Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

office. The police had Tom’s, but she had a set of her own. While searching, she found her gun where she had thrust it the night before.

“Always check your gun before you use it,” her father had said.

She hadn’t last night, but she did now. She had reloaded Saturday morning, before she found Leona’s body. The gun was ready.

She had started out the back door when a new thought struck her. If anything happened to her-No, she said. Face it. If I am killed, no one else will know what I know.

She had left the Dr. Croft column on Randall’s desk, but she hadn’t told him about Betty’s account of the mysterious interview in Dr. Linton’s office shortly before the fatal accident. Betty’s story was not essential, but it was corroborative-though Betty hadn’t seen the man’s face.

The only solid proof was in that file in the attic. She must at least tell someone else that it existed, and then move as fast as possible.

She went back to the telephone, and dialed the Gazette number. Randall answered.

“Listen,” she said. Then it was too much like her call the night before. She had to wait for a wave of dizziness to pass.

“Catherine, is that you? What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I’m at home, Randall. I have to tell you something. Have you read that column?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“This is what I’m going to do,” she said. “And why.”

“Wait for me!” he was saying almost before she finished telling him.

“No,” she replied. “I have to go now.”

She hung up before he could say anything else.

The Mascalcos’ departure had given her back her rage. She was across the moonlit yard, through the hedge, walking up to the back door. Carried along by her anger, she felt strong as a lion. But her body was telling her something quite different, she found as she approached the old office. She had to stop and wait for a wave of weakness to pass, before she could go on.

I should be afraid, she realized. I should be afraid.

She had to fit the rage somewhere in her tired body, shift it so it could be borne. It was threatening to dispose of her.

With difficulty she fit the key in the lock. The moonlight made her arms look eerily gilded. She thought of how clearly she could be seen if anyone was watching.

But still she was not afraid.

The back door swung open. The moon shone in on the white walls covered with dark splotches. A tiny shiver edged along her spine.

The attic door was in this hallway.

She switched on the light and looked up. There was the dangling cord. She laid her gun on the floor, so she could use both hands to reach it. But the old house was high-ceilinged, and she couldn’t stretch far enough to grasp the cord.

Leona had pulled it down for her the last time she had gone up in the attic.

Catherine remembered the stool that had been in Tom’s kitchen on Sunday. She went to fetch it.

At last she could reach the cord. She pulled, and the rectangular wooden slab that fit into the ceiling descended. She pulled out the flimsy stairs that lay folded against it.

The single railing was weak, and Catherine remembered worrying that it might give way while she and Leona were maneuvering the filing cabinets up those narrow folding stairs.

Almost as an afterthought, she picked up the gun. Then she ascended into blackness.

The only light in the attic was a bare bulb in the middle of the sloping roof. She yanked the string dangling from it, and the attic was flooded with light.

She had played there as a child. Then it had held trunks of her grandmother’s old clothes. Now it only contained two filing cabinets, sitting close to the top of the stairs in the only area where a person could stand upright.

The slots no longer had labels, so Catherine had to go through each drawer looking for the file she wanted. There weren’t many left. That helped. Few people were so healthy they hadn’t needed to see a doctor at least once since her father’s death.

Of course, the murderer hadn’t dared to.

When she opened the second cabinet she found what she wanted in the top drawer. She saw immediately that this was the file she was looking for. It had been sealed around the edges with heavy tape. On one side of that tape, there was a slit.

Father did his best to keep Leona from finding out, Catherine thought sadly.

She slid the contents of the file through the slit that Leona Gaites had made in the tape.

She turned to the last entry on the medical record.

“Biopsy taken,” her father had written. “Results: saw Mycobacterium leprae. Evidence of Hansen’s disease.”

Carl Perkins was a leper.

“He didn’t have to do it,” she whispered. She rested her head against the metal of the cabinet.

It wasn’t readily infectious, Dr. Croft had pointed out, deriding medieval prejudices. It needn’t result in the deformities people associated with the word leprosy. It could be treated very effectively now. According to Dr. Croft, researchers had found the nine-banded armadillo very useful in their tests to determine even better treatment.

Four people had died because of a man’s fear of exposure-a family-proud man from Louisiana, where leprosy was endemic; a man who had established himself in the town and enjoyed its respect and admiration; a man who could not bear to see that town, and more crucially his precious, insensitive son (Josh the athlete; the baseball player) turn from him in revulsion.

Had her father ever realized how dangerous Carl Perkins was? Dr. Linton had read up on the disease-had read books on how to perform the biopsy, how to look for Mycobacterium leprae-all to save his old friend Carl Perkins the humiliation of going to Memphis to a doctor he didn’t know. Catherine could read that in the lines of the file, and she knew her father would do that for his neighbor. But her father wouldn’t have flouted the law. Cases of leprosy had to be reported to the Public Health Service.

His eyebrows, Catherine thought. That’s what happened to Mr. Perkin’s eyebrows. That was why he wore long-sleeved shirts. She shuddered as she recalled glimpsing the dark macules his rolled-up sleeve had revealed. That was why he hadn’t felt the scalding coffee spilled on his hand. The feeling in the hand was gone, eaten away by a little bacillus.

She recalled her walk home in the dark with him. It was then that he had found out where the files were, under the pretense of needing Josh’s. Mr. Perkins had walked her home for her protection and safety, she remembered dully.

The next day, at the Gazette, he had checked to make sure she was not involved with Tom. Why? He would have killed Tom anyway, she thought. Maybe he would have been sorrier if I had said Tom was my boyfriend…He had just heard Tom talking to Leila there in the office. I guess he did think Tom would be out of the house; if not with me, then with Leila. Did he hear Tom make a date with Leila? No, he must not have been sure, since he tried to get me to ask Tom to have dinner with them. If I had accepted, I guess he would have made some excuse to slip out for a while…Then he would have come here.

Catherine roused herself and shut the filing cabinet with a definite thud that marked an end. She tucked the file under her arm and switched out the attic light.

Time to go home and wait for Randall, who would be coming. It was all over.

She would tell him everything she had thought of that afternoon while she was staring blankly at the office wall. Carl Perkins had known far in advance that he would kill her father and mother. He had already made the plane reservations to visit Josh in California, because he didn’t want to go to the funeral of two people he had murdered. A strange nicety. He had been upset when he found that during his absence Lowfield had acquired a new doctor much faster than anyone could have expected. The presence of a new doctor muddled the question of where the