Voice Out of Darkness

by Ursula Curtiss

  The wide, very blue eyes were on her face again. Cassie raised her drink and put it down without touching it. She said gently, cajolingly, “Darling, let’s face it. Monica was a thoroughly detestable child. But you didn’t—did you, Katy?”

  Katy dreamed that night. Of Monica, big for her age, skating down an incredibly long, narrow, twisting runway, with statues on either side. Katy kept saying, “Come on, Monica, it’s late,” and Monica’s voice kept floating back on the cold dank air, setting up echoes among the statues, “I can’t—you’ll push me.”

  “But I won’t!” Katy cried, and woke with her own voice hanging in the bleak little room at the Fenwick Inn.

  Outside the world was blindingly, dizzyingly white with snow and sunlight no warmer than crystal and a sharp piercing blue sky. The wind drove a little mist of powdered snow past her window and jostled the laden branches of a giant fir; a thick clump of white trembled and slid and crashed softly down out of sight. Katy wondered absently if it were a good skiing surface, and caught herself in time to smile. Funny how, in the midst of everything, she could slip so easily back into Fenwick. Good skiing surface? Had the thaw ruined the ice on the ponds?… looks like snow.

  Her ring glimmered whitely in the light from the window. It was a beautiful day. Michael was coming that night. Michael had said, glancing at her ring, “Look better on the other hand.” Try and forget the snowy graveyard and the carnations glowing in the little plot under the blue spruce trees.

  The dream came back for a moment, briefly. Breakfast, thought Katy hastily, breakfast and all the hot coffee Mr. Lasky has in the house, and got up, shivering, and dressed.

  On Fridays, the Inn got itself into a miniature turmoil preparing for a handful of out-of-town week-enders. In the midst of subterranean scurryings, and to the tune of Mr. Lasky carrying on a tirade with the chef somewhere in the dim regions of the kitchen, Katy drank three cups of coffee, and when Mr. Lasky reappeared, reserved a room for Michael. She washed her hair and while it dried sat on the bed and did her nails. She had, later on, the inevitable daily encounter with Miss Whiddy.

  Miss Whiddy, hatted and coated and, incongruously, carrying a pair of large pointed black shoes in her hand, was standing in the lobby in earnest low-voiced conversation with Mr. Lasky. At the sight of Katy, bound for the desk and cigarettes, she broke off and said brightly, “—and here we are. Lovely morning, Katherine, lovely.”

  Katy said it was, and took a hopeful step away. Miss Whiddy sidled closer. “Having company for the weekend, too, I guess?” Mr. Lasky looked unhappy and melted from view. Katy, divided between annoyance and amusement, said yes. She added, because Mr. Lasky would undoubtedly have volunteered that too, “From New York. But I won’t keep you, Miss Whiddy—you were on your way out.”

  “Shoemaker,” said Miss Whiddy, waving the sedate black shoes in a vague gesture. She turned with a last searching bright-gray glance. “Have a nice lunch with that Ilse Petersen yesterday?”

  To keep anything that took place in Fenwick from her was like trying to hide a safety pin from a fluoroscope. “Not lunch, Miss Whiddy,” Katy said crisply. “Tea. That must have come through wrong.”

  “Well, really,” said Miss Whiddy, flushing even pinker. “Really, Katherine. Just because Mrs. Baker happened to see you driving Mr. Poole’s car out that way—she was taking the dogs for a run before lunch. And I only wondered…”

  Katy felt a flicker of remorse. Fenwick and its tiny unimportant comings and goings were Miss Whiddy’s whole world, and you couldn’t change the habits of a lifetime. She said, “Oh, of course. I’ve always liked Arnold, and I hadn’t seen him in so long. But I couldn’t stay, so I just had some tea.”

  “She’s a queer one, all right,” offered Miss Whiddy, mollified, and sniffed and nodded and departed, shoe-makerwards.

  It wasn’t long after that, when Katy was standing irresolutely at a window in the corner of the shadowy reading room, that a voice behind her said abruptly, “Hello, Katy. Come for a ride?”

  It was Jeremy Taylor, smiling down at her, greenish eyes faintly apologetic. “I’ve got the car—have to drive out to Judge Landis’ and pick up some contracts. We’ll pass your old place on the way. Want to come?” Amends, Katy thought, for last night when he’d been cool and infuriatingly amused about her ring. She said, “I’d love to. Can you wait until I get my coat?” and Jeremy nodded and said, “Better get a warm one, it’s close to zero.”

  Beyond the town, past the last of the straggling old houses at the end of Main Street, it was a Christmas-card day. White, billowing seas of field, unbroken except by low, humping gray stone fences. Blue shadows on the churned white road curving away under the wheels of the car, a little stone bridge and a brook rimed with ice under a lilac-gray blur of leafless birches and brambles; Katy said, “Pretty,” under her breath. Jeremy grinned and said, “We like it,” and then, with a quick side glance at the kerchief over her hair, “You look about as big-city as a mustard plaster in that thing.”

  “Thank you,” Katy answered, unruffled. “Fenwick affects me that way.”

  The car put more whiteness, more silence behind it. Katy thought of the way Michael drove—surprisingly steady and competent and careful. Jeremy was fast and sure at the wheel, but then Jeremy had grown up with these roads, had driven over them through winter ice and squashy spring mud and the slippery carpeting of damp fallen leaves. She took out a cigarette and lighted it, absorbed, and Jeremy said companionably, without taking his eyes from the road, “Got a spare?”

  “Oh—sorry.” Handing him a cigarette, holding a match, Katy thought surprisedly, he’s not being himself, he’s being quite friendly. It was surprising mainly because the Taylors, father and son, had always been aloof and a little hostile to the rest of the town. Richard Taylor was a calm, handsome, scornful enigma from out of nowhere, who had no profession at all as far as anyone could see, and who had once put Miss Whiddy bodily out of his house when she had interrupted him in communion with his brandy. Fenwick hinted darkly at a scandal in the past. They said Richard Taylor had been convicted of fraud in Chicago, or possibly bigamy out on the coast. They said it was a well-known fact that he had to report back to a sanitarium twice a year. They ended up, baffled, knowing no more about Richard Taylor than when they had begun, and they said of Jeremy Taylor, growing up tall and casually contemptuous, “That boy’ll turn out like his father, you wait and see, they’re like peas in a pod already.”

  Jeremy braked so suddenly that the wheels slithered and spun. “With you in a minute,” he said, and was back in almost that with a brown envelope in his hand. “Now. Want to drive past your place?”

  They headed back towards town. Katy was grateful that Jeremy hadn’t asked her, probingly, if she minded going by the house or the pond. She inquired about the contracts and listened to a discourse on a will and a property dispute; at the end Jeremy said with satisfaction, “Dull, isn’t it? But you would ask… And that, I believe, is Miss Trent up ahead. Shall we give her a lift?”

  Katy stared at the figure in front of them, blocked against the snow. Pauline Trent, her foster-father’s cousin, looked exactly as she had looked six years ago at the Merediths’ funeral, short and dark and thickset and as solid as a tree trunk. They pulled level with her. She came over to the car, staring in turn.

  She knew Jeremy. She said suddenly, “Why, it’s Katy,” and climbed into the car. “This is a surprise. I didn’t know you were in town. You’ll both come in and have some sherry, won’t you?”

  Her voice was deep, and ragged at the edges, as though roughened by a bad cold. A cold, Katy decided detachedly, remembering the ordering of the wreath for Monica’s grave, could disguise a voice far more effectively than any ruse.

  She looked curiously at John Meredith’s cousin as they sat in the familiar long living room in the house on the hill. Pauline Trent was somewhere in her late fifties but her hair, parted in the center and drawn back to a bun so smoothly that it might have been paint
ed on, was still dark. So were her eyes. They were so dark under the straight thick eyebrows that it was impossible to read anything at all in them.

  Sitting beside the fire, with hickory logs snapping and hissing against the blackened gray stone, she said suddenly to Katy, “I remember you tumbling about the hill out there. You’ve shot up a few feet since then, of course. I’ve grown a few inches myself—sideways.” She sipped her sherry. The logs settled and sang. She said, “You must have been a great comfort to John and Belinda when the child died.”

  Katy deposited cigarette ash with care. She said that it had been, of course, a shock to everyone. Jeremy stood and said apologetically that if Katy didn’t mind he’d better be getting back to his office, and they all moved toward the door.

  “I daresay it seems odd to you, Katy, staying at the Inn instead of in this house.”

  “Not at all,” Katy said. “It’s quite comfortable, really.”

  “I live alone here,” Pauline said abruptly, “and I’m afraid I’ve gotten out of the habit of being very civil. It’s too wearing after fifty anyway. And then you’ll have the place to yourself when I’m gone, which won’t, happily for both of us, be too long. I’ve no intention of living to be ninety.”

  Katy, confused by the wintry smile and the bright dark eyes, murmured that she hoped not and then, horrified, that she hoped so. Miss Trent, seemingly amused and a little triumphant at the embarrassment she had created, said that she might see Katy later on that evening; she usually dined out on Fridays. Then they were in the car and out of the driveway and Jeremy, the remnants of a smile at his mouth, was saying, “Sorry. I thought you knew. She’s inclined to be—eccentric.”

  “Just a trifle,” Katy said weakly, and then, “But you—this is the long way into town. I thought you were in a hurry.”

  “We’ll miss the bridge traffic this way,” Jeremy said. “It comes out about even.” They were slowing for a corner, he threw her a questioning look. Katy nodded and said nothing. She thought suddenly, this takes us past the cemetery.

  She took out two cigarettes, silently, and handed one to Jeremy and lighted them both. It was around the next curve now. Now. As they came down the hill she said, “Stop a minute, will you?” Jeremy slowed, and looked at her. He said bluntly, “Shall I drive in?” and Katy said carefully, “Yes, please—just for a minute.”

  Snow-cloaked headstones on either side, here and there a white-hatted angel or a wrought-iron railing standing out black and stiff and lacy against the snow. Off at the back, under the towering dark blue spruce, a flutter of pale cool pink on the ground.

  The wreath on Monica’s grave.

  The cemetery was wrapped in a hush of its own, deeper and more solemn than that of the empty fields. Imagination, thought Katy, and then, no, it’s more than that. Distantly, the carnations foamed and glimmered on the snow, the only flowers in sight. Beside her Jeremy was absolutely still. She could feel the warmth of his shoulder through both their coats. If either of them moved a fraction of an inch their arms would touch. It was, suddenly, the movie-house again; the close darkness, the not daring to breathe for fear of breaking or making a contact, the smothering sensation in a twelve-year-old chest.

  Katy turned her head, and looked directly into Jeremy’s eyes. They were quiet, and terribly intent. A long unwinking second pounded by. Jeremy moved, violently. “Ready?” he said, and turned the ignition key sharply. Snow churned under the wheels and they were on the road again and circling back into town. Jeremy was talking, calmly, matter-of-factly; Katy, sitting rigidly beside him, was aware only of a shocked self-loathing. A childish memory, a man beside her, the cloaked white silence of the cemetery had made her behave like a high-school sophomore. Jeremy, chronically amused and aloof, would now have something tangible to enjoy.

  He dropped her at the Inn door. Katy, who would have liked very much to rush out of sight and beyond the range of laughter, turned coolly and said, “Thanks very much for the ride. I’d forgotten how pretty Fenwick is in the winter.”

  “Glad you could come,” Jeremy said carelessly, and got back into the car and drove away. Katy retreated to the safety of her room and twisted the ring on her finger and thought penitently, Oh, Michael, you’re engaged to a fool. She took off the kerchief and brushed her hair and mapped out an ordinary, reassuring routine: lunch first and maybe a walk downtown, and afterwards a long lazy afternoon and meeting Michael’s train if he called from the station.

  But that was the night that went queerly awry almost from the very beginning. That was the night that her room was rifled savagely, and the night that Miss Whiddy went plunging and crashing down the dim, steep stairway into the lobby.

  5

  Things started going wrong from the time Michael missed his train. Katy, bathed and dressed in new subtle lavender-gray wool that made her quite ordinary hazel eyes look warm and apricot-ish, got the telegram at about five-fifteen. It said, “Arriving Fenwick 6:14. Can you meet me? All my love, Michael.”

  But Michael wasn’t on the 6:14. Katy roamed the dark windy station platform minutes ahead of time and, when the train pulled in, combed the dismounting passengers for Michael’s tall easy figure, Michael’s buoyant shoulders. Once she took a quick step forward, and a tall man in a trench coat backed uncertainly away and then advanced, with more conviction, on a small plump woman and three jumping, shrieking children.

  She went into the waiting room, but Michael wasn’t there; the room was empty except for the ticket agent behind his window. She went out into the windy dark again and got a cab back to the Inn. Michael had missed his train. She had missed trains. Everybody, sooner or later, missed a train; it was as unavoidable as a sudden cold or a visiting aunt. Too bad, though, that it left you feeling so flat and, for no reason at all, rebuffed.

  She was back at the Inn at a quarter of seven, and that was when they all began to converge like threads, sometimes tangled, sometimes separate, running delicately back to the heart of a web.

  Not, Katy thought, sitting by a window in the lobby, that it was really strange. Friday and Saturday were Fenwick’s nights out, and the Fenwick Inn, through simple lack of competition, was the only place to go. Unless, as Francesca Poole had often pointed out ironically, you wanted to make a night of it at the local diner, and really spread yourself on coffee and sandwiches. Consequently, once or twice a week the Inn scooped up an odd mixture of natives—the Miss Whiddys, the Francescas, the amused and handsome young couples like Cassie Poole and Jeremy Taylor.

  First of all, Pauline Trent. Still in thick unyielding tweeds, as solidly shapeless, thought Katy, as though she were tweed all the way through instead of flesh and blood and bone. She nodded and smiled over an inner reluctance and Pauline Trent raised her thick black brows in greeting as she crossed the lobby.

  “Well, Katy. Thought I might see you here this evening. Waiting for that odd young man of Miss Poole’s?” Katy, still smiling, shook her head and said she had an odd young man of her own. It crossed her mind that Miss Trent, for a self-pronounced recluse, was singularly well up on local relationships. It crossed her mind too that her drive with Jeremy Taylor, if it had caught Miss Trent’s negligent notice, would be grist for Miss Whiddy’s tireless mill. Damn. You couldn’t take an aspirin, or say hello to the grocer, without its being the topic for the next woman’s club meeting.

  “—occurred to me that you might want to spend a little time at the house some afternoon,” Pauline Trent was saying abruptly. “Just call me any time next week, Katy. I’m always home.”

  Katy thanked her and said she would, and when Miss Trent had vanished into the dining room, looked restlessly at the clock over the desk. The next train was the 7:10; Michael would certainly have caught that. Should she go out again into the raw windy blackness, or wait here at the Inn for a possible wire or call? The thought presented itself, fleetingly, that he might not come at all tonight, that he might have been delayed by a rush job and it might be tomorrow before she saw him. No, she th
ought violently. I couldn’t stand it, I’ve got to talk to someone, and looked up as a woman’s voice called, “Katy.” Cassie Poole, with Jeremy a few steps behind her, was crossing the lobby.

  Cassie looked lovely; the soft, smoky eyes were bluer than ever over wind-pinked cheeks. Had Katy seen Francesca and Mr. Pickering? She and Jeremy and her mother and the lawyer were all dining together and they’d agreed to meet at seven.

  “Mother’s always late,” Cassie said vaguely. “Come have a drink with us, won’t you, Katy?”

  Jeremy gazed steadily and politely over Katy’s left shoulder, his face waiting. Katy said crisply that she couldn’t, thanks, she was looking for someone herself, and thought that, flickeringly, Jeremy relaxed. Cassie said, “See you later, then,” and they were gone.

  The minutes dragged. Whenever the desk phone rang at the other end of the lobby, Katy braced herself and stared nervously at Mr. Lasky, who began, behind the counter and the potted palm, to twitch a little under the unwavering hazel eyes. She practiced being understanding and philosophical until about twenty minutes after seven, when the Inn door opened to a frosty gust of air and Michael walked in.

  He had gotten involved at the office, he said, holding her hand tightly in his own, and hadn’t been able to get a cab. When he had finally arrived at Grand Central the gates had just closed—and what the hell was that guy at the desk staring at, hadn’t he ever seen a man with only one head before? Katy stopped herself on the brink of a giggle and said, “Sshh, that’s our local Billingsley.” Michael, taking her arm firmly, said, “What we both need is a drink. Let’s find a table and then I’ll take my bag up.”

  When he had seated her in the solemn little bar and ordered and left, Katy lighted a cigarette and looked around her. There was a sprinkling of obviously out-of-town faces, and there were faces she ought to have remembered but didn’t. Over in a corner, surprisingly, was H. J. Pickering, with the patient, expectant air of a man at a table for two.