Three for a Letter Read Online Free PDF

girl he addressed had been given a semblance of life by the sun’s rays, but she remained silent.
    Zoe was a familiar figure, a confidante who knew more about John than anyone, for in times of stress he spoke to her. John knew that the habit distressed his elderly servant Peter, but he found it aided him in untangling his thoughts. Talking to Zoe allowed him to sort through untidy scraps of information. Thus, however indirectly, it helped bring him to a point where he could take the always breathtaking leap from uncertainty to clarity. It was subsequently proving what he saw to be the truth that was the difficulty, as he had remarked to Zoe more than once.
    This evening, however, something in the mosaic girl’s appearance troubled John. He got up and paced back and forth across the tiles through the light of the sunset. After a while he realized the source of the problem.
    “It’s the other girl,” John told Zoe. “She looks like you.”
    It wasn’t just the large, almond-shaped eyes that the surviving twin Sunilda had in common with Zoe, although that similarity was striking enough. He recalled the little girl he had seen only briefly. She was, if anything, small for her age, with the thin limbs of a child but blessed with long, dark hair shadowing a solemn face that seemed much older.
    Perhaps that was where the real resemblance lay, he mused. Both children, the one a guest on the rambling estate by the sea and the other living on John’s study wall, exhibited an air of maturity beyond their years. There was something mysterious about both of them too, as if they were not quite what they appeared to be.
    “But, then,” John muttered, stopping to look out of the window into the square and talking to himself as much as to the mosaic girl, “who can blame those who have been imprisoned by circumstances as much as by prison bars if they develop strange humors?”
    A rising breeze carried the tang of salt from the Sea of Marmara through the half-open window. The smell reminded John of the travels of his youth, the long journeys that had taken him half way around the world. Difficult and often dangerous travel, to be sure, yet no place he had visited, not even Egypt, had struck him as more exotic than Zeno’s estate.
    “How long a journey from Italy it must have seemed for one as young as Sunilda,” he reflected. “She’s scarcely your age and already she’s lost her brother, Zoe. I think you would enjoy walking with her on the beach or looking for shells or perhaps even playing dodge ball with her.”
    He paused, awkwardly and suddenly aware that he had not seen his own child grow from an infant to the coltish grace of the girl living in Zeno’s villa, far away from any of her blood relatives. How could he be certain what such children thought or what games they would enjoy?
    “It’s a sad thing that the boy died so young. I fear Zeno will ultimately suffer for his carelessness, but fortunately for him he doesn’t appear to realize that. No wonder Anatolius has such an unworldly streak at times. It must be in the blood.”
    The room was growing dark. Peter would soon bring in a lamp and announce his master’s meal was prepared, just as he did each evening. The thought reminded John of the lamps that had revealed the pathetically crumpled body of the boy when the mechanical whale’s mouth ponderously opened. Would the lighting of a lamp forever summon forth the same memory?
    He recalled what had happened at the banquet. He had been first to realize that the figure within the great maw was not going to comically leap forward and indeed was not even Barnabas. But where could the mime have gone after performing his last scene?
    And why would he have murdered Gadaric?
    A tap at the study door disturbed John’s ruminations. Peter entered and set his lamp on John’s desk. The elderly servant averted his eyes from the glassy, hypnotic gaze of the mosaic girl as he replenished John’s wine from the jug on the