Fair Warning by Mignon Good Eberhart Read Free Book Online Page A

was your letter?” he said, smiling. “Ancill says you had one. Was it from anyone I know?”
    She felt, as one did with Ivan, as if she were in a huge glass bowl exposed at every angle.
    “Let me see it,” he said.
    Beatrice, coming into the room with some letters in her hand, unwittingly saved her.
    “I’m just going to phone Verity Copley,” she said, “and tell her I can’t come to dinner tonight. Marcia can go, but I much prefer to stay at home with you, Ivan—Verity didn’t know you would be at home today.”
    “I’ll stay,” said Marcia quickly. “I’ll telephone to her at once so she can get someone else.”
    But Ivan wouldn’t have it.
    “Nonsense, both of you must go. Do you think I want you to martyr yourselves for me? Who is going to be there?”
    He had been told, of course, at the time of the invitation, perhaps a week ago, and because Ivan never forgot anything doubtless remembered every guest on the list. But he chose to make a point of it and to emphasize its triviality.
    Beatrice replied. As she stood there looking down at Ivan, Marcia was struck again by the extraordinary likeness between them. Beatrice was actually Ivan in a feminine and not unhandsome mold, except that her eyes lacked his light, peculiar stare, for they were, instead, dark and clouded and remote. And that look, although Marcia sensed it only dimly, had lately changed somehow, as if it had turned inward in secret preoccupation.
    “Not many,” she said. “Verity and Rob Copley. Marcia. Galway Trench. Dr. Blakie. I’m going to stay with you.”
    “You must go. Both of you. I insist. Do you think I want them saying I kept you at home!” He was becoming angry; his cheeks were whiter and his eyes very light except for that small hard, black pupil. Beatrice looked at him again. There was something detached and coolly exploratory about it, as if she were viewing him without any intervening veils of custom or familiarity. She said after a moment, “Why, certainly, Ivan, if you wish it.” She put the letters on a small table beside him. “Do you want me to answer these just now?”
    “I suppose so. Yes—let me see… . Where are you going, Marcia?”
    She stopped abruptly, on her way to the door. She was acutely conscious of Rob’s letter in her pocket, and it had dangerous potentiality. Ivan was quite capable of taking the letter from her by force.
    “I was only going upstairs. Do you want me?”
    “Yes, please. Will you write some letters for me? I find the exertion of writing tires me. Get a pen and some paper.”
    She went to the desk obediently, hoping her face didn’t show her anxiety. He was quite likely to keep her at his side, writing, for hours, and Marcia knew it. And he was likely at any moment to remember the letter and to inquire again about it. It was rather as if she were carrying a small and highly charged bomb in her sweater pocket. And under that surface uneasiness was a greater, more poignant anxiety which there was no time to consider. “… You must come,” Rob had said. “I love you.”
    Pen, stationery with “Ivan Godden” engraved upon it, a blotter. She might slip the letter somewhere in the desk. But Ivan would be sure to find it, if he suddenly decided he was able to sit in his usual chair at the desk. There must be some place in the room where she could hide the letter until she could unobtrusively take it away and destroy it.
    Ivan and Beatrice were talking, and she looked hurriedly around her. French doors, curtains, bookshelves. The aquarium at the opposite end of the room with gleams of small moving bodies in the greenish water.
    If Ivan caught one faint glimpse of a white corner of that letter she was lost.
    Ivan and Beatrice were still talking. She rose and sauntered toward the french doors. On either side of the doors were niches which had been made into small store cupboards wherein were stacked old magazines, ink and paper supplies, all the unsightly objects which accumulate