Voice Out of Darkness (8 page)

Katy said they would, and when Cassie had gone looked absently at her own reflection and thought wryly, Drama and yet more drama. We’ll have a night-cap, now, and some screaming hysterics.

They didn’t. She and Michael joined the party in the corner of the bar and she explained that they were going to be married shortly and there were the usual congratulations and lifted glasses. Francesca laughed and groaned and said, “Heavens. First my own daughter and now you, Katy—you make me feel like a hundred.” She wouldn’t, Katy thought with a flash of something like malice, dare say a thing like that unless she knew how preposterous it would seem to them all, how clearly and boldly her skin and eyes and odd lithe grace stated that she could never feel a day older than thirty-five.

The atmosphere was normal, friendly, gay. Once Katy caught a glimpse of Arnold Poole, glass in hand, talking to a group of people in the doorway of the bar; she wondered if Francesca had seen him, and then thought, how silly, this has been going on for five years. But something had happened, earlier, to strip the charming play of expression from Francesca’s face and leave it white and shaken. Something else, then, because the situation had obviously ceased to be a social crisis. Mr. Pickering, making stately progress through a scotch and soda, nodded affably toward someone in the group with Arnold, and Arnold intercepted the nod and grinned back in careless recognition.

A few minutes after that, Katy threw Michael an apologetic glance and rose. She was tired, she was going upstairs, she’d see them all again soon. Michael went with her into the dim and deserted lobby and kissed her gently. “Have a good sleep. And don’t worry, darling.”

Katy said she would and she wouldn’t, and went on up the stairs. The clock in the lobby pointed to ten-thirty; it felt more like the hectic early hours of the morning. She went along the half-shadowed hall, turned the knob of her own door, thought annoyedly, Why won’t I remember to lock it? and switched on the overhead light—and stood still, staring.

After a long moment she closed the door behind her. Without pausing to check the contents of the opened closet or to investigate the out-pulled bureau drawers, she crossed the room to the window and knelt beside her trunk. The lid was up, the contents tumbled. The letters, of course, were gone. She sat back on her heels and pushed hair away from her forehead and went on looking, mechanically, at scallops on the edge of a satin slip, a fold of yellow sweater, a stocking trailed casually out of the trunk.

It was her own fault, her own blind, stupid fault for leaving her door unlocked. (But, if someone had been really intent on retrieving the letters, would the ancient locks at the Fenwick Inn have stood in the way?) No matter; they were gone, and almost certainly back in the hands of whoever had written them. Which was baffling enough in itself, without the further question of who.

Katy’s first thought was to let Michael know. But the trip back to the bar, the pretext for privacy, the questions and explanations—no, not tonight, not over a dozen masked men with blackjacks.

And on the heels of that, eerily, came a soft, tentative tap on the door.

Katy’s stomach leaped and dropped. She sat motionless, drawing her breath with infinite care, watching the door. It wasn’t locked. A turn of the knob, the thrust of a hand, would find her there, trapped and terrified.

The knob didn’t turn. Instead, muffled footsteps receded and died away altogether, and after a cautious interval Katy dared to get up and lock the door. With that fragile guard between her and future visitors, fatigue came rushing back and a heedless, overpowering desire for sleep. She took a casual glance at the bureau drawers, brushed her teeth, and went to bed and instantly to sleep.

She didn’t stay asleep. Car doors slammed maddeningly in the Inn driveway, and voices hung on the frosty night air. The bar must be closing. Katy turned her back on the window and closed her mind and her ears determinedly and drifted off again.

She woke a second time to a blur of excited voices—were they in the hall or out on the porch below?—and to the sound of car motors humming up the hill to the Inn. Now the voices and the door-slammings were different, urgent, middle-of-the-nightish. Fire? Of course not, or there’d be sirens.

Useless this time to try to slide back into sleep. Katy threw aside the covers, switched on her lamp and put on a quilted robe and slippers. The hall, when she opened her door, was black; the night light at the end had gone out. So had the light in the wall sconce where you turned for the stairs.

The disturbance was centered in the lobby. Someone said in a loud, awed voice, “—must have slipped,” and someone else said, “Poor old thing.” Someone had fallen, then, and must be badly hurt because all at once there was a respectful, waiting hush. Katy went halfway down the darkened stairs, blinded momentarily by the lights in the lobby, and stared.

People were standing in thin little knots around the foot of the staircase, held motionless by the unwilling fascination of spectators at accidents. A dark-suited man, his back to Katy, rising and stepping aside said in a loud, incongruously cheerful tone, “Okay, Pete, you can take her away. Broken neck and a fractured skull that probably would have killed her anyway. You can see why.”

Heads turned automatically to look up the long, steep, dark staircase. Katy went down it slowly, unconscious of startled glances and a fresh tide of murmurs. She was looking at Miss Whiddy’s whipped-cream curls, matted and horribly stained. A white-coated intern came forward and blotted out the dreadful head and there were only Miss Whiddy’s feet, decorous in pointed black calf with discreet bows touched with imitation tortoise-shell.

Then the feet jostled onto a stretcher and people stepped back. The Inn door opened and closed behind the interns and their burden and the hum of voices grew louder.

“Bulb must have blew,” said Mr. Lasky defensively, glancing up at the staircase. “But that’s not all. Her shoe had a loose heel, she told me so herself this morning.”

Frank Abbott, Fenwick’s chief of police, looked up from his notebook and said sharply, “That so? About the shoes?”

“Had ’em in her hand,” Mr. Lasky said, nodding violently. “I asked her, sort of joking, if she always carried a spare, and she said one of the heels was loose and she was going to take them down to Nick’s and have it tightened.”

“But those aren’t the same shoes,” whispered Katy. Michael, who had come quietly up beside her, touched her arm warningly. She turned her head and looked at him, still bewildered with shock, and Michael’s eyes were warning, too. She turned away again. Frank Abbott shut his notebook with a regretful snap. “Guess that’s it,” he said. “Poor old soul.” He took a final glance over his shoulder. “Those are nasty stairs you’ve got there, Ed. I’d get a light on them right away, before there’s another accident.”

Mr. Lasky, anguishedly aware of a spattering of guests, whirled on a small awe-stricken office boy. “ ’S the matter with you?” he demanded witheringly. “Get a new bulb up there right away, and don’t wait till it burns out, see that it’s replaced every week!”

The spell snapped. Chief Abbott and Mr. Lasky moved toward the door; the little groups around the stairway stirred and broke. Katy was half-conscious of Jeremy Taylor and Cassie caught in the stream starting away from the staircase, of Mr. Pickering’s smooth, silvery head, of a cross voice saying, “… told you we should have gone to the Silvermine Tavern, but would you pay any attention?” Someone else said uneasily, “Well, I’m going to bed.”

But those weren’t the shoes she was taking to have fixed, Katy thought. Because the others had been long and black and pointed too, as she vaguely supposed all Miss Whiddy’s shoes were, but they had had no bows, no modest touch of amber.

The lobby was nearly empty. The scurrying office boy would be back at any moment. Moving almost without volition, Katy shook off the light pressure of Michael’s arm and turned and ran up the stairs. At the top, she fumbled for the wall sconce and twisted the loose bulb, cool now, and the light sprang on.

Michael had come partway up to the landing. He looked from the wall light to the foot of the staircase, measuring the plunging, bone-breaking distance. He said slowly, “Bulbs work loose.”

“Particularly,” said Katy, “when they’re unscrewed.”

She told him about the missing letters. She said, “I’ll care in the morning, I suppose, but right now it doesn’t seem to matter much,” and Michael put his hands on her shoulders and shook her a little and said, “All right, go to bed. But don’t you see, this is why I didn’t want you to say anything, down there. You’re involved in enough.”

“Quite enough,” Katy said, and turned away. It was shocking that you could look down on violent, red-stained death one moment and think longingly of your bed the next. But she had to have sleep; the days of watching and listening and wondering, the countless little shocks, the frightful sight of Miss Whiddy’s matted hair and bobbing black-clad feet had built up into a crescendo of utter weariness. She put a hand up to her cheek and became aware all at once of her robe and slippers and sleep-tumbled hair. “Good-night, Michael.”

She went slowly back to her own room and locked the door and got into bed. First the shoes, the wrong shoes, entered so clinchingly in Frank Abbott’s notebook. Then the bulb that hadn’t burned out. And, earlier, that soft, questioning tap at her door. Had Miss Whiddy stood there in the hall, with something to say to Katy, who hadn’t answered the knock?

For some reason, that was the most dreadful thought of all.

Saturday.
A storm-warning sky, so purple-gray that the snowy roofs and distant hills stood out against it like chalk stroked on colored paper. Lights in the lobby and the Inn dining room, even at eight o’clock in the morning, because of the threatening gloom.

Katy drank tomato juice and coffee alone. Michael had said to sleep as late as she could, had said, pleadingly, “This time, Katy, lock your door.” But two aspirin and a locked door hadn’t helped when she’d waked to the icy dark-lilac dawn. Neither had dispassionate morning-after logic. Light bulbs did loosen, especially in old, unsteady wall sconces. And Miss Whiddy hadn’t been young and sure-footed; in any case it was fatally simple to catch your heel in a looseness of carpet, to put out a foot, confidently, for solidity that wasn’t there.

Accident. Tragic, but it could happen to anyone. It hadn’t. A hand had reached out, had caught Miss Whiddy’s arm or shoulder, had sent her twisting and crashing in the darkness. Katy knew it as certainly as though she had seen the calm relentless fingers.

One thing was obvious. Someone had entered her room to find and remove the letters. Miss Whiddy had opened her door only its usual surreptitious crack, but even then she had seen too much. She had had, perhaps, some minute fragment of Fenwick gossip to exchange with Katy and she had peeped out, bright-eyed, into the face of death.

There were raised voices in the lobby. The party from New Jersey, with the woman who had wanted to go to the Silvermine Tavern in the first place, was checking out. Mr. Lasky, confronted with a cancellation, was agonized. “You’ll run into snow—blizzard, likely. You won’t find another place like this between here and Vermont, if you’re lucky enough to find a place at all.”

The woman was adamant. She said tartly that an inn-full of dead bodies and coroners and she didn’t know what wasn’t her idea of a week-end in the country, and the group departed. Katy listened and felt wistful. How lovely to be able to walk out of it like that, to push bills across a counter and say, “The very idea,” and put it behind you indignantly and for good.

She could, of course, do just that. Forget the flowers for Monica’s grave, pretend that there had never been letters in her suitcase, accept the reasonable explanation of Miss Whiddy’s death. Go back to New York with Michael tomorrow, and hope that the whole hideous twisted thing would sicken and die of itself. If he asks me, thought Katy, staring hard into her second cup of coffee, if Michael asks me I’ll go.

Another voice in the lobby, brusque, careless. “Miss Poole thinks she might have left a compact here last night—black alligator, with her initials. Would any of the maids have reported it by now, or one of the waiters?”

Mr. Lasky hadn’t heard anything about it, but he would check. Jeremy Taylor said, “I’ll be having coffee,” and swung through the dining room doors and came toward Katy. “Waiting for someone, or may I have coffee with you?”

“Do,” Katy said politely, and wondered why it was that she could never be alone for very long without having one of that intimate little collection of people close in on her quite pleasantly, quite normally.

“Cassie thinks she might have left her compact here,” Jeremy said. “I told her I’d look in. Frightful thing last night, wasn’t it?” He was intent on opening a package of cigarettes, fingers impatient with the cellophane. When Katy said, “Yes. Horrible,” he looked up, greenish eyes calm and questioning. “Cigarette? Did she ever get to see you, by the way?”

The package of cigarettes was extended toward her. Katy took one with steady fingers, leaned toward Jeremy’s match. “No. Not last night, that is. Did she want to see me, particularly?”

She was safe because Miss Whiddy was dead, because Miss Whiddy hadn’t been given time to see her. It was shocking all over again, because now she was about to find out for certain that it had been Miss Whiddy who had tapped at her door and gone away unanswered.

“I came out to the lobby to get cigarettes somewhere around nine last night,” Jeremy was saying, “and Miss Whiddy asked me where you were. She’d just come in, apparently—hat and coat and galoshes. She seemed to be bursting with something, but then,” he grinned faintly, “she generally was.”

Somewhere around nine. Katy had gone to her room at about ten-thirty; at nine she had probably been finishing dinner with Michael. And Miss Whiddy had died at—what? Twelve-thirty? One? One-thirty? Ask Michael. Not, she thought with sudden warning, Jeremy.

She realized that he was talking again, that he was asking when she was to be married.