Free Voice Out of Darkness by Ursula Curtiss

boldly her skin and eyes and odd lithe grace stated that she could never feel a day older than thirty-five.
    The atmosphere was normal, friendly, gay. Once Katy caught a glimpse of Arnold Poole, glass in hand, talking to a group of people in the doorway of the bar; she wondered if Francesca had seen him, and then thought, how silly, this has been going on for five years. But something had happened, earlier, to strip the charming play of expression from Francesca’s face and leave it white and shaken. Something else, then, because the situation had obviously ceased to be a social crisis. Mr. Pickering, making stately progress through a scotch and soda, nodded affably toward someone in the group with Arnold, and Arnold intercepted the nod and grinned back in careless recognition.
    A few minutes after that, Katy threw Michael an apologetic glance and rose. She was tired, she was going upstairs, she’d see them all again soon. Michael went with her into the dim and deserted lobby and kissed her gently. “Have a good sleep. And don’t worry, darling.”
    Katy said she would and she wouldn’t, and went on up the stairs. The clock in the lobby pointed to ten-thirty; it felt more like the hectic early hours of the morning. She went along the half-shadowed hall, turned the knob of her own door, thought annoyedly, Why won’t I remember to lock it? and switched on the overhead light—and stood still, staring.
    After a long moment she closed the door behind her. Without pausing to check the contents of the opened closet or to investigate the out-pulled bureau drawers, she crossed the room to the window and knelt beside her trunk. The lid was up, the contents tumbled. The letters, of course, were gone. She sat back on her heels and pushed hair away from her forehead and went on looking, mechanically, at scallops on the edge of a satin slip, a fold of yellow sweater, a stocking trailed casually out of the trunk.
    It was her own fault, her own blind, stupid fault for leaving her door unlocked. (But, if someone had been really intent on retrieving the letters, would the ancient locks at the Fenwick Inn have stood in the way?) No matter; they were gone, and almost certainly back in the hands of whoever had written them. Which was baffling enough in itself, without the further question of who.
    Katy’s first thought was to let Michael know. But the trip back to the bar, the pretext for privacy, the questions and explanations—no, not tonight, not over a dozen masked men with blackjacks.
    And on the heels of that, eerily, came a soft, tentative tap on the door.
    Katy’s stomach leaped and dropped. She sat motionless, drawing her breath with infinite care, watching the door. It wasn’t locked. A turn of the knob, the thrust of a hand, would find her there, trapped and terrified.
    The knob didn’t turn. Instead, muffled footsteps receded and died away altogether, and after a cautious interval Katy dared to get up and lock the door. With that fragile guard between her and future visitors, fatigue came rushing back and a heedless, overpowering desire for sleep. She took a casual glance at the bureau drawers, brushed her teeth, and went to bed and instantly to sleep.
    She didn’t stay asleep. Car doors slammed maddeningly in the Inn driveway, and voices hung on the frosty night air. The bar must be closing. Katy turned her back on the window and closed her mind and her ears determinedly and drifted off again.
    She woke a second time to a blur of excited voices—were they in the hall or out on the porch below?—and to the sound of car motors humming up the hill to the Inn. Now the voices and the door-slammings were different, urgent, middle-of-the-nightish. Fire? Of course not, or there’d be sirens.
    Useless this time to try to slide back into sleep. Katy threw aside the covers, switched on her lamp and put on a quilted robe and slippers. The hall, when she opened her door, was black; the night light at the end had gone out. So had