Voice Out of Darkness (16 page)

But this was how Use Petersen had been found, struck down on a snowy road. Katy’s mouth was dry. Jeremy said, again, “Could you come out for just a minute, Katy?”

What was it…? ‘Dilly, dilly, come out and be killed.’ What did you do, on an empty, soundless eternity of road? If she could slide over into the driver’s seat, if she could, magically, make the wheels pick up on that slither of ice… the windshield silvered. A car was coming around the curve, chains grinding. Katy didn’t wait. She was sliding under the wheel, had the driver’s door open, was out in the road, shouting. The oncoming car pulled up and Jeremy walked around in front of the headlights to join her. Katy didn’t look at him. She said to an earnest be-spectacled face in the car, “We’re stuck—I wonder if you could give us a push.” She said, very slowly and deliberately, “I’m Katy Meredith. This is Mr. Taylor, Jeremy Taylor. We’re on our way back to Fenwick.”

The man was obliging. He said that the roads were nasty, with ice under all that snow, and turned his car in the road and nudged their bumper gently with his and gave them a push. They started off. Jeremy waved and shouted his thanks, and Katy shrank towards the door and thought, It’s all right. He couldn’t, now. That man has my name, and his.

There was a red light at the bridge going into Fenwick. Jeremy turned his head, deliberately, and looked at Katy. It was dark and warm inside the car. She had relaxed her stiffened muscles. Their shoulders were almost touching. Jeremy’s eyes were clear and green in the light from the dashboard. Katy heard her own heartbeats, swift and deafening; Jeremy stirred abruptly and put an arm out, along the back of the seat. His wrist touched her hair. And there it was again, without warning, that smothering, pounding sensation, that dizzying awareness of a warm shoulder next to hers, the held breath that, expelled, would make them touch.

Magnetism, she thought remotely. Some peculiar, electric fusion that Jeremy could produce at will. Was he like this, she thought ashamedly, with Cassie? And turned her head, so that her hair slid along Jeremy’s wrist, and her mouth was a scant three inches from his. The light changed, and horns sounded impatiently behind them. Jeremy went on looking at her, and an isolated, chilly spot in her mind warned her to move, to turn her head away, to speak. She didn’t. Jeremy was going to kiss her.

He didn’t. His eyes and mouth changed, he gave her a cool, weighing look and took his arm away from the back of the seat. Horns grew more indignant on the bridge. Jeremy laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Katy. I won’t touch you,” and a sweep of heat came up into Katy’s face. She didn’t say anything. She had stood, for a second, on the ragged edge of danger. With Michael’s ring twisting under her fingers, she was blessedly safe again. A waiting look, a stilling of bone and muscle: it was neat, a conjuror’s trick. In front of the Inn she said lightly, “Dinner was wonderful, Jeremy… don’t get out. And don’t, for heaven’s sake, take me too seriously about Miss Whiddy or anything else—it’s the kind of thing you think up when you’ve time on your hands.”

“Is it?” said Jeremy, and gave her a long look. But the alchemy was gone, Katy thought; he was only a friend, an affianced man, glancing at her in what was undoubtedly meant to be a devastating fashion. Jeremy realized it too, because his mouth looked angry and his “Good night” was curt.

It was after eleven, but she wasn’t tired. She took a bath and brushed her hair stingingly and smoked a cigarette, looking out into darkness, hearing wind shuddering around the Inn. Where was Michael? Asleep—or working late, putting delicate, sure brush-strokes of color on lifeless white paper that would suddenly seem to breathe and move? Bending forward, probably, in a welter of cigarette butts and cold coffee and brush-water, which he usually missed, ending up by dabbling his brush in coffee instead?

Michael was strong and driving, with magic in his fingers and a camel’s-hair brush. Jeremy… Katy undressed and slipped into bed and pulled blankets up under her chin; Jeremy’s charm came out of a faucet, turned on generously when the occasion demanded. Was that why Cassie was so quietly, white-facedly, not happy? Jeremy was attracted to her, Katy—she knew it with blood and senses rather than logic. Was that what it had been, out there on the lonely black road, a fumbling, schoolboy attempt at a tête-a-tête, another version of the out-of-gas routine? The thought made her feel abruptly and unreasonably safer. No man would continue to strike, with hidden, vicious malevolence, at a woman toward whom he was ever so slightly drawn. Would he? Her mind was drowsy.

She forgot, completely, the heat in her own cheeks, the shaking violence of her own heartbeats, the warning consciousness that said this was deliberate magnetism, the other thing that had been willing to be magnetized. The measure of calculated response.

… any one of them. Katy closed her eyes against a peppering of starlight and thought again, blurredly, any one of them…

“Nothing to be alarmed about,” said Lieutenant Hooper over bacon and eggs on the following morning. “Nothing else taken from Mr. Blythe’s apartment in New York, no attack on Mr. Blythe himself. Just some sketches gone. Charcoals, I think. He said you’d know the ones he meant.”

Katy did. She was briefly, sharply furious instead of afraid, because the sketches that had been removed from Michael’s Thirty-eighth Street apartment were the charcoals she’d wanted to have matted and framed after they were married. Landscapes, most of them, and one of an old woman picking her way fearfully through a snowy street, shawl hugged tight, ragged skirt lifted. They were beautiful things, so alive that in the winter scenes you could almost see cold mauve and chilly starlit green and the muted silvers of snow. There were perhaps six of them altogether. They’d been done, Michael said carelessly, years ago, but you could see from the way his eyes went back to them that he liked them too.

She forced a smile. “Maybe Michael’s got a rabid fan, who can’t wait for the next issue of
Panorama.
It can’t have anything to do with—”

Hooper shrugged. “Probably not. Some rather erratic thief, more likely, who took a fancy to the sketches and got alarmed before he had a chance to take anything else. Still, it mightn’t do any harm to check. That was Sunday—trains ought to be fairly few and far between, and the ticket agent would probably remember if one of these people had bought a ticket to New York. We’ll see.”

Katy played with her coffee spoon. “What did the police think when you told them about Miss Whiddy?” Lieutenant Hooper smiled thinly. He said, “They weren’t as surprised as you thought they’d be, Miss Meredith. There were photographs of the body. Somebody apparently wasn’t satisfied to begin with.”

She looked up wordlessly. Hooper said, flatly, “Bruises. A whole handful of them, dark and very recently inflicted, on the right shoulder. Not inconceivable that she’d managed to do it herself, of course, or that it didn’t happen naturally. But, with the other evidence…”

“Then they weren’t taken in,” Katy said. “They did think she hadn’t just fallen, all along.” She felt relieved. She had, after all, through fear and confusion and a feeling of futility, concealed the evidence that made Miss Whiddy’s death murder.

Lieutenant Hooper gave her a sharp look. “It’s imperative,” he said slowly, “that you keep that to yourself, Miss Meredith. The very nature of these murders, the apparent accidents… Abbott thinks he has a great deal to gain by playing along, and he’s managed to convince the state’s man. I told Mr. Blythe when I talked to him last night. But you’re not to mention it to anyone else. There’ll be people questioned, naturally. But right now there’s to be no outright mention of murder.”

No outright mention of murder, when someone strolled casually among them, serene because of two pairs of silenced lips, two threats eliminated, two new graves in the hard December ground. Someone, perhaps, who extended a cigarette to her, or held a match… Lieutenant Hooper caught her eye and smiled again. It wasn’t his demure commuter’s smile; it was probably, Katy thought, his hunting smile. He said, “That doesn’t mean the police here won’t be watching every move, Miss Meredith, or that the state police won’t get regular progress reports. You might call it fighting fire with fire. It was Sergeant Gilfoyle’s idea really. And Sergeant Gilfoyle is not a stupid man.”

No, thought Katy. She would not like to have Sergeant Gilfoyle after her. She said abruptly, “Do they want to see me?” and Lieutenant Hooper said they did. “After lunch—say between one and two. I think you’d better tell them everything, Miss Meredith.”

“But I’ve told you everything,” said Katy defensively, and stopped and blushed. Lieutenant Hooper said mildly, “It remained for Mr. Taylor, when I met him downtown yesterday, to inform me about your missing purse. Suppose you tell me what was in it.”

They ordered more coffee and Katy went obediently through the contents of the black suede bag. “So you see, Lieutenant, it was rather a slim haul. That’s why I’m so sure—”

Hooper wasn’t listening. He said sadly, “Too bad… but then you’d be apt not to, of course…”

“Not to what?” asked Katy, mystified, and caught her breath when Lieutenant Hooper shrugged and said, “I’m not sure, naturally. But the wedding invitation envelope, I presume, was squarish… I think if you had looked inside, you’d have found one of the letters your visitor thought he’d stolen.”

One of the letters, thought Katy hours later, seated on a hard chair in Chief Abbott’s little office. Her voice went mechanically on, repeating details she’d already told; her mind went circling back to the night before she’d left New York. She was packing and it was late, because she and Michael had sat so long on the faded, flowery couch. She was blurry with fatigue and happiness, and she’d sorted through the papers she meant to bring to Fenwick with her eyes on the sparkle of Michael’s ring and not what her fingers were doing. Somehow, she’d managed to misplace the contents of two squarish white envelopes.

“You’d be willing to swear that the shoes Miss Whiddy was taking to be repaired were not the shoes she was wearing when she fell, would you, Miss Meredith?”

“Oh, yes. There was no amber on the others, they were plain black.”

There was really a kind of vicious humor to it: someone opening one of the envelopes addressed simply to Miss Katherine Meredith, Apt. 4A, and finding that Mr. and Mrs. Somebody-or-other Wallace requested the honor of her presence at the marriage of their daughter, Rosemary… but it was chilling, too, because she’d walked carelessly around among those people with that letter in her bag. Someone had wanted it badly enough to enter her room and search for it. Someone had thought so much of secrecy, on that walk down the dim hall, that he had murdered to insure it.

She said, “If that’s all…” and stood. However Lieutenant Hooper had phrased her reasons for not coming forward sooner, the police weren’t hostile. They had been cool and impersonal and briskly routine; they had touched only lightly on the letters, as though they assumed with mysterious official ethics that that was Hooper territory. They thanked her for coming in. Chief Abbott said formally, “I’ll have to ask you not to mention any of this, Miss Meredith,” and she said, “Of course. I understand,” and went out of the little brick building into the crisp gray afternoon.

Dreadfully ironic that Miss Whiddy had missed the scoop of her life—rather, of her own death. Katy walked back to the Inn without seeing anyone she knew. The charcoals, the lovely, living shadows that Michael had coaxed out of a burnt black stick… it was more of the ugly senselessness that seemed to strike at random, out of sheer hatred, frighteningly without brain or plan. Unless it was a dim attempt to hurt her, through Michael.

But who could know how she had loved the sketches the moment she saw them? Simple: no one would have had to know. They were the only non-business drawings in Michael’s apartment.

And who knew Michael’s address in New York? Again it was bafflingly simple: a phone book, a glance at mail boxes in the lobby. Someone had had no trouble at all finding out her own address, so surely and accurately that the letters were laid on the mat before her door.

The breaking into of Michael’s apartment wasn’t nice to dwell upon. It was more of the boldness Lieutenant Hooper had mentioned earlier, the daring which had ordered a wreath, in her name, for Monica’s grave. It was proof that the ugliness could travel fast and silently, out of Fenwick and into New York, could follow them, blind and hideous, until someone put a stop to it.

Katy felt momentarily cold with rage. How long was it to go on, this grappling with an opponent who hid behind anonymous letters, a disguised voice, a wreath of fragrant funeral flowers—who gave you no chance for open combat? It was nearly three o’clock. The afternoon was gray and chilly, and events stood maddeningly still. Until, a few minutes after she entered the Inn, she talked to placid, plaid-mufflered Lieutenant Hooper, and called Pauline Trent to ask if she might drop in before dinner.

Lieutenant Hooper had had a busy three hours. He had talked to the ticket agent at the Fenwick station and had found out that Pauline Trent had bought a ticket to New York on the 4:18 on Sunday, the day Michael’s apartment had been entered and the charcoal sketches stolen. He said, “Which doesn’t necessarily prove anything at all. You can buy your ticket on the train and chances are no conductor will remember you. Still, Miss Trent didn’t go to New York on Sunday for shopping purposes. We’ll see…”

He had spent some time in the Fenwick public library, going patiently back through newspapers, local and out-of-town, dated thirteen years ago. He said bluntly, “I read the accounts of your foster-sister’s accident and death. I’d like very much to know Gerald Blythe’s whereabouts that year.”

Gerald Blythe, Michael’s brother—Katy thought of the unspoken fear in Michael’s eyes. She said, “But that man—the man who stopped his car at the pond—was gray-haired and middle-aged. He couldn’t possibly have been—”

“Probably not,” said Lieutenant Hooper softly. “But men turn prematurely gray, Miss Meredith. And you were twelve at the time, weren’t you? Middle age seems quite a different proposition then, if I remember correctly.”