A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 28
‘I went up to Memphis and asked, but it was awful expensive.’
‘Leona was cheap?’
‘Oh, yeah, compared to Memphis. But I think she charged more later. I was one of her first.’
Catherine felt sick.
‘I’m sorry, Leila.’ It was all she knew to say.
‘Oh, well.’ Leila waved a polished hand to dismiss her former predicament. ‘What I’m scared of,’ she went on urgently, ‘is the sheriff will tell, if he finds out. My parents, you know. I mean, what if Miss Gaites kept records?’
‘Come on, Leila,’ Catherine said tartly. ‘She would hardly have a receipt file!’
Leila pondered that.
‘I guess you’re right,’ she said. ‘I mean, she was breaking the law. So she probably wouldn’t have written anything down. And you had to pay her cash.’
Catherine imagined Leila trying to write a check for Leona’s services and winced.
Leila, now that her immediate fear was banished, looked brighter by the second. She straightened her shoulders, leaned back in her chair, and gave her pink fingernails a once-over. Catherine was glancing at her notes surreptitiously, longing to return to something normal and humdrum, when the girl began to frown.
‘How did you know about Tom’s fiancée?’ Leila asked abruptly.
‘What?’ Catherine made herself pay attention.
‘Tom,’ Leila prompted. ‘When did he tell you?’
‘That they broke up?’ Catherine made an effort to remember. ‘I guess it was yesterday.’
‘He over at your place?’ asked Leila, with badly feigned indifference.
‘Oh,’ Catherine said, enlightened ‘No, I went over to his house’ (that just made it worse, she saw instantly) ‘and he happened to mention it in the course of the conversation.’
And I was trying to do her a good turn, Catherine reflected gloomily, as Leila shot her a look and rose from her chair. Leila returned to her filing, back pointedly stiff, slamming home the drawers of the cabinets with all her strength.
It seemed a good time to go to lunch.
9
Catherine spent the afternoon dodging conversations. She didn’t want to hear any more secrets or opinions.
The entire staff was aware of her penchant for long silences, and when she gave minimal answers to direct questions she couldn’t avoid, they got the point.
* * * *
Finally Catherine caught up with her work. She had deposited with Jewel everything urgent she had pending, with the nagging exception of the Barnes’s grandchild’s birthday-party piece.
She had seen a couple of stories by Randall on the ‘set’ spike when she carried her own things back. In addition to turning out editorials, Randall had to report the occasional event, when Catherine and Tom were too busy to cover it. The Gazette simply couldn’t afford another reporter, even though another pair of hands at a typewriter would often have been welcome, particularly in the fall when high school sports started up.
Catherine remembered the time she had had to cover a basketball game, during the hiatus between Tom’s predecessor’s departure and Tom’s arrival. It had been a fiasco, and she shuddered to recall it, even months later.
Mrs Weilenmann, the head librarian, came in to give Catherine the schedule for the next month’s special library programs. Catherine thanked her whole-heartedly for the neatly typed listing. (All too often, people brought in scrawls that Catherine had to type up to decipher.) In a gush of gratitude, she promised to place it prominently in the next issue, with a border around it.
‘Catherine,’ the tall middle-aged woman said slowly, after she had gathered up her paraphernalia to leave, ‘I’m worried about you and your situation.’
Catherine stared blankly at Mrs Weilenmann’s toffee-colored face. Mrs Weilenmann was intelligent, ugly, and charming; and Catherine had grown fond of her. But they had never had a really personal conversation.
‘It occurred to me this morning,’ Mrs Weilenmann said hesitantly, ‘when I was getting the books out of the bookdrop (and someone’s hit it again; why can’t people control their cars?) – well, it occurred to me that you are a little isolated now.’
Catherine couldn’t think of anything to say, so she waited.
‘Not – socially; I don’t know about that. But geographically.’
‘Oh?’ murmured Catherine, mystified.
‘Well, dear, I don’t mean to make you nervous,’ Mrs Weilenmann said in her peculiarly formal diction, ‘but the Drummonds are gone, aren’t they? Having a great time, I hear, but they won’t be back for a couple of weeks. And the library is closed at night, in the summer, after six on weekdays; and for most of the weekend. So to one side of you and across from you, there’s no one. And on the other side of you, the street. But no one can see your yard from the street, because of the hedge. And behind you, there’s the hedge again, so the other reporter (he still rents from you, doesn’t he?) can’t see your back yard. And being single, I imagine Mr Mascalco isn’t there often. At night.’
Catherine gathered her hair up in a bundle and held it on top of her head.
‘I don’t mean to frighten you. I guess this sounds like I’m trying to. Really, I think I shouldn’t have said anything. But I hate to think of you alone in your house at night. Now I’m sorry I started this,’ she finished in a distressed rush.
‘What all this was leading up to (now that I’ve made a fool of myself by scaring you out of your wits) is that if you would like to stay with me, until this incident gets cleared up, I would love to have you.’
And in Lowfield that was, though Catherine could never compliment her for it, a remarkably brave offer from a black woman to a white woman. Not only was Mrs Weilenmann risking a shocked refusal, but, if Catherine accepted, Mrs Weilenmann would be extremely cramped in her rented crackerbox of a house – which was situated, like Bethesda Weilenmann, in a gray area between the black and white parts of town.
‘It sure is kind of you to offer,’ Catherine said slowly. ‘I really appreciate it. But I think I won’t take you up on that, unless I get scared.’ That seemed inadequate, and Catherine groped around for another way to explain.
‘You like being on your own,’ Mrs Weilenmann said unexpectedly and accurately. ‘I can understand; I do too. It isn’t easy for me to be “company” even overnight. I like to leave and go back to my own place, such as it is.’ Her face turned up in a smile. ‘So I do understand. But if you reconsider, I have a cot I can set up, and it would be no trouble at all. You’re a brave young woman, Catherine. And you’re not stupid, not stupid at all.’
Catherine thought sadly that Mrs Weilenmann must have been very disappointed in many people, to be so firm in praising these paltry recommendations.
‘Thanks for your good opinion,’ Catherine said, and gave Mrs Weilenmann one of her own rare smiles.
‘I’ll see you, then,’ Mrs Weilenmann said briskly, and headed back to her library.
Mrs Weilenmann’s article would have an extra-thick border, Catherine resolved.
* * * *
It had been a long day, even for a Monday. Catherine was covering her typewriter with a definite sense of relief as Tom walked in.
‘I haven’t seen you since this morning,’ she said idly. ‘Have you been working on the story about Leona?’
‘Yeah,’ Tom replied, one hand on the door. ‘I took my basic story back to Jewel this morning, but I told her to expect additions. I’ve interviewed everyone who knows anything, and I haven’t come up with a damn thing more than I knew this morning.’
‘You’ve been doing that all day?’
‘No. I went to the Lion’s Club meeting, too, for their usual ham and potato salad fest and speeches. The lieutenant governor spoke today. And then I had trouble with my car. I’ll have to take it into the shop again now.’
‘Too bad,’ Catherine said politely. ‘See you tomorrow.’
She began walking to her car, which was parked across the street by the courthouse.
‘Catherine!’
She turned and saw Randall hurrying across the street after her.
As she watched him come toward her, she realized she had been too busy all day to think about the date he had made with her that morning.
‘How was today?’ he asked.
‘If you really want to know—’ she said, and laughed.
‘Salton been asking too many graphic questions?’
‘Salton,’ said Catherine, shaking her head. ‘Salton says, and I have it from another source, that Leona was an abortionist. That explains something Sheriff Galton said to me yesterday.’
‘Good God,’ Randall said mildly. ‘I had no idea we had a village abortionist.’ He brooded for a moment. ‘What did Galton say yesterday?’ he asked finally, frowning.
‘He asked if I sold to Leona, or knew she had, some things from Father’s office. A sterilizer and instruments, I suppose, from what she seems to have been doing to support herself in her retirement.’ Catherine’s voice was arid.
‘He thinks you knew? Aided and abetted?’
‘Yes. Or alternatively, that I was a customer.’
Randall touched her hand.
‘Oh well. I can’t convince him different,’ she said. ‘And that’s not all.’
‘More? You have had a busy day.’
‘I’ll tell you now. We didn’t talk about this yesterday,’ Catherine said, putting her purse on the car hood and leaning against the driver’s door. He settled companionably beside her.
‘Leona left her money, her house, the whole kit and kaboodle, to my father. Naturally, she had made this will before he died, and just never changed it. I wish to God she had.’
‘You’re the legatee now?’
‘So it seems. Sheriff Gallon apparently thinks that constitutes a motive for me . . . and I guess it would, at that, if I didn’t have some money of my own. I like money,’ she said simply, ‘but I’m not avid for more.’ She paused to return the wave of Mrs Brighton, the mayor’s secretary.
‘But to keep to the track – Sheriff Galton didn’t give me a figure, but it seems there was quite a lot of money stashed in that little house. Now, I can’t imagine that many girls in Lowfield needed abortions. I think the bulk of it has to be blackmail payments.’
Randall nodded thoughtfully. She wanted to touch his hair.
‘I have evidently been living in a dream,’ Catherine went on quietly, ‘because I am really – flabbergasted – that so many people in Lowfield were blackmailable, if that’s a word.’
‘Who? Did Galton name names?’ asked Randall, looking at the ground.
Catherine was sharply reminded that Randall was a newspaper editor, in the business of spreading information. She became acutely uneasy at the way he was carefully avoiding her eyes. It was a moment of testing; she saw that painfully. Maybe I am brave, like Mrs Weilenmann said, she thought bleakly. She had opened her mouth to speak, when a new line of thought occurred to her. She asked, ‘Randall? Not you? Blackmail?’
He looked sad behind his glasses. He knew as well as she that this was a test of faith that had come too early; she could see that in his face.
He took a deep breath. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Maybe my mother.’
Catherine had tensed, afraid that they were going to shatter their fragile beginning. Now she relaxed.
‘Miss Angel?’ she said, incredulously. ‘I thought she was made of iron.’
‘She is,’ he answered with a half-smile. ‘But she has her chink. My father. He was a famous man, Catherine, at least in this state, and the newspaper is such a family tradition. Even a little weekly newspaper can become a name, when people like my grandfather and father run it. They were crusaders in their way. Brilliant men. Men who always had enemies.
‘And my father, I’ve found out, once took a bribe.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said swiftly, dismayed.
‘Well, just the outline.’ He took a moment to frame what he wanted to say. ‘The paper was losing money. Crusaders lose advertising revenue. Even though this is the only paper in the county, some people would rather rely on word-of-mouth, or advertising in the Memphis papers that everyone here takes, than pay money to the Gazette; at least while Dad was running it. And you know our family money was tied up by my great-grandfather; we can’t pump it into the Gazette. So at a critical point my father accepted some money from someone running for office, to keep the paper going. The candidate didn’t want one of his activities made known. My father was the only newspaperman who knew of this – activity.’ Randall pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
Catherine was trying to hide her shock Randall’s father had been one of her heroes.
‘My mother found out after he died, when she went through his personal papers. I reckon she thought she had hidden all the traces, but I found them when I took over the paper, and I asked her about it. She told me, finally. And I know she would give anything to have no one else on earth know.’
Catherine felt honored that Randall had shown confidence in her.
‘I don’t think you should worry,’ she said gently. ‘I don’t see how Leona could have known – unless your father told mine at his office, where she could have heard.’
‘It’s possible. They were friends. Close friends.’
‘You’ve been brooding about this.’
‘Not yesterday,’ he said, with the ghost of a smile. ‘But today, yes, I have. I heard rumors Saturday night, about Leona’s – sideline. One of the deputies couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the blackmail material and money they found in Leona’s house. Or maybe Galton wanted that leaked, to stir things up and see what rose to the surface.’
‘Miss Angel,’ Catherine began, and faltered. ‘You know your mother better than anyone else, I’m sure. But from what I know of Miss Angel, I’d just out-and-out ask her if she had been paying Leona to keep quiet. Your mother’s that kind of woman. I think if she’d wanted to do away with Leona, she would’ve shot her on the courthouse steps at high noon.’
‘I think so too,’ Randall said, and grinned at her. ‘Now that I’ve spilled my guts, what about yours?’
With no hesitation, she told him about Jewel Crenna and Martin Barnes, and about Sheriff Galton’s son.
Randall whistled.
‘Sounds like the entire population of Lowfield might have had excellent reasons to want Leona dead.’
‘I know,’ Catherine said. ‘I was so positive that the reason Leona died was the same reason my parents died. Now, I’m not sure.’
‘Does it eat at you? Your parents?’
‘How could it not? Vengeance sounds melodramatic, the very word . . . but that’s what I want. I want vengeance.’ She stopped. ‘This may not be what you want a woman to say to you, or what you want a woman to be.’ She clenched her fists and tried to pick her words with absolute accuracy. ‘But at my core, where I really live, I want vengeance on whoever killed my parents. My mother and father should not have died like that. It has altered me.’
‘I would wonder,’ he said quietly, ‘only if you didn’t feel that way.’
They stirred, shaking off the grip of strong emotions, ready to turn to light things, normal subjects.
‘Pick out a movie you want to see Friday,’ Randall said.
‘Early showing or late?’
‘Late. We’ll have dinner first, if that suits you.’
He opened her car door with an exaggerated flourish.
‘I declare, sir, how kind of you,’ Catherine said with an extravagant drawl and a simper.
Randall choked a surprised laugh.
‘I am your servant, you sweet flower of Southern womanhood,’ he responded instantly.
She gripped his hand for a second and then started the engine. She watched him walk back into the office before she pulled out to go home.
* * * *
It was a lackluster evening. Catherine found herself wandering around the house in search of something to do.
I’m completely shaken out of pattern, she reflected. And a good thing, too. Not much of a pattern to stick to.
There was dust on the furniture, and the bathroom needed a thorough scrubbing. This lack of order made Catherine irritable, but she was too restless to begin clearing it up.
When she started putting the clean dishes back into the kitchen cabinets, she came to a stop as her hand fell on an unfamiliar shape. Mrs Perkins’s casserole dish. Returning it was something concrete and necessary. She marched out her front door in a glow of virtue.
I’ll thank her so nicely and be such a lady she won’t be able to say a word about me, Catherine resolved.
The long summer day was fading as she left her house. She stopped on her doorstep to drink in the evening. The sky in the west was stained a dark strawberry-juice pink. The locusts were in full voice, their drone rising and falling in hypnotic rhythm. The humid warmth made her skirt limp against her legs, but the air was no longer stifling. As she moved on with a slower step, the grass rustled around her feet.
The streetlights were on. Catherine emerged from her yard onto the silent street, passing under the lamp at the corner. As she crossed the pavement, she barely bothered to glance right and left. It was a time for quiet in Lowfield.
She was embraced by the dusk, cast back for a few minutes into the time before Saturday, when she had felt shielded by the safety of her own town, street, and house, her unassailable heritage of land and good family.
Catherine sighed as she walked up the gleaming white concrete to the Perkins’s pillared verandah. As she lifted the polished brass knocker, she returned to the present.
It was a signal of her intention to be formal that she went to the front door, instead of to the back as a good neighbor would.
Carl Perkins answered the door. Catherine had been expecting Miss Molly, for some reason, and for a moment she was startled as his thickened frame filled the doorway. She wondered how he could endure the long sleeves he always wore. As a gust of air from the house rushed out to meet her, she decided she understood his preference, at least in his own home. The air was not only cooled, it was refrigerated.
