Dress, shoes. Underwear; Leila had that on. Hose? No, she didn’t wear them. What else? Purse, of course. Purse. For an awful moment, Catherine thought that it must be in the living room, until she spotted it by the side of the chair. She scanned the little bedroom for any other traces of Leila, but saw none. It might not hold up, but it was all she could do. Then she remembered her own possession in the house. She had to go into the living room after all. She went directly to the gun, grabbed it, and ran out.
Leila was slumped on the edge of the bathtub.
“Here,” Catherine said crisply. She helped Leila into the dress and sandals and kept charge of the purse.
“Come on.”
She got Leila to her feet. Leila was by far the taller of the two. It was awkward for both of them, in a horribly comic way. Catherine put her arm around Leila’s waist, and Leila put hers around Catherine’s neck. Somehow they supported each other down the spattered hall, out the open back door, and across the yard. They had to go slowly, tottering like two drunks through the gap in the hedge.
“I’m afraid,” Leila whispered, and the dark between the houses suddenly held ominous possibilities that Catherine had forgotten in her haste to leave the abattoir that had been Tom’s home. She was hopelessly burdened. Leila and Leila’s purse would make her too slow with the gun.
Catherine felt Leila begin to shake again, and heard the girl’s breath become more like sobbing. They would never make it if Leila collapsed. Catherine was coming to the end of her strength. I will go mad if Leila screams again, she thought.
“Come on,” Catherine hissed through clenched teeth. Leila’s arm around her neck was pinning her hair down, and the pain kept Catherine from panicking.
She had to use every muscle she possessed to haul Leila up the steps to her den. She dumped the girl on a couch and wobbled into the kitchen. She didn’t sit down while she dialed the police, but leaned against the wall. She knew that if she sat down she would not be able to get up, and something still had to be done for the girl in her den.
By now Catherine almost hated Leila.
She said something, she never remembered what, into the telephone when it was answered at the sheriff ’s office. She hung up when an excited voice began to ask questions. Then she dropped her gun into a handy drawer. Before she returned to the girl, there was something she was going to do for herself.
She fumbled with the tiny Lowfield telephone directory, opening it with ponderous care to the “G” page. She read the numbers out loud to herself and dialed with that same nerve-wracking slowness.
He answered the telephone himself.
“Randall,” she said, enunciating very deliberately. Then she was unable to speak.
“Catherine?”
“Randall…I wish you would come. Tom is dead.”
The silence was full of questions he was not going to ask yet.
“Tom is dead,” she repeated, and carefully hung up the phone, because she was afraid she was going to say it again.
She wondered what she had been planning to do next. Then she remembered Leila, and looked around the kitchen for something to take the girl. The most useful thing she could see was a roll of paper towels.
I think this is shock, she told herself. With precise movements, in slow motion, she picked up the roll of paper towels and began her slow trip back to the den.
As it turned out, the towels were a good idea. Leila had dissolved in tears by now, and she began choking out her story almost incoherently when Catherine reappeared.
Catherine handed Leila the roll, or rather simply thrust it into the girl’s lap. She debated whether or not she could now sit down, and decided she could. She sat by the weeping girl and fixed a wide gray gaze on the pretty face now fuzzy with tears.
“We had a date,” Leila choked, “but his car was in the shop, so I had to drive over to his place, but I parked the car a block away because I didn’t want anyone to tell Mama and Daddy, you know how people here tell your parents everything…”
Catherine automatically ripped a towel off the roll and stuffed it into Leila’s hands. Leila looked at it as if she had never seen one, and used it.
“Oh, I loved him so much, and he was so good-looking…You know how it is…I just couldn’t help it.” A pause for another application of the towel. “And then when we were in bed, I mean, after it was over, there was a sound in the hall—”
I hope it was good for Tom, Catherine thought clearly. It better have been good.
“—and he got up and put on his pants, and he told me to stay quiet, not to move. He just whispered right up close to my ear, I was so…scared…‘I left the damn door unlocked,’ he said.”
Leila turned her ruined face to Catherine, and her long hand gripped Catherine’s frail wrist with painful strength.
“He went out and then I heard sounds, oh God, sounds. They hit the walls and came off them, out in the hall and then in the living room. I heard things falling and turning over. I thought there must be five people out there, I swear to God. And I couldn’t keep quiet any more, I screamed. And I thought someone ran out of the house. So I waited for Tom to come get me. I thought he’d come in and say it had been a burglar. When he didn’t come back, I thought he was calling the police. And I wanted to get up and get dressed before they got there. But I couldn’t…I was too scared. I waited and waited, and I couldn’t hear anything. So then I put my underwear on, as quiet as I could. I thought at least I could start getting ready. And then I heard the screen door. And it was you. I thought it was the man coming back. I guess it was a man. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to see. I couldn’t wait for Tom anymore.”
Sirens and lights outside.
The difference was that this time Randall was there, and his mother Angel. Randall only left Catherine once, to identify Tom formally. Angel made coffee and more coffee. And she greeted Leila’s parents and led them to their weeping daughter.
Catherine observed dryly that Leila had recovered enough wits to protect herself: the girl edited her story to say that she and Tom had been sitting in the living room when they heard the noise of someone prowling, and that Tom has hustled her into the bedroom for her protection. That left open the question of why Tom hadn’t called the police from the telephone in the living room, but Catherine decided that on the whole Leila had done well.
Then it was Catherine’s turn.
She was holding an embroidered pillow in her lap. She remembered her mother’s hands setting in the stitches. She had moved it from its place in the corner of the couch, so that she could jam herself into that corner as tightly as possible. The couch protected her right side and her back, and Randall was a solid wall on her left. Her fingers went over and over the embroidery her mother had worked on for hours. While Sheriff Galton asked her questions, her fingers never quit moving, in contrast to her face, which felt stiff, as if it didn’t fit her skull very well.
Why had she not heard the screams Leila said she had given?
Because if Leila was shut in the bedroom, I wouldn’t.
Why had she gone over to the house?
I heard the buzzer, he was calling me. I was too late. I heard a rustle in the grass, before the buzzer went off.
Why hadn’t she called the police?
I thought it was a bird. I guess now it was—whoever…
She was grateful for Randall and his mother, but she had gone where Randall could not reach her. She knew he was there, she felt his warmth and knew he was supporting her. She knew Angel was smoothing the way with cups of coffee and her mere presence, for Angel Gerrard, with her erect figure and carefully tended white hair, was a strong and influential woman and an impressive ally.
Catherine desperately wanted to reach out to them, to talk to them, to touch Randall’s broad hand, but she could not. She looked at them from the corner of her eye. When they looked at her, she turned away: for suspicion hung around her like the heavy summer air.
She saw it in the eyes of the pol
ice, she saw it in the way Leila’s parents carefully ignored her.
She heard one of the deputies ask Leila if the clothing Catherine was wearing now was the same she had worn when Leila saw her kneeling by Tom’s body. She saw the deputy look at the blood dried on her knees, and at the smears on her hand.
No one would look directly at her face.
People might accept that she had happened to find one body, but not two, Catherine saw.
Not that she had been first on the scene two times.
Not that she had reported two murders. In three days.
The bruise forming on Leila’s face, where Catherine had hit her, was examined by suspicious eyes. Leila had included the blow in her recital, and she had been quite graphic in describing how she was knocked to the wall by the force of Catherine’s open hand.
Catherine saw very clearly that her frame was being reassessed with regard to its strength.
In a sideways glance, Catherine saw Angel Gerrard’s back get stiffer and stiffer during Leila’s account. A gleam entered Angel’s alert brown eyes.
“I wonder how soon you can fire that girl?” Angel said very quietly to Randall, when the room was momentarily emptied of all but the three of them.
“I won’t wait too long,” Randall said grimly. There was a rough edge to his voice that Catherine had never heard before.
“Of course she was in bed with the boy,” Angel said briskly. She looked at Catherine for confirmation.
For the first time, Catherine met Angel’s eyes directly. She nodded.
“I thought so,” Angel said. “She’s a pretty thing, but she has the brains of a gourd. I wonder that she manages to file things correctly.”
“She doesn’t,” Randall said.
“Catherine,” Angel said sharply.
Catherine kept her face averted.
“Look at me, girl,” Angel said more sharply.
Catherine did, and felt as if she had gotten a shot of amphetamine.
“Did you hit that girl?”
“Yes,” Catherine replied.
“Good. Now wipe that guilt off your face. None of us thinks you had anything to do with this.”
Randall’s arm tightened around her shoulders, and he gave her a little shake, as if to jog her circulation back into action.
She began to feel warm. The sluggishness of strain and fear were slowly draining away.
Sheriff Galton came in the back door. He looked haggard, years older. He seemed so ill that Catherine was on the verge of urging him to see a doctor, when she realized how ludicrous that would sound.
The sheriff dropped into a chair and looked at her wearily.
“Did Tom tell you that he knew anything about Leona Gaites’s murder?”
“You know how he was,” she answered. “He made big noises about digging into it and finding out something that you-all didn’t know. But I don’t think it came to anything?”
“You sure? He said nothing to you about finding something?”
“Not to me.”
“Well,” Galton muttered, passing a huge hand over his face, “there’s that marijuana in his house. Maybe something to do with that.”
Why didn’t I remember to take that with me? Catherine thought. Then she remembered that Tom had bought the dope from James Galton Junior. She exchanged a quick look with Randall and hunched deeper in the sofa. Angel caught the exchanged glance, and rose to go to the kitchen to replenish the coffeepot.
“You know anything about that marijuana?” Galton asked her.
Now she was in a corner.
“I don’t think Tom’s death has anything to do with that,” she said.
“Am I going to have to search your house, too?”
“I saw it in his house when I went there Sunday,” she said. “He told me he had bought it locally. That’s all I know.”
The sheriff might not be admitting to himself what his son was doing, but Catherine could see that he knew. When he heard the word locally, he ran his hand over his face again.
“Where’s Tom’s car?” he asked abruptly.
“In the shop; Don’s,” she said.
“It would look like Tom wasn’t home,” Randall observed.
Catherine turned and looked at him. Sheriff Galton nodded slowly.
“Especially with the lights off, just the one light on in the living room,” Galton thought out loud. “Maybe this was just breaking and entering that turned into something else when Tom came out of the bedroom unexpectedly.”
But his voice held no conviction.
“I overheard that the wounds are similar to Leona’s,” Randall said expressionlessly. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” said the sheriff. “Very similar. But then, in any homicide by beating with a blunt instrument, they would be.”
A little idea began to trickle through Catherine’s tired mind. But when she tried to focus on the tenuous thought, it dissolved. I should have let it alone, she thought. If I had let it alone, it would have formed.
“Drink,” said Angel firmly, putting a full cup on the coffee table in front of Catherine.
She looked up at the older woman, amazed that Angel could be immaculate at such an hour. Then her eyes filled with tears of gratitude that Angel had come to support her. Catherine shook her head angrily. I’m getting maudlin, she thought. She bent forward to pick up her coffee and to hide her face.
“Whoever did this would have been covered with blood,” Galton said, out of nowhere.
He looked at Catherine. Her eyes met his over the rim of her cup.
“I would not describe Catherine as exactly covered with blood,” Randall said with a dangerous gentleness. She felt his body tensing.
“No,” said the sheriff quietly. “I see that.”
“Randall, do you have the Mascalco boy’s home phone number? His parents’ number, I mean?” Angel asked in the silence that had fallen.
“Oh. Oh God.” He thought. “Yes, it’s sure to be in the file at the office. He was living with them when he applied for the job. I’ll have to go down and get it.”
“You can give it to me,” rumbled Galton.
“I’ll call them,” Randall said tightly.
“Then I don’t envy you,” said the sheriff. “I ought to do that myself.”
“He was my employee,” Randall replied.
“Okay, if you’re sure. Tell them to call my office. I guess there’s nothing more we can do here tonight. We’ve asked people for blocks around all the questions we can think of. No one saw a suspicious car, or any car except Leila’s. No one heard anything, saw anyone. Well, come to the station tomorrow morning and make your statement, Catherine.”
“Oh yes, I know the routine,” she said flatly.
Maybe by then I’ll have another dead body to report, she told herself. Gosh, maybe someone will be dead on my lawn when I go out to the car tomorrow morning. That way, I could knock off two statements at once. People should hire me as a divining rod, to find bodies.
She realized she had to get some grip on herself, or she wouldn’t be able to do anything the next day. Or for weeks. The black hole into which she had fallen when her parents died was waiting for her. An indescribable abyss of depression confronted her. She had only to take one more step and she would fall in.
The fear began to grip her. But fear would hurry her toward the hole faster than anything, if she let it overwhelm her. She wanted to lean against Randall with more than her body, but she knew from her experience during the weeks after her parents’ death that this was something she had to fight through alone.
But Randall was there. When she came through, she would have a tenuous something at the other end. She hadn’t had that before, and she had made it then. She would make it again. This time, if she won decisively, it might never happen again, she thought.
The police were gone. Angel was gone, after telling Randall without a twitch of an eyebrow that he would be staying with Catherine that night.
Only Randall an
d Catherine were left in the house, and it seemed empty with just two inhabitants, after the coming and going it had seen that evening.
In the house out back, there was fingerprinting dust, bloodstains, and silence. The blood, Tom’s blood, would be dry now, and brown. Catherine could feel the presence of that house at her back. She wondered what she would do with it, the old house that had seen so many uses in its long life. Who would want it now?
Randall had gone to get the Mascalcos’ telephone number after a long, quiet, tense discussion with Catherine. He had not wanted to wake the Mascalcos with the news that their son was dead. He had wanted to wait until morning. Catherine had only thought they had a right to know as soon as possible. It couldn’t be withheld from them, she had argued. They would bitterly resent being called in the morning and learning their son had been dead for twelve hours.
Catherine had not learned of the death of her parents until she had gone back to her new apartment from her new job. She remembered the guilt she had felt at having been happily engaged in something else while their corpses were in a little funeral home in Arkansas. She remembered her anger that others had known the news, more important to her than to anyone in the world, hours before she was told.
Randall had yielded to her argument. She could hear his voice in the kitchen now.
But she realized, as she huddled in her corner of the couch, that she should have said nothing to Randall, nothing at all. He, not Catherine, was the one who had volunteered to break the news. She should have left it up to him, since he had taken on the sickening responsibility.
She listened to the murmur of his voice and felt furious at her own interference. Her capacity for anger with herself was far greater than her capacity for anger with anyone else.
When Randall returned to the den, his face was gray with strain. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he finally spoke, it was not about the conversation that had just taken place.
“Catherine, take off those goddamned clothes,” he said.
She gaped at him.
Then she understood. She rose without a word. In the bathroom she yanked off the bloodstained jeans and jammed them into the garbage can. She looked down at herself and saw that the blood had soaked through her clothes and dried on her skin. She stepped into the shower and soaped and rinsed, then repeated, until her hands and legs were white again and chafed with scrubbing.
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