Voice Out of Darkness by Ursula Curtiss

down at her, greenish eyes faintly apologetic. “I’ve got the car—have to drive out to Judge Landis’ and pick up some contracts. We’ll pass your old place on the way. Want to come?” Amends, Katy thought, for last night when he’d been cool and infuriatingly amused about her ring. She said, “I’d love to. Can you wait until I get my coat?” and Jeremy nodded and said, “Better get a warm one, it’s close to zero.”
    Beyond the town, past the last of the straggling old houses at the end of Main Street, it was a Christmas-card day. White, billowing seas of field, unbroken except by low, humping gray stone fences. Blue shadows on the churned white road curving away under the wheels of the car, a little stone bridge and a brook rimed with ice under a lilac-gray blur of leafless birches and brambles; Katy said, “Pretty,” under her breath. Jeremy grinned and said, “We like it,” and then, with a quick side glance at the kerchief over her hair, “You look about as big-city as a mustard plaster in that thing.”
    “Thank you,” Katy answered, unruffled. “Fenwick affects me that way.”
    The car put more whiteness, more silence behind it. Katy thought of the way Michael drove—surprisingly steady and competent and careful. Jeremy was fast and sure at the wheel, but then Jeremy had grown up with these roads, had driven over them through winter ice and squashy spring mud and the slippery carpeting of damp fallen leaves. She took out a cigarette and lighted it, absorbed, and Jeremy said companionably, without taking his eyes from the road, “Got a spare?”
    “Oh—sorry.” Handing him a cigarette, holding a match, Katy thought surprisedly, he’s not being himself, he’s being quite friendly. It was surprising mainly because the Taylors, father and son, had always been aloof and a little hostile to the rest of the town. Richard Taylor was a calm, handsome, scornful enigma from out of nowhere, who had no profession at all as far as anyone could see, and who had once put Miss Whiddy bodily out of his house when she had interrupted him in communion with his brandy. Fenwick hinted darkly at a scandal in the past. They said Richard Taylor had been convicted of fraud in Chicago, or possibly bigamy out on the coast. They said it was a well-known fact that he had to report back to a sanitarium twice a year. They ended up, baffled, knowing no more about Richard Taylor than when they had begun, and they said of Jeremy Taylor, growing up tall and casually contemptuous, “That boy’ll turn out like his father, you wait and see, they’re like peas in a pod already.”
    Jeremy braked so suddenly that the wheels slithered and spun. “With you in a minute,” he said, and was back in almost that with a brown envelope in his hand. “Now. Want to drive past your place?”
    They headed back towards town. Katy was grateful that Jeremy hadn’t asked her, probingly, if she minded going by the house or the pond. She inquired about the contracts and listened to a discourse on a will and a property dispute; at the end Jeremy said with satisfaction, “Dull, isn’t it? But you would ask… And that, I believe, is Miss Trent up ahead. Shall we give her a lift?”
    Katy stared at the figure in front of them, blocked against the snow. Pauline Trent, her foster-father’s cousin, looked exactly as she had looked six years ago at the Merediths’ funeral, short and dark and thickset and as solid as a tree trunk. They pulled level with her. She came over to the car, staring in turn.
    She knew Jeremy. She said suddenly, “Why, it’s Katy,” and climbed into the car. “This is a surprise. I didn’t know you were in town. You’ll both come in and have some sherry, won’t you?”
    Her voice was deep, and ragged at the edges, as though roughened by a bad cold. A cold, Katy decided detachedly, remembering the ordering of the wreath for Monica’s grave, could disguise a voice far more effectively than any ruse.
    She looked