Death Has a Small Voice (10 page)

Hilda Godwin's other house seemed large; under the lights of the two cars, it rambled along a ridge. It was of brown shingles, in part two-storied. It was dark. On the drive there was no other car. The doors of the garage stood open, and the garage was empty. As they walked toward the house from the cars, they kicked through the fallen leaves of autumn.

Weigand knocked on the door Rogers led them to, but knocking was a formality. This door, too, was unlocked when he tried the knob. Inside, the torch beams lighted a square hall. In the center of the hall there was a square trunk—a large trunk, a new one.

“There it is,” Rogers said. “I remember it. She decided to come up here and
—Hilda! Hey! Where are you?
” He shouted the last. His voice echoed in the hall; must have echoed through the house; was not answered. Rogers started to call again, but his voice trailed to silence. He stood and looked at the trunk.

“All right, Mullins,” Bill Weigand said. “Open it.”

Mullins was prepared, now. Steel wrenched at the trunk lock; metal protested harshly. The tongue of the lock bent back. Mullins looked down at the trunk, and hesitated.

“You may as well go ahead,” Weigand said, his voice quiet. He reached out and grasped an arm of Jerry North, who stood beside him. “Go ahead, Mullins.”

Mullins lifted the lid.

The body was doubled up in the trunk. Jerry North's breath went out, shudderingly.

It was a small body. The face might have been delicate once, quick with expression. The body might have been light and gay under the yellow dinner dress.

Rogers turned away, his face working; he made a strange, meaningless sound—a sick sound.

“Put it down, Mullins,” Bill Weigand said, his voice without expression. “Miss Godwin's been dead several days, I'm afraid.”

Rogers made the same sick sound again. He turned from the trunk; he seemed to see no one. He seemed to grope his way to the door, and out into the night.

Mullins lowered the trunk lid. He swore, softly.

“Of course,” Weigand said, “we had to expect it. Even so—”

“It's what Pam—knew about, isn't it?” Jerry said. He mumbled the words a little.

“Probably,” Weigand said. “It shaped that way, you know. We had—”

He stopped as, outside, the engine of a car came suddenly, harshly, to life. He turned, and then ran toward the door. Mullins ran after him.

They shouted at the turning Oldsmobile, and ran toward it. But Rogers did not stop. The car cut off the drive, lurched for a moment on turf, through fallen leaves, came out of the turn, kicking dirt and gravel behind it. It was through the gap, then. Mullins ran toward the police car.

“No!” Bill said sharply. “Let him go, Sergeant.”

Mullins stopped; he came back.

“See if the telephone's connected,” Bill Weigand told him. “Get the State Police, if it is. Then the office. Get things started.”

“Pickup on Rogers?” Mullins said.

“Right,” Bill told him. “And—tell them they'd better put a couple of men on Shaw.”

“Oh,” Mullins said. He tried again. “O.K., Loot,” Sergeant Mullins said.

Jerry was already searching the rambling house; already calling, “Pam! Pam!”

Nobody answered. They found nobody.

The State Police found nobody when they came, with sirens—then with lights, with photographers, with the paraphernalia of fingerprinting.

“She was strangled, I think,” Bill Weigand told the sergeant in charge. The sergeant thought so, too.

Outside the house, behind it, where a garden had been, they found the start of a hole. It would have been a rather large hole—larger than an ordinary grave. But it was too shallow for a grave.

If the hole had been planned as a grave, and dug deeper, it would easily have held two bodies, particularly if neither was large.

It had all the quality of a nightmare—the shifting, distorted shape of a nightmare; the unreasonableness of a nightmare. It was the unreasonableness, more even than the simple physical danger, which was obvious even while it was unbelievable, that caused a kind of screaming in Pamela North's mind. She had been in trouble before, thanks in large measure to having met, years ago, a policeman attached to Homicide. But the trouble, while never really expected, had grown logically out of something in which she, along with Jerry, had got herself involved. This was different. This time, Pam North told her soreaming mind, I didn't
do
anything.

She was in a woods, apparently on top of a hill. There were tall trees around her and most of them had lost their leaves. They reached black, twisted branches toward a sky across which the clouds hurried through the light of a small, a quite inadequate, moon. She was, sometime in the middle of the night, lost in the woods somewhere—but she had no real idea where—in the vicinity of New York. She unquestionably was, although there was now no sign of it, being pursued by a whispering man who could, if logic meant anything, exist only in a nightmare, but who had very tangibly existed in the most commonplace of surroundings—a deserted office late in the evening. Pam shook her head, which still ached. She stood and looked around her, and wondered where she was. She wished the trees more friendly.

Her escape—if she had actually escaped; in a nightmare it was difficult to be sure—had been of a part with the rest. The whispering man had bungled, as he must have bungled from the beginning, and not only because murder is always a bungle. If any of all this meant anything, had any logic, he had killed while a machine listened and recorded, and had not had the competence to discover this until too late. (How he had discovered it then she could only guess.) Then he had—well, then he had behaved like a man in a nightmare, like a man gone berserk. He had, for one thing, put a preposterous value on the recording, which did not—

Pam, standing still in the middle of a woods, on a hilltop, stopped herself there. There was no point in making the whispering man out more of a bungler than he really was. The recorded dialogue between murderer and victim did not, to be sure, identify either. But—the murderer had not had the record. If he had got his hands on it, he would have destroyed it. Therefore, he had not heard it. Therefore, he did not know what was on it; could not remember now what he had said, and what the woman had said. Obviously, he could not remember whether names had been used. Under those circumstances, getting his hands on the record, and destroying it, would seem vital. Once you granted that—

The way he had gone about it remained, however, the way of a man lunging in the dark. It was, Pam thought, as if his first act had unstrung the man; since his first act had been murder, done in a moment of fury, that was not unreasonable, given a certain kind of man—given, say, a man unusued to stress, unaccustomed to planning, to testing, to looking ahead. Such a man might very well lunge, as if in the dark, doing without further consideration what first came into his head. Granted that all murderers are unbalanced, this one—who might even now be approaching her through the trees—had a further characteristic: he was inexperienced. This did not help; a hand grenade is at its most dangerous, to everybody, in inexperienced hands.

These thoughts were a jumble in Pam North's mind. When she had got so far with logic, she gave it up and began to hurry, almost to run, through the trees. She started down the hill, hoping she was putting more distance between herself and the house from which she had escaped, but by no means sure of it. She had been doing that now for, she guessed, several hours.

She had been taken to the house, tied up, under a blanket, on the floor of a station wagon. Once there, she had been locked up in a room on the second floor—a room with one window. Left there, without comment even in a whisper, she had eventually got the window open. It was only on the second floor, but on this side of the house the ground dropped precipitously, so that the distance to it was as great as it might have been if she had been a story higher in the house. That was no good, unless she had to decide between broken legs and a broken neck.

She had heard him moving around below; she had heard him dragging into the house a trunk with which she had shared the station wagon. She had a sick feeling that she knew what was in the trunk. She had heard the man go out of the house again and for a long time had heard nothing further. Then she had heard the motor of a car, presumably the station wagon, start up. She had tried the door then, careless of the noise she made, but quickly found it beyond her. She had tried another door, which she had supposed led merely to a closet, and found that she had been right. It was on her third hopeless check of her surroundings that she discovered a trap door in the ceiling of the closet.

Standing on a chair, she pushed up against the trap door, having little hope. It was preposterously easy to open; suspiciously easy to open. He had seemed to know the house. Surely he would not have put her in a room from which, with no more effort than this, she might get out. She hesitated; presumably the trap door, even if she could clamber up through it, would lead her merely to a new, less comfortable, confinement. But she thought: knowing a house well enough does not mean you know all the odd things about it, particularly if it is an old house. She pushed aside the trap door, which was unhinged, and tried to climb.

She failed twice. She broke fingernails. Dust poured down, blindingly. She tried a third time, and pulled herself partly up. Her legs waved wildly; the edge of the flooring cut into her bruisingly. Then she got one foot on the top of the chair's back and, as the chair fell away under her, got just the push she needed. Pam North was through the trap to her waist. After that it was still not easy, but she made it.

She lay in a low passage under the roof—a passage too small to be called an attic, a passage empty except for electric conduits. But at the far end, there was a light. She wriggled to it, again bruisingly, on her belly.

The light came from a little window, hinged at the top, fastened at the bottom merely with a latch. She pulled the dusty window open and, only a few feet below it, a roof sloped down gradually. Pam North wriggled through the window, head first since she had no room to turn, caught herself just in time, and came down—shaking—with her feet on the roof. She sat down on it, then, and inched down cautiously.

At its lowest point, the roof was a few feet above another, also sloping down. Pam lowered herself to the new roof, and continued. She moved cautiously, making as little sound as possible. She was, apparently, at the rear of the house. When the man returned—if he had really gone, which had to be chanced—it would be, she hoped, in the station wagon and along the drive. She reached the bottom of the new roof, which was apparently that of a porch, and was only about ten feet from the ground. She hung from the edge, hoped for softness below, and let herself drop.

Landing, she staggered backward and sat down hard. But she sat down in soft earth. She was up again almost at once, and almost at once was running. She caught herself just before she ran into, fell into, a newly dug hole. It was a large hole—large enough to be a grave. Pam skirted it, and ran down a hill, through an open meadow. Now the night was too bright with the little moon—too bright by far. She ran expecting, with each step, a blow in the back. She ran, not looking around at the dim house she had left behind.

She came to a barbed wire fence and crawled under it. A barb caught her already ruined dress—where was her coat? Surely she had had a coat!—and the dress gave. The point of the barb raked, like a harsh fingernail, on Pam's skin. She got up beyond the fence and went on down the hill, now among blueberry bushes and—yes—wild blackberry. Thorns grabbed at her, whipped at her. They lashed her legs. She kept on going.

She went over a stone fence, clutching—she feared—ugly columns of poison ivy. If I live through this, I'll be a mess for days, Pam North said, and stumbled on a hummock. She grabbed wildly, held a sapling briefly, plunged with both feet into water and almost fell. She was, she realized, in a swamp;

It had been then that her mind, which before had been clear enough, if understandingly full of fears, began to scream. It had been then the nightmare started. Injustice such as this, Pam's screaming mind insisted, was possible only in a nightmare. If you were fleeing for your life you deserved, at the very least, to flee in dignity. To begin flight with what amounted to a prat-fall, to snag oneself—just where one inevitably does—in going under a barbed wire fence, to be whipped by spiked bushes,' now to fall into a swamp, probably full of unpleasant snakes—these things carried life's irony to the point of burlesque. It was as if, facing a firing squad as bravely as possible, one were suddenly to fall uncontrollably to sneezing.

She got hold of herself and began, in the dim light, to work her way to the left. She stumbled often, stepped several times more into cold water, once wrenched her ankle. She made many false turns, false steps, before she came again to firm ground. She then returned, or hoped she did, to her original course, away from the house. She had supposed that soon she would find a road.

She could only guess, on the hilltop, starting down it, with no road yet in evidence, how long it had been since she left the house through the trap door and the little window. She thought it had been several hours and that now it was long after midnight. She was unbearably tired; her body ached. And she had still not found water she dared stop to drink. She came out of the woods and to a mowed field, and on the comparatively level surface Pam North staggered as she walked. Once she fell, catching herself without injury. She did not immediately get up again, but lay as she had fallen on the grass. But she began to feel cold, and managed to get back to her feet.

She went under another barbed wire fence and beyond it came to a brook. It was not a wide brook; there were stones in it on which one could step. Pam lay down on the bank and drank from her cupped hands. No doubt cows drank there; in all likelihood cows waded there. It did not matter. The water was cold in her throat, cold on her face. She got up after a time and, absurdly, wanted a cigarette as she could not remember ever having wanted one. The spirit should flee death, if it must, along a beam of light, Pam thought, being, by then, light-headed. The body is ridiculous.