Charlaine Harris - Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

“Catherine,” Galton said.

She looked at him.

“Who rents your place?”

“Martin Barnes,” she said promptly.

She slid easily back into her silence. It had been her natural element for months; and even before that, she had not been what anyone would call talkative. Her roommate in college had called her “Sphinx.” It had become her accepted name on the small private campus.

She wished there was someone around to call her that now.

Martin Barnes. That was food for thought. Catherine supposed the person most familiar with that piece of land must be the most suspected. The shack was visible, but not obvious, from the highway. You wouldn’t, Catherine decided, just glimpse it and say, “Perfect place for this body I have on my hands.” But Mr. Barnes can’t have anything to do with this, she thought. He’s-older than my father; he’s a good man. Besides-she must have been raped. Why else would anyone drag a lady out to the country and bash her on the head?

But the woman’s dress hadn’t been disarranged. Catherine could see it clearly, pulled down around the woman’s knees. A print shirtwaist dress, an everyday dress, short-sleeved for the summer. The kind of dress any older woman in Lowfield would wear to go to the grocery. Not a dress any woman would wear to die in.

Robbery, then? Catherine wondered. Had there been a purse at the woman’s side? She couldn’t recall one-and she could still see the body clearly. She shuddered, and her small square hands gripped her folded arms.

“Let me tell you the procedure, Catherine,” Sheriff Galton said abruptly, and she knew he had noticed the shudder.

She summoned up a courteous show of interest.

“First we secure the scene.”

The thought of anyone “securing” the ramshackle tenant house made her want to laugh, but she pressed her lips together and locked in the urge. Everyone thinks you’re crazy anyway: don’t confirm it, she warned herself. She inclined her head to show that she was listening.

“Percy here will take some pictures,” Galton proceeded with a matter-of-fact air.

Percy was the black deputy lodged in the back seat with a lot of camera paraphernalia. He was a solemn-faced young man, and as Catherine turned to look at him by way of acknowledging his entrance into the conversation, she felt an unexpected stir of recognition. Before she could place it, Galton rumbled on.

“Mary Jane’s called the coroner, and he’ll convene a coroner’s jury at the scene. They’ll hear your testimony and they’ll give their finding.”

Then I can go home, Catherine thought hopefully.

“Then you come back to the station, make a formal statement, sign it.”

Damn.

“Then you can go home. I may have to ask you a few more questions later, but I think that’ll be it. Until we catch the perpetrator. Then there’ll be the trial.”

Trial opened up new vistas of trouble. It sounded pretty cocky on James Galton’s part, too.

Catherine glanced at Galton’s stern lined face, and suddenly she decided it would be a mistake to underestimate Sheriff James Galton.

The sheriff’s car and the deputies’ car following it turned off the highway onto the dirt road Catherine indicated. The sun was higher, the glare brighter than during Catherine’s early morning venture. She had no sunglasses and had to lower the visor to shield her eyes. She was too short for it to help much.

“This your grandfather’s place?” Galton asked.

“All of it.”

“All rented out to Martin?”

“Yes. For years. Daddy rented to him too.”

Catherine lit a cigarette from the battered pack in her pocket and smoked it slowly.

The shack at the crossroads came into view.

The weathered wood shone in the sun. It looked so quiet and empty that for a brief moment Catherine doubted what she had seen. Then she began shaking again, and dug her nails into her arms to keep from crying.

I’m not going in there. Surely they won’t ask me to go in there, she thought.

“This the place?” Galton asked.

She nodded.

They pulled to a halt under the same oak that had sheltered Catherine’s car. The sheriff and the deputy got out immediately. Catherine put out her cigarette with elaborate care. The black deputy opened her door.

She left the sheriff ’s car and began to walk down the road.

The sweat that had dried in the sheriff ’s cold office had formed a layer on her skin. Now she sweated again. She felt filthy and old.

She ignored Galton, the black deputy, and the other deputies from the second car. The dark emptiness of the doorway grew with every step she took. She imagined she could hear the drone of the flies already.

It was not just her imagination that she could pick up the smell when she reached the stump. She stopped in her tracks. The rising temperature and the passage of even this short amount of time had done their work.

She would not go farther.

“In there,” she said briefly.

The sheriff had picked up the scent for himself. Catherine watched his mouth set grimly. She got some satisfaction from that, though she was ashamed of it.

The other deputies had caught up. In a knot, the brown uniforms approached the cabin slowly.

She could see the full force of the smell hit them. A wavering of heads, a look of disgust.

“Jesus!” one of them muttered.

The sheriff was eyeing the rickety porch with calculation. Catherine weighed about 115 pounds; the sheriff close to 185.

With a kind of detached interest, Catherine wondered how he would manage.

Galton scanned his deputies from the neck down, and picked Ralph Carson, who had gone to high school with Catherine, as the lightest of the group.

After some muttered consultation, Carson edged up on the porch, gingerly picked his way across, and reached the door frame without the porch collapsing. He looked in. When he turned to extend an arm to the sheriff, his face was set in harsh lines of control, and his tan looked muddy.

Galton gripped Carson’s arm, and the deputy gave a heave inward. After Galton, the black deputy was hoisted into the shack. The others began to search the barren area around the house.

I guess I thought it would be gone by the time we got here, Catherine thought with a mixture of relief and dismay. Her tension drained away suddenly, leaving her sick and exhausted. She sat down on the stump, her back turned to the open doorway, which was now occasionally lit with the quick glare of flash bulbs.

A white and orange ambulance was bumping its way down the road. A deputy flagged it in behind the official cars, and two white-coated attendants and Dr. Jerry Selforth, Lowfield’s new doctor, jumped out. After exchanging a few words with the deputy, Selforth detached himself from the little group and came toward Catherine.

“Good morning, Jerry,” Catherine said with polite incongruity. He’s excited by this, she thought.

“Hey, Catherine, you all right?” He massaged her shoulder. He couldn’t talk to a woman without prodding, rubbing, gripping. Men he slapped on the back.

She was too tired to pull away, but her eyebrows rose in a frigid arch. Jerry’s hand dropped away.

“I’m sorry you had to find her like that,” he said more soberly.

Catherine shrugged.

“Well…” the young doctor murmured after a beat of silence.

Catherine whipped herself into more courtesy.

“Your first?” she inquired, tilting her head toward the shack.

“My first that’s been dead longer than two hours,” he admitted. “Since med school. There’s a pathologist in Morene that’ll come help me.”

“They were better preserved in med school,” he added thoughtfully, as a short-lived breeze wafted east.