Death Has a Small Voice (13 page)

It took them less time than it had taken Pam to find a way around the swamp. They went on, Jerry leading, with each step farther from the house. That was the answer, although Jerry did not make it to Mullins. Fleeing, Pam would flee away, along as direct a course as she could manage. It was all they had to go on.

They crossed a brook on stepping stones, and if they had been a dozen feet to the left, they might have seen the depressed grass where she had lain to drink, to cup water onto her face. But they missed this. They came to a wall and went over it, through poison ivy again, and came to a narrow lane. They stopped there. The problem was too obvious to need words. But then Jerry started along the road to his right. It was not, he thought, quite the toss of a coin. Given the need to turn one way or the other, with no special incentive to choice, most right-handed people turn toward the right. Jerry had himself turned so, before he rationalized his choice.

They climbed a hill and, beyond it, saw a cabin near the road.

“May as well ask,” Mullins said, and they turned into a drive, passed a station wagon parked on roughly cut grass, knocked on a door. After a time a tall young man appeared at the door, tightening a robe around his waist.

“Now what have we?” he enquired. His tone was one of exasperated patience.

They told him. Halfway through, he began to nod his head.

“She was here,” he said. “Very bedraggled, if I may say so. Rather dirty, you know, as if she'd been in a dust bin. I said, ‘What now, lady?' or words to that effect, and she took off. Can't imagine why.”

“Which way?” Jerry asked.

It was no good, he told them. He'd had a try at it. She'd gone up the road, running. She'd worried him. He'd taken the car—“Silly thing to do, come to think of it”—and gone after her. He'd gone up the road a mile or more, slowly, found nobody, come back. He'd decided she must have had a car herself, up the road, although he had not heard it start nor seen anything of it.

“What's the row?” he asked.

Mullins told him that, or enough of it. There had been trouble at Miss Godwin's house; Mrs. North had found it necessary—

“Trouble?” the man at the door asked. “What kind of trouble?”

Mullins hesitated. Then he said, “Murder.”

“Not Hilda?” the man said, quickly. “Hilda's all right?” Mullins regarded him. “She's a friend of mine,” the man said. “A good friend.”

“She's not all right,” Mullins said. “She's dead, Mr.—?”

“Lyster,” the man said. “Alec Lyster. Good God! Who—? This gal you're trying to find?”

“Not Mrs. North,” Mullins said. Jerry North had left them; he was walking toward the road. He stopped and looked at the station wagon and then crossed and looked into it. “Wait a minute, Mr. North,” Mullins said. Jerry stopped, his hands on the side of the station wagon.

Mullins said, “It wasn't Mrs. North killed her. It wasn't any woman. You're a friend of hers, you say?”

Lyster said, “Yes.”

“Could be the Loot'ud like to talk to you,” Mullins said. “I mean the Captain.”

“Listen,” Lyster. “You're sure Hilda—?”

“That's right,” Mullins said. “She is. I'm a police detective, Mr. Lyster. I'd like you to come along and talk to the Captain, if you don't mind. We'll look for Mrs. North on the way.”

Lyster hesitated. Then he nodded; said, “Wait till I dress, will you, old man?” and went into the cabin at Mullin's acquiescing nod.

Jerry left the station wagon; he walked to the road; he turned left and began to walk along the road. Mullins made no effort to stop him.

Lyster was quick. When he came out, he looked enquiringly at Mullins, made a gesture with his head toward the place Jerry North had stood.

“The lady who was here's his wife,” Mullins said. “We better take your car.”

They took the station wagon. A hundred yards up the road they stopped for Jerry North. He got in, saying nothing. They drove on slowly. After a time Mullins, who was watching to their right, the beam from his flashlight moving on the road's shoulder, said “Hold it!” Lyster stopped the car and Mullins got out. He examined the shoulder; he crossed and examined that on the other side. He got back in.

“Was a car here,” he told them. “Parked facing that way.” He jerked a thumb. “Turned around. Went in the ditch a little and pulled out. Went the way we're going.”

“I said she might have a car,” Lyster told them.

“She didn't,” Mullins said. “But—”

“Someone had,” Jerry said. He swore, in a hopeless voice.

It was not far by road to the house Hilda Godwin had summered in and Alec Lyster clearly knew the way. Bill Weigand came out when he heard the car; he looked at Jerry, who shook his head slowly; at Mullins, who lifted heavy shoulders. “Looks like she's in a car,” Mullins said. He said, “This is Mr. Lyster. He was a friend of Miss Godwin. Thought you might like—”

“Right,” Bill said. He put a hand on Jerry North's shoulder. “Well find her,” he said.

“Sure,” Jerry said, his voice dull, “Sure.”

“Oh,” Lyster said, “so it's you, Captain.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “I heard you lived near by. You've heard what's happened.”

Lyster nodded.

“Do you know anything about it?” Bill asked.

“Good God, no!”

“Did you hear anything tonight? See anything. You came here after you left the restaurant?”

Lyster had not, he said, seen or heard anything. He had left the Shaws at the restaurant; he had taken Miss Barclay to the theater at which she was playing. He had been at loose ends; the night had been fine and he had decided to spend it in the country. He had been asleep when Pam had wakened him, and fled from him—“rather a shock, that”—and had got to sleep again to be once more awakened, this time by Jerry North and Mullins, and “this dismal business about poor Hilda.”

“Who'd do this to her?” he asked.

“I don't know, yet,” Bill said. “We'll find out, Mr. Lyster. You're staying on in the country?”

Lyster shook his head. He would, he said; drive back to the city. “O.K?”

He was told it was. He gave his city address. He nodded when Bill said they'd probably drop around to talk to him later.

“Is she—?” Lyster asked. He nodded toward the house.

“No,” Bill Weigand said. “She isn't, Mr. Lyster. In any case—” He let the inflection of his voice finish the sentence. Lyster's voice shook a little when he said, “D'y mind telling me—how?”

“Strangled,” Bill said. “Her body put in a trunk. Several days ago, Mr. Lyster.”

Lyster swore, his voice low. He went to the station wagon without saying anything more and backed it into the road, and drove it down the road.

“Hit him hard,” Mullins said. “Didn't it?”

“Apparently,” Bill said. “It's not a pretty idea, Sergeant. Come on, Jerry.”

Jerry North looked at him.

“Pam may be in town by now,” Bill told him. “Anyhow, there's nothing we can do here. The State boys have got a report out on her. They'll—search around here.”

He waited.

“All right,” Jerry said. “I don't know what to do. Whatever you say.”

They drove back to town. As they drove, Bill talked, and was silent, and talked again. Although he knew that Weigand was talking more to himself than to anyone, Mullins listened, now and then put in a word of agreement. Jerry North did not speak; he only half listened. He pushed the car's speed higher with his mind; although Mullins drove fast enough.

She's all right
, Jerry thought.
She's got a car and driven home. She'll be in the apartment, waiting. She'll—

He had sent a man up to the Wilson house, Bill told them both, and was heard by Mullins. As a check, solely—to make certain that Professor Wilson could see from there what he said he had seen. He could have. He was not, however, there. Evidently he, too, had returned to town.

“Why?” Mullins asked.

“I don't know, Sergeant,” Bill told him.

“We haven't got much, and that's a fact,” Mullins said, turning west on New York 35.

“A dead burglar,” Bill said. “A dead poet. A missing record. A missing book manuscript. Four men.”

One of the men had loved the girl and planned to marry her. According to him, another of the men, although already married, had loved her too, and refused rejection. A third, Wilson, had known her years before; had found that she was a light in a university classroom. To the fourth she was a friend, but his voice shook when he thought of her dead.

“Anybody might,” Mullins pointed out. “Like you said, the idea ain't pretty.”

He turned left on Route 21, followed it past the entrance to the Pound Ridge Reservation, slowed for sharp curves and increased speed again.

“Of course,” Bill Weigand said, “it doesn't have to be any of these people.”

Mullins sighed deeply at that. He yawned widely. He said that, anyway, it had to be a man. He was told that he was jumping to conclusions.

“Some women have strong hands,” Bill Weigand said. “I should think, for example, that a woman sculptor might have.”

Mullins did not take his eyes from the road. It was nevertheless as if he looked at Weigand with surprise.

“It's early day,” Weigand said, and yawned himself. “And a long day.”

They left Jerry North at the door of his apartment house. He was, Bill told him, to try to get some sleep. Nobody, Bill told him, could go on forever without sleep.

Jerry said, “Sure,” in a dull voice, but as he went into the building he began to hurry. When the elevator did not come quickly, he went up the stairs, and as he climbed, he was almost running. He was breathless in front of the door to the apartment; he fumbled for his keys. He called, “
Pam!
” as he was opening the door.

The apartment was as he had left it. His bags stood where he had left them. Three cats sat and looked at Jerry North, their eyes round with wonder, with expectancy.

Jerry crouched suddenly and picked up the nearest cat; he held her at arm's length.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

The blue eyes were flat and inscrutable. The cat wriggled. Jerry put her down.

He went through the empty apartment, not calling any longer. Then he returned and sat in a chair in the living room, near the telephone. He started to light a cigarette, but when he had taken one from a package he merely held it, unlighted and forgotten, between his fingers.

There were no road signs on the back roads, and one narrow twisting road led only to another, no wider, no more traveled or better surfaced. It seemed that, steering the heavy station wagon, she might wander forever through the night along roads which led nowhere. She was almost unbearably tired, now; her eyes ached, her body ached. She had no idea how long she had been driving the car, which seemed sluggish, which drifted sullenly to the right on the crowned roads. She came to a Y, unmarked: two roads, neither promising anything, continued diagonally, anonymously, to left and right.

Pam stopped the car. She put her arms on the wheel and her head on her arms. It's no good, she thought. There'll never be an end.

She sat so for minutes. She raised her head, shifted her hands to the rim of the wheel, started the car moving down the road which angled to the right. One way was as good as another; all were meaningless.

Probably there were darkened houses on either side and people slept in the houses. The road led somewhere. But she could not see the houses. She could see only the road, lighted by the spreading beams of the headlights. She could only drive on, slowly, groping through the night.

She drove a little more than a mile from the Y. Then a word leaped at her: “Stop.” For a moment, it seemed to her that the word existed only in her mind. But then she brought the car to a stop and read, above and below the reflected command, the words: “Thru Traffic.” And here there was a road sign. She could see it only dimly, could not make out the words. She pressed a button on the floor of the car with a toe and the lights lifted.

“New York 57 mi.” the sign told her, and pointed to the left. She turned onto a deserted road, and the wheels steadied on concrete. She drove toward New York, the lights slicing the darkness. As she drove, she went faster and faster. Her hands tightened on the wheel.

She tried to think clearly what was happening, but she still thought as one thinks in a dream. Ideas slipped away, distorted themselves in her mind. She had to get it and take it to the police, to Bill, and then she would be safe, she thought, but she could not, at first, remember what it was that had to be taken to the police. Then she remembered—the record. But then she thought, no, I must find it and break it and then I can tell him—

It was not clear. The big car went faster and faster through the night.

The lights picked up signs, held them for an instant, relinquished them. She was on N.Y. 22. She was—“30 M.P.H.” a sign said. “Bedford Village,” a sign said. A sign said, “School Crossing, Slow.” She slowed a little, on the deserted road, in the darkness; went slowly through a sleeping village.

A sign said, “Armonk” and a yellow traffic light blinked on and off, on and off. Beyond it a sign pointed: “White Plains.” She turned left, following the arrow of the sign.

Before she reached White Plains there was another sign, and she slowed the station wagon to read it. “New York via Parkways,” she read, and turned right down a grade. She knew where she was, then. It was as if light suddenly had been turned on. She found the Bronx River Parkway Extension and drove along it to the Hawthorne Circle. She went three-fourths of the way around the circle, and south on the Saw Mill River Parkway.

She remembered, when she was almost past the last turn-off, that if she stayed on the Parkway she would have to pay toll twice, and that she had no money. I forgot my bag, Pam thought. I left it somewhere. She shook her head a little, trying to remember, and could not. She turned right on the road to Yonkers.