Voice Out of Darkness Read Free

the other end of the pond, a branch stirring, or a twig breaking. I heard it more than once. It could have been the wind, of course. But it was so still that day.”
     
    After Michael had gone—had thrown away her untasted drink and insisted on making her a fresh one, had asked more questions, had folded the letters into his pocket and said abruptly that he’d call her in the morning, had kissed her so gently and quickly that she wasn’t really aware of it until the door had closed behind him—Katy went determinedly to bed.
    Washing coffee cups and glasses and turning off lights, she tried to analyze the feeling that had been growing and strengthening ever since October, when the first of the letters had come. It wasn’t remorse, because she didn’t feel, had never felt guilty. She had tried to get Monica to go home, and Monica wouldn’t. She had reached out forcibly for Monica’s arm, and Monica had deliberately evaded her hand.
    It wasn’t grief, because there had never been that, either, not even when she had first come out of the hospital and they had told her carefully that Monica had been buried a week ago. There had just been shock and dimly-understood horror and the somehow mystifying absence of Monica from the table, from their bedroom, from the oak-shaded hill and the field full of tawny waving grass where they had played and quarreled and grown up together.
    It was, Katy supposed detachedly, the gentle beginning of fear.
    Because someone who had no right to know knew what Monica had said, and was twisting a child’s accusation into a brutal, repeated thrust.
    Because it was no random malice that, having conceived and written the letters, went to the trouble of delivering them to her door—cautiously undated, un-post-marked. Not once, but three times. Someone, too, who knew not only her address but her apartment number.
    Because if there was a purpose, it was blind and warped and could only be, Katy thought wryly, to produce exactly the state of mind which it was producing. First stage, distaste. Second stage, anger. Third stage, might as well admit it, fear. After that—what? And where was the satisfaction, if you couldn’t be on hand to watch your victim squirm?
    The warm little apartment seemed suddenly very empty and isolated and full of odd noises. Nonsense, thought Katy, and went on listening. The clock. Had it always been that loud? The windows—but then the weather-stripping was venerable. A dripping; she’d turned that faucet off. And this, she said to herself with grim amusement, is precisely what you are supposed to be feeling, my girl. Better look in your closet, and under your bed.
    She did.
    After that she took an aspirin, switched off the lights and got instantly into bed. Michael had the letters, they were gone from the bookcase. It was as comforting as though someone had removed the dead rat in its trap that had kept you out of the kitchen. Michael would call her in the morning and be very sane and constructive. Feeling protected, Katy went to sleep.
    She woke to the last faint echo of a church bell, with the impression that it had just struck four. It had stopped snowing but the night was almost white with it, the hushed snowlight spreading up from the streets and roofs. Slushy in the morning, Katy thought drowsily, and sat up, shivering, to pull up her comforter.
    Cassie Poole and Jeremy Taylor were in New York today. So were a few thousand other out-of-towners.
    But not all from Fenwick, Connecticut.
    The comforter was delightfully warm. Katy rolled herself into a complicated cocoon and tucked the pillow under her cheek. Sharp and clear and positive as though it were the result of hours of indecision, she thought, I’ll go back to Fenwick, it’s someone there, and slept and didn’t awake until morning.
     
    Paige’s, the fledgling Macy’s sired by an austere old Fifth Avenue corporation, towered sixteen stories high on Sixth Avenue. Advertising was on the fourteenth; Katy