“Have you talked to Jerry Selforth, Tom?” Randall asked.

“Just for a second. He hasn’t done the autopsy. The pathologist in Morene won’t get here till late this afternoon. From a preliminary examination, he doesn’t think she was raped. She wasn’t killed at the shack, either. She was already dead when she was dumped there. He thinks she’d been dead since early last night.”

“Why?” Randall asked himself.

Catherine’s head swung up. She stared at him blindly.

A reason formed in her head. It caused her such pain that she couldn’t recognize it for a moment. Something thumped and shuddered inside her. An enormous wound, compounded of deep grief and unreleased anger, just beginning to heal, broke open afresh.

“Did she have money?” Tom was asking. He sounded far away.

“Oh no,” Randall said. “If she had, she kept it a secret and lived like a woman who has to be careful.”

Shuddering and screeching, about to be born.

“My parents,” Catherine whispered.

“What, Catherine?”

“My parents.”

“What did she say?” Tom’s voice; an irritating buzz, like a horsefly.

A murmur from Randall.

“I thought they died in a car wreck.” Tom, clearer now.

“They were murdered,” said Catherine.

“And you think Leona’s death ties in with theirs?” Randall asked quietly.

His voice steadied her.

“Oh yes, I think it has to be connected,” she said.

Tom looked bewildered, and angry about his bewilderment. They were talking about something he hadn’t found out yet.

“Their car was tampered with,” she told him. “They were on their way to spend the weekend with me. I was working at a weekly paper in Arkansas, my first job out of college…After they crossed the bridge into Arkansas, their car went out of control. Something-” and here Catherine, incurably machine-stupid, shook her head helplessly-“something was loosened with a wrench, deliberately. The Arkansas police investigated the service station they had stopped at there. Sheriff Galton looked here.”