Voice Out of Darkness by Ursula Curtiss Read Free Book Online

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