Voice Out of Darkness Read online

  Ursula Curtiss makes her entrance into the Pocket Book list with the first-rate mystery thriller, Voice Out of Darkness. This novel won the $1,000 Red Badge Prize Mystery contest. With the award went some of the finest reviews ever accorded a first mystery. The Saturday Review of Literature said, “Suspenseful, credible, and a competently plotted tale. Worth its ‘Red Badge’ prize.”

  The Printing History of

  Voice Out of Darkness

  Dodd, Mead edition published October, 1948

  1st printing ……………… September, 1948

  Detective Book Club edition published December, 1948

  1st printing ……………… December, 1948

  Pocket Book edition published March, 1950

  1st printing ………………. February, 1950

  This Pocket Book includes every word con-

  tained in the original, higher-priced edition. It

  is printed from brand-new plates made

  from completely reset, large, clear, easy-to-read type

  Trade-mark Registered in U. S. Patent Office, and

  in foreign countries including Great Britain and Canada.

  POCKET BOOK editions are published only by Pocket Books, Inc.,

  Pocket Books [G.B] Ltd., and Pocket Books of Canada, Ltd.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Copyright, 1948, by Ursula R. Curtiss

  This Pocket Book edition is published by arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company

  Table of Contents

  Cast of Characters

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Ursula Curtiss

  Bibliography

  The characters and situations in this book are wholly fictional and imaginative; they do not portray, and are not intended to portray, any actual persons or parties.

  Cast of Characters

  Katy Meredith, who has been receiving, in her New York apartment, unpleasant reminders of a day thirteen years ago in the little town of Fenwick

  Monica Meredith, Katy’s foster sister, whose pudgy presence lingers on after her death.. i Michael Blythe, commercial artist whom Katy loves

  Cassie Poole, suddenly a stranger to Katy, despite their shared experience thirteen years ago

  Jeremy Taylor, Cassie’s fiancé, a remote young man with a cynical eyebrow

  Lieutenant Hooper, who looks like a demure suburban commuter—except for his eyes

  Pauline Trent, eccentric tenant of the old Meredith house

  Arnold Poole, who left his wife to live with an enigmatic sculptress

  Francesca Poole, Cassie’s glamorous mother—a not-so-merry widow

  Mr. Lasky, innkeeper of Fenwick Inn

  Alice Whiddy, who earned her reputation for sharp eyes and ears

  Ilse Petersen, cold in manner and mien

  Mr. Farrow, a florist

  Harvey Pickering, Francesca Poole’s current escort—a lawyer of ultra-immaculate manners and reputation

  Frank Abbot, Fenwick’s able chief of police

  Sergeant Gilfoyle, his astute assistant

  Mrs. Galbraith-Carlotti, Ilse Petersen’s stolid and disapproving aunt

  1

  Katy got the third letter early in December, after a snowy dusk had turned into windy darkness and she was back at the little apartment on Tenth Street.

  She had left her office later than usual, and had stopped on the way home for lamb chops and the makings of a salad because Michael had, quite unexpectedly, asked himself to dinner. “I want to find out if you can cook,” he had said unsmilingly, “for reasons which you can never possibly guess.” So Katy, who had looked calmly away and said, “You can come tomorrow night if you’d like,” was feeling expectant and a little giddy when the creaking elevator let her out on the fourth floor at about six-thirty.

  The letter lay there on the mat, in the familiar square white envelope with “Miss Katherine Meredith, Apt. 4A” written neatly on the front. No stamp, no postmark. Katy stood looking down at it for a moment, tall and suddenly stiff, snow on her shoulders and her smooth brown hair. All at once the pleasant giddiness had gone away, and she felt flat and cold and angry. Why tonight, when she had been looking forward to a martini and dinner with Michael? Why at all, when Monica, who had slipped and plunged through the treacherous ice, had been dead for thirteen years?

  In the bright little kitchen, with the chops and salad things tumbled on the table, Katy opened the letter. It was a single sheet of paper, the kind you could buy at any drug store or stationery shop. On it was scrawled, in firm black ink, “You pushed her.”

  The kitchen clock ticked noisily in the silence; the lettuce came crackling out of its paper bag and rolled across the table. Katy folded the letter and put it back in its envelope and switched on the light in the tiny dining alcove. In a bookcase under the window, sandwiched in between two books on the middle shelf, were two other square white envelopes. Katy added the third and stood looking down into the quiet street. It had reached the point where she would have to tell Michael. Michael would know what to do. Meanwhile there was the table to set, and a bath to take, and that dreadful inner trembling to stop.

  The first two didn’t take long. Pulling biscuit-colored wool over her head, fastening a narrow gold belt at the waist, Katy forced her mind away from the letters and thought about Michael Blythe, whom she had seen desultorily ever since the summer and somewhat less desultorily for the past three weeks. She didn’t, actually, know a great deal about him. She knew that his parents lived in Chicago, that he was in his early thirties, that he was currently working as an artist for a small company that specialized in advertising presentations. That, in his spare time, he did free-lance magazine illustration which, he said, was a nice change from drawing graphs showing a ratio of three and one-half men to every fir tree in the country. (“Gibberish,” Katy had said, laughing. “Not a bit,” said Michael. “You’d be surprised how it is with fir trees.”)

  But who hates me like that, thought Katy, who’s been brooding about Monica and the little pond for thirteen years?

  She brushed her hair and put on lipstick and had looked at the clock twice by the time the doorbell rang. She’d wait, she’d make herself wait until after dinner before she mentioned the letters. Because then, inevitably, it would all come back, sharp and clear and ugly, and there’d be no point to the martinis or the warm glow of the alcove.

  Michael had brought champagne. When Katy opened the door, he was cradling it in his arms, looking at her out of very blue eyes. “Don’t say a word,” he said. “Commission. Very small, but calling for champagne.” He followed Katy into the kitchen. “Anything I can do in here?”

  “You might make a martini,” Katy said, “while I attend to the salad dressing. I’m glad about the commission—what’s it for?”

  While Michael told her, and later when she tucked herself into a corner of the couch and he poured cocktails and toasted her gravely, Katy thought detachedly how perfect this ought to have been. Snow coming down beyond the black shining windows framed in looped-back white organdy, inside, warmth and lamplight and the table in the alcove, and Michael sitting in the chair beside the window, less casual tonight than he’d ever been. And, hidden in the little bookcase, three innocent-looking white envelopes, three incredibly malevolent messages.

  “—met a friend of yours today,” Michael was saying.

  Katy wrenched her mind and her eyes away from the middle shelf of the dining-room bookcase and looked up inquiringly
.

  “Cassie Poole,” Michael said. “The one who went to school with you in Connecticut. What’s the matter? ”

  Cassie was there, at the little pond.

  “Nothing,” Katy said carefully. “I haven’t seen Cassie in years. Is she living in New York, did she say?”

  Michael shook his head. “I gathered she was still in Fenwick. Jones and I were at the Biltmore softening up a client, and she came by and stopped at the table for a minute. Considering we’d only met once—at that cocktail party I told you about, remember?—I was surprised that she knew me. Our client, I might add, was thoroughly dazzled. I think he’d have pinched her if the waiter hadn’t been in the way.”

  Katy smiled absently. “Cassie’s quite a girl. Oddly enough, she’s also very nice. I suppose she’d been shopping, if she was alone.”

  “She wasn’t,” Michael said quickly. “Just as our client was about to leave his wife and children a man came along, and she said so nice to have seen you again and give my love to Katy and went off with him.”

  “Oh,” Katy said.

  Michael looked at her and sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Well, I didn’t quite catch the color of his eyes,” he said. “He was tall, very fair, and in an extremely bad temper. It seems to me there was something funny about one of his eyebrows. This is your FBI.”

  “He was hit by a golf club,” Katy said abstractedly, “that is, if it was Jeremy Taylor.” She twirled her glass, not seeing the spinning reflections. “Jeremy’s from Fenwick, too. Funny.”

  “Is it?” Michael said. He was looking at her curiously, frowning a little.

  Not now, not till later, Katy thought warningly. She jumped up from the couch. “I’ll put on the chops.”

  “Good,” Michael said, picking up her glass. “I’ll mix another martini.”

  It was almost ten when dinner was through and they sat over a second cup of coffee in the living room. Katy had very nearly done a good job of being gay. Fenwick, the years she had spent there, the people, the scarring memory, had come rushing back like a wall of water with the mention of Cassie Poole and Jeremy Taylor. Instead of the shabby, charming room in the Village apartment that had been her home for four years, there was an icy gray day in Fenwick, Connecticut, so cold and still that their voices and their breath crystallized on the air. There was the little pond, laced and feathered with white where their skates had cut it, and the dark smudged ring of pines against an asphalt sky. Katy, chilled and tired and twelve years old, was saying, “Come on, Monica…”

  Michael stirred restlessly. He looked at his watch. “If you don’t mind the snow, we could make that French movie you wanted to see.”

  “Would you mind if we didn’t?” Katy said. Now that the time had come to tell Michael about the letters, she felt ridiculously nervous. She left the couch and went into the dining room and came back with the three white envelopes. “I’ve been finding these outside my door,” she said simply, and put them into his hands.

  She turned her back deliberately and was very elaborate with a cigarette and a match while Michael read the few brief vicious phrases. She heard the letters being folded and replaced and then there was a small waiting silence; into it Michael said tentatively, trying for lightness, “You correspond with some very unpleasant people, Katy.”

  “Don’t I,” said Katy. She took a few aimless steps toward the dining room and turned back again. “You see, it’s about Monica.”

  “Monica,” Michael said gently, “is news to me. Don’t you think you’d better sit down and tell me what this is all about? If you want to, that is.”

  Katy sat down. “I’m sorry. I’m nervous, and I’m fluttering around like a fool. Monica was my foster-sister.” She smiled across at Michael, feeling calmer. “You can stop me at any point and make a drink, if you like.”

  “I’ll let you know. Go on.”

  “As I’d told you, I was adopted,” Katy said. “The Merediths—I called them Aunt Belinda and Uncle John—married rather late, and I think Monica came as quite a jolt to them both. Anyway, when she was three, they adopted me, partly so Monica would have someone to grow up with and partly because Aunt Belinda had theories about only children. I was going on three too.”

  She paused and put out her cigarette. Michael sat quietly, listening.

  “Monica didn’t ever—exactly take to me,” Katy said hesitatingly. “She was a funny child, and not awfully likeable. She was big for her age, which she hated, and rather secretive. Oh, she wasn’t a monster, by any means, or anything like that. She was just—odd. When I wouldn’t play with her dolls, because I loathed dolls, she wouldn’t complain, she simply wouldn’t eat her meals until I did. She told all her friends that I was half-Indian because I tanned in the summer and she didn’t. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It can’t possibly matter.”

  “It might,” Michael said.

  “Off and on, we got along all right,” Katy said, “probably as well as a lot of real sisters do. Aunt Belinda got me off in a corner one day, I remember, and told me that Monica was shy—actually Monica was about as shy as a Fuller brush man—and not to mind her little moods. That was when she told me about my being adopted, and my having no relatives as far as they knew. She said that eventually she and Uncle John would be leaving something to Monica and me, and they didn’t want some utter stranger turning up to claim me as her long-lost child. We got to be twelve,” said Katy steadily, “and we were in the same grade at school. One day after school we went skating together, on a little pond at the foot of the hill where we lived.” She stopped. “Do you want to make that drink now, Michael?”

  She hadn’t moved when Michael came back with drinks. Gazing at the bright reflection of the room in the windows, hearing the chilly swish of the wind across the roofs, Katy was surprised at the force with which it could still hit her, just the mere cool recounting of it thirteen years later.

  She said, “Thanks…” and went on rapidly, because this was the worst part, the part she wanted to get over. “It was very cold that day, and quite gloomy even at three-thirty. The twelfth of December. We’d only been down at the pond a little while, Monica and I, when Cassie Poole turned up. I remember being rather startled and pleased about that, because Cassie was two years older than we were, and even at fourteen she was something you looked at twice. She was beginning to go to parties, too, and what with one thing or another we worshiped her.

  “After a while, though, it started to get darker, and I was frozen. I wanted to go home, but Monica wouldn’t. She’d dug a little hole in the ice with her skate, the way we used to, and was skating back and forth around it, so that the ice bent and got sort of watery. It was,” said Katy, “right over the channel.”

  The channel. Not deep, really, but deep when you were twelve—five feet of black frigid water. Beyond it was the little dam, where in summer the water trickled down in a tiny falls and wandered its rocky, mossy way under the bridge. But this was winter, and Monica was streaking back and forth across a patch of rubbery ice, mainly to impress Cassie Poole. Katy caught her breath.

  “I was up at the other end of the pond, skating around and trying to get warm,” she said. “I called to Monica once or twice, but she either didn’t hear me or pretended not to, and finally I skated down to her. I remember Cassie saying, ‘You’ll fall in, you dope.’ Just then Monica came past me, on her way back across that piece of ice, and I reached for her arm but she slipped away and that was when the ice buckled. Right under her, so that she went in feet first and on her back. She—went under the ice.”

  That dreadful hollow splashing sound. The quiet little slither of more ice breaking off and floating on the black water, so that Katy and Cassie, who had thrown themselves down and were groping for an arm, a shoulder that wasn’t there, had to inch back a little. The awful subterranean floundering that was Monica trying to fight out of that freezing hellish trap under the ice.

  “We got her out,” said Katy, staring at smoke from
her cigarette. “It couldn’t have been—I figured out later—more than half a minute, although right then it seemed like… Anyway, we got her out. I went in too, but by that time most of the rubber ice had broken off and I got hold of a firm edge. Monica was lying on her face, not moving at all, and Cassie, who took First Aid at school, was trying to press the water out of her lungs. Cassie sort of gasped at me, ‘Get somebody—scream.’ ”

  The little pond wasn’t far from the road. Katy remembered reaching the edge, screaming as she stumbled on her skates over dry brown grass and pebbled earth to the road. A car coming around the curve and stopping, and Katy not waiting for the man who got out, but running awkwardly back on her skates, drenched and terrified and sobbing with panic. Cassie had dragged Monica to the edge of the pond, and Monica, miraculously, was breathing.

  “Then I don’t see—. Even if she died later, as a result, technically you’d saved her, between you,” Michael said, frowning, and Katy came back with a jolt to his voice and the lights and shapes and colors of her own living room.

  “Oh, yes,” she said wearily. “I could have had that much if Monica hadn’t said it was my fault.”

  “Monica?”

  “She opened her eyes, just as I reached her and before that man got there. She said,” said Katy, opening her own eyes very wide and looking directly at Michael, “ ‘Katy pushed me.’ ”

  2

  “She was delirious,” Michael said firmly. But he was shocked. Katy could see it in his eyes, in the quick, slight stiffening of his face, in his involuntary glance at the accusing letters that lay on the table beside him.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so, Michael. Not then. Her voice, her eyes, her face, something—I think we’d have known. Cassie didn’t think she was delirious either, because she ssshhed Monica right away and said I hadn’t even touched her. And I hadn’t. I tried, that time, but I couldn’t catch the cloth of her ski suit. They told me later on that she didn’t say anything at all after that. She went into shock and then pneumonia and—died.”