“You got troubles, Catherine?” rumbled a carefully relaxed voice. Catherine saw Mrs. Cory’s platinum head give a shake in answer to some silent query of Galton’s.

Now that the time had come to deliver her message, Catherine found herself curiously embarrassed, as if she were about to commit a deliberate faux pas.

She turned her head stiffly to look up at Galton.

“There’s a dead woman in an old tenant house. On the place.”

“You sure she’s dead?”

Catherine’s face was blank as she stared at him. “Oh, yes,” she said.

“A black woman?”

“No,” she said, and felt the ripple of surprise. Lowfield white women did not get themselves dumped in tenant shacks.

“Do you know who it is?”

“No. No.” Her voice sounded odd to her own ears. “She’s covered in blood.”

Galton’s face changed as she stared at him. He didn’t look like the relaxed and genial Jimmy Galton who had been her father’s friend.

He looked like the sheriff.

Catherine had assumed she could go home after informing the sheriff of her discovery.

She had, she soon realized, been thinking like a child.

Galton issued a few commands to Mrs. Cory, who got busy on the radio and telephone. He gently but quite firmly led Catherine into his office, guided her to the chair in front of his desk, and then eased himself into his own battered chair.

“You want to go to the doctor for a tranquilizer?”

But the doctor was her father. He was dead.

No, she thought, horrified. No. She shook her head to clear her thoughts. This kind of confusion hadn’t happened to her in a long time; she had thought it was over with.

“Want something to drink?”

“No,” she whispered.

He indicated his pack of cigarettes.