the way the starched uniform rattled when the tall woman walked, had disliked the hair that seemed set upon Miss Gaites’s head instead of growing there.
Most of all, Catherine had disliked the pity she was obliged to feel for Miss Gaites, who had no family.
Her father had always praised his nurse highly to his wife and daughter, insisting with overdone joviality that Leona kept his office together. The forced note in his insistence told Catherine that even her amiable father could not find it in him to wholeheartedly like Leona Gaites.
Catherine remembered the tears sliding down Leona’s square handsome face at the double funeral.
She shouldn’t have died like that, Catherine thought, as she watched the coroner’s jury being heaved across the porch and into the shack. A dog shouldn’t die like that. Then Catherine remembered the dog’s corpse she had passed that morning. The same person killed them both, she thought with surprising certainty. Driving too fast, to get away from what he did to Miss Gaites.
The coroner’s jury viewed the body and came to the obvious conclusion. Murder, they found.
Catherine cast a last look at the covered figure, now bundled onto a stretcher borne by the two sweat-soaked cursing attendants, on its way to Jerry Selforth’s eager knife.
As she watched the load sliding into the back of the ambulance, she saw one of the attendants gag from the smell.
Leona had always been so clean.
Catherine began to walk down the baked dirt road toward the sheriff ’s car. The coroner, Carl Perkins, fell into step beside her.
She looked at him with new eyes. Familiar people were no longer familiar. The anger and suspicion in Sheriff Galton’s face had shaken her out of taking for granted people she had known since childhood.
“Terrible thing,” Perkins muttered. He was obviously upset. His big hands were shoved into the pockets of his working khakis.
He must have been gardening when Mrs. Cory phoned him, Catherine thought dully. She watched Carl and Molly Perkins working in their yard every weekend, provided she herself had remembered to have her hedge trimmed.
“Yes,” Catherine replied belatedly.
“I’m sorry for you, that you had to find her.”
There was real regret in his voice, and Catherine warmed to him. “If I hadn’t happened to shoot cans this morning-” she began, and stopped.
Perkins wrinkled his forehead inquiringly.
His eyebrows are too sparse to count, Catherine noticed. He’s really getting old.
She spoke hastily to cover her stare. “She wouldn’t have been found for a long time, if no one had worked in those fields until-” “Until the smell was gone,” she meant to say, but couldn’t.
“You’re right,” he said. He was angry: his voice sounded hoarse and strained. “Wonder if Galton can handle this? All he’s used to are Saturday night cuttings.”
They had reached the sheriff ’s car, where Galton was directing two deputies to stay behind and continue to search.
“Now, you come over and see us,” Perkins said earnestly. “You’ve been a stranger since your folks have been gone.”
Yes, she thought. I’ve been a stranger.
“Is all your father’s business tended to?” he asked into the blank wall of her silence.
“Yes,” Catherine replied, shaking herself. She would have to say more, she realized after a second. “Jerry Selforth bought almost all Dad’s equipment. We were lucky to get another doctor in town so soon. Dr. Anderson’s so old that I know having Jerry take the practice is a relief to him.”
“It was a surprise,” said Mr. Perkins. “Not too many young men want to come to Lowfield.”
His bleak tone made Catherine raise her eyebrows. She didn’t like Jerry Selforth much as a man, but the town had desperately needed him as a doctor. What had Jerry done to offend her neighbor?
Just then the ambulance started up, and the people by the cars had to step between them to let it edge by.
Catherine’s thoughts flew back to Leona Gaites, and she scarcely noticed Carl Perkin’s farewell nod as he went down the road to his Lincoln, in the wake of the ambulance.
The narrow dirt road became busy with flying dust and confusion as the accumulated vehicles reversed to point back to the highway. The cars formed a train like a funeral procession behind the hearse of the orange and white ambulance.
The black deputy was detailed to take Catherine’s statement.
“Then head on over to Leona Gaites’s house,” Sheriff Galton added when he was halfway out the door. “Bring the camera.”
The young black man nodded briskly and turned to Catherine, who was huddled in a corner hoping she was out of the way.
“Miss Catherine, would you come over here, please?” he said, indicating a straight-backed chair by a scarred desk.
Catherine could tell from the set of Mary Jane Cory’s back that she disapproved of this black policeman. The unnatural brightness of Mrs. Cory’s voice as she spoke to him contrasted sharply with the natural tone in which she spoke to a couple of blacks who entered the station as supplicants.
Catherine was beyond caring who took down her statement; but she was less comfortable with blacks in her own town than she was with blacks anywhere else. Upon taking up her life in Lowfield after her parents’ death, she had found sadly that the old attitudes caught at her and strangled her attempts to be easy in an uneasy situation.
The deputy’s name tag read “Eakins,” Catherine noticed for the first time. Now she could place the familiarity of the man’s face.
“Your mother is Betty, isn’t she?” Catherine asked, as he rolled typing paper into the machine.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said reluctantly, and Catherine felt a pit-of-the-stomach dismay.
Betty Eakins had been the Lintons’ maid for years, until she had grown too old and arthritic to work any more.
Catherine had never called their maid anything but “Betty”; and she had decided, after a year away in college, that that was a shameful thing. Catherine had not even known Betty’s last name for the first years of the woman’s employment. Catherine’s visits home had been more and more awkward as her awareness of what lay around her became acute, to the point that Catherine was secretly glad when Betty grew too infirm to iron the Lintons’ sheets. Catherine’s parents had died before they could replace Betty with another maid.
“How is she?” asked Catherine. She had to say something, she felt.
“Mama’s fine,” he said curtly. Percy Eakins’s face rivaled Catherine’s for blankness.
“She’s a very old woman now,” he said more gently-whether out of fear of being rude to a white woman or because he sensed Catherine’s misery, she couldn’t tell. She chose to regard his softened tone as absolution for the sin of having offended racially.
“I’ll tell her I saw you. She talks about you all the time,” he said finally.
And their personal conversation was closed.
He took her statement in a meticulous professional manner, in question-and-answer form.
“Your full name?”
“Catherine Scott Linton.”
“Your age?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Place of employment and position?”
“The
“Your present place of residence?”
“Corner of Mayhew and Linton.”
No one in Lowfield had ever felt a need for house numbers. The street her house faced had been named for her great-grandfather, when the town was bustling and the river was close. Now the river was two miles away, held in check by the levee, and Lowfield’s population had not fluctuated appreciably in her father’s lifetime.
