Voice Out of Darkness (23 page)

Katy picked up her drink and put it down again untasted. She said through stiff lips, “They’d met again as adults, Michael and Cassie, long before I introduced them.”

“Oh, yes,” said Lieutenant Hooper. “They’d met again some time before—Miss Poole says it was at a cocktail party in New York—and they were… attracted. Michael Blythe happened to ask one day what had become of the little girl who had had the skating accident. When Cassie Poole told him she had died and that the Merediths themselves had died, leaving everything to young Katy, he began to make his plans. How did you happen to meet him, Miss Meredith?”

Katy smiled, and Jeremy, watching her, looked sharply away from the frightening curve of her mouth.

“At a cocktail party,” Katy said. “We went to dinner afterwards. We went to dinner a lot. We—I fell in love with him all of a sudden, right in the middle of a copy meeting at work. It was very distracting.”

“No doubt,” Jeremy said violently, and Katy looked at him with her eyebrows up, and went on, “I didn’t start noticing anything wrong until we were up there in Fenwick. And when I did I thought it was because of Michael’s brother Gerald…”

“Yes,” said Lieutenant Hooper. “Gerald Blythe did exactly what Michael said he did—embezzled from his father’s firm. It was Gerald Blythe who told me, when I got in touch with him through the Florida police, that his young brother had gone up to Fenwick with him once or twice over a dozen years ago.”

“Wasn’t Michael afraid he’d be recognized in Fenwick, and that someone would give him away before Katy?” Jeremy asked, frowning.

Hooper shrugged. “Thirteen years is a long time. As it was, there were only two people who did recognize him. Arnold Poole, and Ilse Petersen, who was at the window of her house by the pond on the afternoon of the skating incident, and who saw Michael Blythe hidden behind the trees, watching—but let’s go back for a moment.

“Michael Blythe wrote those letters to Miss Meredith with two ends in mind: first, to frighten her into turning to him more quickly; second, to provide a motive for her subsequent ‘suicide.’ He came to me,” added Hooper with a deprecating air, “in order to make it airtight. Because, if any question had risen over his new wife’s death, he could always point to me as a witness of how distraught she had been. I was to serve as a convincing blind: why, on the face of it, would a would-be murderer insist on calling in the police in advance?” Yes, thought Katy, looking at the rain-wet windows, Michael had been very sure of himself. He had had every right to be. She had sat here, the night before she went up to Fenwick, and buried her face against his shoulder, and all the time Michael’s mind had been clicking cunningly, as he got ready to—She shivered; the shell of numbness was thinning.

“But,” said Lieutenant Hooper with a wary eye on her whitened face, “I startled him a little, I’m afraid, when I suggested showing the letters to a handwriting expert at headquarters. I told him that there were telltale quirks in the most carefully disguised handwriting. Mr. Blythe didn’t care for that idea at all, because there was Miss Meredith fifty miles away with the letters in her suitcase. So, at the earliest opportunity, he followed her.”

“He missed his train that first night,” said Katy suddenly, and Hooper shook his head. “No. He caught his train—and got off at Norwalk, the station below. A cab driver there remembers taking a man to the Fenwick Inn by the shortest route on that Friday night. Mr. Blythe got to the Inn while you were at the station, Miss Meredith. He entered by the side door and removed the letters from your room.”

Katy said slowly, “And Miss Whiddy saw him…” Lieutenant Hooper nodded. “It was unfortunate for Miss Whiddy that she was so very interested in the comings and goings in the hall. She would undoubtedly have mentioned Mr. Blythe’s surreptitious visit to you later, so—she had to be quieted, for good. She got a few hours’ reprieve,” Hooper’s voice was grim, “by going out to a woman’s club meeting. But later on—”

“Michael pushed her down the stairs,” said Katy, hardly above a whisper.

The lieutenant nodded again. “To return to Miss Petersen…” He looked at the ceiling in gentle disapproval. “Miss Petersen was not a very lofty character. She had no income of her own, and you can hardly offer the butcher a half-completed study of Prometheus in return for a pound of roundsteak. There was Mr. Poole, but up to that point his finances were as shaky as her own. She had been extracting modest regular payments from Miss Pauline Trent, who, by the way, Miss Meredith, had appropriated and sold some bonds be-longing to the estate, and who was afraid, right up to the very last, that you would discover it. Miss Petersen had also received a little money from Cassie Poole—who was trying to get her to leave Fenwick. Which brings us to her death.

“On that Saturday night she had an appointment to see Cassie at the Poole house. Mrs. Poole usually stayed late at her shop on Saturdays, tidying up the week’s affairs. When Cassie discovered that her mother was having a dinner party that night she tried to get in touch with Miss Petersen. She went to the Petersen house, but Ilse was out. She started to leave a note, and saw the letter from her father’s agent, and the details of the sale of his book to the movies. Something frightened her off—probably her father returning. He had told her more than once, fairly impolitely, I gather, to leave his private life alone.”

“And she left in a hurry,” Katy said, “because there was the pen, and an ashtray on the floor, and she forgot one of her green gloves. And then Ilse came to the Pooles’ that night—”

“—and had a very business-like chat with Cassie,” finished Hooper. “She knew about the forthcoming sixty thousand dollars, and she announced to Cassie that there would be no further discussion about her leaving Fenwick, then or ever. In other words, she warned Cassie to keep off—and she pointed out that Cassie’s friend, Miss Meredith, might be interested in knowing that she, Cassie, had renewed an old acquaintance with Miss Meredith’s fiancé. Furthermore, she told Cassie then that she had been looking out at the pond on the day little Monica Meredith went through the ice.”

Of course, thought Katy, stirring. Ilse had been at the Inn on the night before she died, and had seen Michael and Cassie together at some point during the evening. And Francesca had encountered Ilse, and come into the bar with that unseeing whiteness…

Lieutenant Hooper sighed. He looked more than ever like a faintly ruffled commuter. He said, “So, again, Michael Blythe had been recognized. Miss Petersen refused to leave the house. She suspected that Arnold Poole might be going to visit his wife, and she wasn’t going to let sixty thousand dollars slide through her fingers without a battle. She decided to wait it out in the cellar.”

The cellar, with its little window commanding a view of the path to the gate… Lieutenant Hooper was sliding delicately over what had taken place there, but Katy’s mind, bruised and raw and slowly stripped of its protective covering, built up the terrible images as he talked. Michael, warned by Cassie of Use’s knowledge and presence, going down to the cellar for ashes. Selecting, fastidiously, a new and unused shovel, and stalking quietly through dimness and shadowed corners until he found his victim. Bringing the shovel down with all his force on the silk-kerchiefed head, and then bundling the body into a hemp sack. Tossing it to one side, probably, until he had made one or two trips with a sack of ashes. And, under cover of the darkness and the confusion and the whirling, blinding snow, half-dragging and half-carrying that other sack to its place of deposit under the wheels of Harvey Pickering’s Buick.

It was such a heavy car. “Was she dead?” asked Katy carefully.

Lieutenant Hooper glanced at Jeremy and back again at Katy. “Yes,” he said.

“It was Cassie who called Mr. Farrow about the wreath.” She made it a statement, but there was still that flicker of shock whenever she thought of Cassie’s cool, secret maneuvering.

“Yes. And got the dipping, the Merediths’ card of thanks, from the library for Michael to slide under your door. It was Michael, of course, who struck the superintendent of his apartment building in New York and staged a theft in his own apartment. He had to destroy the sketches, because sooner or later you would have realized what one of them meant. He’d given himself away with a sketch pad and a stick of charcoal, because he couldn’t possibly have known just what the little pond looked like unless he’d been there.”

“I almost knew, that day,” Katy said, staring at the windows. “There was the stone bridge, and the frozen waterfall, and the butternut tree on the other side of the road. I suppose it was because I’d never stood on exactly that spot before, had never seen them from that angle…”

Hooper nodded. “Michael knew it had been dangerous carelessness to let you see that particular sketch in the first place, not to have destroyed it earlier.”

“Yes.” Katy thought of the moment when she had begun to realize the significance of the charcoal sketch, the way her eyes had widened, the way Michael had looked at her, had moved toward her—the way the closet door had come soundlessly open on Jeremy Taylor’s tight face and poised body.

She spoke directly to Jeremy for the first time. “You bribed the waiter—the one I left outside my room. And had someone call me on the phone…”

“Yes. The bell-boy,” Jeremy said, and threw an apologetic glance at Hooper. “I hadn’t a very good idea of what was going on, but I could tell from the way the lieutenant handed you your bag at the table that it was important. And—I didn’t like the idea of your being up there alone.”

Katy’s clear hazel eyes flicked to his face, dropped again to her hands. “Well—thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Jeremy said gravely.

Hooper looked demurely at what was left of his drink. He didn’t say that he had been outside the door, that his hand had been on the knob when Jeremy leaped. He told them that Michael had managed to waylay the man Chief Abbott had lent him; had, in the confused darkness of the hall, knocked him unconscious and put him neatly back in the mop closet where he had been stationed.

He said, “Michael Blythe had no way of knowing, Miss Meredith, just when we found the bag you dropped on the night Miss Petersen died, wasn’t aware that we had a photostatic copy of the letter. It was essential to his plan to get the letter back. He would have taken it after he—”

Katy sat up very straight, “—sent me through the window down onto the rocks,” she said simply.

Lieutenant Hooper shrugged. He let a moment of silence go by before he said, “You had to be silenced right away. It had ceased to be a matter of gain any longer. It had become a question of his life or yours.”

Michael’s life. Try not to remember Michael’s arms around her, Michael’s voice saying, “I love you,” Michael’s quick, skilled fingers that could bring an illusion of color to stark blacks and grays and whites. Keep in mind, instead, the single bruise at the base of her throat. She had stood beside him, felt the steadying pressure of his hands, while he looked down at the two women he had killed. And she hadn’t known.

She said curiously, “He seemed so—worried about my safety. It’s incredible to think—”

“He was worried,” Lieutenant Hooper said gently. “Not about your physical safety. His fear came from quite another source—he didn’t want you to have any doubts or any misgivings about marrying him, because that might have raised questions later on. I think it was that that made me start thinking about him in the first place.”

“What?” Katy asked.

“The fact that no attempt was ever made to harm you physically. You were never at any time in actual danger. Mr. Blythe left remarkably few tracks behind him,” said Lieutenant Hooper reproachfully, “but there was that anomaly: someone supposedly hated and loathed you, and at the same time wouldn’t harm a hair of your head. Blackmail was out, for obvious reasons. That left a campaign of nerves. Psychological violence. And,” added Hooper, thudding back to practicality, “it was shortly after I talked to Mr. Blythe about handwriting experts that the letters disappeared. He must have been quite shocked when he discovered that the third was a wedding invitation inserted into the envelope by mistake.”

“He asked me to search my room thoroughly,” murmured Katy, almost to herself.

“—in hopes that you’d discover the other letter and return it to him. Instead, you put it into the handbag which you later dropped on Mrs. Poole’s front lawn in the snow. Michael Blythe, who left the train again at Norwalk when you saw him off at the station on Sunday night, was searching for it when Mrs. Poole interrupted him and he struck her down.”

And Cassie, of course, had seen to it that the police weren’t called.

“Mr. and Mrs. Poole, I imagine,” said Lieutenant Hooper mildly, “have lost no time in re-establishing their home, now that Mr. Poole no longer has to avoid his wife in order to keep from giving her a motive for Ilse Petersen’s death.”

He would soon be looking surreptitiously around for his muffler, Katy knew. She said, “Arnold sent Francesca carnations, that day at the shop. I thought—”

“Mr. Farrow had a whole shopful of carnations,” said Hooper firmly, “and he was peddling them to all and sundry. He did very well, really. A wreath for Monica’s grave. A wreath for Miss Whiddy’s grave. A peace offering from Mr. Poole to his wife…” He stood up.

It was still raining. Katy uncurled herself from the couch and rose, and found that the aching tightness had gone. And that, she thought, was due to Lieutenant Hooper, giant among men, who looked like a wren to his fellow-commuters. She said gravely, “Your muffler, Lieutenant, and of course I can’t begin to tell you…”

“Thank you,” said Lieutenant Hooper, and blushed for the first time since Mrs. Hooper had proposed. “I’m only sorry that—oh, well. Now, I think I had an umbrella?”

Jeremy had his coat on when Katy came back to the living room. He was standing at one of the windows, white organdy frills ridiculously close to his fair head, looking down into the wet black street. Katy said politely, “Won’t you have a drink before you go?”

“No, thanks,” Jeremy said, and reached for his hat. “It was very nice of you to come down with me,” Katy said. “It would have been frightful alone. And—you really need to have your own hand held.”