Sweet and Deadly

by Charlaine Harris

  As Catherine rocked the pictures in the developing tray, she decided that there was something romantic about photography. She watched, enthralled, as the faces began to emerge from the solution.

  There was a dramatic shot of the speaker, bent over the podium, one arm extended in a point-making gesture. And operating on the theory that faces sold papers, Tom had taken several shots of the assembled Lions listening, with greater or lesser degrees of attention, to the address.

  There was Sheriff Galton, looking bored. These past few days had made an awful difference in the man. Catherine focused on the face beside his: Martin Barnes, obviously daydreaming, perhaps about Jewel and her little house by the highway, she thought wryly. The mayor’s face materialized. He was staring at a roll on his otherwise empty plate, perhaps wondering if anyone would notice if he ate it (he had been battling his paunch for years.)

  There was Carl Perkins, smiling broadly, either at the lieutenant governor’s speech or at some private thought. Randall was beside him, pipe in hand. Then Jerry Selforth’s smooth dark head appeared, his face all eagerness and attention. Jerry would marry a Lowfield girl, she decided, and stay there until he died.

  When the pictures were ready, Catherine no longer had an excuse to linger in the darkroom. She emerged reluctantly, found Tom’s copy of the story, and attached the picture of the lieutenant governor. She wrote the cut line and attached that. Then she typed in Tom’s byline.

  Once again she cast around for something to do.

  There were the weekly columns she had lifted from Tom’s desk. Clipping those columns was definitely necessary, and easy to do.

  She got out her scissors and in a very few moments had cut out the comic strips indicated by date for the following week. The handyman column was easy, too. She imagined that the one about building rose trellises was suitable for summer, and her scissors snipped it out.

  To prolong the little task, Catherine read all the Dr. Croft columns. There were seven left in this batch. The one in the previous week’s paper had been on appendicitis. Catherine remembered that it had made Tom a little nervous, since he still possessed his appendix.

  Well, here was one on Crohn’s disease. What about that? Catherine scanned it and decided it didn’t appeal to her.

  Some of these are really exotic, she thought. Dr. Croft must be running out of ailments. My father would be glad of that.

  Then her eye caught the word Armadillo.

  She read the column through once, twice. Pity and loathing made her heart sick.

  When she was able to rise, she went to the darkroom and upclipped Tom’s Lion’s Club group picture. She unearthed photo files from ten years ago, five years, two years. She leafed through them and laid a number of pictures side by side.

  She understood now why her parents had died, why Leona and Tom had been beaten to death.

  Her father had been an innocent. Leona had been foolish, criminally and fatally foolish. Tom had just been in the way.

  The day of her parents’ funeral passed drearily through her mind again…And the day she and Leona had moved the filing cabinets into the attic of the old office. Leona hadn’t taken a file from the cabinets that day, as Catherine had vaguely suspected after hearing Betty’s story. Instead she had put something in; had hidden it there for safekeeping.

  She had to produce it at least once, Catherine thought dully. To prove she had it; so she could get her damned money. She hid it because she was scared he would break into her house to steal it…She wouldn’t have had any leverage after that. Didn’t Leona know how desperate he was? Or was she blinded by greed? Maybe she did see blackmail as a way to avenge my father’s death. She paid…He did break into her house to steal it, and he killed her in the process. He came prepared to kill her, with a baseball bat. What a convenient and appropriate weapon.

  Catherine twisted her hair in a knot and held it on top of her head. She closed her eyes and thought of all the questions she had answered in the past few days without even being aware they had been asked. Her ignorance had caused Tom’s death. That would be lodged in her conscience for the rest of her life.

  Give the devil his due, she thought savagely. He didn’t kill Leila. But then she was screaming, and he thought someone would come…Not enough time to kill Leila or search those cabinets…What a shock he must have had when she began yelling. It was bad enough that Tom was there, when he thought Tom was out on a date with Leila.

  And of course he hasn’t killed me, Catherine thought. He has tried every route in order to avoid killing me. He doesn’t want to…He’s fond of me. And he’s probably very very sorry about Mother and Father. And Tom, my friend—too bad about Tom Mascalco. He was in the way. Of course, Leona asked for it.

  Catherine shuddered.

  Yes, very very sorry about Glenn and Rachel Linton.

  It was a matter of pride and vengeance that she finish the thing herself. And a matter of habit: she had done things for herself for so long.

  And then there was the fact that she had caused Tom’s death. In the first place, she had given the murderer information indicating that Tom was an obstacle in his path; in the second place, she had not called the police when she had heard the rustling in the grass.

  Her rational mind told her she had had nothing to do with the car troubles that had caused Tom to remain in the old office instead of going out with Leila; or with the couple’s going to bed instead of using Leila’s car to go to a movie, for example. But her rational mind also told her that words from her own mouth had led, however indirectly, to Tom’s death.

  Perhaps she could have saved Tom; nothing could have saved her parents.

  When she thought again of the reason they had died, rage came over her. It had been gaining strength, quenching the pity and revulsion, while she sat brooding. The rage shook her as nothing had ever shaken her before. She felt as if she was being burned from the inside out.

  She looked at the clock. She had forgotten about the time. Now she saw it was 5:30. Most of the staff must have gone by while she sat deaf and dumb.

  Time to go, Catherine, she told herself.

  She covered her typewriter and picked up her purse. She put the Dr. Croft column on Randall’s desk, in silent apology. She thought of trying to find him. She was sure he was somewhere in the building, maybe in the production room working on the press with Salton. But a rising sense of urgency carried her out to her car.

  She drove the short distance home with special care. She didn’t trust herself.

  She was so fixed on her course that she was bewildered when she saw a strange car with two people in it parked in front of her house. She saw two heads turning to follow her car into the garage, and realized she couldn’t avoid finding out who they were and what they wanted.

  As she walked across the lawn to meet them, she noticed the Tennessee license plate on their car. A man and a woman, middle-aged, attractive.

  It was hard for her to understand what they were saying. Her ears weren’t at fault, she discovered slowly; their voices were choked and hoarse. The pretty dark woman, still young, with the red-edged eyes, was Tom’s mother, Catherine gradually realized; and the man with olive skin and light hair was his father.

  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.

  T
he 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 wanted 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 n
eedn’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.