Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

daydreaming, half-awake, lulled back into a sense of the continuity of the town by the normal sights of ladies coming and going from the grocery, storeowners and their customers chatting in front of the shops, and a town policeman working his way around the square with painstaking slowness, giving out parking tickets. The policeman was preceded by the usual flurry out of the stores and the courthouse as people saw him coming and hastily moved their cars to safety, or added more coins to the meters.

Catherine’s thoughts inevitably drifted to Melba Barnes. She wondered what Sally would say if she knew her mother had accused Catherine, her high school buddy, of having an affair with Sally’s father. Then she wondered what Jewel would say, and had an inward tremor of amusement as she imagined Jewel’s pungent comments.

Catherine couldn’t help feeling pity for crazy Melba Barnes. She tried to picture herself married and suspecting her husband of having a woman on the side. She couldn’t quite think herself into it, but she felt a strong distaste at the idea.

It was the stealthy aspect of adultery, the sneaking and concealment in the face of someone close to you, that made it seem so…slimy. Though I suppose, Catherine reflected, the sneaking is more fun than the actual bedding down, for some people.

The extension on her desk buzzed. Catherine tucked the receiver between ear and shoulder; she was gathering loose paper clips to shove them into their original box.

“I’m sorry,” whispered a voice, and the line went dead.

Melba Barnes was apologizing as abruptly as she had accused. Catherine returned the receiver to its cradle. She wondered whether Mrs. Barnes had ever called Leona and made the same accusations. Catherine wished she hadn’t had that particular idea. Perhaps Melba hadn’t stopped at words, with Leona.

No, quit it, Catherine admonished herself. When will I be able to stop assessing murderous potential in everyone I speak to? When will people stop wondering about my own potential for violence?

My life was so simple, she thought wearily. Now I’m operating upside down.

She was glad when Tom strode into the room, clutching a copy of the newly printed paper, half-wrathful and half-amused over a typo he hadn’t caught in one of his stories.

A local girl had been elected Miss Soybean Products of Lowfield County-amusing enough in itself, at least to Tom. Miss Soybean Products was in law school, which had been misprinted “lay” school. Catherine laughed over this bad joke until Tom threatened to throw water in her face.

“Extended hilarity,” Tom said sarcastically, when Catherine’s giggles had finally trailed off, “is just not your style, Miss Linton.”

That pomposity was enough to set Catherine off again. Leila, attracted by the unaccustomed laughter from Catherine’s corner, appeared in the doorway and looked questioningly until Tom smiled at her.

Leila swept back to her desk, mollified, her bare legs looking revoltingly long and elegant to Catherine’s envious eyes. Tom was transparently gloating as he watched Leila’s retreat from a rear view. He hummed and whistled the rest of the afternoon, and wasn’t as angry as Catherine had supposed he would be when he phoned the garage and found that his car wasn’t ready. In a resigned voice, he asked her for a ride home.

“Of course,” she said. “Is it time to go?”

“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