“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 clean. 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.
She thought of the light streaming from the open door behind her; of her outline, presented clearly to whatever was out there in the night.
In that interminable moment she was reminded of dreams she had had as a child, dreams in which danger threatened. In those dreams, she could never decide whether moving with elaborate unconcern or moving like lightning would save her. Some nights she tried one thing, some nights another. Which now? she wondered.
The sound was not repeated. Whatever was out there, beyond the pool of light from her house, was standing as still as she was.
Waiting to see what I will do.
What will I do?
If I move fast, if I show fear, it will be on me, she thought.
The watcher assumed the dimensions of the phantoms of her dreams, enormously big and perpetually hungry—and too awful to have to face.
She turned very quietly and without
haste, opened the screen door and stepped inside her house. Very quietly and without haste she shut the heavy wooden door behind her. Then with fingers that were not at all quiet and were extremely hasty, she locked the door and leaned against it. She slid down the door until her rear hit the floor, and there she stayed until her breathing became more regular.
Should I call the police. To say what? I heard something in the grass and I’m scared, Sheriff Galton. I heard something in the grass…
And though she was sharply and clearly glad that no one would ever know she was doing it, she crept on her knees to the nearest window and huddled below it to listen.
A dry whisper in the grass. It had resumed movement.
She raised her head cautiously and peered through the screen. In the light from the window, she saw a bird hopping through the yard. As she watched, it triumphantly pulled a bug from the grass and hopped away with its prey.
“Goddamn! Don’t you know you’re supposed to be asleep?” she asked the bird hoarsely. It was understandably startled and flew off, taking care to retain the bug even in its fright.
Catherine expelled a long breath and slumped against the wall. As she was about to give a self-conscious laugh at her panic, she changed her mind. It wasn’t funny.
I don’t care that I looked crazy as hell, she told her inward critic. I really don’t care.
She sat there for a few minutes, letting her body calm down gradually.
“Oh boy,” she said. “Oh boy.”
She had just scrambled clumsily to her feet when she heard a faint, curious buzz.
She turned her head to one side, trying to identify the source of that half-familiar sound.
The buzz came again, after she had hesitantly started down the hall to her bedroom in obedience to an obscure urging that told her it was the right place to go.
The second time she heard the sound, she recognized it.
It was the buzzer in her father’s old office.
Someone’s calling for him, but he’s not here, she thought. He’s dead.
Her skin crawled.
For a third time the buzzer made its rasping appeal.
“It’s Tom,” she said out loud. Tom. Playing a stupid joke.
But he had promised he wouldn’t. She couldn’t recall him breaking a promise. He had been so serious when she had told him never to play a joke on her with the buzzer.
Something was wrong.
When she reached the master bedroom, she half expected to see her father’s head rising sleepily from his pillow in answer to the summons from his office.
She stared at the place where the sound of the buzzer issued, by the bed on the side where her father had slept.
He’s calling me, she thought. Tom is calling me.
The buzzer fell silent.
Tom, she told herself with an effort. Not Father.
“I am not a fool,” she said. She pulled open the drawer of her bedside table, grabbed her gun, and ran back down the hall.
Catherine didn’t think of the fear that had just let go of her ankles. She was needed, and she had to go, to run, to get there before it was too late.
Out the back door. Fumble with the light switch that would illumine that terrifying yard. A quick scan after the light was on.
The yard was empty.
Running through the grass, avoiding the stepping-stones that would have tripped her in her haste. Through the hedge that seemed to clutch at her.
She was almost at Tom’s back door when she saw that it was wide open. She stopped so suddenly that she wobbled back and forth, and had to struggle to keep her balance. A faint light glowed from the open rectangle. The door ajar to the hot night confirmed her feeling that something was horribly wrong. She held her gun ready.
Not even the eerie sound of the buzzer had been as frightening as that open door was. As she crept closer, she could feel the rush of cooled air escaping from the house.
She eased open the screen door as quietly as she could. It creaked a little and she held her breath.
The doors all along the short hall were shut. The faint glow was coming from the living room, and she was looking at it so fixedly that she failed to see the red splotches against the hall’s white paint, until a thread trickled down from a larger splash. Its tiny movement, slow and hesitant, caught the corner of her eye. She stared at it and wondered if she could move.
There was no sound in the house except the hum of air conditioning behind one of the closed doors. The night, let in through the back door, held its breath.
Because she had to, she began to go forward, her hand against the wall for support. She snatched it away when it encountered wetness.
The hall resembled every nightmare she had ever dreamed. But the thing in the grass had gotten someone else instead of her.
As she moved closer to the light, closer to the living room, her scalp began to crawl.
“Tom?” she whispered.
The living room was a shambles. This disorder in what had been so neat struck her first. She didn’t see Tom for a moment; then she saw his legs, his long thin legs, extending beyond the trunk that had served as his coffee table.
Without realizing she had moved, she was suddenly standing by him, looking down. He was on his back. He was very still, but blood was still running from his wounds. She watched a drop run down his cheek, over what had been his cheekbone. She watched it very carefully until it hit the thin carpeting and was absorbed in a larger stain.
“Oh Tom,” she said, and her fear was swallowed up by her grief. She dropped the gun on the trunk, knelt on the soaked carpet, and put her fingers to the pulse in his neck. It throbbed for a second that was a lifetime, and then the faint throb died.
There was a stillness about him, the total absense of movement that belongs only to the dead, after even the tiny motions of breathing are extinct.
I’m too late, she thought. She could feel the blood soaking through the denim covering her knees. I’m too late.
He was only wearing his trousers, and Catherine wanted to cover him up. He would hate everyone to see him like that, she thought. He would just hate it. And no one should see his face; I should not have seen his face.
There was a tiny movement at the edge of her vision.
Her head snapped up, and she was staring into Leila’s face. As she watched, that face stretched oddly.
“Oh Leila, he’s dead,” Catherine said in an involuntary whisper. “He just died.”
She rose to go to the girl, and Leila’s silent scream came out in a weak strangled ache of a sound. Catherine reached out to touch her, then looked at her hand. It was bloody.
“Get away from me!” Leila shouted, her voice becoming unchained. She backed against the wall with her arms stretched out to repel Catherine. Then she realized she had put her back against a smear of blood, and her scream ripped the room apart.
Catherine suddenly realized that Leila thought she had killed Tom. She also absorbed the peculiar fact that Leila was in her underwear.
The sound Leila made affected Catherine like alcohol in a cut.
“Stop it!” she said harshly, but Leila kept on. Catherine’s exasperation was heightened by shock. She felt positive joy in applying the classical method for dealing with hysterics. With no compunction at all, she hit Leila as hard as she could, and only felt a flash of dismay when she saw the girl stagger a few feet, from the force of the blow.
I didn’t know I was that strong, she thought in amazement. I guess I’ve never hit anyone before in my life.
The blow did indeed silence Leila, but it didn’t calm her in the least. Her terror was evident in her trembling body and distended eyes.
“I didn’t do it,” Catherine said flatly.
But Leila was not in her right mind. Her eyes were empty of reason.
Catherine was irrationally angry.
“You stupid bitch! I didn’t do this! I found him like this!”
Leila seemed to return to her body. She pointed a
shaking finger at Catherine’s bloody hands.
“From the hall,” Catherine explained. “The buzzer sounded.” She pointed to the buzzer on the door frame. There was red spattering the wall around it. “You remember the buzzer. To the house. That my father used. I think Tom hit it in the struggle.”
Leila looked where Catherine’s finger was pointing. Her family had gone to Dr. Linton. She nodded slowly, looking as if she finally understood. She deflated as fear of her own death left her, but she stared at Tom’s legs, her complexion changing from ashy brown to green.
“Are you all right?” Catherine asked ridiculously.
“I’m going to vomit,” Leila muttered.
Catherine was thankful for her knowledge of the house, for she swung the girl into the bathroom and over the toilet just in time. Shivering now with reaction, Catherine sat on the edge of the bathtub until Leila emptied her stomach.
“I’ve got to call the police,” Catherine said.
“Not from here,” Leila pleaded. She was a limp ghost of herself.
“No,” said Catherine, her own stomach heaving at the thought of staying there.
Catherine’s courage was fast seeping away. But the need to get the younger girl out of the house, the responsibility for someone in worse shape than she herself was, kept her mind moving.
“We have to go over to my house,” she said. “Can you walk?” A stupid question, she reflected, because Leila will just dammit have to walk, whether she thinks she can or not.
“Come on,” Catherine said, “if you’re through throwing up.”
Leila got to her feet with some assistance.
Catherine awoke to another need.
“Clothes,” she said sharply.
Leila looked down at herself and turned from green to red.
I didn’t know people could turn so many colors, Catherine thought.
“Oh, Catherine,” Leila began miserably.
“I don’t give a damn,” Catherine interrupted, “but I think no one else needs to know. Are your clothes in the bedroom?”
Leila nodded.
The bed was rumpled and Tom’s shirt and underwear were set neatly on a chair. Leila’s dress was on the floor, her shoes under it.
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