For Every Evil Read Online Free PDF

Oh, yes. Do I have any enemies?” She appeared to give it some thought. “No, not that I can think of. I’m not a young woman, Sergeant, so I suppose I’ve made my share over the years. But I can’t conceive of someone —” A ringing phone interrupted her. “Louie … sorry.” Ivy raised a limp arm. “Would you be a dear and get that?”
     
    Again, he rose and walked into the kitchen. He grabbed the receiver before the answering machine could switch on. “Micklenberg residence.”
     
    Silence.
     
    “Hello?” He waited for several seconds. Finally a young boy’s voice began to speak.
     
    “Who is this?” he demanded.
     
    Without pause, the boy continued, almost as if the words had been recorded.
     
    “Is this some kind of joke?”
     
    The boy just kept talking. Finally the line clicked.
     
    “Damn,” muttered Louie. Angrily he hung up and stood leaning against the counter, staring blankly at a bowl of oranges placed decoratively in the center of the kitchen table. Everything in this god-awful museum of a house looked like a still life. How could Ivy stand it? Out in the living room, he could hear her calling his name.
     
    “I’m coming,” he hollered. By the time he’d returned to the room, his anger had been replaced by uneasiness. Could a phone call like that, coming on the heels of tonight’s shooting incident, be a coincidence?
     
    “Who was it?” she asked.
     
    “I don’t know.”
     
    “What did they want?”
     
    He scratched his head, giving a self-conscious laugh. “You aren’t going to believe this.”
     
    The sergeant looked up from his notepad.
     
    “See, I … uh … remember the verse from when I was a little boy. It’s a nursery rhyme.”
     
    “What is?” asked Ivy, growing more impatient with each less than satisfactory answer. “What are you talking about?”
     
    “The boy on the phone. It sounded like a recording. He said, ‘For every evil under the sun, there is a remedy or there is none. If there be one, seek till you find it. If there be none, never mind it.’ “ Louie felt like a school kid reciting his lessons. He looked up, realizing everyone was watching.
     
    The room had become still.
     
    “That’s it,” said Louie, giving Ivy a helpless shrug.
     
    After a long minute, she asked, “Do you think it was a prank call?”
     
    “I don’t know.”
     
    At that same moment a red-faced and puffing Hale trudged back into the room, followed by two officers. “Everything checks out fine,” he said triumphantly, throwing himself into a chair. “No one tried to break into the gate house.” He looked from face to face. “Say, what’s going on now? Did I miss something?”
     
    A poetry reading, thought Louie, though he had the sense not to say it out loud. Folding his tall frame into the wing chair once more, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. What an evening. His night out on the town was beginning to feel more like a day at the circus.
     

5
    Bram walked briskly down Penn Avenue on his way to the Chappeldine Gallery. He felt loose. Exhilarated. Pleased with himself for the brilliant way he’d handled this morning’s program. After airing a rather dull, taped interview he’d recorded last night with Senator Arlo Barrows — an interview in which the senator artfully sidestepped every important question put to him about the Twin Cities’ newly proposed light rail transit system — Bram launched into two hours of deadly political satire. He could almost see the radios out there in radioland melting from the heat. Well, it served the old fart right. Nobody liked a politician doing the two-step on taxpayer time.
     
    Smiling at his reflection in a shop window, Bram stopped to straighten his tie. It was funny. A radio personality could live his entire life in relative anonymity — that is, until he opened his mouth. On the other hand, Bram knew he bore a striking resemblance to a certain movie actor. Unfortunately, this legend, as