… any one of them. Katy closed her eyes against a peppering of starlight and thought again, blurredly, any one of them…
“Nothing to be alarmed about,” said Lieutenant Hooper over bacon and eggs on the following morning. “Nothing else taken from Mr. Blythe’s apartment in New York, no attack on Mr. Blythe himself. Just some sketches gone. Charcoals, I think. He said you’d know the ones he meant.”
Katy did. She was briefly, sharply furious instead of afraid, because the sketches that had been removed from Michael’s Thirty-eighth Street apartment were the charcoals she’d wanted to have matted and framed after they were married. Landscapes, most of them, and one of an old woman picking her way fearfully through a snowy street, shawl hugged tight, ragged skirt lifted. They were beautiful things, so alive that in the winter scenes you could almost see cold mauve and chilly starlit green and the muted silvers of snow. There were perhaps six of them altogether. They’d been done, Michael said carelessly, years ago, but you could see from the way his eyes went back to them that he liked them too.
She forced a smile. “Maybe Michael’s got a rabid fan, who can’t wait for the next issue of Panorama. It can’t have anything to do with—”
Hooper shrugged. “Probably not. Some rather erratic thief, more likely, who took a fancy to the sketches and got alarmed before he had a chance to take anything else. Still, it mightn’t do any harm to check. That was Sunday—trains ought to be fairly few and far between, and the ticket agent would probably remember if one of these people had bought a ticket to New York. We’ll see.”
Katy played with her coffee spoon. “What did the police think when you told them about Miss Whiddy?” Lieutenant Hooper smiled thinly. He said, “They weren’t as surprised as you thought they’d be, Miss Meredith. There were photographs of the body. Somebody apparently wasn’t satisfied to begin with.”
She looked up wordlessly. Hooper said, flatly, “Bruises. A whole handful of them, dark and very recently inflicted, on the right shoulder. Not inconceivable that she’d managed to do it herself, of course, or that it didn’t happen naturally. But, with the other evidence…”
“Then they weren’t taken in,” Katy said. “They did think she hadn’t just fallen, all along.” She felt relieved. She had, after all, through fear and confusion and a feeling of futility, concealed the evidence that made Miss Whiddy’s death murder.
Lieutenant Hooper gave her a sharp look. “It’s imperative,” he said slowly, “that you keep that to yourself, Miss Meredith. The very nature of these murders, the apparent accidents… Abbott thinks he has a great deal to gain by playing along, and he’s managed to convince the state’s man. I told Mr. Blythe when I talked to him last night. But you’re not to mention it to anyone else. There’ll be people questioned, naturally. But right now there’s to be no outright mention of murder.”
No outright mention of murder, when someone strolled casually among them, serene because of two pairs of silenced lips, two threats eliminated, two new graves in the hard December ground. Someone, perhaps, who extended a cigarette to her, or held a match… Lieutenant Hooper caught her eye and smiled again. It wasn’t his demure commuter’s smile; it was probably, Katy thought, his hunting smile. He said, “That doesn’t mean the police here won’t be watching every move, Miss Meredith, or that the state police won’t get regular progress reports. You might call it fighting fire with fire. It was Sergeant Gilfoyle’s idea really. And Sergeant Gilfoyle is not a stupid man.”
No, thought Katy. She would not like to have Sergeant Gilfoyle after her. She said abruptly, “Do they want to see me?” and Lieutenant Hooper said they did. “After lunch—say between one and two. I think you’d better tell them everything, Miss Meredith.”
“But I’ve told you everything,” said Katy defensively, and stopped and blushed. Lieutenant Hooper said mildly, “It remained for Mr. Taylor, when I met him downtown yesterday, to inform me about your missing purse. Suppose you tell me what was in it.”
They ordered more coffee and Katy went obediently through the contents of the black suede bag. “So you see, Lieutenant, it was rather a slim haul. That’s why I’m so sure—”
Hooper wasn’t listening. He said sadly, “Too bad… but then you’d be apt not to, of course…”
“Not to what?” asked Katy, mystified, and caught her breath when Lieutenant Hooper shrugged and said, “I’m not sure, naturally. But the wedding invitation envelope, I presume, was squarish… I think if you had looked inside, you’d have found one of the letters your visitor thought he’d stolen.”
One of the letters, thought Katy hours later, seated on a hard chair in Chief Abbott’s little office. Her voice went mechanically on, repeating details she’d already told; her mind went circling back to the night before she’d left New York. She was packing and it was late, because she and Michael had sat so long on the faded, flowery couch. She was blurry with fatigue and happiness, and she’d sorted through the papers she meant to bring to Fenwick with her eyes on the sparkle of Michael’s ring and not what her fingers were doing. Somehow, she’d managed to misplace the contents of two squarish white envelopes.
“You’d be willing to swear that the shoes Miss Whiddy was taking to be repaired were not the shoes she was wearing when she fell, would you, Miss Meredith?”
“Oh, yes. There was no amber on the others, they were plain black.”
There was really a kind of vicious humor to it: someone opening one of the envelopes addressed simply to Miss Katherine Meredith, Apt. 4A, and finding that Mr. and Mrs. Somebody-or-other Wallace requested the honor of her presence at the marriage of their daughter, Rosemary… but it was chilling, too, because she’d walked carelessly around among those people with that letter in her bag. Someone had wanted it badly enough to enter her room and search for it. Someone had thought so much of secrecy, on that walk down the dim hall, that he had murdered to insure it.
She said, “If that’s all…” and stood. However Lieutenant Hooper had phrased her reasons for not coming forward sooner, the police weren’t hostile. They had been cool and impersonal and briskly routine; they had touched only lightly on the letters, as though they assumed with mysterious official ethics that that was Hooper territory. They thanked her for coming in. Chief Abbott said formally, “I’ll have to ask you not to mention any of this, Miss Meredith,” and she said, “Of course. I understand,” and went out of the little brick building into the crisp gray afternoon.
Dreadfully ironic that Miss Whiddy had missed the scoop of her life—rather, of her own death. Katy walked back to the Inn without seeing anyone she knew. The charcoals, the lovely, living shadows that Michael had coaxed out of a burnt black stick… it was more of the ugly senselessness that seemed to strike at random, out of sheer hatred, frighteningly without brain or plan. Unless it was a dim attempt to hurt her, through Michael.
But who could know how she had loved the sketches the moment she saw them? Simple: no one would have had to know. They were the only non-business drawings in Michael’s apartment.
And who knew Michael’s address in New York? Again it was bafflingly simple: a phone book, a glance at mail boxes in the lobby. Someone had had no trouble at all finding out her own address, so surely and accurately that the letters were laid on the mat before her door.
The breaking into of Michael’s apartment wasn’t nice to dwell upon. It was more of the boldness Lieutenant Hooper had mentioned earlier, the daring which had ordered a wreath, in her name, for Monica’s grave. It was proof that the ugliness could travel fast and silently, out of Fenwick and into New York, could follow them, blind and hideous, until someone put a stop to it.
Katy felt momentarily cold with rage. How long was it to go on, this grappling with an opponent who hid behind anonymous letters, a disguised voice, a wreath of fragrant funeral flowers—who gave you no chance for open combat? It was nearly three o’clock. The afternoon was gray and chilly, and events stood maddeningly still. Until, a few minutes after she entered the
Inn, she talked to placid, plaid-mufflered Lieutenant Hooper, and called Pauline Trent to ask if she might drop in before dinner.
Lieutenant Hooper had had a busy three hours. He had talked to the ticket agent at the Fenwick station and had found out that Pauline Trent had bought a ticket to New York on the 4:18 on Sunday, the day Michael’s apartment had been entered and the charcoal sketches stolen. He said, “Which doesn’t necessarily prove anything at all. You can buy your ticket on the train and chances are no conductor will remember you. Still, Miss Trent didn’t go to New York on Sunday for shopping purposes. We’ll see…”
He had spent some time in the Fenwick public library, going patiently back through newspapers, local and out-of-town, dated thirteen years ago. He said bluntly, “I read the accounts of your foster-sister’s accident and death. I’d like very much to know Gerald Blythe’s whereabouts that year.”
Gerald Blythe, Michael’s brother—Katy thought of the unspoken fear in Michael’s eyes. She said, “But that man—the man who stopped his car at the pond—was gray-haired and middle-aged. He couldn’t possibly have been—”
“Probably not,” said Lieutenant Hooper softly. “But men turn prematurely gray, Miss Meredith. And you were twelve at the time, weren’t you? Middle age seems quite a different proposition then, if I remember correctly.”
Lieutenant Hooper had talked to the police and to Devlin, the coroner. He said that Ilse Petersen had been wearing a silk kerchief over her hair the night she died. They had found it, stiff with bloodstains and frozen snow, buried in the scuffle on the road in front of the Poole house. The lieutenant said, “Nevertheless, there were traces of hemp in her hair, and in some of the wounds.”
Katy looked at the shiny leaves of a rubber plant on the desk in the lobby, beyond them at a window full of metal sky and pines and chimney smoke from the roofs of Fenwick. She said carefully, “Hemp, Lieutenant?” and Lieutenant Hooper said, “Yes. Sacking hemp. She might have been covered with it, hidden under it, for the necessary interval. Or she might have been carried in it.”
Carried in it. Dead and still warm and hideously bundled. Or—better not think of this—bloody and unconscious until the smashing wheels of the Buick rode over her and made death sure.
Lieutenant Hooper’s mouth went dry. He said, “Yes, Miss Meredith, the cellar. A whole cellar-full of old hemp sacks, probably—Mrs. Poole seems to be the overequipped type. Unfortunately, as far as we can determine, a cellarful of people, too.”
12
“I suppose it seems awfully different to you, Katy.”
Pauline Trent nodded embracingly at rugs, lamps, pictures, at coppery India silk at the windows. She said abruptly, “Everything’s the same, except for a few replacements when things wore out. Still, you haven’t been here in—how long? And it wouldn’t be the same without John and Belinda…”
Unspoken, Katy’s own voice said, “and Monica.” She looked slowly around the long, wide living room. In that hurried visit with Jeremy Taylor four days ago she’d had no sense of homecoming, no revisitation of memories. But the room, seen at leisure, was the same. Persian rugs, rosy in the lamplight. Black wrought-iron stand lamps with warm parchment shades at the wing chair, the outsize sofa, the shabby graceful chair in silver-green velvet. Beams lacing the ceiling overhead-rough, rich hickory, taken from the barn which had been made over into part of the house. India silk at the windows, copper and bronze in the light, mistily green and blue and lavender in the shadows. The iron-strapped Dutch door that opened onto the terrace, the fireplace with its wide uneven stone hearth… Yes, it was the same. Uncle John had sat here and Aunt Belinda there. On wet dark days Monica had spread her dolls on the broad windowsill at the end of the room, and sulked until Katy came to play with them too.
“It’s the same,” Katy said, and realized that her voice was harsh.
But it was unnerving to be plunged back into the comfortable wrappings of childhood. The chair where you’d sat when you’d cut your knee. The corner where Aunt Belinda had said gently, “You mustn’t mind Monica’s little moods, darling.” The wing chair behind which the Airedale had lain, waiting hopefully, one eye open, for a game of hide-and-seek. Outside, beyond the black glittering windows, where the fields and the foamy apple trees and the well, and the little shady hidden place where bluebells and narcissus had come spiking up every spring. Beyond the fields, frighteningly far from the house when you were ten or eleven or twelve, the gold satin brook still ran secretly under hickory trees and steep, perilous banks. And the brook still ran into the little pond, and became abruptly black and cold and deeper.
Katy gave herself a sardonic shake and found a cigarette. She was twenty-five now, and engaged to be married, and had left the age of cut knees and childish memories far behind her. She took the glass of sherry Pauline Trent extended and said, “The whole place is really amazingly the same. And—it’s nice to be back. I hope I didn’t come crashing in on you.”
“Nonsense. I’m always here. And,” Pauline remarked drily, “it is, after all, your home.”
What did you say to that? It wasn’t hers while Pauline lived, would come to her only when Pauline died. If she herself died before Pauline did it would be Pauline’s to dispose of as she pleased… Katy made polite murmurs. She was horrified a moment later to hear herself ask, “Didn’t I see you yesterday at Miss Whiddy’s funeral?”
Pauline Trent laughed. Her face was masked with gold from the fire, but her eyes were bright and black and shining. “You did—and quite by accident. I’ve never been so furious. I daresay Miss Whiddy was quite a worthy woman and so forth, but I’d never have gone to her funeral if I hadn’t been caught in the procession. Enraging. That narrow snowy road—I’d have landed in a snowbank if I’d tried to pull out of the way.”
“Oh,” Katy said, and thought that her bewilderment must have been obvious in her voice, because Pauline said briskly, “There I was, stuck with the cemetery services. Not in sack-cloth and ashes, either—I seem to remember wearing something red. I’m not a funeral-goer, I’m afraid. Barbaric custom. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and what good does it do anybody except the undertaker’s grocer? But I had no choice. I was right in the thick of it.”
Which explained, Katy thought, the look of impatient anger and resentment, the blaringly white coat and the red beret. It was obviously the truth. It made everything more baffling than before, because how could you tell where chance and coincidence and truth left off, and lies and planned maneuvering began? She sipped her sherry and looked at the fire, and glanced obliquely at the woman who was a distant relative by adoption. Squarish face, impossibly dark eyes, smooth, impeccable dark hair parted in the center and drawn tightly back. It was like looking at a wall.
Pauline Trent got up and walked to a window overlooking the terrace. She moved lightly and quickly for a woman with a short, thick body. She said, almost to herself, her back to the room, “Somebody’s home at the Petersen house. Arnold Poole, I suppose.”
The fire crackled. Katy weighed curiosity against tact and said, “I understand you saw something of her—Ilse Petersen. What was she like, really?”
At the window, Pauline turned. Katy, shocked, looked at vindictive lines around the other woman’s mouth, at a sharp furious narrowing of the bleak dark eyes. “She was a dreadful woman,” said Pauline Trent slowly and intently. “A dreadful, dreadful woman.”
It hung there, appallingly stark in an atmosphere of firelight and sherry and small talk. Pauline turned towards the hearth, picked up the tongs and poked at the fire. Her voice came detachedly over her shoulder. “Still, Ilse was a neighbor. She came over to spend the night once or twice when Arnold Poole had to be out of town. You can’t refuse shelter, no matter what you think… more sherry, Katy?”
‘No matter what you think.’ It wasn’t, obviously, what the rest of Fenwick thought; Pauline Trent would be utterly uninfluenced by that. Katy watched sherry spilling into her glass. What, then? What bitter knowledge c
oncerning the dead Ilse put lines around Pauline’s mouth, and the narrowness of rage in her eyes? Not knowledge, necessarily—suspicion, instead, had been implied. She put out her cigarette. At the window again Pauline said suddenly, “The lights have gone out—I suppose Arnold’s off to town.”
The room was warm and rosy and calm. Katy was conscious all at once of the isolation of the house in which she sat, of the cold December darkness shrouding fields and woods and pond and road. Ilse Petersen’s was the nearest place, and the lights had just gone out there. The Meredith house was big. There was a huge dark studio on one side of the living room, and on the other side the black cave of the dining room with the stair well rising out of it, and the kitchen. Upstairs, five silent bedrooms and a long black hall; nervousness came, like a chilly, hidden draught. Pauline Trent turned from the window and said, “Age-old question. Did she fall, or was she pushed? Ilse?”
Katy was stunned. She groped for casualness. “The police seem to think it was a hit-and-run driver—the snow, and the dark. What makes you think—”
“Nothing,” said Pauline flatly, and left the window and came forward with terrifying suddenness. “Katy—you don’t have to go?”
Katy said she did. She got her coat and her gloves, was in the hall. The door was at her back, and outside in the dark was space and freedom and safety. She had told the cab to pick her up at six-thirty. It was six-thirty now. She said, “How did you manage to get to the station through the snow, on Sunday?”
Pauline Trent stared. She said, “Oh. There was a friend I wanted to see in New York… something I’d been meaning to take care of. The roads weren’t bad.”
She said, gently, “What made you think of that, Katy?”
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