Charlaine Harris - Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

“Okay-difficult, but not impossible. However she did it, she found out. And Tom must have found out the same thing. You know what a gung-ho investigative reporter he thought he was. He wanted to solve this case before the police did. He told me so himself, Monday, while you were in Production.”

Again the little thought moved at the back of Catherine’s mind, and again she tried to catch hold of it too soon. It melted away.

“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.

Randall looked at her questioningly.

“I would swear that during the past twenty-four hours he was thinking more about the breakup with his fiancée, and getting Leila to bed, than he was about Leona’s murder,” Catherine said. She gripped the embroidered pillow and added, “He was just a boy. He was younger than I am.”

Randall touched her cheek. They sat in silence for a few minutes.

Then he said, “Just one more thing. If Leona knew who killed your father, do you think she would have kept quiet about it?”

“If she believed the person she was blackmailing was his murderer-she may not have known that, come to think of it-she might have figured, ‘Dead is dead. What good can this bring me?’ Even if she loved him. Or she might have thought she was getting some kind of vengeance by blackmailing the murderer.”

Then Catherine added, “I realize now that I never knew Leona, never understood her. At all.”

Randall stirred and looked at her. “You should be in bed,” he said. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”

She nodded.

“I’ll sleep in here,” he said, thumping the couch.

“No.”

“Catherine,” he said gently, “this isn’t the right time.”

“I know that,” she said irritably. “But you can sleep in my bed without being overcome by passion, surely, tired as we both are? Or you can have the other bed, in my old room.”

“Even as tired as we are,” he said, “I think I’d better take the other bed.”

WHEN SHE GOT up the next morning he was gone.

He had pulled the bed together, she found, when she peeped shyly into her old room. She was disappointed but a little relieved. She would have liked to see his head on the pillow, but her soul craved the solitude of her coffemaking and reading at the table.

That might be a problem later, she thought hopefully.

He had left a note in the kitchen, propped against a full coffeepot. Bless him, she thought, peering at his spiky scrawl.

“Don’t come in to work,” Catherine read. “I looked in at you this morning and had to overcome a mighty temptation, but you need sleep more than anything else at this point.” She smiled.

She saw through the steam of her first cup of coffee that it was nine o’clock. She had to go to the sheriff ’s office to make her statement, but she was going to take her time. She needed to collect herself before facing Sheriff Galton.

Of course she would go in to work after that. She knew Randall would be run ragged if she didn’t show up. No reporters, no one to answer the phone, since Leila undoubtedly would not come in. And that telephone would be ringing off the wall.

Yes, she would go to work.

After she had had some coffee and a few cigarettes, she realized there was no use trying to make anything normal of the morning. How deeply I’m embedded in my little rut, she thought. A friend of mine died last night, while I was watching, and I try to drink my X number of cups of coffee, smoke X number of cigarettes, and stick to my piddling little routine.

She got dressed and drove over to the little brick building in front of the jail.

It was like her arrival there Saturday morning. To her horror, she began shaking as she pulled onto the concrete apron in front of the swinging door. She knew what she would see, and she saw it. There was Mary Jane Cory, typing, her unrealistic hair sprayed into an elaborate structure of swirls.

But the pattern was broken, after all, when the black deputy, Eakins, came out of the sheriff ’s office and approached her.

“Miss Linton,” he said reluctantly, his voice hardly more than a mumble. Catherine turned to face him and waited cautiously.

“My mother wants to see you.” Before Catherine could say anything, before she could tell him she didn’t have any time that day, he went on. “She wants to see you awful bad. She’s been on at me about it for two days now.”

“What is it about?” She guiltily remembered the note in the can of brownies.

“She won’t tell me. You know how stubborn and…old-fashioned she is.”

“Old-fashioned” must mean “Uncle Tom,” Catherine decided. Yes, Betty was. It made Catherine as uncomfortable as it made her son.

I just can’t cope with Betty’s “Miss Catherine’s” this morning, she thought desperately. She was about to say no, when Percy Eakins gave her a pleading look it obviously hurt him to give. His pride was aching like arthritis on a rainy day, Catherine realized.

“I’ll go after I make my statement,” she said.

Then Mary Jane looked up from her typing, and Catherine became caught up in the mills of the law.

Catherine’s statement was longer and a little tricky this time (since she was concealing something, though it seemed a harmless thing to conceal), and she had time to notice that Mary Jane was no longer sympathetic. She was, if possible, even more briskly professional than usual. Her eyes on Catherine’s face were cold and speculative.

Catherine realized for the first time that this might be the pattern for the rest of her life, unless the murderer was caught. There was not enough evidence to arrest her: there was only the coincidence of two dead people turning up in Catherine Linton’s immediate vicinity. The sheriff knew she couldn’t have physically accomplished the murders, she thought. But that would make little difference in Lowfield talk.

She was so depressed when she left the sheriff ’s office that she figured going to see Betty Eakins couldn’t make her feel worse.

The black part of Lowfield was as close to a ghetto as a tiny town could get. Some of the streets were unpaved, and the children ran and played in them, only reluctantly moving aside for cars to pass. Some of the houses were clean, neatly kept, and sound; but most of them leaned and staggered, barely able to contain the life that spilled out of them.

Betty’s house was at a stage in between. It was still upright, but it was beginning to slide. The paint was peeling, and the yard was growing wild.

There were no sidewalks, of course, and the street, paved perhaps twenty years ago, was narrow. Catherine pulled as close to the house as she dared, and hoped no other car would want to pass while she was inside.

Children gathered on the other side of the street to watch her get out of the car. They ranged in age from three to ten, Catherine estimated, and their clothing was in various stages of disrepair, ranging from neat-but-dusty to out-and-out rags. They were barefoot, smiling, and shy. She gave them a tentative smile. The shyest covered their mouths with their hands, but let their returning grins shine through.

She pushed through the burgeoning sunflowers in the yard and knocked on the doorsill. The wooden door was open. The screen door was almost off its hinges.

“Who that?” came a creaky query from the darkness of the house’s back rooms. The shades had been drawn against the heat.

“Catherine,” she called.

“Miss Catherine!”

Betty’s halting steps approached. Catherine could see her emerging from the kitchen. Betty must have been close to seventy-five. She was thin, bent, and gnarled. She was putting in her teeth as she walked, and was dressed in a formidably clean green and white housedress and white apron.