A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin Read Free Book Online Page A

year-book photo and a good picture of him; he hated to burn it, but he had written ‘To Dorrie, with all my love’ across the bottom of it.

SEVEN
    As usual she was late for the nine o’clock class. Sitting at the back of the room, he watched the rows of seats fill up with students. It was raining outside and ribbons of water sluiced down the wall of windows. The seat on his left was still empty when the lecturer mounted the platform and began talking about the city manager form of government.
    He had everything in readiness. His pen poised over the notebook opened before him and the Spanish novel, La Casa de las Flores Negras , was balanced on his knee. A sudden heart-stopping thought hit him; what if she picked today to cut? Tomorrow was Friday, the deadline. This was the only chance he would have to get the note, and he had to have it by tonight. What would he do if she cut?
    At ten past nine, though, she appeared; out of breath, her books in one arm, her raincoat over the other, a smile for him lighting her face the moment she eased through the door. Tiptoeing across the room behind him, she draped the raincoat over the back of her chair and sat down. The smile was still there as she sorted her books, keeping a notebook and a small assignment pad before her and putting the remaining books in the aisle between their seats.
    Then she saw the book that he held open on his knee, and her eyebrows lifted questioningly. He closed the book, keeping his finger between the pages, and tilted it towards her so that she could see the title. Then he opened it again and with his pen ruefully indicated the two exposed pages and his notebook, meaning that that was how much translation he had to do. Dorothy shook her head condolingly. He pointed to the lecturer and to her notebook – she should take notes and he would copy them later. She nodded.
    After he had worked for a quarter of an hour, carefully following the words of the novel, slowly writing in his notebook, he glanced cautiously at Dorothy and saw that she was intent on her own work. He tore a piece of paper about two inches square from the corner of one of the notebook’s pages. One side of it he covered with doodling; words written and crossed out, spirals and zigzagging lines. He turned that side downward. With a finger stabbing the print of the novel, he began shaking his head and tapping his foot in impatient perplexity.
    Dorothy noticed. Inquiringly, she turned to him. He looked at her and expelled a troubled sigh. Then he lifted his finger in a gesture that asked her to wait a moment before returning her attention to the lecturer. He began to write, squeezing words on to the small piece of paper, words that he was apparently copying from the novel. When he was through, he passed the paper to her.
    Traducción, por favour , he had headed it. Translation, please:
    Querido,
    Espero que me perdonares por la infelicidad que causaré. No hay ninguna otra cosa que puedo hacer.    
    She gave him a mildly puzzled glance, because the sentences were quite simple. His face was expressionless, waiting. She picked up her pen and turned the paper over, but the back of it was covered with doodling. So she tore a page from her assignment pad and wrote on that.
    She handed him the translation. He read it and nodded. ‘ Muchas gracias ,’ he whispered. He hunched forward and wrote in his notebook. Dorothy crumpled the paper on which he had written the Spanish and dropped it to the floor. From the corner of his eye he saw it land. There was another bit of paper near it, and some cigarette butts. At the end of the day they would all be swept together and burned.
    He looked at the paper again, at Dorothy’s small slanted handwriting:
    Darling
     I hope you will forgive me for the unhappiness that I will cause. There is nothing else that I can do.
    He tucked the paper carefully into the pocket on the inner cover of the notebook, and closed it. He closed the novel and placed it on top of