Death Has a Small Voice by Frances Lockridge Page A

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