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

in a library. The doors were made of paneled dark wood and were merely latched. But of course she couldn’t open one of the doors, for they would hear it and turn.
    Ivan was looking at Beatrice. Beatrice was reading. Marcia, standing with her back to the cupboard and watching Ivan and Beatrice, managed to slip first the letter and then the envelope through the small space between the door and the casing. She heard the tiny swish as they fell one after the other. Neither Ivan nor Beatrice looked up, and she moved away.
    She felt very much relieved and, indeed, a little pleased at her dexterity. She would recover the note as soon as it was safe; neither of the two was at all likely to approach the cupboard; and it would have been impossible to sit at Ivan’s elbow, writing letters for him, without his detecting the little square outline of the letter through the thin, revealing weave of her yellow sweater.
    But the afternoon wore on, she wrote innumerable letters, Beatrice brought her knitting and sat there working on it feverishly and now and then making a suggestion, and there was no chance for Marcia to recover the letter. Ivan did not refer to it again, and once he sent her to the bank, with Ancill driving, and ironically she would have had plenty of time to destroy it. But Beatrice was watching and Ivan, too, and she was obliged to leave the note where it was. After all, it was in all probability perfectly safe.
    But she was uneasy, all the way to the bank and back, through steady rain again which trickled down the windows of the car and dripped from the evergreens massed along the front walk to the house.
    Beatrice and Ivan, however, were quietly talking while Beatrice knit exactly as she left them, and she gave Ivan the envelope he had sent for—a long brown envelope labeled “I.G.—Private”—from the safe-deposit box.
    At six-thirty Beatrice turned on the lights, handed the evening paper which Ancill had brought to Ivan, and gathered up the enormous red afghan she’d been knitting on all winter.
    “I’m going to dress,” she said and paused in the doorway to look back at Marcia. “I’ll wear your silver-lamé wrap, Marcia. It’s too warm for furs, and I haven’t got summer things down from the cedar closets yet. You can wear something else.”
    “Don’t go yet, Marcia,” said Ivan suddenly from behind the paper. ‘There’s something I want to say to you. I won’t keep you long.”
    Beatrice gave Marcia a dark look and closed the door behind her, and Marcia’s breath caught in her throat.
    What was it to be? Delayed punishment for the morning of March eighteenth, four weeks ago? Or was it the letter? He had not referred to it again, but Ivan never forgot. Well, the letter was safe for the time being, and later she would recover it. That night, perhaps, when he was upstairs asleep. In the room beside her own. For the first time Marcia’s heart turned over with a sickening little lurch of horror.
    The peace of the past three weeks. Why had he returned!
    “I only want to say this, Marcia,” said Ivan suddenly, his aquamarine eyes with their small, hard, black pupils holding her own. “I have not mentioned what occurred the last time we were alone together in this room. But I have not forgotten it. You will see later that I have not forgotten and will understand certain things. Oh, of course, I felt it my duty to warn Beatrice of your—singular behavior on that day. As I shall feel it my duty to warn Verity Copley if there is any need to do so. I will speak to you later regarding the question of taste involved. Running to your neighbors with a sick dog who obviously would be better off dead. Telling them Heaven knows what erratic nonsense. Forgetting, if you were ever aware of it, any decent feeling of loyalty, of gratitude, of affection—” He was very white, and his eyes were shining with a bright, blank light, and he was panting a little. “Even going so far as to attack me. Physically.” He