The day of her parents’ funeral passed drearily through her mind again…And the day she and Leona had moved the filing cabinets into the attic of the old office. Leona hadn’t taken a file from the cabinets that day, as Catherine had vaguely suspected after hearing Betty’s story. Instead she had put something in; had hidden it there for safekeeping.
She had to produce it at least once, Catherine thought dully. To prove she had it; so she could get her damned money. She hid it because she was scared he would break into her house to steal it…She wouldn’t have had any leverage after that. Didn’t Leona know how desperate he was? Or was she blinded by greed? Maybe she did see blackmail as a way to avenge my father’s death. She paid…He did break into her house to steal it, and he killed her in the process. He came prepared to kill her, with a baseball bat. What a convenient and appropriate weapon.
Catherine twisted her hair in a knot and held it on top of her head. She closed her eyes and thought of all the questions she had answered in the past few days without even being aware they had been asked. Her ignorance had caused Tom’s death. That would be lodged in her conscience for the rest of her life.
Give the devil his due, she thought savagely. He didn’t kill Leila. But then she was screaming, and he thought someone would come…Not enough time to kill Leila or search those cabinets…What a shock he must have had when she began yelling. It was bad enough that Tom was there, when he thought Tom was out on a date with Leila.
And of course he hasn’t killed me, Catherine thought. He has tried every route in order to avoid killing me. He doesn’t want to…He’s
Catherine shuddered.
Yes, very very
It was a matter of pride and vengeance that she finish the thing herself. And a matter of habit: she had done things for herself for so long.
And then there was the fact that she had caused Tom’s death. In the first place, she had given the murderer information indicating that Tom was an obstacle in his path; in the second place, she had not called the police when she had heard the rustling in the grass.
Her rational mind told her she had had nothing to do with the car troubles that had caused Tom to remain in the old office instead of going out with Leila; or with the couple’s going to bed instead of using Leila’s car to go to a movie, for example. But her rational mind also told her that words from her own mouth had led, however indirectly, to Tom’s death.
Perhaps she could have saved Tom; nothing could have saved her parents.
When she thought again of the reason they had died, rage came over her. It had been gaining strength, quenching the pity and revulsion, while she sat brooding. The rage shook her as nothing had ever shaken her before. She felt as if she was being burned from the inside out.
She looked at the clock. She had forgotten about the time. Now she saw it was 5:30. Most of the staff must have gone by while she sat deaf and dumb.
Time to go, Catherine, she told herself.
She covered her typewriter and picked up her purse. She put the Dr. Croft column on Randall’s desk, in silent apology. She thought of trying to find him. She was sure he was somewhere in the building, maybe in the production room working on the press with Salton. But a rising sense of urgency carried her out to her car.
She drove the short distance home with special care. She didn’t trust herself.
She was so fixed on her course that she was bewildered when she saw a strange car with two people in it parked in front of her house. She saw two heads turning to follow her car into the garage, and realized she couldn’t avoid finding out who they were and what they wanted.
As she walked across the lawn to meet them, she noticed the Tennessee license plate on their car. A man and a woman, middle-aged, attractive.
It was hard for her to understand what they were saying. Her ears weren’t at fault, she discovered slowly; their voices were choked and hoarse. The pretty dark woman, still young, with the red-edged eyes, was Tom’s mother, Catherine gradually realized; and the man with olive skin and light hair was his father.
Catherine’s ingrained training triumphed in her handling of these newly bereaved parents. She acted out of sheer reflex, rising out of profound shock. She simply could not think of how to ask them to go away.
“Won’t you come inside?” she asked.
“We don’t want to trouble you, but we would like to ask you some questions,” said Mr. Mascalco.
“Of course,” she said blankly.
As she preceded the Mascalcos into the house, she felt as if she was walking through water. It was an almost physical sensation of pressure, a buoyant feeling of absolute unreality.
While the Mascalcos sat on the couch where Catherine had huddled the night before with their son’s blood on her clothes and hands, she made coffee and carried it in to them.
The couple touched her so deeply that a little of her drifting sensation ebbed away. She felt her rage dissolving at the edges as she responded to their grief, their bewilderment at the death of their oldest child and only son.
Mrs. Mascalco wept and apologized for weeping. Her husband sat with his arm around her, his face distorted with emotion.
They asked her questions.
I must be careful, she told herself repeatedly.
It would shock them, and they might well hate her, when they discovered their son had died not because he possessed information dangerous to the murderer but because he had rented a house from Catherine.
“We would like to go into the house,” Mrs. Mascalco said finally. “We need to get some of his things for the funeral. One of his suits.”
“No,” said Catherine sharply, jolted back into complete awareness. They couldn’t see the old office the way it was. She could hardly bear to think of walking through the spattered hall herself, though that was where she must go as soon as they left.
“His brown suit,” Mrs. Mascalco said. “A tie.”
“I want to see where my son died,” said her husband.
“No,” Catherine said firmly.
Tom’s father, she saw, was passing from grief to anger, ready to take issue with anything.
Catherine got blanker of face and firmer of voice. She remembered what the scene of her parents’ crash had looked like. She had seen the car, too.
She promised to get them the suit. No, not now, later. The sheriff had sealed the house, Catherine told them. She wondered, after she said it, if that was true.
Go, she urged them silently. Go.
But they wanted to know more details about the night before. They wanted to linger with Catherine. After all, she had been with their son when he died.
Catherine finally thought of offering them food, but she could think of nothing she had in enough quantity for three people. As if she could eat-but she would have to put up a pretense.
At last Mr. Mascalco looked at his watch.
“My God, Elise, we have to go,” he said.
After many leave-takings, they departed, obviously puzzled by Catherine’s increasingly tense manner. They couldn’t reconcile the time and effort she had given them with the chilly, fixed blankness of her face.
“I’ll get the suit tomorrow,” she told them. “I’ll send it up the fastest way I can.”
She took their address. Reassured by her sincerity, Tom’s parents were finally out the front door and into their car.
After she made sure their headlights were pointing in the right direction, toward the highway, she shut the door.
Headlights, she thought. It’s dark. It’s night.
She had to move, and move fast. The murderer would act tonight, too.
Perhaps the evidence had already disappeared from its hiding place. He would not have to wait very late. After all, he knew that tonight Tom really wouldn’t be there.
Moving swiftly, clumsy in her urgency, she rummaged through a kitchen drawer for the extra keys to the old
