Leila? Catherine almost dismissed Leila offhand. But to be fair, she paused to consider her. After all, Leila had admittedly had criminal contact with Leona Gaites. But, like Randall, she seemed to be cleared by that very admission. Of course, Leila’s father was a pillar of a fundamentalist church. I just don’t know what Mr. Masham might do, if he knew his baby had gotten pregnant and had an abortion, Catherine thought.
And, of course, there were Martin Barnes and Jewel Crenna, the illicit couple.
This has gone far enough, Catherine told herself savagely, trying to arrange her face so it would have some semblance of normality for Mr. Perkins, who had dropped off his folder at Leila’s desk and was coming toward her. I could add Carl and Molly Perkins, Salton Sims…Maybe I have blackouts and did it myself…Maybe the Drummonds aren’t in Europe at all, but hiding out secretly in their house!
“Are you all right?”
Or none of the above, Catherine concluded before she looked up.
“Yes sir,” she said. “I just had some bad thoughts.”
“I guess we’ve all had them lately,” Mr. Perkins said sadly. “Molly and I just wanted to know if you’d come over to supper at our house tonight. You can bring your boyfriend if you want to. Molly and I would sure like to get to know him better.”
“Know him better?” Catherine was sure her jaw had gone slack with astonishment. What was this new kite of rumor sailing through the Lowfield sky?
“Your tenant,” said Mr. Perkins with a trace of uncertainty in his voice. He bobbed his head backward in Tom’s direction.
“He’s just my tenant,” Catherine said definitely. She smiled one of the killer smiles Southern women are taught. “I’m so sorry I won’t be able to come over tonight. I’m way behind on everything I have to do at home.”
“We’re sure sorry you can’t come,” Mr. Perkins said, flinching almost visibly, unable to apologize for fear of getting in deeper. “But if you get nervous about being on your lonesome, you just come right on over.”
“Sure will,” Catherine responded with absolute insincerity.
She watched her neighbor walk away. I guess I nipped that in the bud, she thought with some satisfaction.
The reception area had emptied while Catherine was talking with Mr. Perkins. She was glad. She wanted no more talk, no more suspicion. She wanted to work and be ignored. She quickly delivered baby Chrissy’s picture to the darkroom, earning a glower from the camera operator because of its late arrival.
Leila was at her desk humming as she stapled statements to checks when Catherine passed through on her way to lunch. The girl looked almost elevated, as if she had received a call to a higher duty. Tom was evidently living up to his image in Leila’s eyes. Catherine paused, wondering what Tom was going to do about lunch, since his car was in the shop; but she saw him through the plate-glass window crossing the courthouse lawn, headed toward the sandwich shop on the other side of the square. She supposed he was getting lunch for himself and Leila.
Catherine decided to go home rather than buy a sandwich. She would definitely be a third wheel.
As she drove, she tried to remember what the refrigerator contained that she could fix quickly.
The only raw ingredient around was lettuce. After eating a limp and unsatisfactory salad, Catherine was assembling a grocery list at the kitchen table when the telephone rang. As she reached up to answer it, she wondered who would be calling her at noon.
The voice that came over the line was so choked as to be almost unrecognizable.
“What are you doing with Martin, you little bitch? What do you mean, getting him into trouble?”
“Mrs. Barnes?” asked Catherine unbelievingly.
Her only answer was a few hiccuping sounds that could have been sobs.
My God, Catherine thought blankly.
“What are you talking about?” she ventured, into a silence so taut she imagined she could feel it vibrating. Melba Barnes, my fellow colorful Southern eccentric, Catherine thought wearily.
“I wanted to catch you at home, you little sneak, not down at the paper office where your little friend Tom Mascalco could listen in and laugh at me, too.”
By now Catherine was recovering from her initial shock. Anger made her blood pump faster.
She had had enough.
Enough of Sheriff Galton’s admonitions; enough of Jewel’s hints about keeping her mouth shut, and Leila’s nasty little confidences; enough mysterious half-threats from Martin Barnes; enough of the dark dealings of Leona Gaites.
In a careful low voice, she said, “I don’t know what the hell you are implying, Mrs. Barnes. But I can tell you that I resent your tone and this entire conversation. Now if you have something to tell me, tell me and then shut up. Because if you ever repeat your suspicions to anyone else in this town, I will slap a lawsuit on you so fast your head will swim.”
Another awful hiccup-sob.
“What were you and Martin doing in that shack, anyway? You told the police you saw him out there. I saw him in your office today, through that big window. I saw him talking to you. I knew then he had been lying about riding around the place. I’ve known for a long time he’s been carrying on, but I never thought it would be with a girl his daughter’s age!”
Catherine closed her eyes and leaned against the wall by the telephone. Yesterday, according to Jewel, Melba Barnes had suspected Leona; today, it was Catherine.
“I can’t believe this,” she said, unaware that she had spoken out loud, until Mrs. Barnes gave a snort on the other end.
“Mrs. Barnes,” Catherine said, in a voice so controlled and furious that she almost frightened herself, “I have no interest in your husband at all. I have never met him anywhere by prearrangement. I passed him by chance on a dirt road Saturday morning.” Catherine had to resist a powerful temptation to tell her where her husband had been (Jewel should be the recipient of this blast, not me!). “When Sheriff Galton asked me if I had seen anyone, I told him I had seen Mr. Barnes. He was in his pickup and I was in my car. We were going in opposite directions. This morning he came by the office to give me your grandchild’s picture to put in the newspaper. I think,” Catherine ended heavily, “that you are crazy, and this whole conversation, if you can call it that, is disgusting.” Then she hung the phone firmly on the wall.
The whole thing struck Catherine as being so sordid that she shook her fingers, as if to shake off the dirt transmitted by the telephone.
Catherine Linton, femme fatale, she thought wryly, when she had become a little calmer. Leila thought Tom and I were lovers; Carl Perkins, too. Now Mrs. Barnes thinks I’ve been screwing her dumb husband on the floor of a shack, with a dead woman beside us.
As she locked up the house, Catherine decided that today she didn’t like anyone very much. She included herself in the group.
Leona’s murder is like kicking over an anthill, she thought. Everyone is scurrying to get under new cover, treading over each other in their haste to escape exposure.
11
THE AFTERNOON WENT along quietly. The production staff was frantically busy getting the paper from the press and bundling up the issues to be mailed. The press broke down (it always did), and Randall had to change into a jump suit he kept handy, to help Salton Sims get it back into operation.
Few of the production troubles disturbed the reporters’ room. Catherine was profoundly thankful. She felt she had had as much emotion, other peoples’ and her own, as she could deal with for a while. She lay low deliberatly, not looking up from her desk at all, if she could help it.
The telephone didn’t ring. People in Lowfield knew that Tuesday afternoon was frantic in the production department at the paper, and they generally supposed the reporters were busy too. In fact, the reporters regarded Tuesday afternoon as semilegitimate goof-off time.
When Catherine wasn’t poking around figuring out column inches for the next issue, she was staring out the window by her desk, watching people come and go from the courthouse and the shops around the square. She was
