Voice Out of Darkness

by Ursula Curtiss

  “Told you later on,” Michael repeated. “Weren’t you—”

  “I got pneumonia too. We were in the hospital at the same time, so that poor Aunt Belinda and Uncle John practically slept there for weeks. Cassie came to see me every day after school, but we never talked about what Monica had said. I started to, once, but Cassie got very impatient and said she’d already forgotten it and it wasn’t true anyway, so neither of us ever mentioned it again.”

  Katy got up off the couch, chilled and stiff. It was after eleven; if the little clock had said three in the morning she wouldn’t have been surprised. Snow wove and fluttered past the windows, the wind was still from the east. She said suddenly, “There’s just one more thing. I heard something up at the other end of the pond, a branch stirring, or a twig breaking. I heard it more than once. It could have been the wind, of course. But it was so still that day.”

  After Michael had gone—had thrown away her untasted drink and insisted on making her a fresh one, had asked more questions, had folded the letters into his pocket and said abruptly that he’d call her in the morning, had kissed her so gently and quickly that she wasn’t really aware of it until the door had closed behind him—Katy went determinedly to bed.

  Washing coffee cups and glasses and turning off lights, she tried to analyze the feeling that had been growing and strengthening ever since October, when the first of the letters had come. It wasn’t remorse, because she didn’t feel, had never felt guilty. She had tried to get Monica to go home, and Monica wouldn’t. She had reached out forcibly for Monica’s arm, and Monica had deliberately evaded her hand.

  It wasn’t grief, because there had never been that, either, not even when she had first come out of the hospital and they had told her carefully that Monica had been buried a week ago. There had just been shock and dimly-understood horror and the somehow mystifying absence of Monica from the table, from their bedroom, from the oak-shaded hill and the field full of tawny waving grass where they had played and quarreled and grown up together.

  It was, Katy supposed detachedly, the gentle beginning of fear.

  Because someone who had no right to know knew what Monica had said, and was twisting a child’s accusation into a brutal, repeated thrust.

  Because it was no random malice that, having conceived and written the letters, went to the trouble of delivering them to her door—cautiously undated, un-post-marked. Not once, but three times. Someone, too, who knew not only her address but her apartment number.

  Because if there was a purpose, it was blind and warped and could only be, Katy thought wryly, to produce exactly the state of mind which it was producing. First stage, distaste. Second stage, anger. Third stage, might as well admit it, fear. After that—what? And where was the satisfaction, if you couldn’t be on hand to watch your victim squirm?

  The warm little apartment seemed suddenly very empty and isolated and full of odd noises. Nonsense, thought Katy, and went on listening. The clock. Had it always been that loud? The windows—but then the weather-stripping was venerable. A dripping; she’d turned that faucet off. And this, she said to herself with grim amusement, is precisely what you are supposed to be feeling, my girl. Better look in your closet, and under your bed.

  She did.

  After that she took an aspirin, switched off the lights and got instantly into bed. Michael had the letters, they were gone from the bookcase. It was as comforting as though someone had removed the dead rat in its trap that had kept you out of the kitchen. Michael would call her in the morning and be very sane and constructive. Feeling protected, Katy went to sleep.

  She woke to the last faint echo of a church bell, with the impression that it had just struck four. It had stopped snowing but the night was almost white with it, the hushed snowlight spreading up from the streets and roofs. Slushy in the morning, Katy thought drowsily, and sat up, shivering, to pull up her comforter.

  Cassie Poole and Jeremy Taylor were in New York today. So were a few thousand other out-of-towners.

  But not all from Fenwick, Connecticut.

  The comforter was delightfully warm. Katy rolled herself into a complicated cocoon and tucked the pillow under her cheek. Sharp and clear and positive as though it were the result of hours of indecision, she thought, I’ll go back to Fenwick, it’s someone there, and slept and didn’t awake until morning.

  Paige’s, the fledgling Macy’s sired by an austere old Fifth Avenue corporation, towered sixteen stories high on Sixth Avenue. Advertising was on the fourteenth; Katy walked up the hall, initialed the space next to her name on the copywriters’ time sheet, wrote 9:14 after it, and collided violently with Stan Smith, who wrote drug and cosmetics copy and with whom she usually lunched.

  Stan backed away and looked at her. “Late night,” she said judiciously. “Intemperance and worse. You know what’s good for that?”

  “Paige’s Pacifies,” Katy said, edging away. “No thanks. I had trouble sleeping, that’s all.”

  “It’s difficult at those noisy little bars,” Stan agreed. “There’s a copy meeting at ten, so no coffee. See you later.”

  Copy meeting at ten—she couldn’t talk to Michael, then, until well after eleven. Katy went on into the copy department, took off her coat and hat and boots, reclaimed her ashtray from a neighboring desk, and settled down to work. The talk with Michael and her four o’clock decision had smoothed the roughening edges of her nerves; she should, of course, have done both before this. But that was on the schedule, too. You didn’t just say, as a conversational gambit, “By the way, I’ve just had another letter accusing me of murdering my foster-sister.” Not to Stan, whom she had known well for two years. Not even, until two months of waiting and dread had had their way, to Michael.

  Her phone rang. A buyer with a voice like a hornet demanded to know why her merchandise had been mis-keyed in the News; customers were insisting on fifteen-ninety-five hats for nine-ninety-five and the department was in an uproar. Katy investigated, said soothingly that the News would send a letter of apology and explanation, and hung up. The day at Paige’s had begun.

  The store’s advertising department, one of the largest and most frenzied in New York, wasn’t a place for leisured meditation. Noise and confusion and the pressure of deadlines battered and drove from every side. Voices lifted out of the steady humming pattern: a copywriter asking of the department at large the name of a particularly fresh-sounding flower; a shriek of laughter from the basement writer, whose Mirror proof announced that Paige’s scouring pads were impregnated with vegetable “soup” instead of “soap”; a bellowed warning from the production department that all Times and Tribune proofs must be okayed and released by two o’clock.

  Normally, a routine day plunged Katy into complete oblivion of everything but Paige merchandise by ten o’clock as she divided her time between typewriter and phone. There were pleased buyers, and buyers who gibbered with rage. There were acid penciled comments from the copy chief, and blue-moon moments of excited approval. There were the crises, like the time her wild-mink ad had run in the first three thousand editions of an evening paper as mild mink. There was, every day, the challenge and fascination of convincing matrons in the Bronx and sleek Manhattan secretaries, doubting mothers in Pelham and pretty, expensive girls all over New York that there was nothing like Paige’s Fabulous Fashions Floor.

  Stan Smith, who knew vaguely of Katy’s inheritance, had been frankly incredulous. “Work in this slave-ship when you don’t absolutely have to? Ah, well. Weak in the head. Young and fetching and mad as a hatter—”

  “I like it,” Katy had interrupted calmly. “And anyway, what else would I be doing with myself? And why don’t you go back to your dreadful drugs and potions and leave me alone?”

  But, today, her typewriter stumbled over headlines she’d have to rewrite later, and her phone was a maddening and persistent enemy. She told herself crisply that Michael had work to do too and couldn’t drop everything just to call and be comforting; in spite of hers
elf her hand went out eagerly at every ring. And it was the debutante-dress department with a correction in a color listing, or Mr. Carrara of Better Furs to say bitterly that his Persian lamb ad looked like matted cat, or timid Mr. Wilsham, assistant in Raincoats, asking shyly for a lunch date.

  Two weeks, thought Katy, being firm and gentle with Mr. Wilsham. Two weeks in Fenwick will be enough, because then I’ll either know who and why or I’ll know I can never find out…

  It was, finally, two-thirty when Michael called. Katy had sat, wriggling, through an endless copy meeting in which the advertising manager made windy statements about an institutional approach to all copy in the future and Stan, sitting beside Katy and listening with a rapt and reverent face, wrote a letter to her mother in San Antonio. Immediately after the meeting, Katy had maneuvered for and been granted a two-weeks’ leave of absence, based on one large inspired lie. She had then rushed a protesting Stan through a sandwich at lunch, and at two-twenty-five was smoking a cigarette she didn’t want. When the phone rang and Michael’s far-off voice said, “Hello? Katy? Is Miss Meredith there?” she was lightheaded with relief. “It’s me,” she said. “I. Hello.”

  “Was going to call you earlier,” Michael said, “but I had to get in touch with a friend of mine. He’s a lieutenant in homicide. He—er—we’d like to have a drink with you tonight.”

  All at once Katy felt chilled again. “Oh, Michael—”

  “You’ll like him.” Michael was firm. “He’ll be quite unofficial. He’s probably come up against this before and he’ll know whether there’s anything in it and what you’d better do.”

  “But I know what I’m going to do,” said Katy, bracing herself. “I’m—”

  “—can’t hear you,” Michael said, himself receding. His voice came back. “Is eight all right?”

  “I’m going there,” said Katy. “Going there, Michael.”

  “You’re going out?”

  “No, I said-”

  “Will you be back at nine-thirty?” said Michael, baffled.

  “Five cents, please,” said the operator.

  “Eight,” said Katy desperately.

  “Five, madam,” said the operator coldly.

  “Dear God. Eight, Michael,” Katy said, unnerved, and put an end to it by hanging up.

  Michael Blythe and a stranger in a gray overcoat were standing in the fourth floor hall when Katy stepped out of the elevator that night. She had worked late and had dinner at a small Italian restaurant on Tenth Street on her way home. She had told herself, briskly, that she simply had to get next week’s headlines written. She knew perfectly well that she hadn’t wanted to come back, alone, to the unlighted silence of her own apartment.

  She was disconcerted, in the midst of her apologies for lateness, by Lieutenant Hooper’s mild and wrenlike appearance; he looked, she thought, like a portrait of a Pelham commuter. Rubbers. Plaid woolen muffler, an air of having been assembled, eyed critically, and finally dismissed on the 8:32 by a bustling, dutiful wife. Except for his eyes: shrewd, steady, impartial as jewelers’ scales.

  Katy collected coats and hats, bore them off to the bedroom, and came back to the living room to find Michael and Lieutenant Hooper talking amiably about the governor’s speech. Now that the time had come to discuss the letters with an unofficial representative of the law, she felt childish and a little guilty, as though she had just turned in a false fire alarm. Lieutenant Hooper would think she was upset over nothing, he would say kindly that these things happened every day and not to worry, and go off musing tolerantly about taxpayers who wanted to get their money’s worth out of the police force. Katy cursed Michael silently and said aloud with an effort, “I suppose Michael’s told you about the letters, Lieutenant. Have you seen them? ”

  “Yes,” Lieutenant Hooper said. “They refer, according to Mr. Blythe, to the accidental death of your foster-sister. I’d like that in detail in a minute or two. Do you happen to remember the date when you got the first of the letters, Miss Meredith?”

  “Early in October,” Katy said slowly. “The fourth or fifth, I think, because I’d forgotten to send the rent check and I thought at first it was about that.”

  “And the second letter?”

  Katy shook her head. “At around the middle of November—I don’t know the exact date. I’d been away for a week-end in Philadelphia, and it was here when I got back. The last one came yesterday.”

  The lieutenant nodded. He said, “Now if you’d tell me, yourself, what you told Mr. Blythe last night—” and Michael winked reassuringly down the room at Katy and Katy began to talk.

  The room was very quiet when she finished. The night was cold and windless and there was, in the living room, the maddening ghost of Monica: drenched blonde hair streaming across her forehead, bluish lips moving, voice saying coldly, “Katy pushed me.” Katy looked down at her hands. She said, “I suppose I’m getting nerves over nothing. It’s probably… just spite, just—”

  “Maybe,” said Lieutenant Hooper demurely. “Maybe not. Why do you think Monica accused you of pushing her, Miss Meredith?” When Katy looked up, startled at his tone, he went on, “If what you say is true about her being quite coherent, if you hadn’t come close enough to touch her before the ice broke, she couldn’t honestly have thought that you pushed her. But she said so, in no uncertain terms.”

  “I don’t think she did think so,” Katy said candidly. “I knew Monica, you see. I think she was getting all set for a bad scolding at home. You know—I’d gotten in a temper because she wouldn’t come, and pushed her. Then too she’d had a terrible fright and a thorough drenching, and at that age she probably felt humiliated in front of Cassie. But she didn’t know she was going to die. None of us did, of course.”

  “You don’t think,” said Lieutenant Hooper pleasantly, looking more like a wren than ever, “that your friend Cassie Poole could have… put ideas into Monica’s head?”

  Cassie. Fourteen years old, and looking like a pocket-sized Powers model. Smoky three-cornered blue eyes over delicate cheekbones, shining brown-black hair, a charm that came partly from apparent unawareness of her own head-turning beauty; Cassie, the idol of the seventh grade even though the Pooles hadn’t, people in Fenwick said, a penny to bless themselves with. No, Katy thought violently, and shook her head.

  “Or,” Lieutenant Hooper suggested gently, “that Monica could have said ‘Cassie’ instead of ‘Katy’?”

  He asked a great many questions after that. When had the Merediths themselves died? In an automobile crash on their way back from Canada, when Katy was nineteen. How was the Meredith estate left? A few bequests—to a hospital, a doctor in Santa Fe, a cousin of Aunt Belinda’s, twice-removed, in San Francisco—and the capital, about ninety thousand dollars, to Katy.

  “I haven’t touched it,” Katy said, suddenly and inexplicably defensive. “I did at first, of course, when I came to New York. Clothes and a room and things until I found a job, and after that expenses until I found a job that paid its way. But I’ve put most of it back since then, in a separate account. Not because of what happened, but just because—I wanted it to stay untouched.”

  Because, said something inside her mockingly, Monica said a few words at the edge of the little pond, and threw a net over you. You didn’t notice it for a long time, because the net was loose and comfortable and you didn’t know it was there. But it is, and it’s tightening, and how do you like it, Miss Meredith?

  “—the house in Fenwick?” Lieutenant Hooper was asking.

  Katy made herself think. “A cousin of Uncle John’s—Pauline Trent. She has it for her lifetime. It comes to me, eventually.”

  “You don’t know of anyone,” Lieutenant Hooper said intently, “anyone, Miss Meredith, who’d be apt to send letters like these?”

  Cassie. Jeremy Taylor, much older than she, with whom she’d held hands in the movies, once, for an hour and a half of awe and delight. Cassie’s mother, Francesca Poole, who for all her poverty brought a fain
t redolence of Monte Carlo and Biarritz and a dazzling past to eager, curious, starved little Fenwick. Cassie’s father, Arnold Poole, tall and wiry and charmingly lazy, who had left Francesca and settled down, spang in the middle of town, with a mysterious, unattached sculptress. Pauline Trent, whom she’d met perhaps three times, and couldn’t even remember.

  “No,” said Katy. “That’s why I’m going back—wait a second, Michael.” She was leaning forward now, hazel eyes bright between thick dark lashes. Good-looking, thought Lieutenant Hooper, gazing politely back at her. Not pretty, and too tall, but dash, as Mrs. Hooper would say, and plenty of it.

  “It must be someone in Fenwick. It has to be,” Katy said, “because it happened so long ago, and who else would know the circumstances without having lived there? It wasn’t in any papers. And aside from you, Michael, I’ve nothing but casual acquaintances in New York.” She stopped suddenly, very pink. “Nobody, I mean, who knows where I lived before this. Or has any connection with anybody in Fenwick.”

  “So far as you know,” Lieutenant Hooper pointed out. “But I’m inclined to agree with you. You think somebody might come out in the open, once you were actually there?”

  “Either that,” said Katy, “or I might know. I might be able to tell.”

  At the other end of the room Michael was still looking disapproving and unconvinced. He got up and took a few restless steps toward the window. He frowned out at the snowy roofs. He said, “Katy, don’t you think that’s what someone intends you to do? Go back to Fenwick and get tangled up in God knows what?”

  “I don’t know,” Katy said, “but I do know that I can’t just sit here and—wait. I know it’s silly, but pretty soon I’d start being afraid to open the door when anyone rang.” And you’d go on thinking about Monica and the whole thing, her mind said, until maybe you wouldn’t be quite sure that your hand hadn’t touched Monica’s arm and sent her crashing through the ice.