Voice Out of Darkness (5 page)

Francesca’s shop was closed on Thursdays, she found. No point in asking Francesca about the letters over the phone, Katy thought, and then—, Maybe I’d better wait for Michael anyway. She was standing indecisively in front of the shop when someone said loudly, “Little Katy Meredith, for God’s sake!” and she turned to find Arnold Poole grinning down at her.

Arnold Poole was, at the moment, extremely drunk. He stood swaying the merest trifle, hard and wiry and perfectly erect even now. “Little Katy Meredith,” he repeated fondly. “Come back, no less, to the scene of the crime.”

But everybody says that, it’s a bromide, thought Katy after a flashing second of shock. She smiled.

“Have a drink,” said Arnold largely. “I’ve had a drink, but you’re dry as a bone.” His voice dropped confidingly. “I’m supposed to be shopping for lunch. For Ilse. What the hell do you suppose Use wants for lunch, Katy?”

“I don’t know,” Katy said helplessly. “What did she send you for? Soup? Sandwiches?”

Arnold shook his head. He rocked gravely from toes to heels and back again. “It’s gone,” he said sadly. “Gone right out of my head.”

“Come along,” Katy said, laughing, and started for the nearest grocery store. She had always liked Arnold Poole, you couldn’t help it. He was weak and lazy, unstable as a weathercock and far too fond of women, but he had at the same time a kind of nonchalant charm, half apology, half arrogance, to which even disapproving Fenwick bowed. You felt, even though you knew better, that the world had been very harsh in its treatment of Arnold Poole. He had once been a writer, Katy knew vaguely, but that had long since ceased. In the last few years with Francesca, up until shortly before Katy left Fenwick, he had coasted along on an occasional royalty check and now and then a Western for one of the pulp magazines.

She bought soup and cold sliced meat and a loaf of bread, and Arnold said gratefully, “You’re a good girl, Katy. Tell you what, come home and have some lunch with us.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Katy said hastily. “Thanks very much, but I can’t possibly.”

“Must,” said Arnold mulishly, “or I’ll hang around here and have another drink. Two other drinks. Unless,” his dark eyes were suddenly bright and watchful, his mouth misted a little under the rakish mustache, “you don’t feel you can set foot in our house.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Katy sharply and guiltily. She was remembering, unbidden, the square white envelope sandwiched in with the rest in Francesca’s slender ungloved fingers. “I’ll go back with you if you let me drive.”

Arnold stared, hovering between wrath and good humor. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Same old Katy,” he said. “Head on your shoulders. All right—car’s in the parking lot. Home, James.”

Katy didn’t stay long at the house beside the pond. Ilse Petersen made it quite plain that she had not expected and did not welcome a guest for lunch. She was, surprisingly, because Arnold’s taste had always run to the decorative, a physically unattractive woman—almost, Katy thought curiously, repellent. Tall and thick, from ankles to shoulders. Ash-blond hair pulled tightly back to a braided bun. A pale, full-lipped mouth, scorning lipstick, and deep-set gray eyes cold as the Atlantic. There was in her manner more than the expected coolness of one woman toward another woman who had driven Arnold Poole home in a gay and alcoholic condition. It was animosity, and something else besides. (Poor Francesca, thought Katy obscurely. And, less obscurely, Poor Arnold.) Only when Arnold had said, “Katy did the shopping, Ilse, she’s going to have lunch with us,” and Katy had said, “No, really, I have to get back,” did Ilse say, reluctantly. “There’s tea.”

She and Ilse had tea in the shadowed living room; Arnold, obediently, had strong coffee. Once Ilse said reflectively, “Meredith… didn’t you live up there, on the hill?”

Katy nodded. She felt nervous and uncomfortable; the crest of gaiety from Michael’s telephone call had begun to swing downward. She said, more to break the stiff silence than anything else, “This house. Didn’t the Galbraiths—?”

“Mrs. Galbraith was my aunt,” Ilse said softly. “I’ve always lived here, Miss Meredith.”

She rose and walked over to the window and drew back a curtain with strong blunt fingers. Snow fluttered down out of a leaden sky; Katy knew, without looking, that there would be the little pond, pewter-colored in the stormy light, and the pines on the edge of the circling hills. Unwillingly, she followed Ilse to the window.

How small the pond looked. How incredible now that anyone, falling through the ice, could have died as a result. But they had been twelve then, she and Monica, she reflected, and not as tall and not as strong.

“We have a very fine view from here, Miss Meredith,” said Ilse, flatly.

A very fine view… Katy turned her head wonderingly and looked at the expressionless profile. There were the hills, of course, and the standing pines and the sunsets. And the little pond. Katy gave herself an inner shake. Was there always going to be this—this questioning of every casual word?

There had been someone up at the end of the pond that day, the day that Monica had begun to die. Branches had stirred and crackled, and there had been no wind. But, thirteen years ago, Ilse would have been in her twenties, and no one but a child would have hidden and watched and stayed in hiding even when Katy ran screaming from the pond. And yet—what child?

Katy said she must go and that she’d love to walk, it wasn’t even a mile into town. At Arnold’s persistent offers to drive her back, Ilse said coldly, “Arnold, if Miss Meredith wants to walk it’s rude of you to insist.”

So Katy set out along the snowy twisting road, surprised to find that it was only a little after three. She was relieved to get out of the dim, stuffy living room, and away from the chilly hostility of Ilse Petersen. She had caught a glimpse, on her way out, of what looked like a work-room; Ilse had said, “My studio,” and hurried her past. The air felt cold and sweet in her lungs, snow stung her face as she walked into the wind towards town.

She thought, later, that it must have been about a quarter of four when she came to Main Street and Mr. Farrow. Not that the time, then, mattered. Inevitably, the time that mattered was earlier that day, and couldn’t be checked closely enough to count.

“How do, Miss Meredith,” said a voice out of a doorway. Katy stopped. The street was lavender-blue in the early, snowy dusk; lights were winking on in the stores and papers skirled down the emptying streets. Fenwick was going home for the night. She said, “How do you do?” uncertainly, and thought, Who—?

The voice said modestly, “Florist, Miss,” and a man stepped out in front of her and touched his hat, and Katy said, “Oh, Mr. Farrow, how are you?”

Mr. Farrow had been Fenwick’s florist from time immemorial. He had arranged the flowers for Katy’s graduation. She had often, with Aunt Belinda, visited his steamy earth-smelling greenhouses in search of early tulips and lilac cuts and slender starry narcissus.

“Fine,” Mr. Farrow said. “Yourself?”

“Fine, thanks,” said Katy, and would have edged by if Mr. Farrow hadn’t cleared his throat purposefully.

“I took care of that little matter for you,” he said, “only I thought it might wait till tomorrow, being snowy and all.”

“What little matter?” Katy said bewilderedly. “Some flowers, Mr. Farrow?”

“The ones you ordered this morning,” Mr. Farrow said. His voice became suspicious, the voice of a man who saw a disputed bill in the offing. “When you phoned, remember? The flowers, the wreath for Miss Meredith’s—Miss Monica’s—grave.”

Flowers
for Monica, in memoriam. Small, casual, terrible gesture. It was as shocking as a sudden unlooked-for attack in the dark.

Katy stopped shaking by the time she got back to the Inn. She had said to Mr. Farrow, after a first stunned moment of recoil, “But—when did you get the call?” and Mr. Farrow, still peering suspiciously in the half-light, had answered, “ ’S’morning—ten, ten-thirty, quarter of eleven maybe.” His voice grew defensive. “You didn’t give any price, just said a wreath. You must have forgotten, like?”

Katy wasn’t listening. A woman. Francesca? A woman, anyhow. Someone who had said, “This is Katherine Meredith,” so that Mr. Farrow wouldn’t, naturally, have listened for a Fenwick voice, a familiar intonation. But you could give a maid a pair of stockings, or a child a dollar, or a waitress a lavish tip, and say, “This is a surprise—”

“It’s all wired,” Mr. Farrow was saying plaintively. “Carnations, white to very pale pink. Beautiful thing. Uh—twenty dollars.”

Katy woke and said savagely, “Oh, send it, Mr. Farrow, by all means send it,” and opened her pocketbook and fumbled for bills. Mr. Farrow gestured toward his hat again and said confusedly, “Much obliged, I’ll see that it’s there in the morning,” and Katy, conscious of her own thundering heart-beats, was left alone on the snowy street.

A wreath for Monica—I should never have come here, she thought, turning up the hill to the Inn. I should have stayed in New York, and destroyed the letters as they came and maybe that would have killed it, whatever it is. But I can’t, and I won’t, take much more of this.

Her hair was wet with snow; she realized for the first time that her feet were aching with cold. The warmth of the lobby was unexpectedly welcome. Katy was on her way to her room when a door down the hall opened and a whipped-cream curl and a bright gray eye appeared in the crack.

“Out for a walk in all this snow, were you?” said Miss Whiddy genially.

Appalled, Katy thought, she hears every footstep, every sound. She said abruptly, “Yes. Have to dry off, I’m afraid,” and went rapidly along the hall and unlocked the door of her own room. Behind her, gentle and somehow forlorn, she heard a faint click as Miss Whiddy beat a disappointed retreat.

In the tiny bathroom Katy pulled off her icy, sodden boots and took a towel to her drenched hair. By tonight, by tomorrow morning at the latest, Mr. Farrow would, she knew, have assembled in all its detail the incident of the misordered wreath. He would say to some of his older and more favored customers, “Funny she should be so upset, come to think of it, when Miss Monica was practically like her own sister.” And Mr. Farrow being Mr. Farrow, it would not be long before he did come to think of it.

Damn, thought Katy, frowning into the steamy mirror. A kind of focused fury had taken the place of the dim fear. The wreath for Monica’s grave, the bold macabre remembrance, had been a sudden, challenging step forward. There had been a voice, an audible, necessarily feminine voice, instead of the bland un-post-marked white envelopes. “Come and get me, if you dare.” Carnations, crisp and pink-and-white and stingingly spicy, to bloom on the snow over Monica’s grave.

But why, Katy thought, dressing and brushing her hair and tracing a calm red mouth on the remote white face in the mirror—why? Not blackmail, in spite of the money the Merediths had left, because nothing tangible remained of that December day thirteen years ago. Suppose she had pushed Monica, in a childish rage, through the ice and into the black water and subsequent death? (But I didn’t, and that’s what I must remember.) There would still be nothing to prove it, nothing at all. Nothing but Monica’s own voice, coming shockingly out of the wet white face and saying “Katy pushed me.” But only Cassie had heard that. And, perhaps, whoever it was who had been crouched in the screen of pines at the end of the pond and who could so easily have crept closer, within hearing distance of the two panic-stricken children and the still little body at the edge of the ice.

Because Katy was sure, now. As she had been sure, unconsciously, ever since that day at the pond. It hadn’t mattered for thirteen years. It mattered now.

She went downstairs to the lobby. She asked the operator for the Pooles’ number, and waited while the receiver drawled. When Cassie’s voice said crisply, “Hello?” she said, “Hello, Cassie. This is Katy Meredith.”

“Katy! Mother said she’d been talking to you, I called you this afternoon but you weren’t in. How are you, and what in the world—?”

“I’m at the Fenwick Inn,” Katy said. “Could you possibly come over and have a cocktail with me?”

Cassie hesitated. “I’m meeting Jeremy at a quarter of seven. I’d love to, but—”

“It’s not quite six,” Katy said. “Will you, Cassie? I won’t keep you.”

In the end Cassie said reluctantly, “I’ll come straight to the dining room then,” and Katy said “I’ll be waiting,” and hung up and dialed long-distance. Miraculously, Michael was still at his office. When Katy had talked, in a few brief, matter-of-fact, controlled sentences, he said simply, “Good Lord. Where are you, at the Inn?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t, for God’s sake, go running around.”

“I won’t. You might, if you see him, tell your lieutenant friend.”

“I will. Katy?”

“Yes, Michael?”

“The letters. Don’t show them to anyone until I get there tomorrow night. Maybe Saturday morning we could ask the post-office clerk if the writing’s familiar to him. No one’s seen them yet?”

“No.”

“Well, keep them quiet, and stick to the Inn. Katy, promise me you’ll stay home and sit and knit.”

“I will,” said Katy. “Come as early as you can, Michael.” Michael said he would and then the connection was broken and Katy was left, queerly comforted, in the close little booth in the lobby.

In New York, in a restaurant near Forty-third and Madison, Lieutenant Hooper, eyes direct and thoughtful, said, “I don’t like it, Mr. Blythe, I don’t like it a bit. It’s turning ugly. Someone’s getting daring. It’s got to stop, or it’s going to end in a lot more trouble than a few anonymous letters.”

“It’s so nice to see you, Katy,” Cassie said, in the Inn in Fenwick. She had refused a cocktail; she was meeting Jeremy shortly and they’d have drinks and dinner. She wore an incredibly fitted black coat and a scarf of pale smoky furs, but she looked, Katy thought, essentially the same. There was still the air of immaculate serenity, the charming lift of the dark delicate brows. Polished black-brown hair in a dipping ruffle across her forehead and curling away from the white, beautifully articulated cheekbones; odd, soft, three-cornered blue eyes with the faintest blur of shadow beneath them, as though she had been ill.