Death Has a Small Voice by Frances Lockridge

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