Charlaine Harris - Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

Dress, shoes. Underwear; Leila had that on. Hose? No, she didn’t wear them. What else? Purse, of course. Purse. For an awful moment, Catherine thought that it must be in the living room, until she spotted it by the side of the chair. She scanned the little bedroom for any other traces of Leila, but saw none. It might not hold up, but it was all she could do. Then she remembered her own possession in the house. She had to go into the living room after all. She went directly to the gun, grabbed it, and ran out.

Leila was slumped on the edge of the bathtub.

“Here,” Catherine said crisply. She helped Leila into the dress and sandals and kept charge of the purse.

“Come on.”

She got Leila to her feet. Leila was by far the taller of the two. It was awkward for both of them, in a horribly comic way. Catherine put her arm around Leila’s waist, and Leila put hers around Catherine’s neck. Somehow they supported each other down the spattered hall, out the open back door, and across the yard. They had to go slowly, tottering like two drunks through the gap in the hedge.

“I’m afraid,” Leila whispered, and the dark between the houses suddenly held ominous possibilities that Catherine had forgotten in her haste to leave the abattoir that had been Tom’s home. She was hopelessly burdened. Leila and Leila’s purse would make her too slow with the gun.

Catherine felt Leila begin to shake again, and heard the girl’s breath become more like sobbing. They would never make it if Leila collapsed. Catherine was coming to the end of her strength. I will go mad if Leila screams again, she thought.

“Come on ,” Catherine hissed through clenched teeth. Leila’s arm around her neck was pinning her hair down, and the pain kept Catherine from panicking.

She had to use every muscle she possessed to haul Leila up the steps to her den. She dumped the girl on a couch and wobbled into the kitchen. She didn’t sit down while she dialed the police, but leaned against the wall. She knew that if she sat down she would not be able to get up, and something still had to be done for the girl in her den.

By now Catherine almost hated Leila.

She said something, she never remembered what, into the telephone when it was answered at the sheriff ’s office. She hung up when an excited voice began to ask questions. Then she dropped her gun into a handy drawer. Before she returned to the girl, there was something she was going to do for herself.

She fumbled with the tiny Lowfield telephone directory, opening it with ponderous care to the “G” page. She read the numbers out loud to herself and dialed with that same nerve-wracking slowness.

He answered the telephone himself.

“Randall,” she said, enunciating very deliberately. Then she was unable to speak.

“Catherine?”

“Randall…I wish you would come. Tom is dead.”

The silence was full of questions he was not going to ask yet.

“Tom is dead,” she repeated, and carefully hung up the phone, because she was afraid she was going to say it again.

She wondered what she had been planning to do next. Then she remembered Leila, and looked around the kitchen for something to take the girl. The most useful thing she could see was a roll of paper towels.

I think this is shock, she told herself. With precise movements, in slow motion, she picked up the roll of paper towels and began her slow trip back to the den.

As it turned out, the towels were a good idea. Leila had dissolved in tears by now, and she began choking out her story almost incoherently when Catherine reappeared.

Catherine handed Leila the roll, or rather simply thrust it into the girl’s lap. She debated whether or not she could now sit down, and decided she could. She sat by the weeping girl and fixed a wide gray gaze on the pretty face now fuzzy with tears.

“We had a date,” Leila choked, “but his car was in the shop, so I had to drive over to his place, but I parked the car a block away because I didn’t want anyone to tell Mama and Daddy, you know how people here tell your parents everything…”

Catherine automatically ripped a towel off the roll and stuffed it into Leila’s hands. Leila looked at it as if she had never seen one, and used it.

“Oh, I loved him so much, and he was so good-looking…You know how it is…I just couldn’t help it.” A pause for another application of the towel. “And then when we were in bed, I mean, after it was over, there was a sound in the hall-”

I hope it was good for Tom, Catherine thought clearly. It better have been good.

“-and he got up and put on his pants, and he told me to stay quiet, not to move. He just whispered right up close to my ear, I was so… scared …‘I left the damn door unlocked,’ he said.”

Leila turned her ruined face to Catherine, and her long hand gripped Catherine’s frail wrist with painful strength.

“He went out and then I heard sounds, oh God, sounds. They hit the walls and came off them, out in the hall and then in the living room. I heard things falling and turning over. I thought there must be five people out there, I swear to God. And I couldn’t keep quiet any more, I screamed. And I thought someone ran out of the house. So I waited for Tom to come get me. I thought he’d come in and say it had been a burglar . When he didn’t come back, I thought he was calling the police. And I wanted to get up and get dressed before they got there. But I couldn’t…I was too scared. I waited and waited, and I couldn’t hear anything. So then I put my underwear on, as quiet as I could. I thought at least I could start getting ready. And then I heard the screen door. And it was you. I thought it was the man coming back. I guess it was a man. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to see. I couldn’t wait for Tom anymore.”

Sirens and lights outside.

The difference was that this time Randall was there, and his mother Angel. Randall only left Catherine once, to identify Tom formally. Angel made coffee and more coffee. And she greeted Leila’s parents and led them to their weeping daughter.

Catherine observed dryly that Leila had recovered enough wits to protect herself: the girl edited her story to say that she and Tom had been sitting in the living room when they heard the noise of someone prowling, and that Tom has hustled her into the bedroom for her protection. That left open the question of why Tom hadn’t called the police from the telephone in the living room, but Catherine decided that on the whole Leila had done well.

Then it was Catherine’s turn.

She was holding an embroidered pillow in her lap. She remembered her mother’s hands setting in the stitches. She had moved it from its place in the corner of the couch, so that she could jam herself into that corner as tightly as possible. The couch protected her right side and her back, and Randall was a solid wall on her left. Her fingers went over and over the embroidery her mother had worked on for hours. While Sheriff Galton asked her questions, her fingers never quit moving, in contrast to her face, which felt stiff, as if it didn’t fit her skull very well.

Why had she not heard the screams Leila said she had given?

Because if Leila was shut in the bedroom, I wouldn’t.

Why had she gone over to the house?

I heard the buzzer, he was calling me. I was too late. I heard a rustle in the grass, before the buzzer went off.

Why hadn’t she called the police?

I thought it was a bird. I guess now it was-whoever…

She was grateful for Randall and his mother, but she had gone where Randall could not reach her. She knew he was there, she felt his warmth and knew he was supporting her. She knew Angel was smoothing the way with cups of coffee and her mere presence, for Angel Gerrard, with her erect figure and carefully tended white hair, was a strong and influential woman and an impressive ally.