jammed them into the garbage can. She looked down at herself and saw that the blood had soaked through her clothes and dried on her skin. She stepped into the shower and soaped and rinsed, then repeated, until her hands and legs were white again and chafed with scrubbing.
Tom’s blood, down the drain. Four people, down the drain. Gone. Snuffed out like dogs hit by careless cars, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; because they weren’t aware of the danger until it was too late.
Randall would hire a new reporter. He would doubtless start looking the next day.
Jerry Selforth was prescribing antibiotics and setting broken arms, just as Dr. Linton had done for years. He had a nurse who managed his office just as well as Leona would have. And Molly Perkins held the coffees for the bridge club every bit as well as Rachel Linton had.
Other dun-colored dogs were running through the fields, coupling with bitches to ensure more dun-colored dogs.
That was the way life went on. The thought might even be comforting, after a few years. Many years. More years than I will live, she thought.
She sprayed herself with perfume, thinking the smell of Tom’s death was still on her, and went out to join Randall.
He seemed to have recovered from the worst of his conversation with the Mascalcos. But for the first time, Catherine was fully conscious that he was twelve years older than she was. He had gotten out his pipe and was puffing away, looking more than ever like a muscular, misplaced professor.
“Can you sleep now?”
She shook her head.
“Neither can I. Let’s go over it, if you can stand that.”
She waited. She owed him this, for having urged him to call the Mascalcos.
“Leona. No-your parents. The first ones.”
A fire ignited in her tired body. He accepted her conviction. He agreed.
“Your mother. Your father. His nurse. A reporter who said he was going to pry into their murders. This started with your folks. Glenn or Rachel, as the primary target?”
“I think…my father.”
“I agree. Something he knew as a doctor.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “He was a friend to half the county, and he inspired confidences.”
“Granted.” Randall knocked his pipe out in an ashtray. “Do you think Leona could have killed your parents? Could she have been a murderer? How did she feel about your father?”
“Before she was a blackmailer and an abortionist, she was a good nurse for my father for thirty-odd years,” Catherine replied. “There was never anything between them, but I think Leona loved my father. I can see that now…Maybe I knew it all along.”
“Do you think she could have killed him, knowing she couldn’t ever have him?”
“I don’t think so. I think she was used to the companionship she had with him every day at the office. She would have been his nurse until he retired, and that was years away. And she lost her income when he died: Leona loved money, too. Last point, but not least, I don’t think she knew how to tamper with a car.”
“That’s disposed of, then.” Randall had tidied that argument away. Catherine realized that in his own way he was working off the grief and horror of Tom’s death.
“So,” he muttered, “we assume that Leona didn’t kill your parents. Do we take for granted, then, that Glenn, Rachel, and Leona were killed by the same person, for the same reason?”
Sure, why not? Catherine thought crazily. She nodded.
“Okay. That would point to something they all knew. Considering the six-month lapse between murders, it would seem that for six months Leona kept silent about something she knew, while the murderer paid her blackmail money. Something Leona discovered after your father was killed, maybe when she got the office wound up…Or maybe she realized the significance of an event or a conversation later. Something your father knew in his professional life; or something told to him in the office, as a friend.”
Catherine mulled that over.
“I didn’t express that well. Too many ‘somethings’ and ‘maybes’…But do you agree?” Randall prodded.
Finally Catherine nodded. “Leona was always at the office when my father was there,” she said slowly. “Even when someone buzzed him late at night”-she shuddered-“he would call her to come in before he even went over there. So she would have heard everything he heard, unless the conversation took place after he sent her from the room, while he talked with a patient after an examination. He would do that so she could prepare for the next patient, or pull files on whoever was in the waiting room. And all the files were accessible to her.” Catherine stopped to think. “But with something like this, Randall, I can’t imagine…We’re presuming a critical conversation, a very personal and important conversation. Father would have sent Leona from the room. I know. He always knew when people were embarrassed or self-conscious about what they had, or suspected they had. His consultations with them were always private.”
“Couldn’t she have listened at the door?”
“It would have been hard. There were always other patients around, and the office maid, and the receptionist.”
“Okay-difficult, but not impossible. However she did it, she found out. And Tom must have found out the same thing. You know what a gung-ho investigative reporter he thought he was. He wanted to solve this case before the police did. He told me so himself, Monday, while you were in Production.”
Again the little thought moved at the back of Catherine’s mind, and again she tried to catch hold of it too soon. It melted away.
“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.
Randall looked at her questioningly.
“I would swear that during the past twenty-four hours he was thinking more about the breakup with his fiancee, and getting Leila to bed, than he was about Leona’s murder,” Catherine said. She gripped the embroidered pillow and added, “He was just a boy. He was younger than I am.”
Randall touched her cheek. They sat in silence for a few minutes.
Then he said, “Just one more thing. If Leona knew who killed your father, do you think she would have kept quiet about it?”
“If she believed the person she was blackmailing was his murderer-she may not have known that, come to think of it-she might have figured, ‘Dead is dead. What good can this bring me?’ Even if she loved him. Or she might have thought she was getting some kind of vengeance by blackmailing the murderer.”
Then Catherine added, “I realize now that I never knew Leona, never understood her. At all.”
Randall stirred and looked at her. “You should be in bed,” he said. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”
She nodded.
“I’ll sleep in here,” he said, thumping the couch.
“No.”
“Catherine,” he said gently, “this isn’t the right time.”
“I know that,” she said irritably. “But you can sleep in my bed without being overcome by passion, surely, tired as we both are? Or you can have the other bed, in my old room.”
“Even as tired as we are,” he said, “I think I’d better take the other bed.”
12
WHEN SHE GOT up the next morning he was gone.
He had pulled the bed together, she found, when she peeped shyly into her old room. She was disappointed but a little relieved. She would have liked to see his head on the pillow, but her soul craved the solitude of her coffemaking and reading at the table.
That might be a problem later, she thought hopefully.
He had left a note in the kitchen, propped against a full coffeepot. Bless him, she thought, peering at his spiky
