Voice Out of Darkness (12 page)

Bathtubs… Katy’s fingers curled and tightened in her lap. Weren’t they another favorite on the domestic carelessness list? You slipped, getting in. Your head went back and under, so that you were momentarily stunned. They found you with your hair floating lazily over your face, and water eddying gently into your mouth and eyes and nose… But her bathtub at the Inn was small and pinched, you couldn’t stretch out full length in it and it would be very uncomfortable, doubled up like that—

“Coffee, anyone? Or a drink?” Francesca was standing in the doorway, white and weary, one shoulder against the wood frame. Katy’s eyes came completely open. She’d been almost asleep for a moment, she’d been dreaming—She said, “Not for me, thanks,” and stretched. Jeremy, standing at the hearth and looking down at her, frowned a little and said, “Katy. Feeling all right?”

“Yes,” Katy said violently. In this room, with these people, it seemed important all at once to make that very clear. She said loudly and crisply, “I feel perfectly all right,” and stood up, aware that they were all staring at her. Michael said flatly, “You look frightful. We all do. The sooner we get some sleep—”

They were at the door again, re-enacting the hats-coats-and-gloves scene; it was as though they had been through a ghastly rehearsal for their final departure. Francesca, mouth twisted, said, “I’m sorry the—evening had to end like this, it wasn’t intended to be a police party, really,” and Katy realized, for the first time and with compunction, how frightful it must have been for her. The woman for whom her husband had left her, crushed to death in front of her house—the papers would touch on that, slyly, even though Fenwick had been long accustomed to the Poole-Petersen situation. She said gently, “I hope Cassie will be all right in the morning,” and followed Jeremy out to the car.

It was still snowing, but the wind had dropped. Ahead of them, Mr. Pickering climbed into his car. He didn’t wave this time. The Buick’s back wheels spun and Whipped snow churningly aside and the car pulled slidingly into the road and started away. They followed its taillights until Jeremy turned off for the road back to the town.

They were in the dim, sleeping lobby before Katy discovered the loss of her bag. She tried, and failed, to remember whether she had had the black suede pouch in the car. She could have left it at Francesca’s, might have dropped it somewhere in the snow. Never mind; she would ask in the morning. She said, “Oh, Lord. My key,” and Michael pressed the buzzer on the counter in front of the office and they waited for the slumbering bell-boy to rouse.

It was ten minutes before he came and they stood, quiet and exhausted, in the shadowy silence of the deserted lobby. The dark mouth of the bar, the wider blackness of the dining-room door, the staircase sloping grayly up behind them; the light at the top burned faithfully, making a small island of radiance at the turn of the hall. Katy said idly, “My bag might be in Jeremy’s car,” but Michael didn’t answer. He was staring ahead of him, eyes intent on nothing at all, a tired look stamped around his mouth. He said abruptly, “I’m sorry about tonight, Katy. I should have told you about Gerald months ago, as soon as you mentioned Fenwick. I don’t know why I kept putting it off, except that it doesn’t make very pleasant telling—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Katy said. “Whatever it is, Michael, it doesn’t matter at all.”

Michael gave her a quick glance. “It does, in a way,” he said, “I’ll cut it short, but I want you to know. Gerald’s four years older than I am. He has brains, plenty of them. We all worshipped him, Mother and Dad and I… he was the kind of guy you looked up to, when you were playing high-school football and he was getting his letters at college—”

He paused. Katy wanted to say something, to touch his hand, but she stayed very still. Michael said carefully, “As soon as Gerald got out of college—he did very well—Dad took him into the business. Blythe and Belvedere, Architects. You can find the trimmings in any 1930 Chicago newspaper, but what it amounts to is that Gerald took everything and skipped out. Before that, while he was still at college, he used to come here to Fenwick for vacations. He had a lot of charm, and the golden touch—his college friends were always the ones with money. There was a family here, I don’t remember their name, with an estate on the Sound and a yacht-and a couple of Irish hunters. Natural set-up for Gerald.”

Katy said with quick, soft pity, “Oh, Michael—”

“It got hushed up,” Michael said, “very prettily. No loose ends, just Dad bankrupt and Mother with twenty years on her age and a few dirty headlines in the papers. Belvedere wanted to prosecute, naturally, but he was the lesser partner and from somewhere or other Dad got enough together to pay him back. So—Gerald went abroad for a couple of years, and that was that. I don’t know when he came back. We found out about five years ago that he was in Florida, with a wife, I think, and a couple of kids.”

“But it’s all over with,” Katy said gently. “It must have been horrible for your father, for all of you, but it’s over and done with, Michael, and it was years ago.”

“Katy,” said Michael. He looked at her slowly and deliberately, as though he were memorizing her face. The back door of the shadowy little office opened and feet shuffled, but his eyes didn’t flicker. “That day when Monica went through the ice. A car stopped, you said. There was a man—”

“Middle-aged,” said Katy, giddy with relief. “A good fifty at least, darling. I don’t remember at all what he looked like, but I do know that. Have you been thinking-?”

The bell-boy emerged, blinking. “Not really,” Michael said, and then laughed. “My God. I guess I was. It’s the kind of thing Gerald might be involved in, if he scented money in the offing… Sorry to wake you, but the lady’s lost her key. Can you let her into two-sixteen?”

With the light out and the luminous hands of the traveling-clock pointing at close to 3:30, Katy thought suddenly of the key in her missing bag. In the midst of the storm, and with only a few hours until dawn, it was scarcely likely that the key would be used tonight. Nevertheless, dizzy with fatigue as she was, Katy got shiveringly out of bed, propped a chair inexpertly under the doorknob, looked at it dubiously, thought, “I’m too tired,” crept back under the blankets and was immediately, blessedly, druggedly asleep.

The snow stopped sometime during the night. Katy woke once to a glare of white-gold sunlight and the snort of snow-ploughs and closed her eyes determinedly again. At close to noon she and Michael had something that was more lunch than breakfast and compared notes on the evening before. Michael agreed that Ilse Petersen’s death was not the bad-weather accident it seemed to be; his gaze narrowed alertly when Katy told him about the conversation she had overheard, standing in Cassie’s bedroom before dinner.

“If only you’d heard a little more… you’re sure Ilse Petersen didn’t give any hint at all of what she saw here at the Inn?”

“None,” Katy said. “She only said it was something ‘infinitely more interesting’—more interesting, I suppose, than Cassie’s proposition of a short trip. In fact, it sounded rather like the beginnings of blackmail.”

Michael frowned. “But not of Cassie herself, because Cassie isn’t apparently very fruitful monetary ground. Or maybe she’s going to be. Is Taylor a wealthy man?”

“Heavens, no. Not poor either,” Katy said, “but a lawyer’s salary in Fenwick isn’t very dazzling. Even if he gets to be town prosecutor he’ll be fairly comfortable, but nothing more.”

They rebuilt, between them, a rough framework of the evening. Cassie had been closeted with Ilse. Francesca had left the room to get Scotch from the cellar—but had returned in under five minutes. Cassie had vanished, before that, to bring extra coffee things when her father arrived—and there was, of course, the back door.

“But Cassie’d have been soaked,” Michael said. “It was snowing heavily—and even if she’d had the strength to drag Ilse Petersen out to the road, she’d have been covered with it.”

“They keep raincoats and galoshes and things in a sort of niche near the back door,” Katy said. “With a hood or a scarf, and something to cover your feet—I saw them when I helped Cassie take the coffee things out.”

“Any of them wet?”

“I didn’t notice,” Katy said. “I remember seeing them, that’s all. But later—”

Michael tried, forehead furrowed, fingers probing his temples, to remember who had been where at what time after that. “Taylor was at the cellar door, outside—it wasn’t locked, because he was already on his way out with shovels when I got down there. Pickering was trying his car, flooding the engine and saying something or other about its being outrageous, when I ran into him. Poole had a try at his car and went back to the cellar for another shovel and some work-gloves. It was so damned dark—”

The cellar, Katy thought. She remembered the sound of the coat-room door closing, the click of another latch. The inside door to the cellar was opposite the door to the coat-room; the latch mightn’t have been the front door closing behind Ilse. She might—why was the thought so terrifying?—she might have gone down the cellar stairs instead. “Is it a big cellar, Michael?”

Michael stared. He said, “Big enough to hide in, if that’s what you mean. Yes, plenty big enough for that… there’s a dark storage space on one side of the staircase. The furnace and coal bin and clotheslines are on the other, and the stairs going up to the outside door. Katy, I think you’ve hit it. I don’t think Ilse Petersen ever left the house—alive.”

That would explain Cassie’s trapped look of consternation when her father appeared, Katy thought. To be maneuvering for a reconciliation between your parents, to have another woman in the house with a damaging piece of overseen, overheard evidence on her lips… But Ilse might have left the house alive. Cassie had left the room immediately after her father had come in. It needn’t have been a matter of strength. Simple to have donned raincoat and scarf and galoshes, to have gone to the outside cellar door, to have opened it and whispered, “My father wants to talk to you, out here, in his car… he’s waiting.” After that, a blow with a rock on Use’s temple, repeated blows with Use’s head against the snowy road… then a shove, a return to the kitchen, a reappearance, dry, composed, with a coffee-cup in a steady hand.

Michael was cursing himself, briefly. He said, “If I’d looked, if any of us had looked, we might have seen—but maybe she was already out there. God. I hope she was dead when the car started.”

They waited hopefully for Lieutenant Hooper’s sane, calm arrival. But before that Sergeant Gilfoyle came to the Inn, and extracted from them their account of the accident—“as a matter of routine, of course.” He was expansive. He said that yes, they had talked to Air. Poole earlier that morning. They had discovered three things of possible interest.

Mr. Poole, upon returning to the house by the pond and finding Miss Petersen not at home, had not been worried because he had assumed that she had gone, as had happened several times before, to spend the night with Miss Pauline Trent, on the hill above.

Someone had entered the house by the pond on the afternoon before while both he and Ilse were out. There was a broken ashtray on the floor, its contents spilled, and papers he kept in a desk in the living room were disturbed and his fountain pen was uncapped.

Mr. Poole had received, on Saturday morning, a letter from his agent in New York, announcing that a motion-picture company had bought the rights to
Up with the Eagles,
a novel Mr. Poole had written several years ago.

“For sixty thousand dollars,” Sergeant Gilfoyle said neatly. “A nice letter to get, on a Saturday morning. Ah, well. We can’t all be cowboys. I guess that’ll be all. For now.”

Early
that afternoon Katy called Francesca about her bag.

“Black?” asked Francesca.

“Suede,” Katy said, “a pouch. It might be on the couch, at the end near the windows.”

“Just a sec,” Francesca said, and the phone went down. Katy waited. Nothing important in the purse, really, except her room key and a flat silver compact she was fond of—for the rest, there were only lipstick, comb, cigarettes, eight or nine dollars, stamps, the bill from Saks, nail file and wedding invitation. The last address she could get from Stan Smith, at Paige’s; Stan would have had an invitation too.

“—don’t see it.” Francesca’s voice came back. “Anywhere else you might have left it? I’ll take a look around, anyway…”

“It isn’t world-shaking,” Katy said. “It might be in Jeremy’s car. How’s Cassie?”

“Much better,” said Francesca. “She has a misplaced black eye, of course, but otherwise she’s fine. Want Jeremy’s number?”

“Please,” Katy said, and wrote it down and said, “Are you completely snowed in?”

“Utterly,” said Francesca, sounding pleased. “You should see the driveway. And the windows—the drifts cover them halfway up.” Her voice changed. “Have there been—have you seen any more police?”

“Yes. They’re taking statements—I don’t suppose they’ve been able to get to you,” Katy said.

“Not yet. I suppose Arnold’s heard?”

“Oh, yes. I gathered that he had,” Katy said, and stopped, feeling her way. Not her business to tell Francesca of Arnold Poole’s golden stroke of luck; that should be between them, without outside interference. She said she’d call Jeremy and Francesca said vaguely that she would look around again, and Katy hung up and dialed Jeremy’s number.

Jeremy was home. He said, “Pocketbook? You’ll have to hang on,” and was gone a long time. He came back presently. “Don’t see it. Sure you left it in the car?”

“Not at all sure,” Katy said. “Thanks anyway,” and would have cut the connection if Jeremy hadn’t said briskly, “Seen the police?”

She was perversely dense. “Police? Why should they want to talk to us again, when it was an accident?”

“Of course,” Jeremy agreed. “But they generally like to talk to people. Thorough, our boys in Fenwick. Have they been around?”

Katy admitted that they had. Jeremy said he hadn’t been contacted yet, probably because the snow-ploughs hadn’t been through. “Being a New Yorker, you probably haven’t recognized this for a blizzard. It is, though. Still determined to be the girl he left behind?”