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.