Free Voice Out of Darkness by Ursula Curtiss Page A

the light in the wall sconce where you turned for the stairs.
    The disturbance was centered in the lobby. Someone said in a loud, awed voice, “—must have slipped,” and someone else said, “Poor old thing.” Someone had fallen, then, and must be badly hurt because all at once there was a respectful, waiting hush. Katy went halfway down the darkened stairs, blinded momentarily by the lights in the lobby, and stared.
    People were standing in thin little knots around the foot of the staircase, held motionless by the unwilling fascination of spectators at accidents. A dark-suited man, his back to Katy, rising and stepping aside said in a loud, incongruously cheerful tone, “Okay, Pete, you can take her away. Broken neck and a fractured skull that probably would have killed her anyway. You can see why.”
    Heads turned automatically to look up the long, steep, dark staircase. Katy went down it slowly, unconscious of startled glances and a fresh tide of murmurs. She was looking at Miss Whiddy’s whipped-cream curls, matted and horribly stained. A white-coated intern came forward and blotted out the dreadful head and there were only Miss Whiddy’s feet, decorous in pointed black calf with discreet bows touched with imitation tortoise-shell.
    Then the feet jostled onto a stretcher and people stepped back. The Inn door opened and closed behind the interns and their burden and the hum of voices grew louder.
    “Bulb must have blew,” said Mr. Lasky defensively, glancing up at the staircase. “But that’s not all. Her shoe had a loose heel, she told me so herself this morning.”
    Frank Abbott, Fenwick’s chief of police, looked up from his notebook and said sharply, “That so? About the shoes?”
    “Had ’em in her hand,” Mr. Lasky said, nodding violently. “I asked her, sort of joking, if she always carried a spare, and she said one of the heels was loose and she was going to take them down to Nick’s and have it tightened.”
    “But those aren’t the same shoes,” whispered Katy. Michael, who had come quietly up beside her, touched her arm warningly. She turned her head and looked at him, still bewildered with shock, and Michael’s eyes were warning, too. She turned away again. Frank Abbott shut his notebook with a regretful snap. “Guess that’s it,” he said. “Poor old soul.” He took a final glance over his shoulder. “Those are nasty stairs you’ve got there, Ed. I’d get a light on them right away, before there’s another accident.”
    Mr. Lasky, anguishedly aware of a spattering of guests, whirled on a small awe-stricken office boy. “ ’S the matter with you?” he demanded witheringly. “Get a new bulb up there right away, and don’t wait till it burns out, see that it’s replaced every week!”
    The spell snapped. Chief Abbott and Mr. Lasky moved toward the door; the little groups around the stairway stirred and broke. Katy was half-conscious of Jeremy Taylor and Cassie caught in the stream starting away from the staircase, of Mr. Pickering’s smooth, silvery head, of a cross voice saying, “… told you we should have gone to the Silvermine Tavern, but would you pay any attention?” Someone else said uneasily, “Well, I’m going to bed.”
    But those weren’t the shoes she was taking to have fixed, Katy thought. Because the others had been long and black and pointed too, as she vaguely supposed all Miss Whiddy’s shoes were, but they had had no bows, no modest touch of amber.
    The lobby was nearly empty. The scurrying office boy would be back at any moment. Moving almost without volition, Katy shook off the light pressure of Michael’s arm and turned and ran up the stairs. At the top, she fumbled for the wall sconce and twisted the loose bulb, cool now, and the light sprang on.
    Michael had come partway up to the landing. He looked from the wall light to the foot of the staircase, measuring the plunging, bone-breaking distance. He said slowly, “Bulbs work