Voice Out of Darkness

by Ursula Curtiss

  “Katy!”

  She had reached the road; she turned at Arnold Poole’s shouted greeting.

  “Can I give you a lift? I have to drop something off at Cassie’s but I’m going right into town after that.”

  His absorption of the morning was gone. Katy said gratefully that a lift would be wonderful, and added unconvincingly that she had walked farther than she’d intended. For that, she got a bright dark glance and no comment.

  They didn’t talk about the police, because that meant Ilse. (How did it feel, Katy wondered fleetingly, to wander about in a murdered woman’s house?) Instead, she asked about Arnold Poole’s book and the movie; who would do the scenario, and would it mean going to Hollywood? She said tentatively, “Francesca sent—congratulations.”

  The car swerved a little. That was because Arnold Poole took his eyes from the road and stared unwinkingly at Katy, his face stripped of nonchalance. “Did she, Katy?”

  “Yes… Tree,” said Katy nervously, and braced her feet as Arnold swung the wheel and they shaved past a giant elm. Up a slight hill and around the curve; they were at Francesca’s house, and Katy’s eyes went wide with astonishment.

  Cassie was shoveling snow.

  About as expertly as you would expect Cassie to shovel snow, Katy thought as Arnold pulled the car in off the road. She was slow and impatient; the shovel made wavering little forays into the snow, Cassie deposited the tiny white heaps with shaky care, frowned, stretched, looked peevishly at more snow all around her and made another fragile attack.

  Cassie stopped when she saw them. She started forward, but Arnold was quicker; he was out of the car with a muttered apology to Katy and crossing the snowy lawn before she had taken more than a few steps. Katy watched with unabashed alertness. Arnold Poole took something from his pocket and handed it to Cassie, who was almost hidden by his back. Katy saw a flash of green before the object, whatever it was, disappeared into a pocket of Cassie’s dark blue ski suit. Arnold had moved a little so that he no longer shielded his daughter from view. He bent his head and said something, and Cassie flushed scarlet and turned angrily away.

  End of pantomime? No; Arnold Poole said something else and Cassie turned her head again and looked up at him with a questioning face. Then, abruptly, the scene was over. Cassie came to the car and greeted Katy and waved a helpless hand at the snowy lawn. “Exercise,” she said, and made a face. “Nothing like it—thank heavens.”

  Gloves, Katy thought suddenly and sharply, not listening to Cassie’s voice. The quick glimpse of green, the wave of Cassie’s hand linked all at once in her mind and became a pair of cool green kid gloves that Cassie had worn the day that she had come so reluctantly to the Inn.

  If the flash of green in Arnold’s hand had been a glove, then Cassie had worn them again after that, because she had been on her way to dinner with Jeremy that evening.

  Had she dropped one, carelessly, when she made a hurried exit from Ilse Petersen’s house on the afternoon of the day Ilse died? Someone had left in obvious haste, not stopping to right an ashtray or straighten papers or cap a fountain pen. Katy looked at Cassie. Cassie gazed gently, blandly back. Arnold Poole struggled with the gear shift and then they were pulling away. Out of the corner of her eye, Katy could see Cassie walking back to where the shovel lay.

  The car was idling along at an absent-minded twenty-five miles an hour; Arnold Poole’s mind wasn’t, Katy thought, on his driving. She wondered why he was trying to conceal the fact that he was still very deeply in love with his wife. Dislike or indifference or even casual liking wouldn’t have brought the lighted eagerness to his face for that one unguarded instant when she had mentioned Francesca’s name. But why, when nothing stood between them? Harvey Pickering?…

  She had said the name aloud. Arnold Poole turned his head to give her a sharp dark glance and a single hoot of sardonic laughter. “Pickering!” The car shot forward under the savage pressure of his foot. “Mr. Pickering,” said Arnold more quietly, “found it necessary to be out of town for a few days.”

  He dropped Katy at the Inn door. He said, almost absently, “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Oh-?”

  “Your bodyguard’s orders,” said Arnold pleasantly, and nodded and drove off.

  There was a wire from Michael at the desk; it said extravagantly that he missed her and that he would arrive at Fenwick on the 6:14 without fail this time. Katy looked at the lobby clock, did calculations, and went in search of Lieutenant Hooper.

  Sitting on the single straight chair the Inn provided for bedrooms, he was aloof and uncommunicative. He looked at the published card-of-thanks and listened to Katy’s report of her talk with the maid and said merely, “May I?” and pocketed the clipping and envelope. “It’s undoubtedly from the library files, but I’ll check it. I wondered—”

  “What, Lieutenant?”

  “What form it would start to take next,” Hooper said softly, and nodded without visible signs of astonishment when she told him that the fragile Cassie Poole had been industriously shoveling snow. “I don’t think, however, that she’ll find what she was obviously looking for.”

  Then Francesca had interrupted her nocturnal prowler too late. It should, somehow, have mattered more. Katy felt curiously deadened. She stared at the flowered bedspread, pleating faded roses and forget-me-nots with long nervous fingers. “Arnold Poole said something about your wanting him to be here tonight, Lieutenant. You don’t really think—”

  Hooper didn’t answer directly. He said mildly, “I want to see all of them, Miss Meredith. Not just Mr. Poole. I’d like you to call Miss Trent, if you will, and ask her to dine with you.”

  “It’s after five,” Katy said. “She won’t—”

  “I think she will,” said Lieutenant Hooper implacably. “Mr. Taylor is bringing Miss Poole and her mother.”

  “But Harvey Pickering,” Katy said, perversely triumphant, “is out of town.”

  Lieutenant Hooper’s innocent commuter’s face didn’t change. “Was out of town,” he corrected gently, and stood up.

  It was to be, with the addition of Pauline Trent, the same little group who had dined with Francesca on the wild, snowy night when Ilse died. The people who had been at the Inn the night Miss Whiddy died. The people who knew Fenwick, and how Monica had died. “But why?” said Katy, and Lieutenant Hooper looked for a moment at the thick-lashed penetrating hazel eyes and the red sensitive mouth and moved toward the door. He said, “My leave will be up tomorrow, Miss Meredith. I’ll have to be getting back to New York. I’d like to see all these people together… And now, if you’ll call Miss Trent?”

  Pauline Trent answered almost immediately. Katy, grimly gay, said, “I don’t think you’ve ever met my fiancé, have you? I know it’s a disgraceful hour to call, but Michael and I would like you to have dinner with us if you possibly can.”

  Silence. “Tonight?” said Pauline Trent slowly. Overjoyed, Katy thought wryly, and plunged on.

  “Yes, tonight. I’ve just heard from Michael, and I—we don’t know how long he’ll be here. Do you think—”

  “What time?” asked Miss Trent crisply, and Katy told her, puzzled and a little incredulous. Lieutenant Hooper, mild, timid, unobtrusive Lieutenant Hooper had been right: in spite of a reluctance she didn’t bother to conceal, Pauline Trent had accepted the eleventh-hour invitation.

  She hadn’t much time to wonder about it; Michael’s train would be in soon. With a speed born of early-morning practice Katy splashed in and out of a bath, put on the subtle black wool suit that was nothing off and everything on and added bracelets and lipstick and perfume with one eye on the clock. Threaded through her haste was an odd excited flutter because it was Michael for whom she was hurrying, Michael who would step off the train. When he leaves, she thought, prolonging the flutter, when he leaves I’ll go with him.

  She got to the station as the 6:14 came whistling around a curve. An interminable collection of people swarmed down the steps and onto the pl
atform, and then there were arms around her and a dizzyingly long kiss and Michael was saying in a stifled voice, “I was worried about you, up here alone. I got so I was writing your name in the middle of a presentation for the Glass-blower’s Handy Manual. All in all, I couldn’t stand much more of it.”

  “Nobody’s touched me, darling,” Katy said, laughing, and shook off a sudden whispering echo of Jeremy Taylor’s voice in a darkened car. She told Michael, “We’ve a dinner companion, I’m sorry to say…”

  They got the last cab at the Fenwick station. There was a glass partition between the front and back seats; Katy, her hand still curled in Michael’s, could talk without caution. “You haven’t found out anything more about the sketches?”

  Michael shook his head in the darkness. “No. Reported it to the police, of course, just in case it was part of a neighborhood job. The sketches themselves don’t matter—”

  “They matter very much, to me,” Katy said fiercely.

  “—but,” said Michael, “if it’s part of this other thing I don’t like its branching out like that. There’s no point. It’s like water dripping somewhere—in time it’ll annoy the hell out of you but if you don’t know where it is you don’t know how to stop it.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Katy said, watching sprayed lemon light from the headlamps. “No threats, no anything. But it’s—there.”

  They were silent for a moment. The cab crossed the bridge and stopped for a light; they were nearly at the Inn. Katy’s mind slid back over the day, the brief meetings with Jeremy Taylor, Francesca, Arnold Poole, Cassie, the odd conversation with Pauline Trent. And the moment, the near-knowing instant when she had stood at the other end of the little pond where she and Monica had skated. She said dreamily, “I almost knew, today. I went to the pond—”

  “My God!” said Michael, sharply and frighteningly. He groaned. “Katy, you little fool. You went alone, I suppose?”

  When she nodded he took her hand, gently and firmly. “Katy, listen to me. I’ve felt all along that you were running too much on somebody’s schedule. I think somebody wanted you to come here to Fenwick, and you did come. I think somebody planted a morbid idea in your head, so that you’d go back to the pond and give your nerves a nice fresh jab—and you did. You started remembering it all over again, didn’t you?”

  “Well—of course,” Katy said defensively. “But nobody’s threatened me.”

  Michael drew a long, elaborately patient breath. He said, “Katy, you are an enchanting creature. Thank God you don’t sit in a counting house, running your fingers through your inheritance. But you’ve got to remember that it’s there—what is it, forty, fifty thousand?”

  “Close to ninety,” Katy said automatically, “but I still don’t-”

  Blackmail. She had thought of it at the very beginning, when she had opened the first of the ugly scrawled letters. But you couldn’t extort blackmail without damaging evidence of some kind, and even if she had pushed Monica deliberately there would never; could never be any evidence.

  They were at the Inn. Michael paid the cab and paused for a moment at the foot of the steps leading up to the door. Katy could tell that he was making his voice deliberately brutal. “Have you thought what would become of the Meredith estate if anything happened to you before you married?”

  Oddly, she hadn’t, because there had never been any suggestion of that. It left her groping. “You mean if—”

  “If you fell down a flight of stairs,” said Michael grimly, “or were struck by a hit-and-run driver. Or had any routine—accident. What happens then, Katy?”

  “I’m not sure,” Katy said, but she was. And she was shivering. “I’m cold, Michael, let’s—”

  “All right,” Michael said, relenting. “I’m sorry, Katy, I’m only trying to frighten a little caution into you. Until they get this thing cleared up, don’t go to places like the pond alone. I’ll go with you, or Hooper. But don’t go alone.”

  ‘If you had any routine—accident.’ Katy smiled and lifted her martini and agreed with Pauline Trent about Fenwick’s growing prominence as a quaint resort town.

  Underneath, she thought seethingly that it was all very well for Lieutenant Hooper to toss them together like ingredients for an experimental stew and then go serenely off by himself. But, even with Michael at his most diplomatic, the going with Uncle John’s cousin was rough. Miss Trent smoked and sipped a cocktail and threw abrupt remarks into the small silences. Her air of braced stiffness, her black unwinking eyes said plainly, “Now that you’ve got me here, what do you want with me?”

  Michael inquired, nobly, about the local oyster industry.

  Katy shifted imperceptibly and slid her fingers down the cold polished stem of her glass. ‘What happens then, Katy?’ She knew, dimly, that in the event of her death before she married the Meredith estate would revert to the few Meredith relatives, distant connections, by blood, on both sides of the family. There was a cousin in San Francisco, another in—was it Canada?—a twice-removed couple referred to, vaguely, as Morrow and Lucille.

  And Pauline Trent.

  Nonsense, thought Katy briskly, and looked up and took the full impact of the shining unreadable eyes across the table.

  Voices in the doorway of the bar, someone saying, “—not by the window, it’s freezing, I know it of old.” Francesca Poole, slender and poised, looked restlessly over the little bar. At her shoulder, Cassie, in—why was it surprising?—the warm red wool she had worn the night she had come flying through the snow to stare at Ilse Petersen’s crushed body. Jeremy Taylor, at Cassie’s side, touched her elbow and bent his head and said something, and Cassie smiled brilliantly across the room at Katy and they moved forward.

  “Mind if we join you for a drink?”

  Jeremy was doing it smoothly, sliding chairs into place, tucking Francesca’s coat over her shoulders, folding Cassie’s back over her chair. “If you’ll finish those drinks, we can all start together… waiter?”

  So it’s going to be social, thought Katy coldly and clearly. Why doesn’t Lieutenant Hooper come and watch us performing so prettily? There was a tiny knot of tension somewhere in her throat. Michael’s fingers touched her wrist warningly and she lifted her martini and finished it.

  More cocktails were ordered; Katy wanted to say, ironically, that they might as well wait for Arnold Poole and Harvey Pickering. Then, when Francesca turned a shoulder to speak to Jeremy, she saw that the group was almost complete after all.

  Harvey Pickering’s back was to them; he sat alone at a small table beside one of the wine-curtained windows. He could hardly have failed to turn his head at the greetings and the shifting of chairs. If he was aware of their presence, he didn’t show it. While Katy watched, a waiter deposited a Manhattan before him and went away and returned with a menu.

  It was twenty minutes after seven.

  At about twenty-five minutes after seven, Arnold Poole made a curiously flat entrance. He chose a table for two near the doorway, saw them, smiled and waved, and sat down. He ordered a drink; when it came he raised it toward their table in polite salute. Francesca said composedly, under her breath, “Heavens. Everyone we ever knew is here tonight. How long are you staying, Mr. Blythe?”

  It seemed to Katy that they were all suspended, waiting. Michael said casually, avoiding a pause, “A day or two—or until I can coax Katy to come back with me.”

  Might as well find out now, Katy thought; might as well know if it interferes with someone’s plans… She said clearly, “Whenever you say, darling. I’ll need a few days to resign at Paige’s and do something about the apartment, but we’ll be married right after that, shall we?”

  She waited for a reaction that didn’t come. There were congratulations all over again, and just the right amount of pleased surprise. Francesca said quickly, “Katy, how wonderful!” and Cassie looked at Jeremy and laughed and said, “Why can’t I be that efficient?” Pauline Trent said, with no expression at all, that she was sure they would be very
happy.

  Michael didn’t speak. He had nodded, and now he sat looking at her with the secret blue glance that shut all the others away and left them delightfully alone. Katy dropped her eyes under the dazing directness of his. Seconds later, when she could think rationally again, she told herself that he had been wrong about any threat to her marriage. They had received the news like any polite group of friends, with smiling interest, with the usual questions.

  She stopped twirling her glass and looked up. In time to catch the slow, furious stare which Jeremy Taylor had been directing at his fiancée.

  At seven-thirty-five Lieutenant Hooper came in.

  His face was pink with cold; it made him look demurer than ever. Katy had learned to be frightened of his muffler-and-rubbers mildness. The tight knot in her throat was back, sharpened by dread. Lieutenant Hooper came straight to the table. He said cheerfully, “Good news, Miss Meredith—I think this is yours, isn’t it?”

  He handed her missing black suede bag across the table. The once-soft leather was crustily stiff in her fingers, the drawstring was gone. Someone said innocently, “Oh, had you lost it, Katy?” and someone else asked detachedly, “Everything intact?”

  Harvey Pickering had turned to watch them at last; Katy was half-consciously aware of that. She sat holding the bag in tight fingers, looking up at Lieutenant Hooper for guidance. If he were right, and the wedding-invitation envelope contained the third of the anonymous letters, she might as well be clutching a cobra.

  “Just see if everything’s there,” said Lieutenant Hooper gently.

  Katy pulled at the shirred edge of the pouch. She pretended to probe with her fingers, to count the bills in the black wallet; she saw nothing but the square white envelope.