Voice Out of Darkness (4 page)

“I’ll call you,” Michael said. “I might get up for the week-end if I get that thing for Halliwell’s in on time.”

They were in the hall, putting off the moment when the elevator doors would close behind him. “Be careful,” Michael said abruptly, looking down at her. “I don’t like this return of the native, and I never did. I don’t think you know what you’re walking into, Katy.”

Katy stared. She felt, unreasonably, chilled and a little hurt, as though someone had deliberately snatched away the warm cloak of happiness and left her exposed and alone. She said slowly, “I don’t—what do you mean, Michael?”

“Just be careful, that’s all,” Michael said quickly and firmly, and kissed her, not quickly, and was gone.

Fenwick, Connecticut,
had its replicas all over the New England coast. It lay sheltered in a tumble of windy hills, its architecture a blend of pure old Colonial and the raw new bones of housing developments. Its chief prosperity came from the summer visitors who came to splash and play in its wide blue crescent of Sound and laugh delightedly at its ancient movie-house. Its chief crop was gossip, sown and grown with zest and impartiality. They said Mrs. Powers ought to be ashamed of herself, running around with a boy not even half her age; they would wave jovially at Mrs. Powers and cross the street to say wasn’t it a shame that Mrs. Santini’s new baby had been born with a cast in one eye. They said, all summer, “Hot enough for you?” and all winter, sagely, “Looks like snow.” Between December and March it was a shuttered, silent town. The natives closed themselves into their houses and looked in the almanacs for blizzards and laid in provisions along with next spring’s gossip. Outside the town, shivering in the wind, were great sweeps of field pocketed with dark muttering marshes, and the wooded hills in the distance.

The taxi driver thought it looked like snow. So did Mr. Lasky at the Inn, searching absently for the register and a missing pen. Katy hadn’t thought so but she said, “Yes, doesn’t it?” and joined Mr. Lasky in his hunt for the pen. She was, after all, a New Yorker now, and out-of-towners were not presumed to know tricky, peculiar Fenwick weather.

“Let’s see,” said Mr. Lasky, retrieving the pen from the roots of a potted fern on the desk. “How long’ll that be for, Miss Meredith?”

Katy said two weeks, she thought, and Mr. Lasky looked up. “Vacation, then, I guess?” he hinted. Katy, startled, nodded and said “Yes” as she turned toward the shadowy staircase. People would ask, of course; you didn’t come back, after nearly six years, to collect a book you’d forgotten. People would ask, and someone would be quietly, secretly amused, and know better.

That was on Wednesday. By late Friday afternoon Katy had met again, partly by chance, partly by arrangement, the small handful of people who were to be touched by the spreading and curiously vivid stain of a child’s death thirteen years ago.

“Katy. How nice. Have you lost your mind and come to stay?” It was Francesca Poole, in front of the post office, head tilted to one side, hands thrust childishly deep into the pockets of her coat.

“Vacation, sort of, between jobs,” Katy told her, and marveled that Cassie’s mother should have stayed so young and restless and elfishly attractive.

Francesca sighed. “Well, of course,
I
think you’re mad to spend it in Fenwick.” Mocking thrust, or not? Francesca drew letters from her pocket, flicked absently through them. She didn’t look up at Katy’s tiny sharp indrawn breath. “Damn, I’ve left my gloves inside. Are you off somewhere, or can you wait a minute and come back with me to the shop? I took over from Jenny Vickers, you know—knitting and a rental library. I’ll only be a second.”

Katy waited on the windy street, staring at the sidewalk and seeing instead the letters flipping through Francesca’s fingers. She had had an impression, blurred and flashing, of a firm black slant on a squarish white envelope. Had the handwriting been familiar? She couldn’t tell, it had spun by too rapidly. And Francesca’s other hand had covered the corner where a fresh stamp or a postmark would be.

The little shop was lighted and fragrant with heat. Francesca closed the door on the cold gray afternoon and took off her coat and hat while Katy looked around her. Along one wall were shelves piled with brilliant wools; books, brightly jacketed, angled around the other two walls. There was a desk, a sofa, a hat-rack, a wool-winder.

“I do fairly well,” Francesca said in answer to Katy’s question. She smiled unembarrassedly. “Anything is fairly well, of course, after you’ve had nothing.” She moved idly around the shop, lighting a cigarette and putting it down in an ashtray on the desk, straightening wools, rearranging books in the tiny display window. She wasn’t beautiful by any means but she had, Katy thought, an artist’s kind of beauty, an odd lovely grace in everything she did, in the casual routine motions that other people made jerky or nervous or awkward.

She was too thin, of course, and the short hair that feathered crisply away from her face was graying. But sitting at the desk in the corner, looking at Katy out of smoky blue eyes, she was uncannily like Cassie.

Did you, thought Katy, write me three short letters and stand with them outside my door?

“Where are you living, Katy?” Very off-hand, with just the right amount of interest. The kind of question you’d naturally ask. The kind of question that might give you a pleased, triumphant little feeling if it had been your hand that had written “Miss Katherine Meredith, Apt. 4A.” Katy looked swiftly at Francesca; Francesca put out her cigarette and looked blandly back at Katy.

They talked… Cassie? Cassie was fine; had Katy known she was engaged to Jeremy Taylor? Jeremy would probably be the next town prosecutor, which was rather ironic in view of the fact that Fenwick had said, darkly, that he would come to no good. They must all have dinner together at the Pooles’ some night next week. More town gossip about people Katy had known or vaguely remembered; her mind, wandering, ’went to the letters which were still, presumably, in the pocket of Francesca’s coat or in the flat black antelope bag. Had the square white envelope been addressed to Mrs. Arnold Poole, or had Francesca dropped it briskly down the “Outgoing” chute in the post office? Her attention came back with a jump.

“—it’s quite all right to ask about Arnold, you know, Katy.” Francesca had put on a little smile, steady and utterly without expression. “He’s still being constant to his great Dane, Ilse Petersen, the local sculptress. Do you know her? Very cozy. Just you and me and the chisel.”

She was still smiling, and her voice was light. Katy looked away from the pain in her eyes. “I thought,” said Francesca pleasantly, “that I’d save Fenwick the trouble of telling you. They’re living—they and the statuary—almost across from your old place. That little house by the pond.”

Katy said “Oh,” and let her voice trail off and stood up. Francesca said, laughing, “Heavens, I’ve embarrassed you.” Her eyes were blue and cool again. “I’ll call you some time over the week-end about dinner, shall I? Welcome back, by the way. And do have a nice vacation.”

Alice Whiddy, at the Inn. Pink and good-humored, with whipped-cream hair and an unshakable reputation, ever since Katy could remember, for the keenest eyes and the sharpest ears and the busiest tongue in Fenwick.

“I said to myself,” reported Miss Whiddy faithfully, “if that isn’t Katherine Meredith it’s her double. I didn’t get a chance to speak to you when you came in but sure enough, there it was in the register. How do you like the old town? Changed much, do you think?”

She paused for breath, sniffed, and eyed Katy alertly. Katy opened her mouth. “I suppose you heard,” said Miss Whiddy, refueled, “about poor Fred passing on.” Sorrow dropped magically over her face, lingered tactfully, and vanished. Poor Fred, Katy remembered, had been Miss Whiddy’s brother and a clerk in the town hall. She had a fleeting and uncharitable suspicion that Miss Whiddy regretted him largely as a rich deposit of local gossip.

It occurred to Katy suddenly that Miss Whiddy, with her boundless knowledge of what went on in Fenwick, might be very valuable indeed.

“—the librarian, you remember, was asking me what you were doing back in Fenwick. I told her,” said Miss Whiddy conspiratorially, stopping just short of a wink, “that you were on vacation.” She waited invitingly.

“Thank you,” Katy said gravely, and managed to keep her mouth still.

Miss Whiddy drew back, disappointed but game. “You know how it is. Fenwick,” she said imperturbably, “is a terrible place for gossip.”

Surprisingly, that night there was Jeremy Taylor. He was sitting alone at a table against the wall in the Inn dining room, staring into a drink. Katy, through dinner and on her way back up to her room, hesitated and stopped. “Hello, Jeremy,” she said. “Remember me?”

“Katy!” Jeremy stood, glass in hand, looking astonished; he was the only one, Katy thought parenthetically, who had shown more than the most casual surprise at seeing her. Which meant exactly nothing at all.

“Of course I remember,” Jeremy was saying. “We even went to the movies together once.”

“And held hands.”

“It was something about Devil’s Island, only the projector broke down.”

“I nearly went into a decline over you,” Katy said, laughing, “and now I hear I’ve lost you to Cassie Poole.”

“Oh—yes. She’s a wonderful girl. I’m very lucky,” Jeremy said abruptly. It was, Katy thought, as though he were repeating phrases in a foreign language, and knew the sounds but not the meaning. “Cassie’s—home in bed, she said she was tired. You’ll have a drink with me, won’t you?”

Katy shook her head. Jeremy, looking behind her, said rapidly, “A cigarette, then—sit down, anyway, I see that Whiddy woman approaching. She’ll have it all over town that Cassie’s home nursing a black eye.”

Katy sat down. Michael’s ring twinkled frostily against the white cloth. Jeremy’s greenish eyes went to it and then to her face. He said pleasantly, “Wrong hand. Or shouldn’t I notice it?” The interrupted eyebrow with the narrow scar cutting through it gave him a faintly mocking look.

“Right ring, though,” Katy said calmly, and began to talk quickly to forestall any more questions. Michael had said no explanations; hadn’t even, in so many words, asked her to marry him. And yet he had wanted her to wear his ring when she came back here to Fenwick. It was, Katy decided with a tiny spurt of irritation, unreasonable. He might call tonight. Against her will she began to wait for a summons to the telephone in a corner of the lobby. It didn’t come.

“You’re not listening,” Jeremy remarked. He was looking at her much too intently, the light from the table lamp slanting upward to gild his fair hair. “It’s plain to see I’m not first any more.”

Katy smiled stiffly and stood up. “But if it were me,” Jeremy said coolly, rising, “I wouldn’t let you run around with my ring misplaced like that.”

Katy was furious to feel her face growing hot. She picked up her gloves and said, “It’s nice of you to worry, Jeremy. Give my love to Cassie, will you?” and left the dining room and went upstairs. Although it was only a little after nine o’clock she undressed, managed a bath in the undersized tub and went to bed, tired and confused and angry—at herself, at Jeremy Taylor, at Michael, who hadn’t called.

The envelopes in her bag were much the same shape as the one that had leaped at her as it flicked past in Francesca Poole’s fingers. The writing was, or seemed, alike. Was Francesca receiving similar letters? Or was she forwarding another one of the letters Katy had received by hand to an unknown person? Ask Francesca boldly and watch her expression, she thought, and then remembered Lieutenant Hooper. Be circumspect, Miss Meredith.

There was Jeremy Taylor. Jeremy had been in New York the day before yesterday. He could have delivered a letter for his future mother-in-law. Of all the people she had met that day, only Jeremy had showed astonishment at her being back in Fenwick. Only Jeremy hadn’t asked her what she was doing there.

Michael called the next morning. Katy was drinking hot coffee in the deserted dining room when Mr. Lasky came over to her table to say, reverently, that long-distance was on the wire. Katy almost flew to the booth in the corner of the lobby; she knew, and didn’t even care, that Mr. Lasky was hovering nearby, pretending loving solicitude over a very large, very ugly plant that was dying from sheer inattention.

Michael said, “Are you—is everything all right?” His voice sounded faraway and anxious.

Katy said, “Yes, Michael.”

“I was working late last night,” Michael said, “at home on the Halliwell thing. When I got out to a booth it was too late to call you. You’re sure you’re all right.”

“Yes,” Katy said.

“I don’t suppose—” Michael’s voice thinned and faded and came back, “—can talk. All right if I come up tomorrow night? ”

“Oh, yes,” said Katy. “What train?”

“Whatever I can catch. I’ll come straight to the Inn. We’ll have dinner. I love you.”

“I can’t hear you,” Katy said contentedly. “What was that, at the end?”

“I love you. Katy?”

“Yes?”

“Just wanted to make sure you heard me,” said Michael. “I’ll see you tomorrow night. Good-by, darling.”

Distantly, the receiver went down. Katy opened the door of the booth and smiled benignly at Mr. Lasky.

“Wasn’t your office, I hope?” said Mr. Lasky, poking violently at the roots of the plant. “Oh, dear, no,” Katy said, and went placidly back to her coffee. Everything seemed at once very sunny and simple. She would approach Francesca about the letters and if Francesca said in honest astonishment, “What letters?” she would look to Jeremy Taylor—who, as Cassie’s fiancé, might easily know everything there was to know about Monica and what had happened at the little pond. And soon, quite soon, she would put Michael’s ring on the proper finger, and the doubt and dread and hidden malignancy would be forgotten and gone forever.

That was at a quarter of ten on Thursday.

It began to snow at shortly after noon. The Fenwick Inn was on a rise just behind the center of town; Katy walked down its curving dirt driveway, past firs and the Inn parking lot and the back of the post office, and out a short side street into the town.