Death Has a Small Voice

by Frances Lockridge

  She was in a woods, apparently on top of a hill. There were tall trees around her and most of them had lost their leaves. They reached black, twisted branches toward a sky across which the clouds hurried through the light of a small, a quite inadequate, moon. She was, sometime in the middle of the night, lost in the woods somewhere—but she had no real idea where—in the vicinity of New York. She unquestionably was, although there was now no sign of it, being pursued by a whispering man who could, if logic meant anything, exist only in a nightmare, but who had very tangibly existed in the most commonplace of surroundings—a deserted office late in the evening. Pam shook her head, which still ached. She stood and looked around her, and wondered where she was. She wished the trees more friendly.

  Her escape—if she had actually escaped; in a nightmare it was difficult to be sure—had been of a part with the rest. The whispering man had bungled, as he must have bungled from the beginning, and not only because murder is always a bungle. If any of all this meant anything, had any logic, he had killed while a machine listened and recorded, and had not had the competence to discover this until too late. (How he had discovered it then she could only guess.) Then he had—well, then he had behaved like a man in a nightmare, like a man gone berserk. He had, for one thing, put a preposterous value on the recording, which did not—

  Pam, standing still in the middle of a woods, on a hilltop, stopped herself there. There was no point in making the whispering man out more of a bungler than he really was. The recorded dialogue between murderer and victim did not, to be sure, identify either. But—the murderer had not had the record. If he had got his hands on it, he would have destroyed it. Therefore, he had not heard it. Therefore, he did not know what was on it; could not remember now what he had said, and what the woman had said. Obviously, he could not remember whether names had been used. Under those circumstances, getting his hands on the record, and destroying it, would seem vital. Once you granted that—

  The way he had gone about it remained, however, the way of a man lunging in the dark. It was, Pam thought, as if his first act had unstrung the man; since his first act had been murder, done in a moment of fury, that was not unreasonable, given a certain kind of man—given, say, a man unusued to stress, unaccustomed to planning, to testing, to looking ahead. Such a man might very well lunge, as if in the dark, doing without further consideration what first came into his head. Granted that all murderers are unbalanced, this one—who might even now be approaching her through the trees—had a further characteristic: he was inexperienced. This did not help; a hand grenade is at its most dangerous, to everybody, in inexperienced hands.

  These thoughts were a jumble in Pam North’s mind. When she had got so far with logic, she gave it up and began to hurry, almost to run, through the trees. She started down the hill, hoping she was putting more distance between herself and the house from which she had escaped, but by no means sure of it. She had been doing that now for, she guessed, several hours.

  She had been taken to the house, tied up, under a blanket, on the floor of a station wagon. Once there, she had been locked up in a room on the second floor—a room with one window. Left there, without comment even in a whisper, she had eventually got the window open. It was only on the second floor, but on this side of the house the ground dropped precipitously, so that the distance to it was as great as it might have been if she had been a story higher in the house. That was no good, unless she had to decide between broken legs and a broken neck.

  She had heard him moving around below; she had heard him dragging into the house a trunk with which she had shared the station wagon. She had a sick feeling that she knew what was in the trunk. She had heard the man go out of the house again and for a long time had heard nothing further. Then she had heard the motor of a car, presumably the station wagon, start up. She had tried the door then, careless of the noise she made, but quickly found it beyond her. She had tried another door, which she had supposed led merely to a closet, and found that she had been right. It was on her third hopeless check of her surroundings that she discovered a trap door in the ceiling of the closet.

  Standing on a chair, she pushed up against the trap door, having little hope. It was preposterously easy to open; suspiciously easy to open. He had seemed to know the house. Surely he would not have put her in a room from which, with no more effort than this, she might get out. She hesitated; presumably the trap door, even if she could clamber up through it, would lead her merely to a new, less comfortable, confinement. But she thought: knowing a house well enough does not mean you know all the odd things about it, particularly if it is an old house. She pushed aside the trap door, which was unhinged, and tried to climb.

  She failed twice. She broke fingernails. Dust poured down, blindingly. She tried a third time, and pulled herself partly up. Her legs waved wildly; the edge of the flooring cut into her bruisingly. Then she got one foot on the top of the chair’s back and, as the chair fell away under her, got just the push she needed. Pam North was through the trap to her waist. After that it was still not easy, but she made it.

  She lay in a low passage under the roof—a passage too small to be called an attic, a passage empty except for electric conduits. But at the far end, there was a light. She wriggled to it, again bruisingly, on her belly.

  The light came from a little window, hinged at the top, fastened at the bottom merely with a latch. She pulled the dusty window open and, only a few feet below it, a roof sloped down gradually. Pam North wriggled through the window, head first since she had no room to turn, caught herself just in time, and came down—shaking—with her feet on the roof. She sat down on it, then, and inched down cautiously.

  At its lowest point, the roof was a few feet above another, also sloping down. Pam lowered herself to the new roof, and continued. She moved cautiously, making as little sound as possible. She was, apparently, at the rear of the house. When the man returned—if he had really gone, which had to be chanced—it would be, she hoped, in the station wagon and along the drive. She reached the bottom of the new roof, which was apparently that of a porch, and was only about ten feet from the ground. She hung from the edge, hoped for softness below, and let herself drop.

  Landing, she staggered backward and sat down hard. But she sat down in soft earth. She was up again almost at once, and almost at once was running. She caught herself just before she ran into, fell into, a newly dug hole. It was a large hole—large enough to be a grave. Pam skirted it, and ran down a hill, through an open meadow. Now the night was too bright with the little moon—too bright by far. She ran expecting, with each step, a blow in the back. She ran, not looking around at the dim house she had left behind.

  She came to a barbed wire fence and crawled under it. A barb caught her already ruined dress—where was her coat? Surely she had had a coat!—and the dress gave. The point of the barb raked, like a harsh fingernail, on Pam’s skin. She got up beyond the fence and went on down the hill, now among blueberry bushes and—yes—wild blackberry. Thorns grabbed at her, whipped at her. They lashed her legs. She kept on going.

  She went over a stone fence, clutching—she feared—ugly columns of poison ivy. If I live through this, I’ll be a mess for days, Pam North said, and stumbled on a hummock. She grabbed wildly, held a sapling briefly, plunged with both feet into water and almost fell. She was, she realized, in a swamp;

  It had been then that her mind, which before had been clear enough, if understandingly full of fears, began to scream. It had been then the nightmare started. Injustice such as this, Pam’s screaming mind insisted, was possible only in a nightmare. If you were fleeing for your life you deserved, at the very least, to flee in dignity. To begin flight with what amounted to a prat-fall, to snag oneself—just where one inevitably does—in going under a barbed wire fence, to be whipped by spiked bushes,’ now to fall into a swamp, probably full of unpleasant snakes—these things carried life’s irony to the point of burlesque. It was as if, facing a firing squad as bravely as poss
ible, one were suddenly to fall uncontrollably to sneezing.

  She got hold of herself and began, in the dim light, to work her way to the left. She stumbled often, stepped several times more into cold water, once wrenched her ankle. She made many false turns, false steps, before she came again to firm ground. She then returned, or hoped she did, to her original course, away from the house. She had supposed that soon she would find a road.

  She could only guess, on the hilltop, starting down it, with no road yet in evidence, how long it had been since she left the house through the trap door and the little window. She thought it had been several hours and that now it was long after midnight. She was unbearably tired; her body ached. And she had still not found water she dared stop to drink. She came out of the woods and to a mowed field, and on the comparatively level surface Pam North staggered as she walked. Once she fell, catching herself without injury. She did not immediately get up again, but lay as she had fallen on the grass. But she began to feel cold, and managed to get back to her feet.

  She went under another barbed wire fence and beyond it came to a brook. It was not a wide brook; there were stones in it on which one could step. Pam lay down on the bank and drank from her cupped hands. No doubt cows drank there; in all likelihood cows waded there. It did not matter. The water was cold in her throat, cold on her face. She got up after a time and, absurdly, wanted a cigarette as she could not remember ever having wanted one. The spirit should flee death, if it must, along a beam of light, Pam thought, being, by then, light-headed. The body is ridiculous.

  She crossed the brook, climbed wearily over another stone wall, and stepped down into a lane. Without any hesitation, or any thought, Pam turned to her right and followed the little lane. Inevitably, it climbed a hill. Pam put one foot grimly in front of another.

  At the top of the hill, the lane pitched down. A hundred feet down the slope, on her left, there was a small house. Pam walked to the gap in the wall in front of the house and turned and walked up to the house, putting one foot in front of the other. She did not look to either side. She reached the door of the house and knocked, and knocked again.

  After a time there was sound from within the house, and then lights went on. The door opened.

  A tall man in his thirties stood at the door, and tightened a robe around him. He was blond; he had a long narrow face and a wide thin mouth, which now widely expressed surprise.

  “Well,” he said, “hello.” He looked at her again. “Hello, hello,” he said. “What—”

  “My name is North,” Pam said. “Pamela North.” She was conscious that she mumbled.

  “Come again?” the man with the thin face said.

  Pam said, “I’m lost—I—”

  “You do look it,” he said. He opened the door. “Motor smash? Come in and—” He stopped.

  Pam had raised both hands, palms outward. She was backing away.

  “Hold it,” he said. “Come in here and—” Pam was backing away. “I’m perfectly respectable,” he said. “Wait. My name’s Lyster. Perfectly respectable bloke, for a journalist. You—”

  Pam turned.

  “I say!” Alec Lyster called after Pam North as she ran from the house, from a man who pronounced “again” to rhyme with “pain,” who might be—

  She ran past a station wagon parked to one side of the drive. She reached the lane and turned left, and ran along it, stumbling.

  Alec Lyster stood for a moment looking after her. Then he walked, taking long strides, to the station wagon.

  The sound was loud in the still night as the motor caught. Hearing it, Pam North left the lane and went over a stone wall. She lay behind it, in deep grass.

  But was it? Pam thought. Was it the same voice?

  Bill Weigand was explanatory; he was logical; he was patient. Jerry North listened, dully.

  There was nothing to suggest that Pam had been in this rambling house at any time. There were, indeed, indications that she had not. Hilda Godwin had been dead for several days; almost certainly she had been dead before Monday night, when Pam had gone to the office of North Books; Inc., with the recording she had—again this was almost, but only almost, certain—received in the mail. It was after that that she had been in the coal bin of the little house on Elm Lane and had left a handkerchief there, by accident or by design. There was evidence that a trunk, probably the trunk from which the swollen body of Hilda Godwin had now been removed, had also been in the basement of the Elm Lane house.

  But there was nothing to indicate that the trunk had not been removed from the basement and taken to the country long before Pam had been locked in the coal bin. If one had to guess, one would guess that it had been; that trunk and body had been in the country house since, perhaps, Sunday. Assuming Hilda had been killed in New York—and that was only hypothesis—and brought to the country for burial, there would have been no reason to delay the transportation.

  “There may have been,” Jerry said. “We don’t know what reasons he may have had.”

  Bill agreed to that. He had said it was a guess. He was only saying he thought it the most probable guess. He was saying only that, so far as they knew, Pam had been last in New York. He was only saying there was nothing to indicate she had been at any time in this rambling house.

  They were in a room—a small room, book-filled—off the square central hall. The whole house was lighted; the whole house was full of State policemen. Mullins was with them; they were looking everywhere, for anything.

  “I have to get back,” Bill Weigand said. “We’ve got to get things going there. I think you should come with me.”

  “I think she was here,” Jerry said. “I know what you have to do—what your job is.”

  “If I thought—” Bill began.

  “I know,” Jerry said. “All the same, you’ve got your job.” He moved a hand out, slowly. “This,” he said. “Hilda Godwin murdered and crammed into a trunk. But I’ve got to find Pam. I—”

  But Mullins was standing in the doorway. Jerry and Bill looked at him.

  “There’s a room upstairs,” Mullins said. “Locked up, and no key. The boys are—”

  There was a sound of impact from above, of rending wood.

  “—breaking it down,” Mullins said. “It looks like maybe—”

  Jerry was brushing past Mullins, by then, and Bill Weigand was after him. Mullins followed Weigand.

  “—somebody’s been locked up in there,” Mullins said, and followed the others up the stairs.

  It was not immediately apparent whether anyone had been locked in the small room on the second floor. The window was open, and that, since the house would normally have been closed between visits to it by Hilda Godwin, was suggestive. It was several minutes before they found the opening in the ceiling of the closet, and found that a current of cool air came down through it. They found the attic space quickly, then, and the open window at the end of it. By that time, Mullins, working with a trooper, had found prints.

  Pam North had been there. At a guess, she had been there recently. She was not there then.

  When they were outside the house, throwing the beams of strong lights against it, picking out the little window near the roof, it was not hard to guess which way she had gone. The roof of the house sloped gradually, ended a few feet above the back porch roof which sloped at the same angle. They examined the ground, then.

  A woman had dropped from the porch roof; her narrow, sharp-heeled shoes had dug deeply into soft earth. She had staggered backward, off balance, and sat down hard in soft earth, leaving an impression neatly round.

  “Pam!” Jerry North said, with conviction.

  She had got to her feet again. She had almost fallen into the wide, shallow excavation in the middle of a cleared garden plot. She had gone around it, and she had been running—running away from the house, down a slope. Beyond the cleared square of the garden she had left no tracks they could find in the darkness, even with the best of flashlights.

  Jerry co
uld not stop. He ran down the slope, the beam from his flashlight leaping ahead of him.

  “Go with him, Mullins,” Bill Weigand said. Mullins went.

  Three strands of barbed wire made a fence at the bottom of the slope. The beams from two flashlights moved along the fence; it was that from Jerry’s which stopped on a small piece of cloth which dangled from a barb on the fence’s lowest strand.

  It was wool; it was beige wool. Jerry was almost certain. He and Mullins went under the fence.

  Beyond it they picked up again, briefly, the signs of someone’s passage through tall grass, among bushes. They found, in an area bare of grass, one footprint. They went on to a stone fence, covered luxuriantly with heavy vine. Here and there the vine still carried the bright red leaves which ivy flaunts in autumn.

  “That’s poison ivy, huh?” Mullins asked. “Seems to me—”

  But Jerry North was already going over the wall, through the ivy.

  “Jeeze!” Mullins said. Mullins followed Gerald North. He followed him into the swamp beyond the wall.

  Bill Weigand watched them go, saw them stop at the bottom of the first slope and examine something; saw them wriggling under the barbed wire fence. He went back into the house, and conferred with the sergeant; then with a physician from the Medical Examiner’s office.

  At a guess, Hilda Godwin had been killed Saturday night or Sunday. She had, almost certainly, been strangled. It was probable that the body had been put into the trunk within a short time after death. They would see what else they could find out, using knives and chemical reagents. So—