Voice Out of Darkness (22 page)

Take care of yourself… but people said that as automatically as “See you later,” or “So long.” But how alert he had been about her black suede bag. How observant, to have recognized it from halfway across the room.

At close to ten o’clock Katy announced in a beautifully careless voice that she could scarcely keep her eyes open and was going upstairs to bed.

They had all talked idly about getting home, but they had stood upon the order of their going—through more coffee and a highball. Under the fragile screen of light discussion and cigarette smoke, Katy had watched Pauline Trent, who was oddly, unmistakably, nervous, and as restlessly anxious to get away as a bored child at an elderly party. She didn’t go. She sat with the rest, not speaking and obviously only half-listening, her remote dark gaze on Katy’s face, on an ashtray, on Katy’s face again.

Michael went to the stairs with Katy. He said grimly, “I hope we never have to do this again. I suppose Hooper knows what he’s about, and to hear him talk you’d think he had a detective under every rug, but it’s a hell of a way to spend an evening.”

“But they’ll have to start going home soon,” Katy said practically. “Whoever doesn’t—”

“I’ll count them as they go out,” Michael said. His smile was reassuring. It couldn’t, even in the dim light of the lobby, warm the anxiety out of his eyes.

Lieutenant Hooper didn’t tell me the whole plan, Katy thought, Michael knows something I don’t know—and was too nervously weary to care. She said goodnight, had it smothered in Michael’s hard, quick kiss, and went on up the stairs to her room. Inside it, she locked the door, put the now frightening black purse on the bedside table, and lighted a cigarette.

Silly to stand listening, knife-edgedly aware of the infinitesimal sounds implicit in silence—the tiny tick of her traveling clock, the cold little creak of a glass pane as the wind rushed against it, her own measured breathing. Because professional ears were listening for any sounds that would matter, and trained eyes were watching.

A half hour slid by. The room had become a bright box of safety—with menace pressing against the keyhole, waiting outside the windows. Katy put off undressing, and was aware that it was partly because she didn’t want to make a single alien sound in the stillness that was security, somehow, because it was complete. But she couldn’t, obviously, sit on the edge of the bed all night. She stood up.

Someone knocked at the door.

Katy went over to it and asked the crack, “Who is it?”

“Waiter, Miss. There’s a telephone call for you.”

It’s a trick, Katy thought clearly. It’s a way of getting me out of my room. Anybody who’d call me is right here, at the Inn.

Unless one of those people had had time to get home.

There was Stan, in New York.

She said, “Just a minute, please,” and turned the key and opened the door a sliver, with her weight braced against it. A white-coated waiter stood in the hall; she’d seen him often in the dining room. He looked back at her, politely puzzled, and Katy went and got the black bag. There were still eight dollars in it. She gave the waiter five and said carefully, “Will you wait here until I get back? And tell me if anyone comes while I’m gone. I won’t be long.”

The staircase was empty. So was the lobby. She crossed its shadowy stretches to the booth in the corner. She lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?” and a man’s voice said briskly, “Pearl? Say, I just got a wire from Bill and Edith; they got there safe and they said thanks for the bottle.”

Familiar? Katy didn’t think so; she couldn’t be sure. She thought gratefully of the waiter upstairs at her door and said, “I’m afraid you have the wrong person.”

“Pearl? Isn’t this Fenwick 3599? I asked for Pearl Merriwell—”

If it wasn’t genuine it was very well done, Katy thought, replacing the receiver. The voice had become aggrieved and a little suspicious; it had seemed to think, like most wrong-party callers, that the whole thing was a deliberate and malevolent conspiracy. It hadn’t sounded like a disguised voice—or had it been too loud and brash and cheerful?

She went slowly upstairs. The waiter said that nobody had come by while he’d been there. Katy didn’t notice that his words were carefully chosen, or that one hand was curled lovingly in his jacket pocket. She thanked him and went into her room and turned the key in the lock and, this time, went determinedly about preparing to go to bed. She lingered for a few minutes in the warm steamy little bathroom, doing idle things with dusting powder and lemony face cream. She put on the quilted ivory robe and yellow sandals, and went back into the bedroom. She was brushing her hair when she heard the sounds in the hall.

There was a faraway whisper of voices, a faint metallic click, a soft thump, then silence. When the sounds began again they were muffled and indescribable. Listening, brush suspended in mid-air, Katy tried to attach action to them, and couldn’t. Abruptly, the hall was again quiet.

There had been no outcry, no crisp police voices. Katy found that her hands were shaking. She lighted a cigarette and kept on staring at the door. Nothing had happened, the hush said so. Then why was her heart beating like that, thickly and unevenly?

Finish her cigarette and take an aspirin and turn out the light and try to sleep; Lieutenant Hooper had wanted her to behave as normally as possible and that was what, when your mind and body couldn’t stand any more, you normally did. But would Monica come into, the darkness with her tonight? Monica, the wet-haired, gray-lipped child who had uttered three words at the edge of the pond and unleashed a subtle and dreadful force?

Katy’s mind backed away from the thought of Monica. She put out her cigarette—and stood stiff and still as knuckles brushed softly against her door. There was, again, someone in the hall outside, someone who wanted to come in.

The door is locked, said Katy’s brain. Nobody can come in unless you turn the key. Unless someone forces the door.

Slow, stumbling thoughts, out of a primer of fear.

The windows—

But the windows, at this end of the Inn, looked steeply down on rocks. She stared at the black suede bag on the writing table in the corner. In the hall, someone tapped again, guardedly.

Who was at the door? And was Lieutenant Hooper watching?

“Katy,” said Michael’s voice, close to the crack.

Katy uncurled her fingers and drew breath through an aching throat. She went to the door and turned the key in the lock and opened it, and Michael stepped in. He wasn’t looking at her. He was half turned away, looking out into the hall. He said slowly, “Was the light on when you came up, Katy?”

Katy looked over his shoulder at darkness that hadn’t been there when she had come back from the phone. “Yes. But I heard sounds a few minutes ago—”

“Do you know what you heard, Katy?” Michael closed the door and looked at her with eyes that should have been exultant but were, instead, bleak and tired. “It’s over. Hooper’s plan worked, Katy, and it’s over.”

“Then there was someone—”

“—outside your door, in the hall,” Michael finished grimly. His face was white and strained. “Hoping to… God knows. They’re all in Hooper’s room now. He wants both of us, and the letter—think you can stand it?”

Katy didn’t move. It was over. Over. Danger had crept along the blackened hall to her own door, and there had been a scuffle, a pouncing attack, and she was safe. She said, “Michael, who is it?”

Michael looked away. He said, “I caught just a glimpse—I can’t believe it. I wish you didn’t have to go through this on top of everything else… I suppose we’d better get it over with.”

Katy didn’t ask again. She was numb, now that the time had come to look at the one dreadful face. She went over to the writing table and picked up the black suede bag with the letter that had been bait and now was evidence. And felt, again, that abnormal sharpening and heightening of all her senses.

Wind whipping coldly at the dark windows. A frozen ribbon of snow on the sill, a gaunt black branch in a slow and eerie dance. Black and white and gray, like a winter charcoal.

The charcoal sketches.

The knowledge had come tantalizingly close to her earlier today, when she had revisited the little pond. It had hovered, and she had almost known who it was who had stood hidden among the screening pines, and why it had taken thirteen years to ripen a chance conjecture into deadly maturity. Now it was sliding as quixotically back, fumbling at the edges of logic and reason. Dimly, she heard Michael saying, “Are you all right, Katy?” and she turned, the bag in her hands, her face burning with panic, her voice jagged in her throat. “The sketches. The charcoals.”

Michael was staring down at her, frowning. And all at once his eyes knew, too, and she heard his single harsh indrawn breath.

Only one thing moved in the utterly still room. It was the knob of the closet door, turning with caution, letting a slice of blackness into the wall. The slice widened. There was a face in it, a shockingly familiar face, above a coiled and springing body. Katy screamed, and the screams took her rocketing upwards, crazy and crimson in sudden blackness.

They sat
, the three of them, in the living room of Katy’s apartment on Tenth Street.

Organdy in loops at the windows and lamplight lying warmly on the rugs; rain put silver basting-stitches on the polished black panes. Lieutenant Hooper, who had said modestly that he didn’t mind if he did, looked thoughtfully into his Scotch and water and said, “Oh, yes, I don’t think there’s any doubt at all that Mr. Blythe would have killed Miss Meredith.”

‘Mr. Blythe would have killed Miss Meredith’—it had only been four days, but she could hear it now without nausea, because it had been said in so many ways by so many people that it had ceased to have any meaning at all. Katy said casually, “Then—or later, that’s it, isn’t it?”

“That night,” Lieutenant Hooper said mildly. “The window, I think—there’s a big drop there, with rocks below. If you had survived the fall it would have been taken care of. You wouldn’t have been found until morning. You would have left a note, probably to the effect that you couldn’t stand the anonymous persecution any longer, weren’t sure any more that you hadn’t pushed Monica Meredith, and were taking that way out.”

Katy went back to her intent scrutiny of the coffee table. Lieutenant Hooper and Jeremy Taylor exchanged warning, head-shaking glances; Hooper said gently, “I think we might go into all this a little later, Miss Meredith,” and Katy looked up. “Oh, no,” she said brightly. “Might as well face it, don’t you think, Lieutenant?”

Worse, said Jeremy’s eyebrows to Lieutenant Hooper.

Hooper himself didn’t like it; it filled him with a mixture of pity and horror. You used a sharp slap to stop hysterics; how did you bring them on? “It’s appalling,” he had said to Mrs. Hooper. “She didn’t seem to know what to do with his ring. Had his hands at her throat, and all she said, after she found out, was that she supposed they wouldn’t be getting married next week after all.”

“I’m quite all right,” said Katy steadily from the couch. “I’m not going to explode, or have convulsions, so you needn’t look at me like that, either of you. What Michael wanted, then, was the money Uncle John and Aunt Belinda left me.”

“The money, and Cassie Poole,” said Lieutenant Hooper, and now it was Jeremy Taylor the lieutenant didn’t particularly want to look at. “Mr. Blythe and Miss Poole had been determined to marry for some time without letting anybody know about it. They were both rather—expensive people. Cassie Poole was to keep putting off her marriage with Mr. Taylor, and Michael Blythe was to go through with his to you, Miss Meredith. In time—a fairly short time, I’m afraid—” Hooper looked at the rug, “the new Mrs. Blythe would have become so depressed by a continued barrage of anonymous notes and telephone calls and so forth that she would have taken perhaps an overdose of sleeping pills. Leaving behind her a note and her inheritance—both for her husband.”

Katy looked up wonderingly. She said, “Did Cassie know-all this?”

Hooper shook his head. “I doubt it. She swears—and I’m inclined to believe her—that Mr. Blythe mentioned a vague juggling of the funds, investments, probably, and then a divorce. She wanted to believe him, and she says she did. But guilt and fear of discovery had begun to show, as you probably noticed.”

The windows shuddered under a sudden tide of rain. Jeremy’s face was expressionless. He said, “I knew all along that there was something wrong, but I didn’t, of course, know what it was. Our engagement was just one of those things anyway.” He shrugged. “We’d grown up together in the same small town. We liked each other quite a bit. People started pairing us off automatically, and there didn’t seem to be any reason why not. At the time.”

Lieutenant Hooper looked at Jeremy with one of his demure, bird-like glances. Jeremy was looking at Katy. Katy looked at the coffee table. She said, completely ignoring Jeremy’s words, “The letters started coming in October. But I suppose that wasn’t really the beginning.”

“The beginning,” said Hooper, “was thirteen years ago. The day after Michael had taken Cassie to a holiday dance up in Fenwick. He went there originally with his brother Gerald. But he was much younger and sought his own diversions, mingled with young people Gerald didn’t even know. He was one of a group who stopped by at the Poole house to pick Cassie Poole up, which is why, of course, Mr. Poole remembered him after a bit of concentration. Mr. Blythe refuses to say anything. Miss Poole is still much too frightened to—but I think we’ll find out that this is what happened.

“Michael Blythe was immediately interested in Cassie Poole. He was nearly twenty at the time, and Cassie was only fourteen—but Miss Meredith herself has pointed out that even at fourteen Cassie was ‘something you looked at twice.’ At any rate, Michael Blythe looked twice. He went back to the Poole house the next day and was told that Cassie had gone to the Merediths’ and he went on over there in hopes of seeing her. With the result that he wound up, that afternoon, at the northern end of the pond, where he waited until he could see Cassie without the two younger children around.” Hooper paused. The bottom of his glass was damp, and he wiped it scrupulously dry with his handkerchief before setting it down on the little end table. Katy thought, Coasters, and didn’t move at all. Hooper said, “Michael Blythe heard Monica say, ‘Katy pushed me.’ It was, keep in mind, a very still day. He was curious. He waited. The mere fact that he could have stayed hidden while a child was apparently drowning shows an almost incredible streak of cold blood. But, nearly thirteen years later, he had reason to congratulate himself.”