Free Voice Out of Darkness by Ursula Curtiss Page B

loose.”
    “Particularly,” said Katy, “when they’re unscrewed.”
    She told him about the missing letters. She said, “I’ll care in the morning, I suppose, but right now it doesn’t seem to matter much,” and Michael put his hands on her shoulders and shook her a little and said, “All right, go to bed. But don’t you see, this is why I didn’t want you to say anything, down there. You’re involved in enough.”
    “Quite enough,” Katy said, and turned away. It was shocking that you could look down on violent, red-stained death one moment and think longingly of your bed the next. But she had to have sleep; the days of watching and listening and wondering, the countless little shocks, the frightful sight of Miss Whiddy’s matted hair and bobbing black-clad feet had built up into a crescendo of utter weariness. She put a hand up to her cheek and became aware all at once of her robe and slippers and sleep-tumbled hair. “Good-night, Michael.”
    She went slowly back to her own room and locked the door and got into bed. First the shoes, the wrong shoes, entered so clinchingly in Frank Abbott’s notebook. Then the bulb that hadn’t burned out. And, earlier, that soft, questioning tap at her door. Had Miss Whiddy stood there in the hall, with something to say to Katy, who hadn’t answered the knock?
    For some reason, that was the most dreadful thought of all.

6
    Saturday. A storm-warning sky, so purple-gray that the snowy roofs and distant hills stood out against it like chalk stroked on colored paper. Lights in the lobby and the Inn dining room, even at eight o’clock in the morning, because of the threatening gloom.
    Katy drank tomato juice and coffee alone. Michael had said to sleep as late as she could, had said, pleadingly, “This time, Katy, lock your door.” But two aspirin and a locked door hadn’t helped when she’d waked to the icy dark-lilac dawn. Neither had dispassionate morning-after logic. Light bulbs did loosen, especially in old, unsteady wall sconces. And Miss Whiddy hadn’t been young and sure-footed; in any case it was fatally simple to catch your heel in a looseness of carpet, to put out a foot, confidently, for solidity that wasn’t there.
    Accident. Tragic, but it could happen to anyone. It hadn’t. A hand had reached out, had caught Miss Whiddy’s arm or shoulder, had sent her twisting and crashing in the darkness. Katy knew it as certainly as though she had seen the calm relentless fingers.
    One thing was obvious. Someone had entered her room to find and remove the letters. Miss Whiddy had opened her door only its usual surreptitious crack, but even then she had seen too much. She had had, perhaps, some minute fragment of Fenwick gossip to exchange with Katy and she had peeped out, bright-eyed, into the face of death.
    There were raised voices in the lobby. The party from New Jersey, with the woman who had wanted to go to the Silvermine Tavern in the first place, was checking out. Mr. Lasky, confronted with a cancellation, was agonized. “You’ll run into snow—blizzard, likely. You won’t find another place like this between here and Vermont, if you’re lucky enough to find a place at all.”
    The woman was adamant. She said tartly that an inn-full of dead bodies and coroners and she didn’t know what wasn’t her idea of a week-end in the country, and the group departed. Katy listened and felt wistful. How lovely to be able to walk out of it like that, to push bills across a counter and say, “The very idea,” and put it behind you indignantly and for good.
    She could, of course, do just that. Forget the flowers for Monica’s grave, pretend that there had never been letters in her suitcase, accept the reasonable explanation of Miss Whiddy’s death. Go back to New York with Michael tomorrow, and hope that the whole hideous twisted thing would sicken and die of itself. If he asks me, thought Katy, staring hard into her second cup of coffee, if Michael asks me