Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

by Charlaine Harris

  Catherine’s ingrained training triumphed in her handling of these newly bereaved parents. She acted out of sheer reflex, rising out of profound shock. She simply could not think of how to ask them to go away.

  “Won’t you come inside?” she asked.

  “We don’t want to trouble you, but we would like to ask you some questions,” said Mr. Mascalco.

  “Of course,” she said blankly.

  As she preceded the Mascalcos into the house, she felt as if she was walking through water. It was an almost physical sensation of pressure, a buoyant feeling of absolute unreality.

  While the Mascalcos sat on the couch where Catherine had huddled the night before with their son’s blood on her clothes and hands, she made coffee and carried it in to them.

  The couple touched her so deeply that a little of her drifting sensation ebbed away. She felt her rage dissolving at the edges as she responded to their grief, their bewilderment at the death of their oldest child and only son.

  Mrs. Mascalco wept and apologized for weeping. Her husband sat with his arm around her, his face distorted with emotion.

  They asked her questions.

  I must be careful, she told herself repeatedly.

  It would shock them, and they might well hate her, when they discovered their son had died not because he possessed information dangerous to the murderer but because he had rented a house from Catherine.

  “We would like to go into the house,” Mrs. Mascalco said finally. “We need to get some of his things for the funeral. One of his suits.”

  “No,” said Catherine sharply, jolted back into complete awareness. They couldn’t see the old office the way it was. She could hardly bear to think of walking through the spattered hall herself, though that was where she must go as soon as they left.

  “His brown suit,” Mrs. Mascalco said. “A tie.”

  “I want to see where my son died,” said her husband.

  “No,” Catherine said firmly.

  Tom’s father, she saw, was passing from grief to anger, ready to take issue with anything.

  Catherine got blanker of face and firmer of voice. She remembered what the scene of her parents’ crash had looked like. She had seen the car, too.

  She promised to get them the suit. No, not now, later. The sheriff had sealed the house, Catherine told them. She wondered, after she said it, if that was true.

  Go, she urged them silently. Go.

  But they wanted to know more details about the night before. They wanted to linger with Catherine. After all, she had been with their son when he died.

  Catherine finally thought of offering them food, but she could think of nothing she had in enough quantity for three people. As if she could eat-but she would have to put up a pretense.

  At last Mr. Mascalco looked at his watch.

  “My God, Elise, we have to go,” he said.

  After many leave-takings, they departed, obviously puzzled by Catherine’s increasingly tense manner. They couldn’t reconcile the time and effort she had given them with the chilly, fixed blankness of her face.

  “I’ll get the suit tomorrow,” she told them. “I’ll send it up the fastest way I can.”

  She took their address. Reassured by her sincerity, Tom’s parents were finally out the front door and into their car.

  After she made sure their headlights were pointing in the right direction, toward the highway, she shut the door.

  Headlights, she thought. It’s dark. It’s night.

  She had to move, and move fast. The murderer would act tonight, too.

  Perhaps the evidence had already disappeared from its hiding place. He would not have to wait very late. After all, he knew that tonight Tom really wouldn’t be there.

  Moving swiftly, clumsy in her urgency, she rummaged through a kitchen drawer for the extra keys to the old office. The police had Tom’s, but she had a set of her own. While searching, she found her gun where she had thrust it the night before.

  “Always check your gun before you use it,” her father had said.

  She hadn’t last night, but she did now. She had reloaded Saturday morning, before she found Leona’s body. The gun was ready.

  She had started out the back door when a new thought struck her. If anything happened to her-No, she said. Face it. If I am killed, no one else will know what I know.

  She had left the Dr. Croft column on Randall’s desk, but she hadn’t told him about Betty’s account of the mysterious interview in Dr. Linton’s office shortly before the fatal accident. Betty’s story was not essential, but it was corroborative-though Betty hadn’t seen the man’s face.

  The only solid proof was in that file in the attic. She must at least tell someone else that it existed, and then move as fast as possible.

  She went back to the telephone, and dialed the Gazette number. Randall answered.

  “Listen,” she said. Then it was too much like her call the night before. She had to wait for a wave of dizziness to pass.

  “Catherine, is that you? What’s wrong? Where are you?”

  “I’m at home, Randall. I have to tell you something. Have you read that column?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  “This is what I’m going to do,” she said. “And why.”

  “Wait for me!” he was saying almost before she finished telling him.

  “No,” she replied. “I have to go now.”

  She hung up before he could say anything else.

  The Mascalcos’ departure had given her back her rage. She was across the moonlit yard, through the hedge, walking up to the back door. Carried along by her anger, she felt strong as a lion. But her body was telling her something quite different, she found as she approached the old office. She had to stop and wait for a wave of weakness to pass, before she could go on.

  I should be afraid, she realized. I should be afraid.

  She had to fit the rage somewhere in her tired body, shift it so it could be borne. It was threatening to dispose of her.

  With difficulty she fit the key in the lock. The moonlight made her arms look eerily gilded. She thought of how clearly she could be seen if anyone was watching.

  But still she was not afraid.

  The back door swung open. The moon shone in on the white walls covered with dark splotches. A tiny shiver edged along her spine.

  The attic door was in this hallway.

  She switched on the light and looked up. There was the dangling cord. She laid her gun on the floor, so she could use both hands to reach it. But the old house was high-ceilinged, and she couldn’t stretch far enough to grasp the cord.

  Leona had pulled it down for her the last time she had gone up in the attic.

  Catherine remembered the stool that had been in Tom’s kitchen on Sunday. She went to fetch it.

  At last she could reach the cord. She pulled, and the rectangular wooden slab that fit into the ceiling descended. She pulled out the flimsy stairs that lay folded against it.

  The single railing was weak, and Catherine remembered worrying that it might give way while she and Leona were maneuvering the filing cabinets up those narrow folding stairs.

  Almost as an afterthought, she picked up the gun. Then she ascended into blackness.

  The only light in the attic was a bare bulb in the middle of the sloping roof. She yanked the string dangling from it, and the attic was flooded with light.

  She had played there as a child. Then it had held trunks of her grandmother’s old clothes. Now it only contained two filing cabinets, sitting close to the top of the stairs in the only area where a person could stand upright.

  The slots no longer had labels, so Catherine had to go through each drawer looking for the file she wanted. There weren’t many left. That helped. Few people were so healthy they hadn’t needed to see a doctor at least once since her father’s death.

  Of course, the murderer hadn’t dared to.

  When she opened the second cabinet she found what she w
anted in the top drawer. She saw immediately that this was the file she was looking for. It had been sealed around the edges with heavy tape. On one side of that tape, there was a slit.

  Father did his best to keep Leona from finding out, Catherine thought sadly.

  She slid the contents of the file through the slit that Leona Gaites had made in the tape.

  She turned to the last entry on the medical record.

  “Biopsy taken,” her father had written. “Results: saw Mycobacterium leprae. Evidence of Hansen’s disease.”

  Carl Perkins was a leper.

  “He didn’t have to do it,” she whispered. She rested her head against the metal of the cabinet.

  It wasn’t readily infectious, Dr. Croft had pointed out, deriding medieval prejudices. It needn’t result in the deformities people associated with the word leprosy. It could be treated very effectively now. According to Dr. Croft, researchers had found the nine-banded armadillo very useful in their tests to determine even better treatment.

  Four people had died because of a man’s fear of exposure-a family-proud man from Louisiana, where leprosy was endemic; a man who had established himself in the town and enjoyed its respect and admiration; a man who could not bear to see that town, and more crucially his precious, insensitive son (Josh the athlete; the baseball player) turn from him in revulsion.

  Had her father ever realized how dangerous Carl Perkins was? Dr. Linton had read up on the disease-had read books on how to perform the biopsy, how to look for Mycobacterium leprae-all to save his old friend Carl Perkins the humiliation of going to Memphis to a doctor he didn’t know. Catherine could read that in the lines of the file, and she knew her father would do that for his neighbor. But her father wouldn’t have flouted the law. Cases of leprosy had to be reported to the Public Health Service.

  His eyebrows, Catherine thought. That’s what happened to Mr. Perkin’s eyebrows. That was why he wore long-sleeved shirts. She shuddered as she recalled glimpsing the dark macules his rolled-up sleeve had revealed. That was why he hadn’t felt the scalding coffee spilled on his hand. The feeling in the hand was gone, eaten away by a little bacillus.

  She recalled her walk home in the dark with him. It was then that he had found out where the files were, under the pretense of needing Josh’s. Mr. Perkins had walked her home for her protection and safety, she remembered dully.

  The next day, at the Gazette, he had checked to make sure she was not involved with Tom. Why? He would have killed Tom anyway, she thought. Maybe he would have been sorrier if I had said Tom was my boyfriend…He had just heard Tom talking to Leila there in the office. I guess he did think Tom would be out of the house; if not with me, then with Leila. Did he hear Tom make a date with Leila? No, he must not have been sure, since he tried to get me to ask Tom to have dinner with them. If I had accepted, I guess he would have made some excuse to slip out for a while…Then he would have come here.

  Catherine roused herself and shut the filing cabinet with a definite thud that marked an end. She tucked the file under her arm and switched out the attic light.

  Time to go home and wait for Randall, who would be coming. It was all over.

  She would tell him everything she had thought of that afternoon while she was staring blankly at the office wall. Carl Perkins had known far in advance that he would kill her father and mother. He had already made the plane reservations to visit Josh in California, because he didn’t want to go to the funeral of two people he had murdered. A strange nicety. He had been upset when he found that during his absence Lowfield had acquired a new doctor much faster than anyone could have expected. The presence of a new doctor muddled the question of where the records would be kept and who would have charge of them. And then Leona Gaites stepped in, with the damning file. Who would ever know what had tripped her memory, what had made her search those filing cabinets while Catherine was downstairs preparing the old office for Tom’s rental? How long Carl Perkins had paid for her silence, until, in the frenzy of a man driven too far, he came into her home and killed her…and after a desperate search found that the file was not there.

  Where could it be?

  Why, the old Purloined Letter ruse.

  It was with the other files.

  Or maybe he made Leona tell him before she died, Catherine thought for the first time, as she slowly descended the attic stairs.

  Catherine slowly refolded the wooden stairs. As she was about to go out the door, she remembered she had promised Tom’s parents she would send them his suit.

  The bedroom had been left just as it was the night before. Averting her eyes from the rumpled bed, evidence of Tom’s last moments of life and Leila, she searched through the closet until she found the suit. A matching tie was conveniently looped around the hanger.

  She had turned out all the lights just before she heard the noise.

  She froze with the gun in one hand, the file and suit encumbering her arm.

  She didn’t for one minute try to deceive herself into thinking it was Randall. She knew it was Carl Perkins.

  He must have seen the light in the attic, from across the street. He knew what she had been doing. She had found the file for him. He still wanted it. He had killed four people to get that file and destroy it.

  And she had left the back door unlocked, so Randall could enter.

  It opened slowly.

  She could see his silhouette against the moonlight streaming gently through the open door. She knew that her own white face was bathed in the same light.

  “I never wanted this to happen,” said Carl Perkins.

  Sorry. He was sorry. And he would kill her, in this house, where she couldn’t run.

  The pang of fear she had first felt when she heard the scrabbling at the door was growing. It would do her in, if she didn’t act. It was already slowing her, she tried to summon up her rage, but it wouldn’t come. She was swamped by the unreality of the situation. A man she had known all her life was prepared to kill her, end her existence.

  She saw the long dark shape in his hand. It was Josh’s baseball bat, she knew; discarded when Josh left behind him high school sports, Lowfield, and his father.

  She must act now or she would die.

  She threw Tom’s suit in his face. She wheeled and ran through the dark living room. She was saved only by the stool she had left in the hall, and by her knowledge of the house. The stool tripped him up, and the suit blinded him for a second. The lock at the front door was familiar, and her fingers worked it automatically.

  Then she was outside in the night. She was down the sidewalk before he came through the door.

  She almost ran across the road and out into the fields, but the instinct to seek help made her turn left, round the corner, and run back toward the town. She ran between the side of her own house and the front of Carl Perkin’s mansion. Would Molly Perkins protect her if she dashed up the sidewalk and slammed down the brass knocker? It was too risky to try, and her legs picked up their speed again after a brief hesitation.

  Run, run, don’t look back. Her breath was loud and ragged. She was lighter than Perkins; not very swift, but then he wasn’t either. His arms were strong enough to wield a baseball bat, but his legs weren’t used to running.

  Passing her front yard, the temptation to swerve in was almost irresistible. But she had left the front door locked, and it would take too much time to open it. Run, run farther, don’t get trapped.

  The gun. I have a gun.

  It had just been something she was clutching along with the file.

  She was now under the streetlight a block past her house. She wheeled, dropped the file.

  Her knees bent slightly, her head snapped back, her left arm came up to grip her right forearm, and she fired. The sound ripped the night in two.

  He kept running toward her.

  He doesn’t think I can hit him, she thought, with an odd cold rush of amusement.

  She took careful aim and fired again.

  She kill
ed him.

  For a long second she didn’t understand the significance of the emptiness beyond the barrel of the gun. Then her arms fell to her sides. She straightened. For the moment of detachment she had remaining, she felt considerable pride in that shot. Her father would have been proud.

  Then the detachment melted away forever, and she was Catherine Linton, shivering with cold in the oppressive heat of the summer night. The locusts were singing.

  She walked toward the sprawled figure in the middle of the street. She stood over Carl Perkins’s body. The file, with its contents spilled out onto the pavement, lay forgotten behind her. She felt for a pulse she knew she would not feel.

  Doors were opening down the street. There were shouts of alarm.

  Then there was the sound of rapid light footsteps moving toward her. Molly Perkins was running down the street.

  Catherine flinched away from the body, and took four rapid steps backward to stand under the streetlight. She turned away. She didn’t want to see Miss Molly’s face. She heard the sound of the woman kneeling by her husband’s body.

  Then she looked. Molly Perkins was gazing at the face of her dead husband. She did not look up at Catherine. There was no indication of surprise in the woman’s posture; she had been waiting for her husband’s death for a long time. Maybe her grief was all spent.

  A car pulled up behind Catherine. She didn’t move.

  Running footsteps, heavier this time.

  Randall held her to him fiercely.

  She let out her breath in a light sigh. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides, the gun still clutched in her right hand.

  Then there were many voices, many footsteps. She kept her face buried against Randall’s chest. There was a siren, and Sherriff Galton’s voice. She didn’t move.

  Her fingers relaxed, and the gun fell to the ground, slid across the pavement, and went into the ditch. Her arms went up, anchored around Randall’s waist.

  In the noise and movement that disturbed the clear hot night, they stood joined under the bleak glare of the streetlight.

  The locusts sang.