Voice Out of Darkness (18 page)

And that was that. It told them very little. It did place Pauline Trent in New York on the day that Michael’s apartment had been entered and the sketches stolen, and it established a greater intimacy than anyone had thought existed between Pauline Trent and Ilse Petersen. Aside from that, it helped not at all.

Katy shook her head stubbornly when Lieutenant Hooper told her about it that evening. “It isn’t right—Pauline Trent must have gone for some other reason. She’d no more do that than fly—go calling on an utter stranger out of the blue to tell her about her niece’s sudden death. I don’t really know her at all—but I do know that much about her.”

Lieutenant Hooper dismissed the matter for the moment. He said musingly that no one, so far, had raised a small, unobtrusive, highly basic question, a question that might have a very interesting answer indeed. Ilse Petersen had had no apparent income, from her sculpture or anything else, and yet she had maintained the little house by the pond and had paid her taxes and supported existence without any evidence of strain—there were no debts, no loans, no attachments. At the same time, she had made small regular deposits in a running account, once a month.

Katy was startled. She said, “Arnold Poole…” and Lieutenant Hooper said thoughtfully, “No. Mr. Poole was astonished—or said he was astonished, which for the moment comes to the same thing—to hear of any money at all. He said they’d been living on an occasional royalty check of his and what he was able to squeeze out of an aunt in Pittsburgh.”

“Then where—” said Katy, and stopped, feeling her way, because one possible answer was staring her in the face. Cassie had been giving Ilse money—but not much, and only since the summer. Katy twisted her ring and looked carefully away. She said, “Had Ilse Petersen been making the deposits for long?” and when Hooper said, “Over a year,” drew a long breath and told him about the conversation she had overheard between Ilse and Cassie in Francesca’s house on the night Ilse died. It wouldn’t hurt Cassie seriously—obviously she hadn’t been Ilse Petersen’s main benefactor.

Lieutenant Hooper listened and sighed, and said that people who kept things from the police did more harm than good to the people they thought they were protecting. He said, “However, these windfalls of Miss Petersen’s came from another source. She was apparently handy with a chisel, out of hours. A constant financial drain like that, month after month, might get to be very annoying to whoever was coughing up… I wonder just what it was that Miss Trent was paying Miss Petersen to be quiet about?”

And there it was in the open: blackmail. The age-old path to the land of milk and honey. The one sure way of being paid for doing nothing. Reluctantly, but because the whole thing was getting blacker and uglier, Katy told Lieutenant Hooper the rest of it: Cassie saying, “You’ll have to wait, but it’ll be worth your while,” Use answering coolly, “I came to tell you something else, Miss Poole,” and then adding that she had been at the Inn on Friday night, the night Miss Whiddy was murdered.

Lieutenant Hooper looked sad and tired and chilly. He said, almost to himself, “It’s an odd case. Some of it has, and some of it hasn’t,” and when Katy said, “Hasn’t what?” looked at her with eyes that were suddenly cold. He said, “Some of it has nothing to do with you and Monica and the letters. Most of it has. I’m not sure…” and on that he looked at his watch, said good-night abruptly and went upstairs to his room.

Katy hadn’t heard from Michael that day. She wondered if, when he had called last night and she wasn’t in, Lieutenant Hooper had told him she was dining with Jeremy Taylor. It didn’t matter. Michael had met and measured Jeremy with quiet friendliness, had said later, “Looks like a nice guy, that childhood swain of yours.” Because she herself had gone for a few moments schoolgirl-giddy under Jeremy’s charm was no reason to presuppose that Michael, in New York, had retired into pique.

But suppose something had happened to Michael?

Don’t think about that. Ridiculous, anyway, because all those people were here in Fenwick, and not roaming New York on a dark December night. But, said Katy’s mind insistently, you assumed that they were all here on Sunday, too, and one of them wasn’t. Pauline Trent, thick and strong and implacable, who moved with such astonishing lightness and agility. Was it Pauline who had entered Michael’s apartment for purposes of furtive and senseless destruction?

It was only a little after nine o’clock. Her room upstairs would be unfamiliar and too silent, and you could hear the wind tonight, freezing and shuddering around the Inn, whipping icily through the dark. Not, thought Katy, a good night to lie stiffly awake and listening—for footsteps or a soft pressure of the doorknob or a terrifying long-distance summons to the phone. Or to the dreadful soundlessness of your own groping mind. She went on sitting at the corner table and ordered a drink she didn’t want, because the little bar was warm and lighted and there was reassurance in humdrum bartender sounds and safety in the faces of idle strangers.

The Inn’s lone bell-boy was standing at her table. He said, “There’s a call for you, Miss Meredith. It’s from New York. Shall we put it on the phone in the booth?” Katy walked out of the bar and across the lobby and into the booth. She picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” and listened to Michael’s impatient dim voice trying to cut across the operator who wanted to be sure, implacably, that this was Miss Katherine Meredith. She said steadily, “Hello, Michael. Nothing’s happened?” Michael’s voice said, “No. I just wanted to let you know—” and Katy had a lightning second of blindness and deafness, when she leaned back against the wall of the booth and relief poured through her and muscles she hadn’t known were tightened went limp and loose again.

Michael said sharply, “Katy. Are you all right? Katy!” and the fear was just as unmistakable in the sound of his voice as it had been in her own nerves and bones and body. She laughed shakily and said, “Yes, of course. This connection… what were you saying?”

“I’ll be up there, sometime tomorrow,” Michael answered distantly. “Now that the police are working on it it’s only a matter of time before they’ll want to talk to everybody anyway. And even with Hooper around I don’t like your being there.”

“Well,” said Katy, “you don’t seem to be so awfully well off either. The sketches. Oh, damn, Michael—they were so beautiful, and I wanted—”

“I’ll do others,” Michael said, “don’t worry about them,” but Katy thought that his voice was grim. She said, “How did whoever it was get in?” and, fifty miles away in New York, Michael’s short laugh had an edge. “The superintendent wears the master keys on a chain. He says the last thing he remembers about seven o’clock Sunday night was hearing something behind him. I think it was probably the rustle of a ten dollar bill.” Much simpler that way, Katy thought, particularly if you were a woman. No surprise violence, just money changing hands. Michael added, “The superintendent’s wife swears he had a lump the size of an egg on his head Sunday night. Maybe. He looked remarkably hale on Monday. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it was a neighborhood thief with a fancy for charcoals.”

He didn’t know about Pauline Trent. Katy didn’t go into that on the phone. She asked what time Michael would get to Fenwick and he said he didn’t know, but it would be as soon as he could wind up the thing he was working on at the agency. He said, “It can’t be long now, darling, with the police on it and everything out in the open. Don’t throw me over for a prosecuting attorney in the meantime, will you?”

Katy was queerly shocked. She said violently, “Don’t be—” and Michael laughed and said, “Joke, Miss M. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow,” and the connection was broken.

Her room wasn’t frightening after all. Katy put on a housecoat and brushed her hair and creamed her face, and emerged from the satiny mask pink-cheeked and in a mood of gaiety. The gaiety carried her through a last cigarette and into bed and a warm black fog of drowsiness. It wiped out, completely, the flickering edge-of-sleep reflection that she had arrived in Fenwick exactly one week ago today, and that shortly after a previous telephone call like the reassuring one she had just had the death and the horror had begun.

Katy
went to sleep easily, and as easily awoke.

It was still the deepest part of the night. Her room was black and cold. Outside, wind shrieked across icy roofs and spun the curtains wildly into the room, almost horizontal. A patch of moonlight in the corner caught silver from a bottle of cologne.

Hemp. There had been threads of hemp in the wounds on Use Petersen’s head. But how could you carry a woman’s body like that, crammed and bundled into a sack; it would be heavier than ever, and impossibly cumbersome, she thought. The answer was as cold and lucid as the moonlight: you wouldn’t have to carry it. On a wild black night, blind with snow that sponged away your footprints behind you, you could drag it part of the way.

But what would you do with the sack—later?

The furnace, said Katy’s horribly wide-awake mind. A wet hissing and a leap of redness and that would be the end of the sack. Had they sifted the ashes from the furnace in Francesca Poole’s cellar?

She stirred restlessly, and took an aspirin.

When she woke again, it was the gray, windy, unearthly hour before dawn, with loneliness in the dimming sky and the knifing sound of the wind. She had been dreaming, and Jeremy Taylor was somewhere in the dream. In the millionth part of a second, her mind went from sleep to sharpness.

It would soon be light, now, but it had been dark on the road coming back from Easton. Dark, and more important, far from human hearing. There had only been herself and Jeremy, and Jeremy had been asking, gently, if she would mind getting out of the car for a minute. She had told herself, with the memory of her hair lying on his wrist, that it had been a fleeting moment of attraction that he didn’t bother to try and control. Jeremy was aloof and contemptuous; he wouldn’t fumble at girls in cars. But he was perfectly capable, she knew it instinctively, of kissing another man’s fiancée, carelessly, if the mood took him. Either like that, on impulse, or for purposes of his own, as unfathomable as the rest of the whole bewildering tangle.

And earlier, in the cemetery, his hand had reached out for her wrist idly and mechanically, though he hadn’t taken his eyes from hers. Here at the Inn, a week ago, someone’s hand had slid out of darkness to close bruisingly on Miss Whiddy’s shoulder.

Katy turned her back on the graying window. Suppose she had stepped out of the car, and that other car hadn’t come silvering around the curve? Would Jeremy have kissed her, or killed her?

The final police reports on Ilse Petersen were curiously negative. Shreds of hemp, yes. Specks of rust or other indications of a metal weapon used for battering—no, but the silk kerchief would have protected her head. And the kerchief, when they found it, had been frozen and thawed and frozen again with snow.

No indication, either, of the dead woman’s having been in the cellar of the Poole house—but then she’d hardly write with lipstick on the walls. Mrs. Poole and her daughter took care of the furnace themselves, and hired a man to come twice a month and remove the ashes. The man had called early Monday morning. It was his regular trip.

Blank wall, as far as the evidences of murder went. Except for the hemp, and without the sack itself, or even proof that there had ever been a sack, it was a very fragile lead indeed.

What’ll you have? There was a small but appetizing choice. Arnold Poole’s sudden and unexpected wealth led the way to it. Mrs. Poole, who was still his legal wife and might have a hankering for sixty thousand dollars? Cassie Poole, violently attached to her mother, who had grown up in penury and might, conceivably, also have a taste for honey? Jeremy Taylor, who might like to be son-in-law to sixty thousand? Pauline Trent (this was conjecture, strongly backed up) who had hated—and feared—Ilse Petersen, frenzied with the threat of the possible tie that bound them? Harvey Pickering, who had had the opportunity to kill Ilse in the blizzard’s confusion, but who had no motive whatsoever?

The shadowy figure of Gerald Blythe didn’t enter publicly, then. There were wires to Chicago and some to Florida, and a long-distance call to the firm that had once been Blythe and Belvedere, Architects, and was now Blythe Architecture. But Katy knew nothing of any of it—the silent methodical workings or the slow relentless unraveling. She did begin to realize, late on that icy Thursday, that it was, eerily, happening all over again: the meetings, some chance, some planned, with that little group of people who walked and chatted and dined with a murderer.

There was Jeremy Taylor. Oddly enough in the dining room, and this time mysteriously gay. Jeremy said, “The lost is found,” and held up a black alligator compact with a thin silver CP in one corner. Katy raised her brows and put down her coffee cup. “Oh. Cassie will be pleased.”

“Yes. Although,” said Jeremy, “I’ve gone after this one so often that it comes when I call it.” He hadn’t, obviously, come to talk about the compact; he dropped it into his pocket and the gaiety went out of his eyes. Standing motionless, he said, “About Miss Whiddy—”

Katy smiled brilliantly up at him, remembering police cautions. She said, “That’s pure Meredith, Jeremy. Once a copywriter always a copywriter… the police seem quite satisfied.”

“They ought to know, I suppose.” Jeremy was without conviction. He drew on a leather glove, looking down at her, and the mocking expression was back. “You did seem worried about the compact, the other morning, and I thought I’d let you know a waiter had found it. They called Cassie from the Inn last night.”

Katy looked at her empty coffee cup and didn’t blush. She was tempted to say that what had intrigued her at the time was not the compact but Jeremy’s prompt arrival on the scene the morning after Miss Whiddy’s death—that, coupled with his casual query as to whether she had talked to Miss Whiddy the evening before. But, surprisingly, he had been telling the truth, because there was the compact in his pocket. She said, “How’s Francesca?”