There had been a coffee can at the back door when she unlocked it, a three-pound Folger’s can full of brown bars. Even before she found the note inside, she knew they were from Betty Eakins, the Lintons’ former maid.
The note, written on a ragged piece of paper, read, “Miss Catherine, I thought you might like these right now. You use to. Come see me when you get a minute. Betty.”
Catherine’s eyes prickled when she thought of ancient Betty walking all the way to her house on arthritic legs. Then she shook herself briskly. Probably that young deputy son of hers had brought Betty in his car.
The brownies were as wonderful as Catherine remembered; but not much of a meal. She reminded herself to go to the grocery store on her lunch hour the next day. She decided to drive to Memphis on Thursday evening after work, to begin her spending spree. If Randall was taking her out to dinner and to a movie Friday…She had to rouse herself from thinking about clothes, and Randall, to begin her belated housecleaning.
She started by cutting off the air conditioning and opening all the windows. The cessation of the humming of the central-air unit made the house suddenly very quiet. Outside in the dusk the locusts had begun their nightly drone. Catherine stood at a window listening, caught herself at it, and was angry; but she checked the three doors into the house to make sure they were locked.
Catherine began her cleaning in the master bedroom. She put on her oldest jeans for the operation; she never failed to get dirty while the house got cle
an. She scrubbed the bathroom methodically, and then set about dusting. The house was full of bookcases and her grandmother’s bric-a-brac, so it was nine o’clock by the time she put away the dust rag and pulled the vacuum cleaner from its closet. The vacuum’s businesslike roar filled the house with a satisfying sound, and Catherine maneuvered it around the rooms with unusual care, shifting the furniture laboriously to reach every corner and cranny.
Kitchen floor next, she decided as she looped the vaccum cord. And then I’ll be through.
This evening was a little cooler than the one before, but her shirt was clinging to her back and her forehead felt wet by the time she had moved the chairs around the kitchen dining table.
The good thing about cleaning, she thought, as she turned on the kitchen-sink tap full blast, was that you could think about anything or nothing.
She chose to think of nothing, and the physical work was relaxing. But she was beginning to feel bored by the time she finished the tile floor.
She wrung out the dirty mop, rinsed, and wrung out the excess water again. Usually she put the mop out the side door to dry, but tonight she decided to put it out the back door. The last time, she had forgotten to bring it in for several days. In case she did that again, she wanted it to be out of sight from the street.
With a dirty kitchen towel wrapped around the mop to catch drips, Catherine walked quickly through the den and opened the back door to the night.
After propping the mop upright, she stood for a minute on the steps, looking up at the dark sky. It was cloudy; the stars were blotted out. Catherine hoped that meant rain, but the air didn’t feel right for a shower. It was heavy, but not pressing.
As she stood with her face raised to the night sky, she heard a rustling in the grass.
She remained quite still. Her eyes, still turned skyward, no longer saw the blackness above them. They were blind with concentration. Everything in her was bent on identifying the source of the sound, so like that of feet passing through dry grass.
Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog Page 11