instead of her.
As she moved closer to the light, closer to the living room, her scalp began to crawl.
“Tom?” she whispered.
The living room was a shambles. This disorder in what had been so neat struck her first. She didn’t see Tom for a moment; then she saw his legs, his long thin legs, extending beyond the trunk that had served as his coffee table.
Without realizing she had moved, she was suddenly standing by him, looking down. He was on his back. He was very still, but blood was still running from his wounds. She watched a drop run down his cheek, over what had been his cheekbone. She watched it very carefully until it hit the thin carpeting and was absorbed in a larger stain.
“Oh Tom,” she said, and her fear was swallowed up by her grief. She dropped the gun on the trunk, knelt on the soaked carpet, and put her fingers to the pulse in his neck. It throbbed for a second that was a lifetime, and then the faint throb died.
There was a stillness about him, the total absense of movement that belongs only to the dead, after even the tiny motions of breathing are extinct.
I’m too late, she thought. She could feel the blood soaking through the denim covering her knees. I’m too late.
He was only wearing his trousers, and Catherine wanted to cover him up. He would hate everyone to see him like that, she thought. He would just hate it. And no one should see his face; I should not have seen his face.
There was a tiny movement at the edge of her vision.
Her head snapped up, and she was staring into Leila’s face. As she watched, that face stretched oddly.
“Oh Leila, he’s dead,” Catherine said in an involuntary whisper. “He just died.”
She rose to go to the girl, and Leila’s silent scream came out in a weak strangled ache of a sound. Catherine reached out to touch her, then looked at her hand. It was bloody.
“Get away from me!” Leila shouted, her voice becoming unchained. She backed against the wall with her arms stretched out to repel Catherine. Then she realized she had put her back against a smear of blood, and her scream ripped the room apart.
Catherine suddenly realized that Leila thought she had killed Tom. She also absorbed the peculiar fact that Leila was in her underwear.
The sound Leila made affected Catherine like alcohol in a cut.
“Stop it!” she said harshly, but Leila kept on. Catherine’s exasperation was heightened by shock. She felt positive joy in applying the classical method for dealing with hysterics. With no compunction at all, she hit Leila as hard as she could, and only felt a flash of dismay when she saw the girl stagger a few feet, from the force of the blow.
I didn’t know I was that strong, she thought in amazement. I guess I’ve never hit anyone before in my life.
The blow did indeed silence Leila, but it didn’t calm her in the least. Her terror was evident in her trembling body and distended eyes.
“I didn’t do it,” Catherine said flatly.
But Leila was not in her right mind. Her eyes were empty of reason.
Catherine was irrationally angry.
“You stupid bitch! I didn’t do this! I found him like this!”
Leila seemed to return to her body. She pointed a shaking finger at Catherine’s bloody hands.
“From the hall,” Catherine explained. “The buzzer sounded.” She pointed to the buzzer on the door frame. There was red spattering the wall around it. “You remember the buzzer. To the house. That my father used. I think Tom hit it in the struggle.”
Leila looked where Catherine’s finger was pointing. Her family had gone to Dr. Linton. She nodded slowly, looking as if she finally understood. She deflated as fear of her own death left her, but she stared at Tom’s legs, her complexion changing from ashy brown to green.
“Are you all right?” Catherine asked ridiculously.
“I’m going to vomit,” Leila muttered.
Catherine was thankful for her knowledge of the house, for she swung the girl into the bathroom and over the toilet just in time. Shivering now with reaction, Catherine sat on the edge of the bathtub until Leila emptied her stomach.
“I’ve got to call the police,” Catherine said.
“Not from here,” Leila pleaded. She was a limp ghost of herself.
“No,” said Catherine, her own stomach heaving at the thought of staying there.
Catherine’s courage was fast seeping away. But the need to get the younger girl out of the house, the responsibility for someone in worse shape than she herself was, kept her mind moving.
“We have to go over to my house,” she said. “Can you walk?” A stupid question, she reflected, because Leila will just dammit have to walk, whether she thinks she can or not.
“Come on,” Catherine said, “if you’re through throwing up.”
Leila got to her feet with some assistance.
Catherine awoke to another need.
“Clothes,” she said sharply.
Leila looked down at herself and turned from green to red.
I didn’t know people could turn so many colors, Catherine thought.
“Oh, Catherine,” Leila began miserably.
“I don’t give a damn,” Catherine interrupted, “but I think no one else needs to know. Are your clothes in the bedroom?”
Leila nodded.
The bed was rumpled and Tom’s shirt and underwear were set neatly on a chair. Leila’s dress was on the floor, her shoes under it.
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
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
