Voice Out of Darkness by Ursula Curtiss Page B

matter-of-factly; Katy, sitting rigidly beside him, was aware only of a shocked self-loathing. A childish memory, a man beside her, the cloaked white silence of the cemetery had made her behave like a high-school sophomore. Jeremy, chronically amused and aloof, would now have something tangible to enjoy.
    He dropped her at the Inn door. Katy, who would have liked very much to rush out of sight and beyond the range of laughter, turned coolly and said, “Thanks very much for the ride. I’d forgotten how pretty Fenwick is in the winter.”
    “Glad you could come,” Jeremy said carelessly, and got back into the car and drove away. Katy retreated to the safety of her room and twisted the ring on her finger and thought penitently, Oh, Michael, you’re engaged to a fool. She took off the kerchief and brushed her hair and mapped out an ordinary, reassuring routine: lunch first and maybe a walk downtown, and afterwards a long lazy afternoon and meeting Michael’s train if he called from the station.
    But that was the night that went queerly awry almost from the very beginning. That was the night that her room was rifled savagely, and the night that Miss Whiddy went plunging and crashing down the dim, steep stairway into the lobby.

5
    Things started going wrong from the time Michael missed his train. Katy, bathed and dressed in new subtle lavender-gray wool that made her quite ordinary hazel eyes look warm and apricot-ish, got the telegram at about five-fifteen. It said, “Arriving Fenwick 6:14. Can you meet me? All my love, Michael.”
    But Michael wasn’t on the 6:14. Katy roamed the dark windy station platform minutes ahead of time and, when the train pulled in, combed the dismounting passengers for Michael’s tall easy figure, Michael’s buoyant shoulders. Once she took a quick step forward, and a tall man in a trench coat backed uncertainly away and then advanced, with more conviction, on a small plump woman and three jumping, shrieking children.
    She went into the waiting room, but Michael wasn’t there; the room was empty except for the ticket agent behind his window. She went out into the windy dark again and got a cab back to the Inn. Michael had missed his train. She had missed trains. Everybody, sooner or later, missed a train; it was as unavoidable as a sudden cold or a visiting aunt. Too bad, though, that it left you feeling so flat and, for no reason at all, rebuffed.
    She was back at the Inn at a quarter of seven, and that was when they all began to converge like threads, sometimes tangled, sometimes separate, running delicately back to the heart of a web.
    Not, Katy thought, sitting by a window in the lobby, that it was really strange. Friday and Saturday were Fenwick’s nights out, and the Fenwick Inn, through simple lack of competition, was the only place to go. Unless, as Francesca Poole had often pointed out ironically, you wanted to make a night of it at the local diner, and really spread yourself on coffee and sandwiches. Consequently, once or twice a week the Inn scooped up an odd mixture of natives—the Miss Whiddys, the Francescas, the amused and handsome young couples like Cassie Poole and Jeremy Taylor.
    First of all, Pauline Trent. Still in thick unyielding tweeds, as solidly shapeless, thought Katy, as though she were tweed all the way through instead of flesh and blood and bone. She nodded and smiled over an inner reluctance and Pauline Trent raised her thick black brows in greeting as she crossed the lobby.
    “Well, Katy. Thought I might see you here this evening. Waiting for that odd young man of Miss Poole’s?” Katy, still smiling, shook her head and said she had an odd young man of her own. It crossed her mind that Miss Trent, for a self-pronounced recluse, was singularly well up on local relationships. It crossed her mind too that her drive with Jeremy Taylor, if it had caught Miss Trent’s negligent notice, would be grist for Miss Whiddy’s tireless mill. Damn. You couldn’t take