Charlaine Harris - Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

Good. Beer. With one of those in me, I bet I can sleep. I’m glad Tom left some.

Armed with the beer and a fresh pack of cigarettes, Catherine wandered into the living room. She settled in her favorite chair, which she had pulled out of its original spot so she could look out the bay window. She had arranged beside it a heavy round table, and, some time later, another chair to keep the first one company. It was her own little base in a house too big for one person; a house still echoing with loss.

The old home across the street had been renovated into the town library. It closed at eleven on Saturday, so Catherine was just in time to see Mrs. Weilenmann, the librarian, lock the front door. Mrs. Weilenmann was the town wonder: an educated northern black woman, who spoke with no trace of the heavy accent white Southerners associated with blacks. And, rumor had it, Mrs. Weilenmann, a widow, had acquired her name by marrying a white man. It was a bandage to Catherine’s conscience that Mrs. Weilenmann had gotten the librarian’s job. The only wonder, as Catherine saw it, was that she wanted it.

I meant to go to the library today when I got back, Catherine recalled, glancing down at the heap of books on the floor as Mrs. Weilenmann maneuvered her Toyota out of the library parking lot.

Catherine reckoned she had enough to read to last until Monday. And took a swallow of beer to celebrate that minor goodness.

A possible diversion occurred to her. She craned forward to see if Mr. Drummond next door was holding true to form in his late-Saturday-morning grass mowing. But the lawn beyond the hedge that bordered Catherine’s yard was empty. She was disappointed and puzzled. She faithfully witnessed Mr. Drummond’s ritual each summer Saturday. After a moment, she remembered that the Drummonds were still in Europe, and shook her head at her forgetfulness.

Perhaps she could move her chair to face a side window. She could look across Mayhew Street, see if the Perkinses were back at work in their yard.

It didn’t seem worth the trouble.

I’ll just sit and drink my beer, she decided. Maybe I’ll think of something to do to use up this blasted day.

Her eyes fell on a half-finished book. She considered reading, but decided she couldn’t concentrate enough. The book was a murder mystery. Not such a good thing to read today. Her mouth twisted wryly.

After a moment Catherine wriggled deeper into the big chair, stretching her legs to rest them on its matching ottoman. She drank some more beer. She was profoundly bored, yet very tense. She decided it was a horrible combination.

“Toes, relax,” she said out loud, suddenly recalling an acting-class exercise. “Feet, relax.”

She had worked up to her pelvis when she was diverted by a car pulling onto the graveled apron at the end of the walkway in front of the house. She suspended her exercise in astonishment.

The car was familiar, but she couldn’t place the owner. Not Tom, her only occasional visitor. He would merely stroll across to her back door from his own.

“It’s Randall Gerrard!” she muttered. Her employer had never come to see her before.

She didn’t realize the impact the beer had had on her empty stomach until she got up.

Instead of straightening up the pile of books, instead of fluffling out her damp hair, Catherine stared at Randall as he came up the walkway.

She itemized his heavy shoulders and thick chest, surprising on a man of his height. Especially surprising on a man who had, Catherine told herself, no butt at all.

The sun glinted on the thick reddish-brown hair of his head and beard, and winked off his heavy glasses.

How old must he be now? she wondered. Thirty-five?

She stood riveted and staring. Like a fool, she told herself when she finally roused. She had just begun to move when he knocked on the door, and she could only be grateful he had not glanced at the window.

“Please come in,” she said. The beer soaked her voice with a duchesslike formality. She blinked in surprise.

Randall’s face, which had been grave, lit with amusement. She followed his glance down to her hand that had gestured him in with a gracious flourish. She saw, appalled, that she was still clutching the beer can. Her elaborate sweep had slopped beer all over her hand.

“Oh damn !” she muttered.

He said gently, “Catherine.”

To her horror, that note of kindness tipped her into collapse. She began to cry. She twisted away to hide her face, covered her mouth to muffle the ugly sound. She hated for anyone to see her crumple.

A heavy arm went around her, and she instantly twitched away. But she didn’t move when the arm firmly encircled her again.

She was somehow deposited on a convenient couch. She dimly heard footsteps crossing the floor and going purposefully down the hall. She looked up as Randall reappeared with a box of tissues. She blessed him mentally, and lowered her face. She was acutely aware of how dreadful she looked when she cried. As she cleaned her face, she felt the tears dry up inside her.

Catherine waited until she could hope that her nose had returned to its normal color before she brushed her hair back and looked sideways at him…and surprised something in Randall’s face that amazed her, something unmistakable; though it had been a long time since she had cared to recognize it in a man’s face.

Empty and giddy, Catherine felt a pleasant little jolt of lust. She had seen and thought too much of death to deny that positive celebration of life.

“Better?” Randall asked, with a fair assumption of gravity.

“Yes, thank you,” she answered with dignity.

He handed her the beer can. Catherine took a sizeable swallow. Her eyes were on his face-a Slavic peasant face, she thought darkly-as he looked around the room, zeroed in on her arrangement in the bay window. The soft chair with the dent her body had left, the paperback with a bookmark thrust inside, the lamp pulled over close to her chair surrounded by a litter of books: it looked like what it was, the habitual den of a solitary person. From where she was sitting now, Catherine thought, it looked pitiful.

“If you heard so fast,” she said hastily, “then…”

An impatient knock on the back door finished her sentence.

“Tom,” Catherine said simply.

She was regretting the end of a promising moment as she went through the den at the rear of the house to answer the knock.

As she had predicted, it was Tom, her only full-time fellow reporter. His long lean frame bisected the doorway.

“Are you all right” he asked perfunctorily. His mouth had already opened to begin firing questions when Catherine cut him short.

“You might as well come on in the living room, Randall’s in there,” she said.

Tom looked almost comically taken aback.

Catherine, bowled over by giddiness, nearly laughed as she preceded Tom into the living room.

“Hey, Randall,” he said casually, folding his length into an uncomfortable Victorian rosewood chair. Then he forgot to be offhand. “The coroner’s jury said murder, of course. And a Gazette reporter found the body! Jesus, what a story!” He yanked his fearsome Fu Manchu mustache so fiercely that Catherine thought he might pull the hair out.

“Calm down, Tom, it’s not like there was another paper to scoop,” Randall said. He took his pipe from his pocket.

“Hey Catherine, is there any of that beer left?” Tom asked, sidetracked into showing Randall that he, Tom, had been there first.

“Three or four,” Catherine said. “Randall, would you care for a beer?”

Randall accepted.

It seemed to Catherine that she took forever pulling out the tabs on three cans, pouring them, and putting the glasses on a tray.