Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

“Well, I hope you enjoy the gumbo,” Mrs. Perkins repeated desperately.

“I’m sure I will.” She noticed that Molly Perkins did not offer the quick hug and kiss that was customary on food-bringing visits.

“Can’t let all your air conditioning run out the door!” Mrs. Perkins concluded with artificial gaiety.

And off she trotted with an anxious backward glance at Catherine, who remained in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest until the woman had gotten down the walkway and turned right to cross the street to her own house.

When Miss Molly had entered the mansion’s front door, Catherine slammed her own violently. “Talk talk talk,” she muttered. Miss Molly had come to spy and pry, to report on Catherine’s mental state and demeanor. And yet Catherine knew the pigeon-breasted little lady had also been genuinely worried about her well-being.

The phone rang as Catherine stood in the middle of the living room brooding over this duality in small-town life. She was bitterly sure the caller was not Randall: How could it be? That was who she wanted to talk to. She decided it was another sympathy call from some high school classmate she hadn’t seen in years.

The irritating sound served to trigger the anger Galton and Molly Perkins had generated. Catherine said something that undoubtedly shocked the very curtains in her mother’s living room. She had never in her life been able to take a telephone off the hook. The alternative was to leave the telephone. Catherine marched out her back door and across the lawn to Tom’s house.

She pounded, rather than knocked, on the back door.

She was holding her heavy hair up off her neck, to take advantage of a slight breeze-maybe it would cool her down-when Tom answered. He was almost as surprised to receive a visit from Catherine as she was to be making one.

She had not entered the old office since Tom had moved in.

“Well, the landlady comes to call,” he said easily, opening the screen door for her to enter. “Just come this way through the foyer, and don’t scuff the marble.”

Catherine looked around as she went through the hall. Dr. Linton’s office had been a house before he bought it; now it was a house again. Her father had used the rooms at the back of the old house for examinations and storage. They were now Tom’s kitchen and bedrooms. The living room had been Dr. Linton’s waiting room; now it had cycled back. Catherine took stock of the reversion.

“You recognize, of course, my furniture period-Modern American Battered.”

Tom’s description was accurate. His couch and chairs were covered with mismatched throws, to hide the worst holes from sight-but not from sensation, as Catherine found when she sat down.

But the place was neater than she had expected. The couch, where Tom obviously had been lying, had a sad old trunk exactly centered before it to serve as a coffee table. On the trunk was a neat pile of magazines, a telephone aligned with the pile, and what Catherine supposed was a cigarette box beside a large cheap ashtray.

“You keep it nice,” Catherine offered.

“Oh, Mother Mascalco brought her boy up right,” Tom said with a grin. She noticed that Tom wasn’t sloppy in dress even on the weekend. He was wearing a sports shirt obviously straight from the laundry; and, amazingly, his jeans had creases. “The bed, I have to admit, is not made. You wouldn’t be interested in seeing the bedroom?”

Catherine shook her head with a smile. “We wouldn’t suit,” she said. “Besides, what happened to your fiancee in Memphis? I thought one reason you took the job here was because you could drive up to see her on weekends.”

“She dumped me,” Tom said, with an attempt at lightness. “Haven’t you noticed that I’ve been lurking around here the past two weekends?”

Well, yes, she had noticed, kind of. But she had vaguely assumed he had fetched the girl from Memphis for some weekend housekeeping. Tom’s visits to her house had been during the past two weeks, now that she came to think of it.

“Stuck here for nothing,” Catherine said, making a tactful effort to match Tom’s light tone. “Well, this job will look good on your resume.”

“Yeah,” he said morosely. “Want something to drink? Beer, orange juice? I have some milk, too,” he added apologetically, “but I think it’s past its prime. Or dope?” He opened the cigarette box, and Catherine saw that it held at least fifteen rolled joints.

“Yes to the beer,” she said.

“Turning into an alcoholic,” Tom said with a mocking shake of the head, as he unfolded his lanky frame from the low couch and went into the kitchen.

“You better watch out with this stuff,” Catherine called after him, putting the lid back on the cigarette box. She wandered around the room, then followed him to the kitchen. It too was neat, without being exactly clean. “This little house sits in the county, you know,” she said “and you’d have Galton to contend with rather than the town police.”

“You can’t be serious,” he said incredulously. “Why isn’t the road in front of this house the city limit? There’s only cotton fields on the other side of it! I feel like a planter every time I go out the front door!”

“I don’t know,” Catherine said. She was looking around the kitchen, which her father had used for the shelving of medicines and supplies of plastic gloves and tongue depressors. The little stool Leona had used to get supplies from the top shelf was still sitting by the door. “The line runs right through my backyard.”

Tom shook his head darkly at this piece of town planning, and Catherine wandered back out into the living room. The office-the house, she corrected herself-was as familiar to her as her own home, and it felt strange being a guest in it.

She sat down in the caved-in chair and leaned forward to see what magazines Tom bought. A photography glossy, Playboy, Time. The phone placed so neatly by the stack was a princess type. On the smooth back of the receiver Tom had pasted a list of phone numbers. It was not an extensive list. Tom was not integrated into the town’s life yet, since he had been gone on weekends for the past months. Catherine noted that her own number topped the list. He really doesn’t know any girls, she thought wryly.

But Tom was attractive in a long dark way, and Leila, the Gazette secretary- receptionist, had been giving him the eye ever since he started work. With the fiancee out of the picture, maybe Tom would wake up to Leila’s adoring brown eyes.

“How did your dad stand having his office and house so close?” he asked as he handed Catherine her can of beer.

“The house I live in now was my grandparents’,” she explained. “When my dad finished medical school and moved back in with them, they were already getting old. They had him late, and he was an only child. So he wanted to be close to them in case of an emergency, and my mother didn’t mind living with them. This house was up for sale. So it was convenient to him.” She sighed. “Things were different then. People would come at night-” and Catherine stopped dead.

She rose abruptly and walked straight to the door leading to the hall. She examined the door frame.

“Termites?” Tom asked silkily.

“Smartass,” Catherine said with irritation. “No, look at this.”

He joined her.

“It’s a buzzer, like a doorbell, and it rings in the master bedroom in my house. Dad had it put in so that if emergencies came at night, people could come into this waiting room and buzz him. I told you things were different then. He left the front door unlocked, only locked this door opening into the hall. I had completely forgotten about it.”

“My God, you mean I could ring for you?” Tom leered theatrically.

“Yes, but you’d better not!”

“It still works?”

“I guess so,” said Catherine, dismayed. “Now don’t go playing jokes on me, you hear?”

For a moment Tom looked as mischievous as an eight-year-old with a frog in his pocket. Then his thin lips settled into an unusual line of sobriety.

“No, I promise, Catherine,” he said. “You’ve had enough shocks.”

“Thank you,” Catherine said with feeling. She sat back down.