Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

working at a weekly paper in Arkansas, my first job out of college…After they crossed the bridge into Arkansas, their car went out of control. Something-” and here Catherine, incurably machine-stupid, shook her head helplessly-“something was loosened with a wrench, deliberately. The Arkansas police investigated the service station they had stopped at there. Sheriff Galton looked here.”

“They never caught who did it?” Tom was incredulous.

“No,” she said bleakly. “How could they? Anyone could have gotten into our garage, Father didn’t lock it. And it must have been done here. Why would a service-station attendant in Arkansas do anything like that? They were nice people…I met them.” She closed her eyes and leaned back against the couch.

She heard Tom rise, and knew it was because he was too excited to sit. I’ve made one person happy today, she thought.

“I’m going to call Galton,” he said eagerly. Without another word, he stalked out the back door.

She forgot him as soon as he was gone.

I’ve been waiting for this, Catherine realized. Somewhere in this little town he’s been waiting, too, free and alive. Everyone forgot about my parents after a while. But now that he’s killed again, he’s drawn attention to himself. I’ve been waiting…She knew it now and was amazed she had not known it before. She was frightened to discover that this blood lust existed in quiet Catherine Linton.

But it was anger released. It felt good.

She opened her eyes to meet Randall’s. He looked thoughtful.

“Go to bed,” he advised gently, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll come by tomorrow.”

She could hear him let himself out as she went obediently to the soft waiting bed. She didn’t wonder at his sliding into the position of man to her woman, instead of employer to employee. She accepted the transition without question. As she turned over on her stomach and wrapped her arms around the pillow, she was able to forget her parents, forget Leona Gaites, for the moment before sleep swamped her.

5

CATHERINE SLEPT DREAMLESSLY until morning.

She woke slowly; saw early morning light seeping through the curtains, heard birds twittering faintly outside.

She felt weak but at peace, the way an invalid feels after a long and debilitating illness has passed its crisis. She turned on her side to peer out the gap in the curtains, and when she had absorbed what she could see of the morning, her gaze transferred to the curtains themselves.

They were an olive green to match the bedspread. It dawned on Catherine that she didn’t like them, had never liked them. In fact, she hated olive green.

She would pick out new curtains, drive to Memphis and debate her choice with a saleswoman at an expensive shop.

I’ll buy something light and striped and open-weave. I’ll do it this weekend, she resolved. She swung out of bed and went to the louver-doored closet lining one wall of the bedroom. Her supply of clothes, most dating from her college days, barely filled one side of the vast closet.

And I’ll buy new clothes, too, she thought. Shoes. She eyed her bedroom slippers with disgust. How could she have kept those for so long?

She went down the dim hall to the kitchen, looking forward to her breakfast. It wasn’t until she saw the coffee pot, still dirty from the previous morning, that she remembered.

She sat abruptly on one of the bamboo chairs grouped around the breakfast table. She saw a hand lying in a pool of sunlight. Taking several deep breaths, she focused on the pattern of her robe until the worse had passed. With an immense and grim effort Catherine washed the coffee pot, filled it, and plugged it in. From the pile of library books in the living room, she picked an innocuous biography of an Edwardian lady and sat at the glass-and-bamboo table reading the first paragraphs very carefully until the coffee had perked. After she had poured her first cup, she returned to the book.

She staved off the image of Leona’s hand until she had finished three cups of coffee, two pieces of toast, and fifty pages of the lady’s opulent childhood.

Then she moved to her favorite chair at the bay window and set herself to think.

If Leona’s death was connected with the murder of her parents, what could the connection be? Leona and her mother had never been friends. So Leona and her father, nurse and doctor, must have seen, or found out… something to be killed for.

If that was so, if the two had died because they knew the same thing, had seen the same thing (whatever), why the gap in time between the murders? Catherine asked herself. Could Leona have been so difficult to kill that six months had lapsed before the murderer had had another chance?

She shifted restlessly. Hers was not the kind of intelligence that asserted itself in orderly trains of reasoning but the kind that mulled in secret and then presented her, so to speak, with a conclusion.

Instead of undertaking the calm application of logic she had set herself to perform, she found herself dwelling with resentment on the suspicion in James Galton’s face when he told her that the dead woman was Leona Gaites. When Catherine’s restlessness goaded her into the bedroom to begin dressing, she was still gnawing at the shock that suspicion had made her feel.

While she was brushing her teeth, Catherine decided she was arrogant.

Why should he not suspect her? In all the mystery novels she had read, the finder- of-the-body was suspect.

I never realized how much pride I take in being who I am, she thought. I expect my lineage to speak for me; I think “Scott Linton” means “above reproach.” The “Catherine”-that’s the important part. That’s just me.

She looked in the mirror over the sink and surveyed the toothpaste surrounding her mouth in a white froth.

“Gorgeous,” she muttered. “Like a mad dog.”

The word mad triggered another train of thought. Perhaps Sheriff Galton thought she was seriously crazy? Not just neurotic, but psychotic?

The anger she felt at the possibility was another confirmation, to Catherine’s mind, of her own arrogance. She rinsed out her mouth with unnecessary force.

Of course, she brooded, she had reacted drastically to her parents’ deaths. Who wouldn’t? Especially when that loss was simultaneously double, untimely, and violent. A period of grief; natural, expected.

But people had begun to wonder-she had seen it in their faces, in their careful selection of topics-when the way she lived, holed up in her family home, became permanent. No invitations in, no invitations out. And by the time she realized how she had isolated herself, she had gotten used to it.

I’ve been working on it, she thought defensively.

The terrible jolts of the day before had shown her how far she had come and how far she had to go.

Like an arrogant fool, I didn’t think anyone else would ever hold it to my discredit, she told her reflection silently (she was by now putting on her makeup).

Catherine glared at the mirror and made a horrendous crazy face at herself.

But Randall likes me, she reminded herself.

She picked delicately at the edges of that undeniable fact, half frightened. She mulled over the unexpected feeling that had passed between them.

Then she scolded herself, You’re mooning like a fifteen-year-old. And she smoothed her face out and gave the mirror her best, her Number One, smile. It had been a long time since she had used it; it made her cheeks ache.

Instead of donning a long-ago boyfriend’s football jersey, which lay at the top of the pile, she rooted deep in a drawer and pulled out something that fit quite a bit better.

The bells of the Baptist church were pealing for the eleven-o’clock service as she put in her earrings.

The church bell chimed in with the doorbell. Catherine opened the front door uncertainly, half doubtful she had heard it.