Voice Out of Darkness (13 page)

She hadn’t, until then, made up her mind whether to go or stay. She said crisply, “Yes, I am,” and Jeremy clucked and said, “I’ll be seeing you, then. Hope you find your bag,” and, maddeningly, hung up.

The bag wasn’t important. Except for the room key and her favorite compact, the contents could be easily duplicated. Nevertheless, it was an annoying loose end. When she left the phone booth in the lobby and joined Michael in a dim corner of the bar, he made no effort to conceal his worry about its loss. Katy described the bag’s innocuous contents. “After all, Michael, there isn’t anything—”

“There’s your room key,” Michael said bluntly, “free passage to anyone who decides to drop in at any hour of the day or night. Whoever it is probably got what he wanted the first time when the letters were taken, but—you can’t tell.”

Not to be safe even behind a locked door, to be afraid to sleep with her face toward the windows for fear the doorknob might twitch in the shadows behind her—Katy remembered the night before. When Michael said firmly, “You’ve got to move to another room,” she agreed.

In spite of the white-sequined brilliance of sunlight on snow, the cloudless arch of frigid sky, it was a somber, waiting afternoon. Michael had to submit sketches at a meeting the next morning, thought he’d be allowed to take a late train back to New York that night. “They might want me later at the inquest as another witness, but I doubt it. Abbott seems pretty well convinced that Ilse Petersen’s death was an accident.”

“But there’ll be an autopsy,” Katy said slowly. “Isn’t there always, in a case like that? And maybe they’ll find—”

Michael looked at her and looked hurriedly away. “I’m—afraid they won’t,” he said, and Katy knew wincingly that he had seen Ilse Petersen’s smashed body. She said hastily, “Do you think Lieutenant Hooper—?” and Michael shook his head. “The storm seems to have been worse than we thought. Only a bird could get here from Bridgeport today.”

He was wrong. It took Lieutenant Hooper some time, because he arrived in Fenwick by way of a good deal of official wangling and the state snow-plough, but he came.

By that time Katy had gotten the bewildered Mr.

Lasky to assign her to another room, moved her belongings, and succeeded in working herself up to a state of acute nervousness. Hanging quilted apricot satin in the closet, folding sweaters into a drawer, stowing cold cream and toothpaste and dusting powder in the bathroom cabinet, she found herself waiting, nerves tight, for some unnamable thing that in all probability was not going to happen at all.

Because the violence had spent itself. Ilse Petersen had possessed knowledge that was dangerous to a person or persons unknown and had died very rapidly as a result. (Was there another spot that served as a sounding-board in the little house under the Japanese pines, where someone else could have heard the words that sent Ilse to her death? Katy stared at a swooping seagull and tried to think back. Who else had left the living room during that five-minute interval?.)

But there it was: that particular threat had been removed. And the letters were safely back in the hand that had written them. Wasn’t this, surely, the end of the malign and senseless plan that wrote notes and ordered funeral wreaths?

Katy sat down at the tiny desk in the corner and looked out at the hill that rose behind the Inn, a stand of dark pines at its crest, a curve of the frozen, snow-blanketed river. She wondered who had visited the house by the pond on the afternoon of the day before. Francesca Poole could now have not only her husband but his suddenly lavish bank-account as well. Someone had spilled ashes in that dim living room and gone through papers and read the letter that made it possible. Someone who had, presumably, left in too much of a hurry to dispose of the contents of the overturned ashtray or straighten the disordered desk.

Strange, too, the unlikely friendship between the dead sculptress and Pauline Trent. Both were more or less mystery women in the town, because of the seclusion in which they lived and the calmness with which they flouted the local mores. Katy thought, if Ilse had been watching that day at the pond, if she had seen whoever was hiding at the other end… and jumped, ridiculously, at a tap on the door. It was Michael, to announce unbelievably that Lieutenant Hooper had arrived.

It was a little after four o’clock. The afternoon was graying rapidly and there were lights in the almost-empty bar. Lieutenant Hooper stuffed his muffler tidily into a sleeve of his overcoat, sat back against dark brown leather and explained modestly that his brother-in-law, the assistant fire-chief of Bridgeport, had been able to get him on the state plough. He became brisk; more than ever, Katy thought helplessly, like a wren starting determinedly to build a nest. “Now, Miss Meredith. First of all, I’d like one of those letters you received. I’ve talked to one of our handwriting men at headquarters—”

“But the letters are gone,” Katy said, and told him about the invasion of her room. Lieutenant Hooper looked sad. He said that it had occurred to him, after Katy left New York, that it ought to be relatively simple for her to get samples of the handwriting of ail concerned; that, although it was undoubtedly well-disguised, Belaski, at headquarters, had assured him that there would be tell-tale characteristics—a twist,, a break, a pressure of the pen—of which the writer himself was probably unaware. He said, “As I told Mr. Blythe, I read about the woman—Whiddy, wasn’t it—who was killed here Friday night. Suppose you begin from the time you arrived, Miss Meredith…”

Katy began. She told, very carefully, about her brief visit to Ilse Petersen’s house with Arnold Poole. “It—overlooks the pond, Lieutenant.” She mentioned the wreath of carnations, fleetingly, because he had already been told in New York by Michael. Now he clucked disapprovingly. “Bold, very bold. I didn’t like the looks of that at all… but go on.”

Katy sent her mind back over that frightening Friday night. The searching of her room and the theft of the letters, the tap, unanswered, at her bedroom door. Miss Whiddy lying broken and dead at the foot of the stairs, and her shoes—not the shoes with the loose heel—bobbing onto the stretcher. The light bulb that hadn’t burned out but had flashed on again at a flick of Katy’s fingers. Hooper said, “You didn’t tell the police any of this, Miss Meredith?”

Katy flushed. “I should have. I was terrified, and the whole thing was so confused… and then there was only my word against Mr. Lasky’s about the shoes. He was sure they were the same. And there was no particular reason for the police to be interested. Lieutenant. People don’t get murdered in Fenwick—”

“ ‘They only fade away,’ ” finished Lieutenant Hooper unexpectedly. He looked directly at Katy, and she was startled all over again at the cool impersonal shrewdness of the eyes in the mild and bird-like face. He said gently, “And you don’t think there’s a chance that it was just what it seemed to be—an accident?”

“No,” Katy said flatly. “Not when you think of those other things. Not with the way Miss Whiddy watched everyone who came and went in the hall—no. She was pushed.”

Pushed. It hung there in the air, as clearly as though it were written again in slanting black on white: ‘You pushed her.’ But nobody had pushed Monica, no, nobody, even though Cassie had said shockingly that she couldn’t have seen even if Katy had. And somebody had pushed Miss Whiddy. It was an unfortunate juxtaposition of terms, that was all. Thrusting it deliberately away from her, Katy said, “And then to have another ‘accident,’ twenty-four hours later—”

Lieutenant Hooper was interested; he had heard on his way through town that a woman had been run over in the storm the night before. Michael ordered drinks. Outside, so subtly that they weren’t aware of it, it was late afternoon one moment and night the next as snow and sky and trees slid into the clear cold dark.

Katy explained about the dinner at Francesca’s; “Small and informal—there were just six of us altogether.” When she came to Air. Pickering, Lieutenant Hooper’s feathery no-colored eyebrows went up mildly. “A current interest, perhaps?” Katy said that Francesca without a man was unthinkable; she was an extraordinarily attractive woman and, although Katy didn’t think there were ever any serious entanglements, there must always be someone to call and send her flowers and hand her into cabs.

Behind the screen of words that were building a little pre-Revolutionary house under the pines, filling its rooms with yellow light, manipulating people and their movements and their relations to each other, Katy’s mind went rapidly on ahead. She was remembering Cassie, white and pleading, lying under apple green satin and looking up at her with wet eyes. To report Cassie’s conversation with Ilse Petersen was to supply Cassie immediately with a motive for Use’s death: her parents’ probable reconciliation—for which she had cared enough to attempt to finance it herself, painfully and in secret.

She skirted it cautiously. “Ilse was in the house that night, Lieutenant. I went upstairs before dinner and I heard her speak to someone, somewhere below—I don’t know who. But the front door was unlocked, because later on Arnold Poole walked in.” She could feel Michael’s restlessness beside her, touched his elbow warningly with hers. Lieutenant Hooper listened and nodded and inserted a question now and then. “Did anyone leave the room for any length of time during the evening, before the expedition to dig the cars out?” he asked.

Cassie had gone to the kitchen when her father arrived; Francesca to the cellar for the bottle of Scotch. Michael stared at darkness filling the window. “There was someone else—wait a minute, yes, Pickering went out on the side porch. To get wood for the fire.”

“But he must have come back right away,” Katy said, disappointed.

“No,” Michael said. “Apparently snow had blown in on top of the woodpile and he had to go underneath for dry wood. He was knocking around out there for quite a few minutes.”

“And,” said Lieutenant Hooper mildly, regarding the table top, “there’s always the man who didn’t quite come to dinner. Mr. Poole.”

Arnold Poole had been minus his hat. Your hat was the first thing you lost, in a scuffle. But Arnold had been snowy and gay and cheerful, and you couldn’t come from murder that way. Katy said, “Oh, but—” and looked up as Jeremy Taylor came through the doorway.

He ordered a hot rum and water, standing at the bar. Katy could see his reflection in the long mirror, calm and a little contemptuous—but that could be the odd break in his eyebrow. His eyes, roaming the mirror, caught hers. Katy looked into her drink and said, “Have you a cigarette, Michael?” and was bending her head to a match when Jeremy’s voice said coolly, “Hello there, Katy. How are you, Blythe?”

He didn’t stay long. Just long enough to be introduced to Lieutenant Hooper, to say “Nice to meet you, Lieutenant,” with something measuring in his eyes. Then he was gone, and Michael was turning to Hooper.

“You’ll have dinner with us, won’t you, Ed?—and another drink.”

The drinks came. Michael said, looking at Hooper, “There’s one thing you didn’t know. I’m bringing it up because Arnold Poole brought it up last night, and while it can’t have anything to do with all this you’d better know anyway.”

The bitterness had drained out of him; his voice was even as he described the embezzlement that had bankrupted his father. He said, “It was a shock—I never dreamed that Gerald knew any of these people. From what I heard he confined himself, those few summers, to the local Gold Coast.”

Lieutenant Hooper looked at the ceiling. “Blythe—I think… In the early thirties, was it?”

Michael nodded. Katy’s mind, unbidden, re-dictated a conversation at dinner two nights ago: ‘And now we come to the question of my renouncing your wealth.’ ‘But why do we talk about that…?’ ‘Because other people talk about it…’ Of course. People had talked and Michael, as Gerald Blythe’s brother, had been cut by the edges.

Lieutenant Hooper left them to make a phone call before dinner. He came back with a thoughtful eye on his watch. “It’s a little late to think about leaving for Bridgeport,” he said, “though I understand the roads are clear. I wonder—”

“There’ll be room here,” Katy said. “Business has fallen off, slightly.”

“I have a few days’ leave,” said Lieutenant Hooper. “Naturally, I’d have to talk to the local police; it’s out of my province. They’ll have to know something about the letters, of course—”

“Oh, please stay,” Katy said on a long breath, and Michael said, “I’ve got to be in New York tomorrow, but if I knew there was someone here, that Katy wasn’t completely alone—”

Lieutenant Hooper looked demure, and said he would stay.

Katy put Michael on the 10:30 train. The roads were eerie, banked in places with four feet of snow and bare except for an occasional truck or a cab, like theirs, with a doubled meter. On the platform, in a black roar of wind, Michael put his arms very tightly around her and said in a muffled voice, “Next week.”

“Next week, darling,” Katy said, and lifted her face to his kiss as the train came in.

At about four-thirty, while Katy and Michael and Lieutenant Hooper sat talking in the Inn bar, Frank Abbott tilted back in his chair in the tiny office at the Fenwick police headquarters and nodded at Sergeant Gilfoyle. “Let Blythe go back to New York,” he said, “let them all run around as they please. The more running around they do the better I’ll like it.”

Gilfoyle nodded back. He said, “Nothing on the Petersen woman until tomorrow night, at the earliest. Can’t get a word out of Devlin, as usual. You’d think he was paid to keep his mouth shut instead of open. He did say he thought he’d find traces of metal in some of those temple wounds.”

“Metal?”

“Like from a shovel,” said Sergeant Gilfoyle dreamily, and went on rocking. There was silence in the little office. Blackness pressed against the panes of the single window; it was, unobtrusively, night. On the desk an unfinished report awaited completion before being dispatched to Lieutenant Thall of the state police. Chief Abbott looked at his watch. “Poole must have been out. Well, tomorrow—”

There was a knock at the door. An officer opened it and stood aside as Arnold Poole walked in.