Into the Night

“No, strangely enough, I didn’t,” Charlotte said. “I went to my priest, and he played a great part in relieving my mind. He said, in effect, that lightning never strikes twice, and it was almost outside the bounds of possibility that such a thing should happen a second time to the same family, the same parents. I saw what good sense this made, and from that time on I lost all my fears.”

“Are you sure you have no objection?” Madeline asked, before untying the slender packet Charlotte had handed her.

“No, go ahead; you’re welcome to read them if you want to,” Charlotte invited. “There isn’t anything of consequence in them; just the typical letter a girl away from home sends home.”

Then she added pensively, “I suppose it’s foolish to keep letters — especially after the writer is gone.”

“But we all do at one time or another,” Madeline reminded her.

“You’ll have to turn them upside down if you want to read them in order,” Charlotte pointed out. “The early ones are at the bottom, the later ones at the top.”

It may help me to know her better, Madeline thought defensively, and knew she was lying to herself. She wasn’t trying to know Starr better; she was simply prying, trying to ferret out evidence, almost the way a detective would have. She was uneasily aware there was a big difference between questioning Charlotte conversationally and reading Starr’s private letters, letters written to someone else. At least there was to her own mind, which was what counted. It was like seeing someone undressed.

She took them over beside a window and sat down there, to read them in more privacy. Charlotte remained where she’d been, silently looking down at the backs of her own hands, as if reliving in memory the time she’d first read them herself.

Madeline didn’t read each one through from start to finish; she didn’t have to. Her eyes would skim down the page and pick out a key phrase. Sometimes the whole gist of the letter, its importance to her purpose, was expressed in that key phrase.