Death Has a Small Voice (12 page)

“I thought she might have been taken ill,” he said. “That the siren was that of an ambulance. I did feel I might help.”

Possibly he had, Bill told him. The car had arrived at the house at, was this right, about a quarter after nine? Had gone again at ten or a little after? Bernard Wilson thought so. It took, not hurrying, a couple of hours to drive between this area beyond South Salem and New York?

“Less, if one is in a hurry,” Wilson said. “Shaw does it in an hour and a half, he says. When traffic's light, of course.”

“Shaw?” Bill Weigand repeated. “He lives near here?”

The Shaws had a summer place in the neighborhood, Wilson said. They seldom visited it after Labor Day. And Alec Lyster had a cabin near by.

“Not much more than a shack,” Wilson said. “But comfortable enough. On Farm Road.”

“And Mr. Rogers?” Bill asked. “Does he live around here too?”

Not Rogers, Wilson said. He smiled.

“Of course,” he said, “this isn't conincidental. It seldom is, is it? Hilda found this house four or five years ago and fell in love with it, and with the country. She kept urging her friends to get places here. The Shaws did—bought a place. Then I rented one. Then Lyster did. One has a tendency to go where one already has friends, you know.”

Bill nodded, abstractedly.

“You don't happen to know whether the Shaws came up this evening?” he asked. “Or whether Lyster did?”

Wilson did not. He would be inclined to think they had not. On the other hand, it had been a pleasant evening.

“A pleasant evening,” he repeated. “She loved such evenings, Captain. She had such—such awareness.” Wilson shook his head. “Such vitality,” he said. “To think—” He shook his head again. “I met her first when she was almost a child, you know,” he said. “She was in one of my classes. It was as if—as if there were a light in the class.”

There was nothing to say. Bill said nothing.

“It was in her poetry,” Wilson said. “It would have been in her novels.”

“Speaking of the novel,” Bill said, “did you know the manuscript has been—misplaced?”

Wilson emerged from nostalgia. He raised expressive eyebrows; he shook his head.

“After you returned it,” Bill said. “At least, that's what I understand from Mr. Rogers. It seems to have disappeared from the receptionist's desk.”

“Disappeared?” Wilson repeated. “That's very strange. Do you mean someone misappropriated it? Does Rogers think that?”

Bill shrugged. He said that apparently no one knew what to think. The manuscript had vanished.

“They've misplaced it,” Wilson said. “It's a large firm, you know. All very carefully organized. The sort of place in which all sort of things disappear for days.”

It could be that, Bill agreed. No doubt it was. But so far the manuscript had been traced only to the receptionist's desk.

“Is it important?” Wilson asked. “There'll be copies, of course. There always are. No doubt her agent has at least one.”

Bill supposed so. They had not yet come across a copy. Mr. Rogers had looked for a copy. But no doubt Wilson was right.

“Of course,” Wilson said. “A copy will turn up, unquestionably.” He paused. “You don't feel it has anything to do with this?” he asked, and nodded, uncomfortably, at the trunk.

It was difficult to see what the connection could be, Bill agreed. Nevertheless, it was strange, out of the ordinary. When things out of the ordinary, however trivial in themselves, turned up in relation, however distant, to murder, one—well, thought twice.

Wilson shook his head.

“I read it,” he said. “You won't find anything in it to help you, I'm quite sure. An autobiographical novel by a young woman—by a young woman who happened to have great talent, who often hit on miraculous phrases. But still, nothing too far out of the ordinary. Her second novel might have been that. This was interesting, showed her special flair, but remained innocuous. She used her own life, people she had known, as first novelists almost always do.”

“People she had known?” Bill said.

“Of course,” Professor Bernard Wilson told him. “Who else? But very tenderly, Captain. Very appreciatively. I can see myself in it, to be sure—myself and others she knew. That is inevitable. She was rather perceptive about us, Captain. But gentle. Almost tender, it seemed to me. She was like that, you know.”

“Was she?” Bill said. “I didn't know, of course. It isn't often the gentle people who are murdered, of course.”

This time it had been, Wilson assured him. This time it most certainly had been.

“By the way,” Bill asked, “what did she call the book?”

“Oh,” Wilson said, “she called it ‘Come Up Smiling.' Not a very good title, I'm afraid. Probably it will have to be changed.”

“If they find it,” Bill said.

“I've no doubt they'll find it,” Wilson said. He waited. “Well?” he said. “Can I do anything?”

Bill Weigand was afraid he could do no more than he had done. It was quite probable he had helped.

VII

Wednesday, 3:10
A
.
M
.
to 5:30
A
.
M
.

Pam North lay behind the stone wall, in wet grass, cold dampness spreading through her. She shivered; nervousness and cold combined to make her teeth chatter. She was absurdly afraid, as she heard the station wagon coming down the road toward her, that the chattering of her teeth would reveal her. She set her teeth hard together.

The car, invisible from where she lay (as she prayed she would be invisible to its occupant), passed slowly down the road. She could see the lights, which briefly made the pale night white. The car passed, and she did not move. She heard it continue, still slowly, down the road. She waited. After a few minutes, the sound of its motor died away, but she still did not move. After several more minutes, she got to her knees and then, crouching, to her feet.

She saw headlights and dropped back to concealment in the wet grass. She heard the motor again, as the car approached; again the lights whitened the top of the wall, leaving her in a trough of darkness. The car still moved slowly, and again it passed. She was certain it was the station wagon she had seen in the yard of the man—what was his name?—whose intonation and pronunciation were British. She was certain that, in it, the man was looking for her.

Was his the voice? Pam North thought again, and found she could not be sure. She did not know, now, whether she would ever be sure. If she could not, this strange nightmare of flight was without purpose. She heard the car move back along the narrow road and then, while its sound was still clear in the night, the motor stopped. After a moment, straining her ears, she heard another sound which might be that of a door closing. Still for some moments she lay quiet, the damp cold biting into her.

When finally she roused herself, she got to her feet and began to walk, gropingly, inside the wall, parallel to the road, away from the house to which, she was almost certain, the man had returned. She continued to the length of one field, but then came to a closely articulated wire fence. Pam North went back over the wall, then, and down the road. She was too tired to run and could not see her way to run. As she walked, she kept looking back over her shoulder.

How long she went, furtive, through the semi-darkness, along the narrow road, she did not know and could afterward hardly estimate. She lost track of time; she lost any real consciousness of movement, except that each forward step came to be an ordeal almost beyond endurance. She did not pass any more houses or, if she did, they were set too far back from the road to be visible. She had begun by running for safety; now she crept. The light weight wool of the dress, damp now, the dress shapeless, clung to her body. It was blotched with coal dust and with mud; there was coal dust in Pam's hair and streaked on her face.

As she walked, Pam suddenly became conscious that she was sobbing like a child, and that she could not stop this.

She went on, one foot in front of the other, on the winding little road. It climbed and descended; vaguely, she felt that, in total, it bent to her right. But that meant nothing. The only thing that meant anything was that sometime, somewhere, this back road must come to another, more frequented road, and that that road would reach another; that sometime she would reach the help of other people and then, perhaps, find Jerry again. But no—Jerry was in California. Jerry knew nothing of this.

She had no idea, now, where she was in relation to the house from which she had fled. She might, indeed, be circling back toward it. She realized this, but the realization was dim—the possibility seemed without importance. She would take this step, and then this step, and where the steps took her she could not control.

She was walking on the right of the road, finding the way with her feet more than with her eyes. She walked into the station wagon before she saw it. Her hands came up to protect her face and body and touched the hood of the wagon. She leaned against it, for a moment, glad of the support. But then, as if she had in fact been walking in her sleep, she awakened.

She did not recognize the station wagon. Even in daylight, she realized, she would not be able to tell, finally, whether this station wagon—or any other—was the one into which she had been pushed, tied up, in a fenced-in yard somewhere in the city. But, by now, any station wagon was inimical. When she realized what she was leaning against, Pam North recoiled. She pushed herself away, as if she were pushing away the vehicle itself.

She staggered with weariness as she rejected support, and almost fell. She recovered and started toward the nearest wall. But as she reached it, she stopped. Looking, as she could after she had moved, through the station wagon she realized that it was unoccupied. It had been parked on the narrow shoulder, jutting somewhat into the road. There was, so far as she could see, no house near by, and no driveway leading to a house. A station wagon—a big one, she thought a new one—had merely been pulled to the wrong side of a back road deep in the country and left there.

She waited briefly and listened anxiously. She heard no sound, except the movement of the wind through trees. Cautiously, she re-approached the station wagon. She looked into the darkness in all directions; then she tried the left hand door. It would open only part way before it hit bushes along the road, but it opened far enough. Pam climbed into the station wagon.

Of course, it would be locked. Even in deep country, no one left a valuable station wagon by the roadside with the ignition unlocked. She slid behind the wheel; reached, without thought, for the ignition switch.

There was, as she had expected, no key in the switch. It was, as she had known—

Her fingers pressed on the switch. It turned. The key had been taken, but the car had nevertheless been left unlocked.

She turned the switch off again, and looked into the rear of the wagon. Something was lying on the floor there, behind the second seat. Pam leaned back, far back. When that failed, she climbed back—slowly, shakingly.

Her hands closed on the wool of a blanket. She moved it. Under the wadded blanket there was a coat—a woman's coat. Pamela North's coat.

This, then, was the station wagon!
Not the one the man who had stood at the door of a cottage, and pronounced “again” to rhyme with “pain” had driven after her. Because that one, surely—

Pam shook her head. Nothing was sure. It had been a long time since she had heard, as she thought, that other station wagon return to the yard of the cottage. During that time, the man might have driven anywhere; he could easily have circled, knowing back roads, and come to this place long before she could walk to it and then—But her mind gave it up. Why would he abandon the station wagon in a place where she would almost certainly find it, if she lasted long enough? There was no answer.

There was, however, an immediate need. That was to get away. Pam, moving as rapidly as her weary, and somewhat battered, body could be moved, got back behind the wheel. She turned the ignition switch again, and then she stepped on the accelerator. That was how their own car was started.

It was how this one was started. There was a heavy sigh under the hood, as the cold motor turned. There was a whir, then, and the motor caught. Pam reached for the light switch on the panel and found it, and the lights went on.

She could not go in the direction the car faced; she had come from that direction, and there there was only danger. Laboriously, wrenching at the wheel, Pam cut and backed, cut and went forward, cut and backed again. Once one rear wheel sank alarmingly into something and, when she started forward again, that wheel spun for a moment. Then it caught.

She made it on that turn, which was lucky, since it would have been risky to back again. She straightened the car on the narrow road and drove, not rapidly, certainly with no confidence, toward whatever lay ahead.

She drove a Buick station wagon which carried New York license plates numbered HG-7425. This was an unusual number for New York; it indicated that the owner of the car had gone to some slight trouble to express individuality.

They had found nothing further to prove, nothing even to indicate, that they were following a path Pam had followed before them. Mullins pointed this out; Mullins was patient. His voice, not normally gentle, was gentle now.

“Look,” Mullins said. “I know how you feel, Mr. North. We all do. We'll find her. But this don't get us anywhere. How do we know she didn't go that way?” He gestured. “Or that way?” He waited.

Jerry merely called his wife's name in the quiet night. He called and kept on going. He did not hurry, now, as he had hurried, without rest, without sleep, for more than twenty hours. He merely walked on through fields, calling, “Pam!
Pam!
” and hearing no answer.