Voice Out of Darkness

by Ursula Curtiss

  There was Jeremy Taylor. Oddly enough in the dining room, and this time mysteriously gay. Jeremy said, “The lost is found,” and held up a black alligator compact with a thin silver CP in one corner. Katy raised her brows and put down her coffee cup. “Oh. Cassie will be pleased.”

  “Yes. Although,” said Jeremy, “I’ve gone after this one so often that it comes when I call it.” He hadn’t, obviously, come to talk about the compact; he dropped it into his pocket and the gaiety went out of his eyes. Standing motionless, he said, “About Miss Whiddy—”

  Katy smiled brilliantly up at him, remembering police cautions. She said, “That’s pure Meredith, Jeremy. Once a copywriter always a copywriter… the police seem quite satisfied.”

  “They ought to know, I suppose.” Jeremy was without conviction. He drew on a leather glove, looking down at her, and the mocking expression was back. “You did seem worried about the compact, the other morning, and I thought I’d let you know a waiter had found it. They called Cassie from the Inn last night.”

  Katy looked at her empty coffee cup and didn’t blush. She was tempted to say that what had intrigued her at the time was not the compact but Jeremy’s prompt arrival on the scene the morning after Miss Whiddy’s death—that, coupled with his casual query as to whether she had talked to Miss Whiddy the evening before. But, surprisingly, he had been telling the truth, because there was the compact in his pocket. She said, “How’s Francesca?”

  “Recovered,” said Jeremy, and frowned. “She, or Cassie, should have called the police at the time. When you can’t stick your head outside your own door to investigate your own lawn—oh well. Her good luck that she wasn’t hurt badly.”

  “Yes,” said Katy, looking hard at the tablecloth. There was a second of silence, and then Jeremy said something vague about seeing her later, and went out.

  On Main Street the pattern wove back on itself once more. Quite logically, because Francesca carried the morning’s mail in one hand and was glancing idly through it when she met Katy. She might, thought Katy, shocked, have been another woman entirely. There were lines in her skin that had never shown before, and her face looked sunken rather than delicate, her eyes middle-aged instead of misty. When Katy asked, she denied still feeling the effects of the attack on her Sunday night. “Come back to the shop with me for a few minutes, will you, Katy? It’s always dismal at this hour of the morning… or are you going somewhere in a hurry?”

  Katy didn’t want to go back to the little shop with the hidden, curtained closet in back. She felt compelled to in the face of Francesca’s drawn weariness. She waited silently while Francesca closed the door behind them and turned on lights that intensified the cold grayness of the morning, while she took off her coat and sat down at the small desk and said savagely, “Why don’t the police come right out with it, and say they think someone killed Ilse?”

  “Do they?” Katy said, and got a glance of scorn. “Of course. They must,” Francesca said. “They’ve been asking all kinds of questions. They’ve even talked to James—you know, the man who takes the ashes—and that great Gilfoyle creature keeps turning up at all hours of the day and night. They say they’re looking for traces of whoever was outside the house Sunday night, but they came before that—” She stopped abruptly, looked away from Katy. One hand went out, nervously, for cigarettes.

  Katy said, “Why didn’t you call the police that night, Francesca?”

  Nothing moved for a moment in the little shop. Then Francesca pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk and fumbled for matches and found them. “It was so late,” she said. The match caught and the flame was gold and perfectly steady. “And after all I wasn’t really hurt, just knocked out.”

  Just knocked out. Just struck down in the dark, alone with your daughter, and out of sight of the nearest house lights. There was more to it than that, Katy knew, but she knew too that there was no point in persisting, that Francesca would just go on making that deprecating arch of her eyebrows and saying that it had been so late.

  Had she, for that matter, ever been struck at all?

  The reflection flashed unbidden into Katy’s mind; she looked at the tip of her own cigarette and was appalled to find that she could quite easily suspect Francesca Poole of pretending, for reasons of her own, a nocturnal visit that had never taken place. Or Cassie, who had retained shreds of cunning even in the midst of fright and shock, when she had talked to Katy upstairs in the green and rose and frilled-organdy bedroom.

  It wasn’t pleasant sitting there in Francesca’s shop, masking cool suspicion under camaraderie. Katy picked up her gloves, and Francesca said, “Katy—wait…” and got up and began to move restlessly and gracefully around the shop, pushing books into line, tidying the brilliant wools.

  Katy waited. Francesca said, “I’ve—there’s something…” and drew a harsh breath. “I’ve stopped taking them, if that’s what you were thinking that day. And it’s no use saying you weren’t, because you had them in your hand and you guessed, I saw it in your face.”

  Katy sat very still in astonishment. She said, “I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about,” and Francesca said impatiently, “Oh, don’t be tactful, Katy. The pills. I hadn’t even remembered that they were in that old straw bag until you knocked it off the shelf the other day, and I’ve thrown them away—you can look if you want to.”

  The pills. The little green bottle of what had looked like aspirin, that had tumbled out of the Mexican straw handbag in the closet the afternoon Katy had been rummaging for the gilt Christmas star. Of course—Francesca standing in the doorway and glaring at her with that look of rigid rage, because she had held the bottle in her hand, and they weren’t aspirin at all.

  She said quickly, out of pity and embarrassment, “Oh, but I never—” and Francesca stared at her for a second of frank disbelief before she turned back to the wool shelves and straightened a drooping snowy skein. “It doesn’t matter now anyway—it’s all past, thank heavens. But I knew what you must be thinking—”

  Katy hoped Francesca wouldn’t go on, but she did. She had started taking sedatives in order to sleep, shortly after Arnold Poole had left her—“allonal or seconal, I can never remember which.” After six months or so, without the doctor’s knowledge, she had increased the amounts because one or two pills no longer helped. She said slowly, “It was wonderful, for a while. I’d sleep like a lamb, and wake up on top of the world. Then it would hit me all over again, during the day. Not just fits of depression—you can’t imagine. So tired that I couldn’t stand up, and so nervous that I couldn’t sit still, even for a minute, and so low that all I could think of was how nice it would be to Be dead. That went on for a while, until… you remember the Thomas boy?”

  Katy did, dimly: the druggist’s assistant, young and handsome and cheerful and far from bright. Easy to see what had happened. A lady in distress—particularly a lady with Francesca’s looks and charm—and any professional scruples he might have had would have gone out the window while he basked in a wide, grateful smile. She said, “What was it?” and Francesca shrugged; he had never told her the name of the drug.

  “Whatever it was, it worked. Too well, because I found out that I could get along without morning coffee or dinner or sleep, but not without the pills. So I stopped. It was ghastly, for two months—Cassie still remembers it as a nervous breakdown. Then I took over the shop and got back on my feet, and… that’s that.” Katy stood up, searching for something to say that wouldn’t underline the whole awkward and distressing situation. There wasn’t anything. She said simply, “I’m sorry. Why don’t you forget that you ever told me?” and pulled on her gloves with great intentness. When she looked up the speculative quality was gone from Francesca’s eyes; they were casual and friendly again. At the door Francesca said, “Thanks for coming in, Katy. Have you seen Arnold lately?”

  Katy said that she hadn’t. Francesca went on steadily, “Wonderful luck, about his book. If you should happen to run
into him, pass on my congratulations, will you?” Francesca hadn’t seen her husband, then, since his gay and alcoholic visit on the night Ilse died. It must be bitter, on top of everything else, to have it so plainly stated that, with the barriers of poverty and another woman removed, the emotional situation remained unchanged. That was odd, too, because Cassie Poole had said that her father showed signs of wanting to resume his interrupted marriage.

  Cassie had said—and there it was again, the wall of lies and silence and subterfuge. In spite of it, some things had begun to fall into place.

  If, as Lieutenant Hooper thought, Pauline Trent had been bound to Ilse Petersen by blackmail, she had almost certainly visited Use’s aunt in New York for purposes of finding out whether the other woman had shared her niece’s lucrative secret. The relationship would also explain the mocking appearance of friendship.

  Certain questions about Francesca had been answered, too: her fury at finding Katy handling the contents of the straw handbag in the closet, and, Katy was almost sure, her swift change of color that same day when she had read the card that came with the carnations. Arnold Poole had sent them. Nothing else would have brought that betraying pinkness and pallor, the curious tenderness with which Francesca had lifted the flowers to her face.

  Had Arnold Poole sent those other carnations, too, the carnations for Monica’s grave? By means of a voice they would never hear again?

  The wind was cuttingly cold, it had frozen the melting snow into rumpled blankets on the Town Hall lawn, grimy misshapen humps in the street. Katy, walking blindly through the windy gray morning, turned and started back toward the Inn.

  She very nearly collided with Arnold Poole. He was striding down the steps from the little brick police station, dark head bare, an unlighted cigarette between his fingers. His face was blank with concentration, and he gave Katy an absent look as she stepped out of his way. She said, “Arnold, I wanted to tell you—” and stopped. Arnold Poole’s glance at her was bright and unseeing. He said mechanically, “How are you, Katy?” without pausing, and was gone.

  Katy went back to the Inn.

  If only Michael were there, but he couldn’t be. She walked idly, in spite of the cold, because at the Inn there was only the watery gray light in the dining room, and the shadowy silences of the upper halls, and the isolation of her room, where it was so frighteningly easy for her mind to go twisting back. So that it was nearly noon when she closed her door behind her and tossed gloves and coat on the bed, and saw the envelope on the bedside table.

  It was one of those envelopes, but it was blank and flat. It looked empty. Katy knew, stiffly, that it wasn’t. When she opened it there was only an inch-deep oblong of faintly yellowed newspaper, cut out very neatly, so that the black border was intact. Words from thirteen years ago looked up at her: “Mr. and Mrs. John Meredith wish to extend their gratitude for the many kind expressions of sympathy…”

  Card of thanks for Monica’s mourners. Cut out and carefully preserved because someone wanted to keep the fact of Monica’s death alive and crawling in Katy’s mind.

  Katy didn’t go in search of the elusive Lieutenant Hooper. She smoked a cigarette, looking steadily at the malicious scrap of newspaper, and then hung up her coat and brushed her hair and put on fresh lipstick. She felt no panic or shrinking or even surprise, which was in a way the most alarming thing of all. It seemed peculiarly inevitable that the game should go on, that there should always be a fresh little stab to remind her.

  Maybe, said a tiny corner of Katy’s brain, maybe your mitten brushed Monica. It wouldn’t have taken much to throw her off balance. The lightest, slightest touch would have done it. Come now, couldn’t you, just possibly…?

  No. Keep remembering that, because it was the last lonely link with complete sanity. And that, thought Katy, was the danger of a trap like this one: sooner or later you would walk into it, wearily, because it was too much effort to keep dodging the hunter. She went downstairs.

  Mr. Lasky had had a trying week. Miss Whiddy had breathed her last on the floor of his lobby, and business had dropped off sharply. A police sergeant had talked to the bell-boy, and people kept glancing at his staircase in a way he didn’t like. When Katy appeared and asked grimly to see the maid who took care of her room he looked at her abjectly. “Nothing wrong, I hope, Miss Meredith?”

  Katy had had more than she could stand of evasion and wariness and a constantly guarded tongue. She said, “There’s a letter in my room that wasn’t there when I went out this morning. I’d like to see if the maid knows anything about it.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Lasky hopelessly. “Oh, dear. That shouldn’t—”

  “No,” agreed Katy flatly, “it certainly shouldn’t. Do you think you could find her for me, Mr. Lasky?”

  Mabel Christy’s information was both helpful and baffling. Yes, she had done the room that morning, and she had happened to notice something white, just the very tip of a corner, sticking out from beneath the rug just inside the door. She had supposed that it was a message for Miss Meredith, and had put it on the bedside table, and that was all there was to that.

  “Do you think you’d have seen it if it had been there yesterday, or the day before?” asked Katy.

  Mabel Christy hesitated. It had been such an infinitesimal glint of white; she couldn’t be sure. “If it was there before, though, walking on the rug might have squeezed it out toward the edge. I couldn’t honestly swear one way or the other, Miss. I hope it wasn’t something—?”

  Katy said that it hadn’t been anything terribly important and thanked her and went slowly back to her room. The envelope could have been put there at any time at all within the last two days, ever since she had moved from the room at the other end of the hall. It had been delivered as silently and efficiently as the other three letters, but this time there had been a new caution: no handwriting, no identifying mark of any kind. That was the only hopeful note—with police on the scene, someone had had to be a little more careful than usual.

  The day stretched bleakly out after lunch. There was no way of knowing what train Michael could catch out of New York. Lieutenant Hooper had been swallowed up in his own subterranean maneuvers; there had been no sign of him since the evening before. At close to three o’clock, partly out of aimlessness, mainly because of a dreadful beckoning, an inner insistence that she couldn’t quell, Katy set out, deliberately, for the little pond.

  14

  It was, after all, very like that other day.

  She had walked rapidly, lashes narrowed against the stinging wind, so that it was only a little after three o’clock when she came to the stone bridge and the pond. Were Michael’s sketches, those six haunting charcoals, hidden in the Meredith house up on the hill above? Or had they been calmly and wantonly destroyed as a warning to Michael, an indirect thrust at Katy? And the clipping—the card of thanks published in the local newspapers when Monica died. Simple to cut it out of the files in the Fenwick library; equally simple to find out whether that had been done. It was far more horrifying to think that it had been laid aside carefully on a day thirteen years ago, as part of a slowly ripening plan.

  Here was Ilse Petersen’s house, and the pond. All at once Katy’s mind was swept icily clear; conjecture vanished and memory took its place, sharp and exact.

  Again, it was a December afternoon, between three and four, with the gray light chilling and thickening, the pines in a smoky ring against the sky. Again the surface of the pond was scrolled and scribbled with white; Katy stared at it in something like terror, half-expecting to see a gaping hole full of shiny black water, until she pulled herself shakily back to the present. Children still skated here, that was all, and their blades had cut sprays of white frost in the ice, just as hers and Monica’s had once done.

  There were three ways to get to the other end of the pond. Across the ice, which was slippery and apt to quake. Along the narrow stone ledge at the edge of Ilse Petersen’s property—but you had to hold back stiff canes of s
umac and negotiate the sharp-thorned barberry bushes. Katy went around the other side, threading her way through humps and hillocks of dead grass that poked through the frozen snow; she supposed vaguely that this was Meredith property although the pond itself belonged to the town. Then she was at the other end of the ice, in among the screening pines, where the pond narrowed away to a ribbon of brook that went curling back through the fields.

  Someone else had stood here thirteen years ago and witnessed the tragic little tableau that had been the beginning of death for one of three children. Katy stood very still, watching and listening, groping with every bared nerve for something that trembled on the edge of her consciousness. A sight, was it? Or a sound, or the breath of a familiar sensation? She went on staring down the tarnished-silver ice and the something, the tiny shred of a half-awakened knowledge, quivered closer. Was it…

  A light sprang on in Ilse Petersen’s living room. Katy turned her head sharply and let out her breath. There was someone standing at the window, motionless and dark, looking out at her.

  But Ilse was dead, thought Katy, fiercely and frantically, dead and deep in the little cemetery… she was shaking. Control came back, steadyingly, when the rigid shadow in the window moved and waved a hand whitely behind glass. Arnold Poole. Of course. She waved back, heart still pounding from the sudden rush of panic. It was foolish; she had been in a mood of terror, had deliberately set the scene for fear, and a casual glance from a window had pushed her over the edge.

  She turned away and started back for the road. Put two other people in exactly those positions thirteen years ago, and what did you have? Ilse, perhaps, standing in that same window, looking out at—whom? For a moment, she had almost known. It had slipped away again, but it had been there, thought Katy, scrambling over tousled humps of grass. What was it that she had almost recalled? Was it something she had never seen or heard or felt before because she had never before stood in just that place at the end of the pond? Or was it, more logically, a piece of knowledge she had possessed without knowing it, that had needed the re-creation of the setting to give it focus and meaning?