A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 32
Without realizing she had moved, she was suddenly standing by him, looking down. He was on his back. He was very still, but blood was still running from his wounds. She watched a drop run down his cheek, over what had been his cheekbone. She watched it very carefully until it hit the thin carpeting and was absorbed in a larger stain.
‘Oh Tom,’ she said, and her fear was swallowed up by her grief. She dropped the gun on the trunk, knelt on the soaked carpet, and put her fingers to the pulse in his neck. It throbbed for a second that was a lifetime, and then the faint throb died.
There was a stillness about him, the total absence of movement that belongs only to the dead, after even the tiny motions of breathing are extinct.
I’m too late, she thought. She could feel the blood soaking through the denim covering her knees. I’m too late.
He was only wearing his trousers, and Catherine wanted to cover him up. He would hate everyone to see him like that, she thought. He would just hate it. And no one should see his face; I should not have seen his face.
There was a tiny movement at the edge of her vision.
Her head snapped up, and she was staring into Leila’s face. As she watched, that face stretched oddly.
‘Oh Leila, he’s dead,’ Catherine said in an involuntary whisper. ‘He just died.’
She rose to go to the girl, and Leila’s silent scream came out in a weak strangled ache of a sound. Catherine reached out to touch her, then looked at her hand. It was bloody.
‘Get away from me!’ Leila shouted, her voice becoming unchained. She backed against the wall with her arms stretched out to repel Catherine. Then she realized she had put her back against a smear of blood, and her scream ripped the room apart.
Catherine suddenly realized that Leila thought she had killed Tom. She also absorbed the peculiar fact that Leila was in her underwear.
The sound Leila made affected Catherine like alcohol in a cut.
‘Stop it!’ she said harshly, but Leila kept on. Catherine’s exasperation was heightened by shock. She felt positive joy in applying the classical method for dealing with hysterics. With no compunction at all, she hit Leila as hard as she could, and only felt a flash of dismay when she saw the girl stagger a few feet, from the force of the blow.
I didn’t know I was that strong, she thought in amazement. I guess I’ve never hit anyone before in my life.
The blow did indeed silence Leila, but it didn’t calm her in the least. Her terror was evident in her trembling body and distended eyes.
‘I didn’t do it,’ Catherine said flatly.
But Leila was not in her right mind. Her eyes were empty of reason.
Catherine was irrationally angry.
‘You stupid bitch! I didn’t do this! I found him like this!’
Leila seemed to return to her body. She pointed a shaking finger at Catherine’s bloody hands.
‘From the hall,’ Catherine explained. ‘The buzzer sounded.’ She pointed to the buzzer on the door frame. There was red spattering the wall around it. ‘You remember the buzzer. To the house. That my father used. I think Tom hit it in the struggle.’
Leila looked where Catherine’s finger was pointing. Her family had gone to Dr Linton. She nodded slowly, looking as if she finally understood. She deflated as fear of her own death left her, but she stared at Tom’s legs, her complexion changing from ashy brown to green.
‘Are you all right?’ Catherine asked ridiculously.
‘I’m going to vomit,’ Leila muttered.
Catherine was thankful for her knowledge of the house, for she swung the girl into the bathroom and over the toilet just in time. Shivering now with reaction, Catherine sat on the edge of the bathtub until Leila emptied her stomach.
‘I’ve got to call the police,’ Catherine said.
‘Not from here,’ Leila pleaded. She was a limp ghost of herself.
‘No,’ said Catherine, her own stomach heaving at the thought of staying there.
* * * *
Catherine’s courage was fast seeping away. But the need to get the younger girl out of the house, the responsibility for someone in worse shape than she herself was, kept her mind moving.
‘We have to go over to my house,’ she said. ‘Can you walk?’ A stupid question, she reflected, because Leila will just dammit have to walk, whether she thinks she can or not.
‘Come on,’ Catherine said, ‘if you’re through throwing up.’
Leila got to her feet with some assistance.
Catherine awoke to another need.
‘Clothes,’ she said sharply.
Leila looked down at herself and turned from green to red.
I didn’t know people could turn so many colors, Catherine thought.
‘Oh, Catherine,’ Leila began miserably.
‘I don’t give a damn,’ Catherine interrupted, ‘but I think no one else needs to know. Are your clothes in the bed-room?’
Leila nodded.
The bed was rumpled and Tom’s shirt and underwear were set neatly on a chair. Leila’s dress was on the floor, her shoes under it.
Dress, shoes. Underwear; Leila had that on. Hose? No, she didn’t wear them. What else? Purse, of course. Purse. For an awful moment, Catherine thought that it must be in the living room, until she spotted it by the side of the chair. She scanned the little bedroom for any other traces of Leila, but saw none. It might not hold up, but it was all she could do. Then she remembered her own possession in the house. She had to go into the living room after all. She went directly to the gun, grabbed it, and ran out.
Leila was slumped on the edge of the bathtub.
‘Here,’ Catherine said crisply. She helped Leila into the dress and sandals and kept charge of the purse.
‘Come on.’
She got Leila to her feet. Leila was by far the taller of the two. It was awkward for both of them, in a horribly comic way. Catherine put her arm around Leila’s waist and Leila put hers around Catherine’s neck. Somehow they supported each other down the spattered hall, out the open back door, and across the yard. They had to go slowly, tottering like two drunks through the gap in the hedge.
‘I’m afraid,’ Leila whispered, and the dark between the houses suddenly held ominous possibilities that Catherine had forgotten in her haste to leave the abattoir that had been Tom’s home. She was hopelessly burdened. Leila and Leila’s purse would make her too slow with the gun.
Catherine felt Leila begin to shake again, and heard the girl’s breath become more like sobbing. They would never make it if Leila collapsed. Catherine was coming to the end of her strength. I will go mad if Leila screams again, she thought.
‘Come on,’ Catherine hissed through clenched teeth. Leila’s arm around her neck was pinning her hair down, and the pain kept Catherine from panicking.
She had to use every muscle she possessed to haul Leila up the steps to her den. She dumped the girl on a couch and wobbled into the kitchen. She didn’t sit down while she dialed the police, but leaned against the wall. She knew that if she sat down she would not be able to get up, and something still had to be done for the girl in her den.
By now Catherine almost hated Leila.
She said something, she never remembered what, into the telephone when it was answered at the sheriff’s office. She hung up when an excited voice began to ask questions. Then she dropped her gun into a handy drawer. Before she returned to the girl, there was something she was going to do for herself.
She fumbled with the tiny Lowfield telephone directory, opening it with ponderous care to the ‘G’ page. She read the numbers out loud to herself and dialed with that same nerve-wracking slowness.
He answered the telephone himself.
‘Randall,’ she said, enunciating very deliberately. Then she was unable to speak.
‘Catherine?’
‘Randall . . . I wish you would come. Tom is dead.’
The silence was full of questions he was not going to ask yet.
‘Tom is dead,’ she repeated, and carefully hung up the phone, because she was afraid she was going to say it again.
She wondered what she had been planning to do next. Then she remembered Leila, and looked around the kitchen for something to take the girl. The most useful thing she could see was a roll of paper towels.
I think this is shock, she told herself. With precise movements, in slow motion, she picked up the roll of paper towels and began her slow trip back to the den.
As it turned out, the towels were a good idea. Leila had dissolved in tears by now, and she began choking out her story almost incoherently when Catherine reappeared.
Catherine handed Leila the roll, or rather simply thrust it into the girl’s lap. She debated whether or not she could now sit down, and decided she could. She sat by the weeping girl and fixed a wide gray gaze on the pretty face now fuzzy with tears.
‘We had a date,’ Leila choked, ‘but his car was in the shop, so I had to drive over to his place, but I parked the car a block away because I didn’t want anyone to tell Mama and Daddy, you know how people here tell your parents everything . . .’
Catherine automatically ripped a towel off the roll and stuffed it into Leila’s hands. Leila looked at it as if she had never seen one, and used it.
‘Oh, I loved him so much, and he was so good-looking . . . You know how it is . . . I just couldn’t help it.’ A pause for another application of the towel. ‘And then when we were in bed, I mean, after it was over, there was a sound in the hall—’
I hope it was good for Tom, Catherine thought clearly. It better have been good.
‘—and he got up and put on his pants, and he told me to stay quiet, not to move. He just whispered right up close to my ear, I was so . . . scared . . . “I left the damn door unlocked,” he said.’
Leila turned her ruined face to Catherine, and her long hand gripped Catherine’s frail wrist with painful strength.
‘He went out and then I heard sounds, oh God, sounds. They hit the walls and came off them, out in the hall and then in the living room. I heard things falling and turning over. I thought there must be five people out there, I swear to God. And I couldn’t keep quiet any more, I screamed. And I thought someone ran out of the house. So I waited for Tom to come get me. I thought he’d come in and say it had been a burglar. When he didn’t come back, I thought he was calling the police. And I wanted to get up and get dressed before they got there. But I couldn’t . . . I was too scared. I waited and waited, and I couldn’t hear anything. So then I put my underwear on, as quiet as I could. I thought at least I could start getting ready. And then I heard the screen door. And it was you. I thought it was the man coming back. I guess it was a man. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to see. I couldn’t wait for Tom anymore.’
Sirens and lights outside.
* * * *
The difference was that this time Randall was there, and his mother Angel. Randall only left Catherine once, to identify Tom formally. Angel made coffee and more coffee. And she greeted Leila’s parents and led them to their weeping daughter.
Catherine observed dryly that Leila had recovered enough wits to protect herself: the girl edited her story to say that she and Tom had been sitting in the living room when they heard the noise of someone prowling, and that Tom has hustled her into the bedroom for her protection. That left open the question of why Tom hadn’t called the police from the telephone in the living room, but Catherine decided that on the whole Leila had done well.
Then it was Catherine’s turn.
She was holding an embroidered pillow in her lap. She remembered her mother’s hands setting in the stitches. She had moved it from its place in the corner of the couch, so that she could jam herself into that corner as tightly as possible. The couch protected her right side and her back, and Randall was a solid wall on her left. Her fingers went over and over the embroidery her mother had worked on for hours. While Sheriff Galton asked her questions, her fingers never quit moving, in contrast to her face, which felt stiff, as if it didn’t fit her skull very well.
Why had she not heard the screams Leila said she had given?
Because if Leila was shut in the bedroom, I wouldn’t.
Why had she gone over to the house?
I heard the buzzer, he was calling me. I was too late. I heard a rustle in the grass, before the buzzer went off.
Why hadn’t she called the police?
I thought it was a bird. I guess now it was – whoever . . .
She was grateful for Randall and his mother, but she had gone where Randall could not reach her. She knew he was there, she felt his warmth and knew he was supporting her. She knew Angel was smoothing the way with cups of coffee and her mere presence, for Angel Gerrard, with her erect figure and carefully tended white hair, was a strong and influential woman and an impressive ally.
Catherine desperately wanted to reach out to them, to talk to them, to touch Randall’s broad hand, but she could not. She looked at them from the corner of her eye. When they looked at her, she turned away: for suspicion hung around her like the heavy summer air.
She saw it in the eyes of the police, she saw it in the way Leila’s parents carefully ignored her.
She heard one of the deputies ask Leila if the clothing Catherine was wearing now was the same she had worn when Leila saw her kneeling by Tom’s body. She saw the deputy look at the blood dried on her knees, and at the smears on her hand.
No one would look directly at her face.
People might accept that she had happened to find one body, but not two, Catherine saw.
Not that she had been first on the scene two times.
Not that she had reported two murders. In three days.
The bruise forming on Leila’s face, where Catherine had hit her, was examined by suspicious eyes. Leila had included the blow in her recital, and she had been quite graphic in describing how she was knocked to the wall by the force of Catherine’s open hand.
Catherine saw very clearly that her frame was being reassessed with regard to its strength.
In a sideways glance, Catherine saw Angel Gerrard’s back get stiffer and stiffer during Leila’s account. A gleam entered Angel’s alert brown eyes.
‘I wonder how soon you can fire that girl?’ Angel said very quietly to Randall, when the room was momentarily emptied of all but the three of them.
‘I won’t wait too long,’ Randall said grimly. There was a rough edge to his voice that Catherine had never heard before.
‘Of course she was in bed with the boy,’ Angel said briskly. She looked at Catherine for confirmation.
For the first time, Catherine met Angel’s eyes directly. She nodded.
‘I thought so,’ Angel said. ‘She’s a pretty thing, but she has the brains of a gourd. I wonder that she manages to file things correctly.’
‘She doesn’t,’ Randall said.
‘Catherine,’ Angel said sharply.
Catherine kept her face averted.
‘Look at me, girl,’ Angel said more sharply.
Catherine did, and felt as if she had gotten a shot of amphetamine.
‘Did you hit that girl?’
‘Yes,’ Catherine replied.
‘Good. Now wipe that guilt off your face. None of us thinks you had anything to do with this.’
Randall’s arm tightened around her shoulders, and he gave her a little shake, as if to jog her circulation back into action.
She began to feel warm. The sluggishness of strain and fear were slowly draining away.
Sheriff Galton came in the back door. He looked haggard, years older. He seemed so ill that Catherine was on the verge of urging him to see a doctor, when she realized how ludicrous that would sound.
The sheriff dropped into a chair and looked at her wearily.
‘Did Tom tell you that he knew anything about Leona Gaites’s murder?’
‘You know how he was,’ she answered. ‘He made big noises about digging into it and finding out something that you-all didn’t know. But I don’t think it came to anything?’
‘You sure? He said nothing to you about finding something?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Well,’ Galton muttered, passing a huge hand over his face, ‘there’s that marijuana in his house. Maybe something to do with that.’
Why didn’t I remember to take that with me? Catherine thought. Then she remembered that Tom had bought the dope from James Galton Junior. She exchanged a quick look with Randall and hunched deeper in the sofa. Angel caught the exchanged glance, and rose to go to the kitchen to replenish the coffeepot.
‘You know anything about that marijuana?’ Galton asked her.
Now she was in a corner.
‘I don’t think Tom’s death has anything to do with that,’ she said.
‘Am I going to have to search your house, too?’
‘I saw it in his house when I went there Sunday,’ she said. ‘He told me he had bought it locally. That’s all I know.’
The sheriff might not be admitting to himself what his son was doing, but Catherine could see that he knew. When he heard the word locally, he ran his hand over his face again.
‘Where’s Tom’s car?’ he asked abruptly.
‘In the shop; Don’s,’ she said.
‘It would look like Tom wasn’t home,’ Randall observed.
Catherine turned and looked at him. Sheriff Galton nodded slowly.
‘Especially with the lights off, just the one light on in the living room,’ Galton thought out loud. ‘Maybe this was just breaking and entering that turned into something else when Tom came out of the bedroom unexpectedly.’
But his voice held no conviction.
‘I overheard that the wounds are similar to Leona’s,’ Randall said expressionlessly. ‘Is that true?’
‘Yes,’ said the sheriff. ‘Very similar. But then, in any homicide by beating with a blunt instrument, they would be.’
A little idea began to trickle through Catherine’s tired mind. But when she tried to focus on the tenuous thought, it dissolved. I should have let it alone, she thought. If I had let it alone, it would have formed.
