Voice Out of Darkness (17 page)

Lieutenant Hooper had talked to the police and to Devlin, the coroner. He said that Ilse Petersen had been wearing a silk kerchief over her hair the night she died. They had found it, stiff with bloodstains and frozen snow, buried in the scuffle on the road in front of the Poole house. The lieutenant said, “Nevertheless, there were traces of hemp in her hair, and in some of the wounds.”

Katy looked at the shiny leaves of a rubber plant on the desk in the lobby, beyond them at a window full of metal sky and pines and chimney smoke from the roofs of Fenwick. She said carefully, “Hemp, Lieutenant?” and Lieutenant Hooper said, “Yes. Sacking hemp. She might have been covered with it, hidden under it, for the necessary interval. Or she might have been carried in it.”

Carried in it. Dead and still warm and hideously bundled. Or—better not think of this—bloody and unconscious until the smashing wheels of the Buick rode over her and made death sure.

Lieutenant Hooper’s mouth went dry. He said, “Yes, Miss Meredith, the cellar. A whole cellar-full of old hemp sacks, probably—Mrs. Poole seems to be the overequipped type. Unfortunately, as far as we can determine, a cellarful of people, too.”

“I suppose
it seems awfully different to you, Katy.”

Pauline Trent nodded embracingly at rugs, lamps, pictures, at coppery India silk at the windows. She said abruptly, “Everything’s the same, except for a few replacements when things wore out. Still, you haven’t been here in—how long? And it wouldn’t be the same without John and Belinda…”

Unspoken, Katy’s own voice said, “and Monica.” She looked slowly around the long, wide living room. In that hurried visit with Jeremy Taylor four days ago she’d had no sense of homecoming, no revisitation of memories. But the room, seen at leisure, was the same. Persian rugs, rosy in the lamplight. Black wrought-iron stand lamps with warm parchment shades at the wing chair, the outsize sofa, the shabby graceful chair in silver-green velvet. Beams lacing the ceiling overhead-rough, rich hickory, taken from the barn which had been made over into part of the house. India silk at the windows, copper and bronze in the light, mistily green and blue and lavender in the shadows. The iron-strapped Dutch door that opened onto the terrace, the fireplace with its wide uneven stone hearth… Yes, it was the same. Uncle John had sat here and Aunt Belinda there. On wet dark days Monica had spread her dolls on the broad windowsill at the end of the room, and sulked until Katy came to play with them too.

“It’s the same,” Katy said, and realized that her voice was harsh.

But it was unnerving to be plunged back into the comfortable wrappings of childhood. The chair where you’d sat when you’d cut your knee. The corner where Aunt Belinda had said gently, “You mustn’t mind Monica’s little moods, darling.” The wing chair behind which the Airedale had lain, waiting hopefully, one eye open, for a game of hide-and-seek. Outside, beyond the black glittering windows, where the fields and the foamy apple trees and the well, and the little shady hidden place where bluebells and narcissus had come spiking up every spring. Beyond the fields, frighteningly far from the house when you were ten or eleven or twelve, the gold satin brook still ran secretly under hickory trees and steep, perilous banks. And the brook still ran into the little pond, and became abruptly black and cold and deeper.

Katy gave herself a sardonic shake and found a cigarette. She was twenty-five now, and engaged to be married, and had left the age of cut knees and childish memories far behind her. She took the glass of sherry Pauline Trent extended and said, “The whole place is really amazingly the same. And—it’s nice to be back. I hope I didn’t come crashing in on you.”

“Nonsense. I’m always here. And,” Pauline remarked drily, “it is, after all, your home.”

What did you say to that? It wasn’t hers while Pauline lived, would come to her only when Pauline died. If she herself died before Pauline did it would be Pauline’s to dispose of as she pleased… Katy made polite murmurs. She was horrified a moment later to hear herself ask, “Didn’t I see you yesterday at Miss Whiddy’s funeral?”

Pauline Trent laughed. Her face was masked with gold from the fire, but her eyes were bright and black and shining. “You did—and quite by accident. I’ve never been so furious. I daresay Miss Whiddy was quite a worthy woman and so forth, but I’d never have gone to her funeral if I hadn’t been caught in the procession. Enraging. That narrow snowy road—I’d have landed in a snowbank if I’d tried to pull out of the way.”

“Oh,” Katy said, and thought that her bewilderment must have been obvious in her voice, because Pauline said briskly, “There I was, stuck with the cemetery services. Not in sack-cloth and ashes, either—I seem to remember wearing something red. I’m not a funeral-goer, I’m afraid. Barbaric custom. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and what good does it do anybody except the undertaker’s grocer? But I had no choice. I was right in the thick of it.”

Which explained, Katy thought, the look of impatient anger and resentment, the blaringly white coat and the red beret. It was obviously the truth. It made everything more baffling than before, because how could you tell where chance and coincidence and truth left off, and lies and planned maneuvering began? She sipped her sherry and looked at the fire, and glanced obliquely at the woman who was a distant relative by adoption. Squarish face, impossibly dark eyes, smooth, impeccable dark hair parted in the center and drawn tightly back. It was like looking at a wall.

Pauline Trent got up and walked to a window overlooking the terrace. She moved lightly and quickly for a woman with a short, thick body. She said, almost to herself, her back to the room, “Somebody’s home at the Petersen house. Arnold Poole, I suppose.”

The fire crackled. Katy weighed curiosity against tact and said, “I understand you saw something of her—Ilse Petersen. What was she like, really?”

At the window, Pauline turned. Katy, shocked, looked at vindictive lines around the other woman’s mouth, at a sharp furious narrowing of the bleak dark eyes. “She was a dreadful woman,” said Pauline Trent slowly and intently. “A dreadful, dreadful woman.”

It hung there, appallingly stark in an atmosphere of firelight and sherry and small talk. Pauline turned towards the hearth, picked up the tongs and poked at the fire. Her voice came detachedly over her shoulder. “Still, Ilse was a neighbor. She came over to spend the night once or twice when Arnold Poole had to be out of town. You can’t refuse shelter, no matter what you think… more sherry, Katy?”

‘No matter what you think.’ It wasn’t, obviously, what the rest of Fenwick thought; Pauline Trent would be utterly uninfluenced by that. Katy watched sherry spilling into her glass. What, then? What bitter knowledge concerning the dead Ilse put lines around Pauline’s mouth, and the narrowness of rage in her eyes? Not knowledge, necessarily—suspicion, instead, had been implied. She put out her cigarette. At the window again Pauline said suddenly, “The lights have gone out—I suppose Arnold’s off to town.”

The room was warm and rosy and calm. Katy was conscious all at once of the isolation of the house in which she sat, of the cold December darkness shrouding fields and woods and pond and road. Ilse Petersen’s was the nearest place, and the lights had just gone out there. The Meredith house was big. There was a huge dark studio on one side of the living room, and on the other side the black cave of the dining room with the stair well rising out of it, and the kitchen. Upstairs, five silent bedrooms and a long black hall; nervousness came, like a chilly, hidden draught. Pauline Trent turned from the window and said, “Age-old question. Did she fall, or was she pushed? Ilse?”

Katy was stunned. She groped for casualness. “The police seem to think it was a hit-and-run driver—the snow, and the dark. What makes you think—”

“Nothing,” said Pauline flatly, and left the window and came forward with terrifying suddenness. “Katy—you don’t have to go?”

Katy said she did. She got her coat and her gloves, was in the hall. The door was at her back, and outside in the dark was space and freedom and safety. She had told the cab to pick her up at six-thirty. It was six-thirty now. She said, “How did you manage to get to the station through the snow, on Sunday?”

Pauline Trent stared. She said, “Oh. There was a friend I wanted to see in New York… something I’d been meaning to take care of. The roads weren’t bad.”

She said, gently, “What made you think of that, Katy?”

Tires crackled and crunched on the remnants of snow and ice; a horn blew. Katy said without answering Pauline Trent’s question, “There’s my cab. I’m off, and thanks… will you have dinner with me at the Inn some night this week?” and stepped gratefully down stone steps between cedars and into the waiting car. In the midst of memories and old associations and the odd, delicately-balanced conversation with the stranger who was John Meredith’s cousin, she had discovered two things: Pauline Trent had hated the woman who had been, presumably, her friend. She had also—Katy’s mind re-photographed her, turning at the window, mouth bitter, dark eyes wintry—been very much afraid of Ilse.

Fenwick had its second bizarre funeral the next day, when Ilse Petersen was buried in a plot in a far corner of the little cemetery. It was a bitterly cold day and the thawing ice had re-frozen into twisted crystal and razor-sharp ruts. It didn’t keep the curious away.

Katy didn’t go. She heard, later, that Arnold Poole was there, tall and stone-faced and erect as a ramrod. People in Fenwick liked Arnold Poole, but no one spoke to him in the cemetery that day; his bearing and expression were an open warning.

Harvey Pickering was also there. Katy was startled at that until she remembered that it was Harvey Pickering’s car that had mutilated the dead woman under its wheels. As Fenwick’s most prominent attorney—Katy recalled his returning poise that night, his “I can’t help feeling responsible”—he couldn’t afford not to be present.

There was also, from New York, the dead woman’s only relative, a Mrs. Carlotti. The name puzzled Katy until she remembered that Use’s aunt, Mrs. Galbraith, had married again before she moved away. And, aside from unobtrusive Lieutenant Hooper, there were no police at the cemetery. No one noticed the man who stepped up to Mrs. Carlotti at the end of the services; no one saw them drive away together. But that evening Lieutenant Hooper told Katy snatches of the interview that had taken place in the Fenwick police station immediately after the funeral.

Mrs. Carlotti was a large woman with a forbidding expression, gray eyes without depth, and all the imagination, Lieutenant Hooper said mildly, of a yellow turnip. If she gave any impression at all it was frigid disapproval—of the police, of her niece, of the weather and the town and the chair in which she sat. She answered questions flatly and without—except once—doubt or wonder.

Mrs. Carlotti said at once that she had seen very little of her niece in the past few years, since her own marriage and move to New York. Before she left town she had deeded over the little house by the pond to Use because, after all, the girl had nothing in the world. “I told her that she should have taken a business course instead of meddling around with that stupid clay…” Mrs. Carlotti had heard by devious channels that Ilse had taken up with a married man and had written her niece a letter of rebuke and advice. The letter had gone unanswered. On the rare occasions when Ilse came to New York and they met, it was always to talk about business details connected with the house beside the pond.

Lieutenant Hooper had grown gently and imperceptibly alert while Mrs. Carlotti spoke her mind. He said, “Then your niece had no income at all from her sculpture, Mrs. Carlotti? She never sold any work, or did any on commission?”

Mrs. Carlotti said emphatically never, not so far as she knew, and she was sure that Ilse would have told her out of sheer triumph in the face of disapproval. She said with distaste, “Great, nasty crouching things that might have been men or might have been animals. I told her, I told her all along that there was no sense in it. But she wasn’t a girl who took sensible advice.”

They asked her if Ilse had talked about people in Fenwick, had ever given the impression of having any particularly close friends there. Mrs. Carlotti shook her head and went on shaking it, flatly, as Chief Abbott went persistently through the names of the little group of people in whom they were interested. At one name she stopped shaking her head and sat up straighter. She said slowly, “Miss Trent… now that’s odd. She’s that woman who came to see me on Sunday, to tell me about Ilse.”

And that, bafflingly, was all there was to Mrs. Carlotti’s odd and unsolicited visit.

Pauline Trent had taken a train from Fenwick to New York, as soon as the news of Use’s death became public, to call on a woman whom she had never seen or met, presumably, Mrs. Carlotti admitted in a grudging tone, to cushion the blow. (Lieutenant Hooper had smiled wryly to himself at that; Use’s aunt was plainly a woman to whom nothing would ever have to be broken gently. The idea was as ludicrous as a pink bow on a bulldozer.) Miss Trent had seemed, once the news was broken, not to know what to do with herself. Mrs. Carlotti had given her a cup of tea, and they had had a somewhat barren chat about Ilse.

Did Miss Trent, Lieutenant Hooper wanted to know, ask many questions, seem curious about the dead woman’s personal life and affairs?

That was when the faint flicker of doubt came over Mrs. Carlotti’s square uncompromising face. She thought concentratingly, behind flat gray eyes. She said, “Well… not exactly,” and stood immovably upon that. Pauline Trent had not asked open questions, but there might have been a deeper motive for her visit—that was the impression with which she left them.

No one had said the dangerous word “murder.” They had made vague, bland statements about “routine” and “information for the usual reports,” and Mrs. Carlotti was apparently satisfied and incurious. Her manner as she departed said that you could hardly lead a sinful, shiftless life and expect not to be run over on a dark and snowy night, under most unpleasant circumstances.