Voice Out of Darkness (11 page)

Harvey Pickering continued to be nervous. He didn’t quite like it: the eminent Mr. Pickering, dining at the home of a lady whose alarmingly moody and unpredictable husband, who had left her for another woman, had dropped in for the evening. He had an air of staying fastidiously at the edge of it, as though it were a rather murky situation in an ill-lit hotel room.

And Cassie, thought Katy. Frightened of her father, frightened of Ilse Petersen, with whom she had made an appointment. Cassie, who had laughed and said, “Flu,” who had other reasons for the faint wash of blue under her eyes—but that, in a way, was typical of Francesca’s daughter. She was as deceptively yielding as firm foam-rubber: you probed and made a dent, and then the surface sprang gently and implacably back and in the end you hadn’t really touched her at all… would the evening never be over? It was, very shortly.

Muffled thumpings sounded from somewhere outside. Cassie looked up sharply and Francesca moved to the window beside Michael and said, “Jeremy’s opening the cellar door. Heavens, the cars must be really stuck.”

Within the next few minutes the men were all outside. Arnold Poole thought he might be able to get his car started and give someone a push. Michael asked brusquely if there were any ashes to be had and vanished down the cellar stairs; Jeremy could be heard shouting that he would go on up ahead and start shoveling. Cassie made more coffee and Francesca poked restlessly at the fire, sending green and gold and blue sparks raining up the chimney. The faint, fragrant scent of carnations hung in the small pretty room. Katy, grimly holding up her end of the silence, smoked cigarettes she didn’t want and clung to the reassuring thought of Lieutenant Hooper.

Jeremy came stamping in for a moment. “God, it’s cold out there. We’re almost through. Is that coffee hot?” He drank it and went outside again. In the interval before the door closed they could hear the swish of wind and snow, a tangle of voices, the chunking of shovels.

Why had Michael been so furious at the mention of his brother? Katy had assumed, vaguely and automatically, that he was an only child; she supposed now that Gerald Blythe was the blackest of all possible black sheep and not to be mentioned—which wasn’t like Michael. It didn’t matter. What was ridiculous was that stiff little ruffle of hurt pride because he hadn’t told her. She stopped thinking about complexities and listened to the weather report that Cassie had just turned on.

Twelve inches of snow before midnight, with no immediate end in sight. Cars warned off the parkways, householders advised to conserve coal and oil. Electricity out in Noroton, Queenspoint, sections of Bridgeport; the Hudson tunnel closed to traffic… it went on. There followed a lengthy comparison between this and all other heavy storms in the history of the local weather bureau. Cassie shivered and snapped off the radio and smiled at Katy.

“Remember, Katy? These used to be fun.”

“No school,” Katy said, nodding. Could you say, “Remember, Katy?” like that if you were so dreadfully not what you seemed? But Cassie’s face was white and newly serene. Cassie had made up her mind about something.

In the end, it was nearly midnight when they stood in the hall and said good-night to Cassie and Francesca. Arnold Poole had already left, as abruptly as he had arrived. Jeremy would drop Michael and Katy at the Inn; Mr. Pickering’s route took him to the other side of town. Cassie said, “You’re sure you’ll make it home all right, Jeremy?” and he said yes and kissed her lightly and turned and went out the door.

Katy and Michael followed him to the car. The tightness was still in Michael, Jeremy was perversely gay. He folded gloved hands on the wheel, said, “Better wait until the legal man shoves off.” But Mr. Pickering didn’t immediately leave. He climbed into his heavy black Buick, switched on the headlamps, started the motor, and waved a signaling gray suede hand in farewell. The Buick pulled forward. The back wheels spun, caught; the car lurched forward and stopped. Katy said, “He can’t be stuck again?”

“No,” Michael said slowly, “I don’t think he’s stuck. I think-”

He was out of the car. With a curt, “Stay where you are, Katy,” Jeremy was after him. Mechanically, fingers clenched against the cold, Katy followed them that short dark distance. She didn’t go very close to the puddle of brilliance from the headlights of Jeremy’s car. She didn’t have to. Mr. Pickering’s car was heavy, but you could still see that the crushed and snowy thing it had passed over was Ilse Petersen.

Francesca’s front door opened as Katy turned blindly into the darkness, wondering how she would manage to reach the car. Francesca stood in the yellow-peach oblong of light, Cassie at her shoulder. She called, “What is it, Jeremy? Harvey, what—?”

Cassie brushed by her, a red bird against the snow. She reached the edge of the light and looked down. She made a sound that wasn’t quite a scream and, before anyone could reach her, crashed face forward into the snow.

The police
had been called. And a doctor.

Cassie had struck her forehead on a rock when she fell; there was a cut and a swelling that would be an ugly bruise. She had been gaspingly sick when they got her to her feet and she lay, now, in an upstairs bedroom, still and staring under apple green satin.

Harvey Pickering was like a man who had had a stroke. Gray-faced, mauve-mouthed, his air of prosperous serenity crumpled, he kept repeating, over and over again, “She was there all the time, under the back wheels of the car, and I didn’t see her. It felt like driving over a log, it didn’t feel like… One of the wheels must have gone over her—head. She was there, all the time…”

Katy didn’t think she could stand it. She couldn’t sit still. She paced the living room, tall and too stiff inside smart black moire, long fingers curled tightly into her palms. When Michael said gently, “Katy, darling…” and Francesca, coolly, “You might as well sit down, Katy,” she said, “it’s this waiting. I’ll see if Cassie wants anything.”

This was the bedroom at the door of which she had stood listening to broken threads of conversation between Cassie and Ilse Petersen. White organdy crisscrossing at the windows, with dark-cherry roses on heavy linen at either side, a dressing-table skirted with roses, a small fat armchair, scatter rugs, soft and woolly and deep green. Katy closed the door carefully behind her. For the second time that night it came to her with a little jolting shock that the girl in the wide low bed was a stranger, immaculately polite—and utterly unknown. She had thought she knew Cassie because they had grown up in the same town, and because there had been that moment of shared and unforgettable crisis at the pond with Monica. But that was thirteen years ago, and now the measuring-stick of familiarity was gone.

Cassie took her blue gaze away from the ceiling and smiled palely up at her. “The police ought to be here soon, oughtn’t they?”

Katy nodded. She sat down in the little armchair across the room and looked at iodine and gauze and adhesive on Cassie’s forehead. It was brutal to ask searching questions of someone who had just had a shock and a bad fall. It had been infinitely more brutal to place a dead or unconscious woman in the snow under the wheels of a car. She said slowly, “They’re going to want to know what Ilse was doing on the road in front of the house tonight, in the middle of a snowstorm.”

Cassie widened her eyes. “But how would any of us know that?”

Cruel to trick her; Katy didn’t try. “She was in the house tonight, Cassie. You talked to her.”

Cassie didn’t ask how Katy knew. She turned her face away and began quietly and dreadfully to cry, and Katy looked deliberately away and reminded herself of the letters and the wreath and Miss Whiddy tumbling down to death. It hardened her enough to say, “Why did you ask Ilse to come here tonight, Cassie?”

Cassie stopped crying. She said tonelessly, “It’s Mother,” and began to talk. She had known for some time that Francesca Poole was still desperately in love with her father, had gathered, from chance glimpses, from scraps of gossip, from flowers that Arnold had sent Francesca on their anniversary six weeks ago, that her father was growing bored with his inamorata. She had thought that if Ilse Petersen could be persuaded to leave Fenwick, even for a month or two, her parents could resume their interrupted marriage and Francesca would be happy again for the first time since Arnold had left her five years ago.

She said, “I’ve been helping Mrs. Vail in the real estate business since the summer, one or two days a week. I gave Ilse money, not much, but she said she’d have to start saving if she were to go away for a while.”

“And you promised her more,” Katy said. She felt miserably sorry for the white-faced girl in the bed, but she had to go on.

“Yes,” Cassie said, “I thought I might be able to sell something, borrow from somewhere… Ilse said she’d think it over.”

And that was where the truth ended, and the bland and impenetrable deception took over. Ilse Petersen hadn’t been talking to Cassie in the little coat-room below about an impending separation from Arnold Poole.

She had said with cold triumph, “I came to tell you something else, Miss Poole” and then, later on—Katy looked through the dark window at whirling whiteness—her own name had been mentioned. She drew a long breath.

Outside in the icy snow-driven night, car doors slammed. Cassie said, “It was an accident. I’m not sorry—how could I be?—but it was an accident. Another car must have hit Ilse when she went out, must have thrown her under Mr. Pickering’s car… or maybe she crawled under it after she was hit—”

The iron knocker fell.

Katy stood up. She said, “Did she leave, Cassie?”

The smoky, three-cornered blue eyes were steady. “Yes. She did.” A clock ticked somewhere in the pretty cherry and green and white bedroom. An odd expression, almost of cunning, slid over Cassie’s white, beautifully-articulated face. She drew green satin closer under her chin and said, “You won’t mention it, will you, Katy? You won’t tell anyone she was here?”

Katy’s hand was on the knob. She couldn’t promise. She said, “They may find out anyway. But don’t worry, and try to sleep,” and opened the door and closed it behind her and went down the stairs.

Ilse Petersen had either been struck by a passing car or had slipped and fallen in the blinding snow, after which the last shreds of life and semi-consciousness had sent her crawling under the wheels of Harvey Pickering’s car; that was how they finally reasoned it out at close to two A.M. on that Sunday morning.

Chief Abbott was there, and a Sergeant Gilfoyle, a mountainous man with small, thick-lidded, very shrewd eyes. The coroner had come—glumly, because, as he pointed out, it wasn’t a fit night for man nor beast—and gone. He said bluntly that it was difficult to tell the ex-act nature of the injuries, because the head and face had been almost completely crushed by the right rear wheel of the Buick. It was also impossible to say when the accident and death had occurred; rigor would have set in very quickly in the icy air and the snow.

Chief Abbott said he supposed they hadn’t heard anything—a cry, brakes squealing, anything like that? Francesca gestured regretfully. “But then there were six of us for cocktails and dinner—I suppose we did a good deal of chattering, and naturally we weren’t listening for sounds outside.”

Chief Abbott understood. He was embarrassed because the dead woman had been living with Mrs. Poole’s husband; he wasn’t looking for motive or opportunity because there had been casualties and fatalities all over the state that stormy night. It was Sergeant Gilfoyle who said thoughtfully, “Peculiar night to be taking a walk. She lives over a mile from here. Wonder where she was going, in all this snow?”

Katy went on looking intently at the fire, at an edge of white-hot ash along a blackened log. Incredible that the blatantly obvious question hadn’t been asked before. She turned her head the merest trifle in time to see Francesca’s lashes sweep reticently down as she said in a low voice, “I think I can help you there, Sergeant. My husband came here tonight, although I hadn’t expected him. I think Miss Petersen suspected where he had gone, and followed him.”

Chief Abbott cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You think she was—”

“Jealous,” Francesca said with a wry smile. “Odd as it may seem, Mr. Abbott. It—happened once before.”

Chief Abbott looked at the clock and closed the notebook in which he had entered his report. The fire gave a dying snap. Sergeant Gilfoyle looked at Francesca with shrewd bright eyes and said, “Funny Mr. Poole hasn’t sent in an alarm. He should have been home by now. He must have missed Miss Petersen.”

Chief Abbott stirred restively. “Maybe he has. We’ve been gone well over an hour, Bill.” Someone else remarked that Arnold Poole might have had trouble getting home over the snowy roads. Abbott nodded, anxious to be gone from the small-hours inquiry into what was palpably a tragic but understandable accident. Blinding snow, a slippery curve, a car fumbling its way through the stormy darkness—there would be other people, luckier than Miss Petersen, ending up in hospitals all that night. He said, “We’ll have to talk to Mr. Poole in the morning anyway,” and, respectfully, “We may have to call on you again, Mr. Pickering.”

The firm pinkness was returning to Harvey Pickering’s face. He was surer of his ground, now; he had, after all, helped put Frank Abbott into office. He said, “Anything, anything, Chief. It’s a dreadful thing. I can’t help feeling partly responsible…”

The police left, then. Bur, thought Katy, they would almost certainly be back. Frank Abbott was not a stupid man, nor was huge, quiet Sergeant Gilfoyle, whose lazy half-closed eyes had been brightly full of unasked questions. It would occur to them, it must occur to them, that there had been two violently accidental deaths in Fenwick within the space of a little more than twenty-four hours, and that the same group of people had been on hand at both times. Fatal, among those people, to be too observing. Miss Whiddy had seen something she shouldn’t have seen, and unfortunately Miss Whiddy had lost her footing on a steep dark staircase. Ilse Petersen had also seen and heard something at the Inn, and Ilse Petersen had been struck down by a car on a wild and snowy night, as thousands of people had been before and thousands undoubtedly would be again. No weapon, either time, any more than the bathtub in which you slipped and broke your neck was a weapon.