Voice Out of Darkness (7 page)

He dropped her at the Inn door. Katy, who would have liked very much to rush out of sight and beyond the range of laughter, turned coolly and said, “Thanks very much for the ride. I’d forgotten how pretty Fenwick is in the winter.”

“Glad you could come,” Jeremy said carelessly, and got back into the car and drove away. Katy retreated to the safety of her room and twisted the ring on her finger and thought penitently, Oh, Michael, you’re engaged to a fool. She took off the kerchief and brushed her hair and mapped out an ordinary, reassuring routine: lunch first and maybe a walk downtown, and afterwards a long lazy afternoon and meeting Michael’s train if he called from the station.

But that was the night that went queerly awry almost from the very beginning. That was the night that her room was rifled savagely, and the night that Miss Whiddy went plunging and crashing down the dim, steep stairway into the lobby.

Things
started going wrong from the time Michael missed his train. Katy, bathed and dressed in new subtle lavender-gray wool that made her quite ordinary hazel eyes look warm and apricot-ish, got the telegram at about five-fifteen. It said, “Arriving Fenwick 6:14. Can you meet me? All my love, Michael.”

But Michael wasn’t on the 6:14. Katy roamed the dark windy station platform minutes ahead of time and, when the train pulled in, combed the dismounting passengers for Michael’s tall easy figure, Michael’s buoyant shoulders. Once she took a quick step forward, and a tall man in a trench coat backed uncertainly away and then advanced, with more conviction, on a small plump woman and three jumping, shrieking children.

She went into the waiting room, but Michael wasn’t there; the room was empty except for the ticket agent behind his window. She went out into the windy dark again and got a cab back to the Inn. Michael had missed his train. She had missed trains. Everybody, sooner or later, missed a train; it was as unavoidable as a sudden cold or a visiting aunt. Too bad, though, that it left you feeling so flat and, for no reason at all, rebuffed.

She was back at the Inn at a quarter of seven, and that was when they all began to converge like threads, sometimes tangled, sometimes separate, running delicately back to the heart of a web.

Not, Katy thought, sitting by a window in the lobby, that it was really strange. Friday and Saturday were Fenwick’s nights out, and the Fenwick Inn, through simple lack of competition, was the only place to go. Unless, as Francesca Poole had often pointed out ironically, you wanted to make a night of it at the local diner, and really spread yourself on coffee and sandwiches. Consequently, once or twice a week the Inn scooped up an odd mixture of natives—the Miss Whiddys, the Francescas, the amused and handsome young couples like Cassie Poole and Jeremy Taylor.

First of all, Pauline Trent. Still in thick unyielding tweeds, as solidly shapeless, thought Katy, as though she were tweed all the way through instead of flesh and blood and bone. She nodded and smiled over an inner reluctance and Pauline Trent raised her thick black brows in greeting as she crossed the lobby.

“Well, Katy. Thought I might see you here this evening. Waiting for that odd young man of Miss Poole’s?” Katy, still smiling, shook her head and said she had an odd young man of her own. It crossed her mind that Miss Trent, for a self-pronounced recluse, was singularly well up on local relationships. It crossed her mind too that her drive with Jeremy Taylor, if it had caught Miss Trent’s negligent notice, would be grist for Miss Whiddy’s tireless mill. Damn. You couldn’t take an aspirin, or say hello to the grocer, without its being the topic for the next woman’s club meeting.

“—occurred to me that you might want to spend a little time at the house some afternoon,” Pauline Trent was saying abruptly. “Just call me any time next week, Katy. I’m always home.”

Katy thanked her and said she would, and when Miss Trent had vanished into the dining room, looked restlessly at the clock over the desk. The next train was the 7:10; Michael would certainly have caught that. Should she go out again into the raw windy blackness, or wait here at the Inn for a possible wire or call? The thought presented itself, fleetingly, that he might not come at all tonight, that he might have been delayed by a rush job and it might be tomorrow before she saw him. No, she thought violently. I couldn’t stand it, I’ve got to talk to someone, and looked up as a woman’s voice called, “Katy.” Cassie Poole, with Jeremy a few steps behind her, was crossing the lobby.

Cassie looked lovely; the soft, smoky eyes were bluer than ever over wind-pinked cheeks. Had Katy seen Francesca and Mr. Pickering? She and Jeremy and her mother and the lawyer were all dining together and they’d agreed to meet at seven.

“Mother’s always late,” Cassie said vaguely. “Come have a drink with us, won’t you, Katy?”

Jeremy gazed steadily and politely over Katy’s left shoulder, his face waiting. Katy said crisply that she couldn’t, thanks, she was looking for someone herself, and thought that, flickeringly, Jeremy relaxed. Cassie said, “See you later, then,” and they were gone.

The minutes dragged. Whenever the desk phone rang at the other end of the lobby, Katy braced herself and stared nervously at Mr. Lasky, who began, behind the counter and the potted palm, to twitch a little under the unwavering hazel eyes. She practiced being understanding and philosophical until about twenty minutes after seven, when the Inn door opened to a frosty gust of air and Michael walked in.

He had gotten involved at the office, he said, holding her hand tightly in his own, and hadn’t been able to get a cab. When he had finally arrived at Grand Central the gates had just closed—and what the hell was that guy at the desk staring at, hadn’t he ever seen a man with only one head before? Katy stopped herself on the brink of a giggle and said, “Sshh, that’s our local Billingsley.” Michael, taking her arm firmly, said, “What we both need is a drink. Let’s find a table and then I’ll take my bag up.”

When he had seated her in the solemn little bar and ordered and left, Katy lighted a cigarette and looked around her. There was a sprinkling of obviously out-of-town faces, and there were faces she ought to have remembered but didn’t. Over in a corner, surprisingly, was H. J. Pickering, with the patient, expectant air of a man at a table for two.

He hadn’t seen her. Katy looked away again and thought amusedly, Mr. Pickering—and Francesca? Mr. Pickering was not only a lawyer but a legend; in a town where the natives referred to the first selectman as “old Frank” and the chief of police as “Matty Abbott’s boy,” he remained, respectfully, Mr. Pickering. He was immaculate, from polished gray-white hair to richly glowing shoe-tops. At somewhere between fifty-five and sixty he had the face of a serene and well-fed baby, unless you looked too closely at his eyes, cold and curious and shallowly orange-brown. He had been the Merediths’ lawyer.

Out of the corner of her eye Katy saw Mr. Pickering draw out a pocket watch, glance at it, and replace it. A second later heels clicked in the doorway to the bar and Francesca, in ash-green gabardine and furs, was threading her way through the tables. She didn’t see Katy. Probably she didn’t, Katy thought, see anything very clearly. Her face was blind and concentrated, and so white that the bones seemed almost about to thrust through the delicate skin.

Michael arrived as Katy was wondering if she would ever be able to look at any of them normally again. Without painting evasive shadows under Cassie Poole’s eyes, and an odd unseeing whiteness on Francesca’s face. Without finding too much intentness in Jeremy Taylor, and a sort of chilly threat in Ilse Petersen, and quick, sharp perception beneath Arnold Poole’s alcoholic blur, and surveillance from Pauline Trent’s dark eyes—Pauline Trent, who was Uncle John’s cousin and who lived in the house that was still stamped indelibly with Monica’s death.

But they can’t all be writing me letters, Katy thought practically, and managed a dazzling smile for Michael and lifted her drink.

Michael wanted to know everything that had happened since she had stepped off the train at Fenwick. Whom she had met, what had been said, what, if anything, had been the reaction among the people concerned to her coming back to Fenwick.

Katy talked. Guardedly, because there was that feeling of being surrounded. At the end she said, “That’s the defeating part of it, Michael, except for the flowers and that letter Francesca was carrying, that looked like the ones I got, there’s been nothing at all that couldn’t be my imagination. You start—seeing things.”

“The letter,” Michael said slowly. “Francesca Poole could have been mailing it, or she could have just received it. Or she could have been mailing it for someone else.”

Katy nodded. “That’s just it. And I can’t believe that anyone who’s been so terribly careful up to now would flip it right under my nose like that.”

“Might have been a mistake,” Michael said, unexpectedly savage. “Someone’ll slip up, you know, sooner or later. She couldn’t have known she’d meet you on the street like that.”

They were silent. Michael ordered another drink. “The flowers, Katy. Think there’s any use going after Farrow?”

Katy shook her head. “I’m sure he doesn’t know. After all, why shouldn’t it have been I who called him? But you said the post-office clerk—someone there might recognize the writing. I know Bill Allen, he’s been postmaster for years. We might ask him tomorrow.”

“We will,” Michael said. He lifted his head and stopped frowning and smiled. “Do you know it’s three full days since I’ve seen you, Katy?”

Katy smiled back. She said, “Heavens, three
full
days?” and Michael, not smiling any more, said abruptly, “Katy, I wasn’t going to ask you anything, remember? Because you’re in the middle of this thing and you’re frightened and confused and can’t really give the whole of your mind to anything else.” He stopped, his eyes quiet and exploring on hers.

Katy, just as she had been in the apartment when Michael had given her the ring, was acutely conscious of shapes and colors and sounds around her, because she knew that this was the kind of moment that turned out later to be indelible. Deliberately, she shut out the spurting laughter and the passing waiters and the hum of voices and said, “You can ask me, Michael.”

Michael didn’t say anything. Very gently, his face grave, he lifted her right hand and slid the ring off and replaced it on the third finger of her left hand. There was a tiny, throbbing silence. Katy was horrified to find her throat tight and aching. She was aware of Michael’s warm fingers on her hand and Michael’s voice, low, saying, “It’s very much the wrong time for this, I know. But Katy—look at me—I couldn’t wait. I can’t stand being away from you and not knowing.”

Katy found her voice. She said simply, “I’m glad to know, too, darling,” and caught Michael’s hand in her own. All the things that they hadn’t said before came spilling out, then. Plans, dates, questions. Michael said, “When you come back to New York?” and Katy answered fiercely, “Yes. Whether I’ve found out about all this or not.” Who to ask? “I haven’t a soul,” Katy said, momentarily wistful. “A few friends, maybe, if I stretch a point.”

“And now,” said Michael wryly over coffee, “we come to the subject of my renouncing your wealth.”

“Don’t be silly,” Katy said. “Why do we talk about that, when there’s so much else? ”

“Because other people talk about it, and it’s nice to have it straight,” Michael said. “However, you’re a most uncomplicated heiress. You’ve managed to keep it in the background so far and get along quite adequately on your own salary. I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to get along on mine although it won’t”—he grinned—“keep us in nightingales’ tongues.”

“Idiot,” said Katy. “I’m Yankee-bred, what more could you ask?”

“We could,” said Michael, rising and putting an overlay of lightness on the deeper thing that had sprung up between them, “step outside for a moment.”

They didn’t stay long on the icy, shadowed porch. The night was dizzy with silver—stars and sequined snow and shafted moonlight, woven through the winter black. Katy kissed Michael back, and felt for a fractional time safe and sure and utterly content. And knew, even before she stepped out of his arms, that things were not right.

She was tired, of course, that was part of it—and you couldn’t, unfortunately, divide your emotions into two distinct and tidy halves: Michael and happiness on one side and, on the other, the ugly, idle game that someone was playing with her. Michael, looking down at her, said gently, “I’m a damned fool, Katy, rushing you like this. You’ve got enough on your mind as it is. Come on in and have something warm, you’re shivering.”

Katy hesitated. There would be people and noise and probably introductions to come; she wanted, instead, silence and sleep. She said, “One drink, then. I’ll go and do something about my lipstick—shall I meet you in the bar?”

The ladies’ room was up the stairs from the lobby and to the left. To the right were linen and mop closets and beyond those bedrooms, among them Miss Whiddy’s, halfway along the hall, and Katy’s near the end. Katy opened the door of the ladies’ room, and after a startled split-second began a soundless retreat. Not in time. Cassie Poole stopped crying and lifted wet lashes and said, “Oh, don’t bother, Katy, I’m all through anyway.”

She drew a long shaking breath. Katy closed the door carefully behind her and sat down on one of the two faded chintz seats in front of the mirror. She pretended an absorbed search for her lipstick while Cassie began methodically to powder away the tears. She said lightly, re-capping her lipstick, “Anything I can do, Cassie?”

Their eyes met in the mirror—clear hazel, blurred blue. Something searching and thoughtful came into Cassie’s gaze. She slid, almost perceptibly, back into her cool and charming shell. She let a tiny waiting silence go by before she said, deliberately, “No.” The flat negative came out like a careless slap. She added quickly, “It’s nothing anyway—hangover from the flu, maybe. Sulfa always makes me sorry for myself.” She gave a final flick of the powder puff, re-did her mouth, and stood up. “Why don’t you and—it’s Michael Blythe, isn’t it—join us for a drink? We’re in the bar.”