Voice Out of Darkness (20 page)

There were three ways to get to the other end of the pond. Across the ice, which was slippery and apt to quake. Along the narrow stone ledge at the edge of Ilse Petersen’s property—but you had to hold back stiff canes of sumac and negotiate the sharp-thorned barberry bushes. Katy went around the other side, threading her way through humps and hillocks of dead grass that poked through the frozen snow; she supposed vaguely that this was Meredith property although the pond itself belonged to the town. Then she was at the other end of the ice, in among the screening pines, where the pond narrowed away to a ribbon of brook that went curling back through the fields.

Someone else had stood here thirteen years ago and witnessed the tragic little tableau that had been the beginning of death for one of three children. Katy stood very still, watching and listening, groping with every bared nerve for something that trembled on the edge of her consciousness. A sight, was it? Or a sound, or the breath of a familiar sensation? She went on staring down the tarnished-silver ice and the something, the tiny shred of a half-awakened knowledge, quivered closer. Was it…

A light sprang on in Ilse Petersen’s living room. Katy turned her head sharply and let out her breath. There was someone standing at the window, motionless and dark, looking out at her.

But Ilse was dead, thought Katy, fiercely and frantically, dead and deep in the little cemetery… she was shaking. Control came back, steadyingly, when the rigid shadow in the window moved and waved a hand whitely behind glass. Arnold Poole. Of course. She waved back, heart still pounding from the sudden rush of panic. It was foolish; she had been in a mood of terror, had deliberately set the scene for fear, and a casual glance from a window had pushed her over the edge.

She turned away and started back for the road. Put two other people in exactly those positions thirteen years ago, and what did you have? Ilse, perhaps, standing in that same window, looking out at—whom? For a moment, she had almost known. It had slipped away again, but it had been there, thought Katy, scrambling over tousled humps of grass. What was it that she had almost recalled? Was it something she had never seen or heard or felt before because she had never before stood in just that place at the end of the pond? Or was it, more logically, a piece of knowledge she had possessed without knowing it, that had needed the re-creation of the setting to give it focus and meaning?

“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 platform, 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.”