Voice Out of Darkness (2 page)

She paused and put out her cigarette. Michael sat quietly, listening.

“Monica didn’t ever—exactly take to me,” Katy said hesitatingly. “She was a funny child, and not awfully likeable. She was big for her age, which she hated, and rather secretive. Oh, she wasn’t a monster, by any means, or anything like that. She was just—odd. When I wouldn’t play with her dolls, because I loathed dolls, she wouldn’t complain, she simply wouldn’t eat her meals until I did. She told all her friends that I was half-Indian because I tanned in the summer and she didn’t. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It can’t possibly matter.”

“It might,” Michael said.

“Off and on, we got along all right,” Katy said, “probably as well as a lot of real sisters do. Aunt Belinda got me off in a corner one day, I remember, and told me that Monica was shy—actually Monica was about as shy as a Fuller brush man—and not to mind her little moods. That was when she told me about my being adopted, and my having no relatives as far as they knew. She said that eventually she and Uncle John would be leaving something to Monica and me, and they didn’t want some utter stranger turning up to claim me as her long-lost child. We got to be twelve,” said Katy steadily, “and we were in the same grade at school. One day after school we went skating together, on a little pond at the foot of the hill where we lived.” She stopped. “Do you want to make that drink now, Michael?”

She hadn’t moved when Michael came back with drinks. Gazing at the bright reflection of the room in the windows, hearing the chilly swish of the wind across the roofs, Katy was surprised at the force with which it could still hit her, just the mere cool recounting of it thirteen years later.

She said, “Thanks…” and went on rapidly, because this was the worst part, the part she wanted to get over. “It was very cold that day, and quite gloomy even at three-thirty. The twelfth of December. We’d only been down at the pond a little while, Monica and I, when Cassie Poole turned up. I remember being rather startled and pleased about that, because Cassie was two years older than we were, and even at fourteen she was something you looked at twice. She was beginning to go to parties, too, and what with one thing or another we worshiped her.

“After a while, though, it started to get darker, and I was frozen. I wanted to go home, but Monica wouldn’t. She’d dug a little hole in the ice with her skate, the way we used to, and was skating back and forth around it, so that the ice bent and got sort of watery. It was,” said Katy, “right over the channel.”

The channel. Not deep, really, but deep when you were twelve—five feet of black frigid water. Beyond it was the little dam, where in summer the water trickled down in a tiny falls and wandered its rocky, mossy way under the bridge. But this was winter, and Monica was streaking back and forth across a patch of rubbery ice, mainly to impress Cassie Poole. Katy caught her breath.

“I was up at the other end of the pond, skating around and trying to get warm,” she said. “I called to Monica once or twice, but she either didn’t hear me or pretended not to, and finally I skated down to her. I remember Cassie saying, ‘You’ll fall in, you dope.’ Just then Monica came past me, on her way back across that piece of ice, and I reached for her arm but she slipped away and that was when the ice buckled. Right under her, so that she went in feet first and on her back. She—went under the ice.”

That dreadful hollow splashing sound. The quiet little slither of more ice breaking off and floating on the black water, so that Katy and Cassie, who had thrown themselves down and were groping for an arm, a shoulder that wasn’t there, had to inch back a little. The awful subterranean floundering that was Monica trying to fight out of that freezing hellish trap under the ice.

“We got her out,” said Katy, staring at smoke from her cigarette. “It couldn’t have been—I figured out later—more than half a minute, although right then it seemed like… Anyway, we got her out. I went in too, but by that time most of the rubber ice had broken off and I got hold of a firm edge. Monica was lying on her face, not moving at all, and Cassie, who took First Aid at school, was trying to press the water out of her lungs. Cassie sort of gasped at me, ‘Get somebody—scream.’ ”

The little pond wasn’t far from the road. Katy remembered reaching the edge, screaming as she stumbled on her skates over dry brown grass and pebbled earth to the road. A car coming around the curve and stopping, and Katy not waiting for the man who got out, but running awkwardly back on her skates, drenched and terrified and sobbing with panic. Cassie had dragged Monica to the edge of the pond, and Monica, miraculously, was breathing.

“Then I don’t see—. Even if she died later, as a result, technically you’d saved her, between you,” Michael said, frowning, and Katy came back with a jolt to his voice and the lights and shapes and colors of her own living room.

“Oh, yes,” she said wearily. “I could have had that much if Monica hadn’t said it was my fault.”

“Monica?”

“She opened her eyes, just as I reached her and before that man got there. She said,” said Katy, opening her own eyes very wide and looking directly at Michael, “ ‘Katy pushed me.’ ”

“
She
was delirious,” Michael said firmly. But he was shocked. Katy could see it in his eyes, in the quick, slight stiffening of his face, in his involuntary glance at the accusing letters that lay on the table beside him.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so, Michael. Not then. Her voice, her eyes, her face, something—I think we’d have known. Cassie didn’t think she was delirious either, because she ssshhed Monica right away and said I hadn’t even touched her. And I hadn’t. I tried, that time, but I couldn’t catch the cloth of her ski suit. They told me later on that she didn’t say anything at all after that. She went into shock and then pneumonia and—died.”

“Told you later on,” Michael repeated. “Weren’t you—”

“I got pneumonia too. We were in the hospital at the same time, so that poor Aunt Belinda and Uncle John practically slept there for weeks. Cassie came to see me every day after school, but we never talked about what Monica had said. I started to, once, but Cassie got very impatient and said she’d already forgotten it and it wasn’t true anyway, so neither of us ever mentioned it again.”

Katy got up off the couch, chilled and stiff. It was after eleven; if the little clock had said three in the morning she wouldn’t have been surprised. Snow wove and fluttered past the windows, the wind was still from the east. She said suddenly, “There’s just one more thing. I heard something up at the other end of the pond, a branch stirring, or a twig breaking. I heard it more than once. It could have been the wind, of course. But it was so still that day.”

After Michael had gone—had thrown away her untasted drink and insisted on making her a fresh one, had asked more questions, had folded the letters into his pocket and said abruptly that he’d call her in the morning, had kissed her so gently and quickly that she wasn’t really aware of it until the door had closed behind him—Katy went determinedly to bed.

Washing coffee cups and glasses and turning off lights, she tried to analyze the feeling that had been growing and strengthening ever since October, when the first of the letters had come. It wasn’t remorse, because she didn’t feel, had never felt guilty. She had tried to get Monica to go home, and Monica wouldn’t. She had reached out forcibly for Monica’s arm, and Monica had deliberately evaded her hand.

It wasn’t grief, because there had never been that, either, not even when she had first come out of the hospital and they had told her carefully that Monica had been buried a week ago. There had just been shock and dimly-understood horror and the somehow mystifying absence of Monica from the table, from their bedroom, from the oak-shaded hill and the field full of tawny waving grass where they had played and quarreled and grown up together.

It was, Katy supposed detachedly, the gentle beginning of fear.

Because someone who had no right to know knew what Monica had said, and was twisting a child’s accusation into a brutal, repeated thrust.

Because it was no random malice that, having conceived and written the letters, went to the trouble of delivering them to her door—cautiously undated, un-post-marked. Not once, but three times. Someone, too, who knew not only her address but her apartment number.

Because if there was a purpose, it was blind and warped and could only be, Katy thought wryly, to produce exactly the state of mind which it was producing. First stage, distaste. Second stage, anger. Third stage, might as well admit it, fear. After that—what? And where was the satisfaction, if you couldn’t be on hand to watch your victim squirm?

The warm little apartment seemed suddenly very empty and isolated and full of odd noises. Nonsense, thought Katy, and went on listening. The clock. Had it always been that loud? The windows—but then the weather-stripping was venerable. A dripping; she’d turned that faucet off. And this, she said to herself with grim amusement, is precisely what you are supposed to be feeling, my girl. Better look in your closet, and under your bed.

She did.

After that she took an aspirin, switched off the lights and got instantly into bed. Michael had the letters, they were gone from the bookcase. It was as comforting as though someone had removed the dead rat in its trap that had kept you out of the kitchen. Michael would call her in the morning and be very sane and constructive. Feeling protected, Katy went to sleep.

She woke to the last faint echo of a church bell, with the impression that it had just struck four. It had stopped snowing but the night was almost white with it, the hushed snowlight spreading up from the streets and roofs. Slushy in the morning, Katy thought drowsily, and sat up, shivering, to pull up her comforter.

Cassie Poole and Jeremy Taylor were in New York today. So were a few thousand other out-of-towners.

But not all from Fenwick, Connecticut.

The comforter was delightfully warm. Katy rolled herself into a complicated cocoon and tucked the pillow under her cheek. Sharp and clear and positive as though it were the result of hours of indecision, she thought, I’ll go back to Fenwick, it’s someone there, and slept and didn’t awake until morning.

Paige’s, the fledgling Macy’s sired by an austere old Fifth Avenue corporation, towered sixteen stories high on Sixth Avenue. Advertising was on the fourteenth; Katy walked up the hall, initialed the space next to her name on the copywriters’ time sheet, wrote 9:14 after it, and collided violently with Stan Smith, who wrote drug and cosmetics copy and with whom she usually lunched.

Stan backed away and looked at her. “Late night,” she said judiciously. “Intemperance and worse. You know what’s good for that?”

“Paige’s Pacifies,” Katy said, edging away. “No thanks. I had trouble sleeping, that’s all.”

“It’s difficult at those noisy little bars,” Stan agreed. “There’s a copy meeting at ten, so no coffee. See you later.”

Copy meeting at ten—she couldn’t talk to Michael, then, until well after eleven. Katy went on into the copy department, took off her coat and hat and boots, reclaimed her ashtray from a neighboring desk, and settled down to work. The talk with Michael and her four o’clock decision had smoothed the roughening edges of her nerves; she should, of course, have done both before this. But that was on the schedule, too. You didn’t just say, as a conversational gambit, “By the way, I’ve just had another letter accusing me of murdering my foster-sister.” Not to Stan, whom she had known well for two years. Not even, until two months of waiting and dread had had their way, to Michael.

Her phone rang. A buyer with a voice like a hornet demanded to know why her merchandise had been mis-keyed in the
News;
customers were insisting on fifteen-ninety-five hats for nine-ninety-five and the department was in an uproar. Katy investigated, said soothingly that the
News
would send a letter of apology and explanation, and hung up. The day at Paige’s had begun.

The store’s advertising department, one of the largest and most frenzied in New York, wasn’t a place for leisured meditation. Noise and confusion and the pressure of deadlines battered and drove from every side. Voices lifted out of the steady humming pattern: a copywriter asking of the department at large the name of a particularly fresh-sounding flower; a shriek of laughter from the basement writer, whose
Mirror
proof announced that Paige’s scouring pads were impregnated with vegetable “soup” instead of “soap”; a bellowed warning from the production department that all
Times
and
Tribune
proofs must be okayed and released by two o’clock.

Normally, a routine day plunged Katy into complete oblivion of everything but Paige merchandise by ten o’clock as she divided her time between typewriter and phone. There were pleased buyers, and buyers who gibbered with rage. There were acid penciled comments from the copy chief, and blue-moon moments of excited approval. There were the crises, like the time her wild-mink ad had run in the first three thousand editions of an evening paper as mild mink. There was, every day, the challenge and fascination of convincing matrons in the Bronx and sleek Manhattan secretaries, doubting mothers in Pelham and pretty, expensive girls all over New York that there was nothing like Paige’s Fabulous Fashions Floor.

Stan Smith, who knew vaguely of Katy’s inheritance, had been frankly incredulous. “Work in this slave-ship when you don’t absolutely have to? Ah, well. Weak in the head. Young and fetching and mad as a hatter—”

“I like it,” Katy had interrupted calmly. “And anyway, what else would I be doing with myself? And why don’t you go back to your dreadful drugs and potions and leave me alone?”

But, today, her typewriter stumbled over headlines she’d have to rewrite later, and her phone was a maddening and persistent enemy. She told herself crisply that Michael had work to do too and couldn’t drop everything just to call and be comforting; in spite of herself her hand went out eagerly at every ring. And it was the debutante-dress department with a correction in a color listing, or Mr. Carrara of Better Furs to say bitterly that his Persian lamb ad looked like matted cat, or timid Mr. Wilsham, assistant in Raincoats, asking shyly for a lunch date.