Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

by Charlaine Harris

  She thought of the light streaming from the open door behind her; of her outline, presented clearly to whatever was out there in the night.

  In that interminable moment she was reminded of dreams she had had as a child, dreams in which danger threatened. In those dreams, she could never decide whether moving with elaborate unconcern or moving like lightning would save her. Some nights she tried one thing, some nights another. Which now? she wondered.

  The sound was not repeated. Whatever was out there, beyond the pool of light from her house, was standing as still as she was.

  Waiting to see what I will do.

  What will I do?

  If I move fast, if I show fear, it will be on me, she thought.

  The watcher assumed the dimensions of the phantoms of her dreams, enormously big and perpetually hungry-and too awful to have to face.

  She turned very quietly and without haste, opened the screen door and stepped inside her house. Very quietly and without haste she shut the heavy wooden door behind her. Then with fingers that were not at all quiet and were extremely hasty, she locked the door and leaned against it. She slid down the door until her rear hit the floor, and there she stayed until her breathing became more regular.

  Should I call the police. To say what? I heard something in the grass and I’m scared, Sheriff Galton. I heard something in the grass…

  And though she was sharply and clearly glad that no one would ever know she was doing it, she crept on her knees to the nearest window and huddled below it to listen.

  A dry whisper in the grass. It had resumed movement.

  She raised her head cautiously and peered through the screen. In the light from the window, she saw a bird hopping through the yard. As she watched, it triumphantly pulled a bug from the grass and hopped away with its prey.

  “Goddamn! Don’t you know you’re supposed to be asleep?” she asked the bird hoarsely. It was understandably startled and flew off, taking care to retain the bug even in its fright.

  Catherine expelled a long breath and slumped against the wall. As she was about to give a self-conscious laugh at her panic, she changed her mind. It wasn’t funny.

  I don’t care that I looked crazy as hell, she told her inward critic. I really don’t care.

  She sat there for a few minutes, letting her body calm down gradually.

  “Oh boy,” she said. “Oh boy.”

  She had just scrambled clumsily to her feet when she heard a faint, curious buzz.

  She turned her head to one side, trying to identify the source of that half-familiar sound.

  The buzz came again, after she had hesitantly started down the hall to her bedroom in obedience to an obscure urging that told her it was the right place to go.

  The second time she heard the sound, she recognized it.

  It was the buzzer in her father’s old office.

  Someone’s calling for him, but he’s not here, she thought. He’s dead.

  Her skin crawled.

  For a third time the buzzer made its rasping appeal.

  “It’s Tom,” she said out loud. Tom. Playing a stupid joke.

  But he had promised he wouldn’t. She couldn’t recall him breaking a promise. He had been so serious when she had told him never to play a joke on her with the buzzer.

  Something was wrong.

  When she reached the master bedroom, she half expected to see her father’s head rising sleepily from his pillow in answer to the summons from his office.

  She stared at the place where the sound of the buzzer issued, by the bed on the side where her father had slept.

  He’s calling me, she thought. Tom is calling me.

  The buzzer fell silent.

  Tom, she told herself with an effort. Not Father.

  “I am not a fool,” she said. She pulled open the drawer of her bedside table, grabbed her gun, and ran back down the hall.

  Catherine didn’t think of the fear that had just let go of her ankles. She was needed, and she had to go, to run, to get there before it was too late.

  Out the back door. Fumble with the light switch that would illumine that terrifying yard. A quick scan after the light was on.

  The yard was empty.

  Running through the grass, avoiding the stepping-stones that would have tripped her in her haste. Through the hedge that seemed to clutch at her.

  She was almost at Tom’s back door when she saw that it was wide open. She stopped so suddenly that she wobbled back and forth, and had to struggle to keep her balance. A faint light glowed from the open rectangle. The door ajar to the hot night confirmed her feeling that something was horribly wrong. She held her gun ready.

  Not even the eerie sound of the buzzer had been as frightening as that open door was. As she crept closer, she could feel the rush of cooled air escaping from the house.

  She eased open the screen door as quietly as she could. It creaked a little and she held her breath.

  The doors all along the short hall were shut. The faint glow was coming from the living room, and she was looking at it so fixedly that she failed to see the red splotches against the hall’s white paint, until a thread trickled down from a larger splash. Its tiny movement, slow and hesitant, caught the corner of her eye. She stared at it and wondered if she could move.

  There was no sound in the house except the hum of air conditioning behind one of the closed doors. The night, let in through the back door, held its breath.

  Because she had to, she began to go forward, her hand against the wall for support. She snatched it away when it encountered wetness.

  The hall resembled every nightmare she had ever dreamed. But the thing in the grass had gotten someone else instead of her.

  As she moved closer to the light, closer to the living room, her scalp began to crawl.

  “Tom?” she whispered.

  The living room was a shambles. This disorder in what had been so neat struck her first. She didn’t see Tom for a moment; then she saw his legs, his long thin legs, extending beyond the trunk that had served as his coffee table.

  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 absense 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.
r />   “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 bedroom?”

  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.