Charlaine Harris - Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

“Dr. Selforth!” bellowed Galton from the interior of the cabin.

Jerry flashed Catherine a broad grin and trotted cheerfully away.

He certainly fit right into his slot in Lowfield, Catherine thought wryly. She had heard the ladies loved him, and after a residence of five months, he was first-naming everyone in town.

Catherine had not liked Jerry Selforth, who had taken over her father’s practice almost lock, stock, and barrel, since the time he had laughed at her father’s old-fashioned office in back of the Linton home. To her further irritation, Jerry Selforth had been much smitten with her black hair and white skin, and he had lengthened the business of purchasing Dr. Linton’s office equipment considerably, apparently in the hope of arousing a similar enthusiasm in Catherine.

Because of the dates she had refused, she always felt she had an obligation to be kind to him, though it was an uphill effort. Something about Jerry Selforth’s smile said outright that his bed was a palace of delights that Catherine would be lucky to share.

Catherine had her doubts about that.

Time limped by, and the stump grew uncomfortable. Rivulets of sweat trickled down her face. Her skin prickled ominously, a prelude to sunburn. She wondered what she was doing there. She was clearly redundant.

She had felt the same way when other people, to spare her, had made all the arrangements about her parents’ bodies. The sheriff in Parkinson, Arkansas, had been shorter, heavyset. He had been kind, too. She had accepted a tranquilizer that day. After it entered her blood stream, she had been able to call her boss at her first job, to tell him she wouldn’t be coming back.

A flurry of dust announced new arrivals. Catherine was glad to have something new to look at, to break her painful train of thought. Three more cars pulled up behind the ambulance. The lead car was a white Lincoln Continental that was certainly going to need a wash after this morning was over.

As the driver emerged, Catherine recognized him. It was her neighbor, Carl Perkins. He and his wife lived in an incredible pseudoantebellum structure across the street from the west side of Catherine’s own house. Its construction had had the whole town agape for months.

Catherine suddenly felt like laughing as she recalled Tom Mascalco’s first comment on that house. Whenever he drove by, Tom said, he expected a chorus of darkies to appear on the veranda and hum “Tara’s Theme.”

Catherine’s flash of humor faded when she remembered that Carl Perkins was, in addition to his many other irons in the town fire, the county coroner. The men piling out of the other cars must comprise the coroner’s jury, she realized. She knew them all: local businessmen, planters. There was one black-Cleophus Hames, who ran one of the two Negro funeral parlors.

I wish I was invisible, she thought miserably.

She became very still and looked down the short length of her legs at her tennis shoes.

Of course, if I don’t look at them, they can’t see me, she jeered at herself, when she realized what she was doing.

But it worked for a while. The men stood in an uneasy bunch several feet from the shack, not talking much, just glancing at the doorway with varying degrees of apprehension.

It worked until Sheriff Galton drew all eyes to her by jumping from the cabin doorway and striding directly to Catherine’s stump.

She had surreptitiously raised the hem of her T-shirt to wipe some of the sweat from her face, so she didn’t observe the set of his shoulders until it was too late to be alerted. She had a bare second to realize something was wrong.

“Why did you say you didn’t know her?” he asked brusquely when he was within hearing distance.

“What?” she said stupidly.

She couldn’t understand what he meant. The heat and the long wait had drained her. Her brain stirred sluggishly under the sting of his voice.

Galton stood in front of her now, no longer familiar and sympathetic but somehow menacing.

He said angrily, “You’ve known that woman all your life.”

She stared up at him until the sun dazzled her eyes unbearably and she had to raise an arm to shield them.

The cold stirring deep inside her was fear, fear that activated a store of self-defense she had never been called upon to use.

“I never saw her face. I told you that,” she said. Her pale gray eyes held his with fierce intensity. “The side of her head nearest me was covered with blood.” Her voice was sharp, definite. For the first time in her life she was speaking to an older person, a lifelong acquaintance, in a tone that was within a stone’s throw of rudeness.

She saw in his face that he had not missed it.

“You better think again, Catherine,” he retorted. “That’s Leona Gaites, who was your father’s nurse for thirty-odd years.”

CATHERINE GAPED AT him.

“What on earth…” she stammered. “Miss Gaites…what is she doing out here?”

Even through her shock Catherine saw some relief touch Galton’s face. Her unalloyed amazement must have gone some way toward convincing him of her ignorance of the dead woman’s identity. Her innocence.

My innocence? Her anger grew. It felt surprisingly good. She was so seldom overtly angry.

“Well, come on,” Galton was saying in a more relaxed voice. “The coroner’s jury is here. You have to testify.”

Catherine lost that portion of the day. While she automatically delivered her simple account to a ring of sober faces, she was remembering Miss Gaites.

The incongruity of seeing starched, immaculate Leona Gaites in such a state!

She must have given me a hundred suckers, Catherine thought, her childhood crowding around her.

The suckers had been a bribe to convince Catherine that Leona liked her.

It hadn’t worked. Leona hadn’t liked children at all.

So Catherine had disliked Miss Gaites, had not even accorded her the courtesy of “Miss Leona.” She had disliked 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.