Death Has a Small Voice by Frances Lockridge Page A

table, and the sound they heard, although a small sound, was loud in the room.
    â€œ The basement! ” Bill Weigand said, quickly, his voice low.
    They had missed it the first time; they found it quickly. The door opened off the little kitchen; it opened on a steep flight of wooden stairs. The beam from the torch knifed down the stair flight. Bill Weigand’s voice traveled down the beam of light, as flat, as without inflection, as the light itself.
    â€œAll right,” Weigand said. “Come up.”
    For a moment there was silence. Then there was a sound of movement. Then a tall, youngish man, with a crew haircut, stood in the beam of light. He held a flashlight of his own, turned off. He looked up into the glare.
    â€œAll right, Mr. Rogers,” Bill Weigand said. “Come up.”
    For a moment, Gilbert Rogers, associate editor of the Hudson Press, blinked in the light. Then he came up. They moved back to let him through the kitchen, into the living room.
    â€œWell?” Bill Weigand said.
    â€œSo it’s you,” Rogers said. He looked at the others. “Hello, Rogers,” Jerry North said.
    â€œWhat the hell goes on?” Rogers asked them.
    â€œPerhaps you’d better tell us,” Bill Weigand said.
    Rogers hesitated.
    â€œNow,” Weigand advised.
    Rogers looked from one to the other of the three men. He looked longest at Jerry North, and then seemed most puzzled. He looked back at Bill Weigand.
    â€œI got worried,” he said. “After you left—something came up. I got worried about Hilda.”
    â€œWhy?” Bill asked him. “You weren’t this afternoon, Mr; Rogers. Why are you now?”
    Rogers hesitated again. They waited.
    â€œWell,” he said, “the manuscript I was telling you about—the manuscript of her novel—it’s disappeared. I found that out after you left. I decided to take it home and start reading it. And—we seem to have lost it. First Miss Godwin goes away, without telling anybody—”
    He stopped, because Weigand was shaking his head.
    â€œShe told a man named Shaw,” he said. “Told him that she was going south. That—”
    â€œWhat’s Shaw got to do with it?” Rogers demanded. He flushed a little; his words were hurried. “Where does he come into it?”
    Bill Weigand told him. Rogers shook his head, with violence. They waited.
    â€œMaybe she told him that,” Rogers said. “Maybe she thought of going. But she didn’t go. She’d have told me before she went.” He spoke with conviction.
    â€œWhy?” Bill asked.
    â€œBecause—” Rogers began, and hesitated, and went on more slowly. “She’s submitted this book,” he said. “We hadn’t made a decision on it. She wouldn’t go away without telling us where we could reach her.” He looked at Jerry. “You know that, North,” he said. Jerry nodded.
    â€œYou didn’t mention that this afternoon,” Bill said. “You seemed to think it was perfectly reasonable that she should merely go off somewhere.”
    â€œI know,” Rogers said. “It’s true, she does do that. But then, I got to thinking. And then the business about the manuscript came up.”
    â€œGo ahead,” Weigand said. “Tell us about that, Mr. Rogers.”
    Rogers told them. The manuscript of Hilda Godwin’s novel had come in, from her agent, about two weeks before. At that time, Rogers, who normally would have read it first, was away on vacation. “I’ve been her contact at the office recently,” Rogers explained. “Not on much—reprints of her earlier stuff, that sort of thing. Mr. Wilmot felt that, since the editor she used to work with isn’t with us any more, I might as well handle her prose, if she was going in for prose.” But with Rogers away, a preliminary reader had gone over the book and then it had been started on