Two more applications of steam and the flap curled back. Bertha took out the letter.
“All in typewriting, same as the other,” she said. “Signed on the typewriter: ‘A Friend and Well-wisher.’ Want to read this privately, or shall I read it out loud?”
“I’d better just glance at it,” Belder said, extending his hand. As his fingers closed on the sheet of paper, his hand began to shake with a series of tremors; the letter slipped from his nervous thumb and forefinger, and volplaned back and forth to the floor in a series of swinging zigzags.
“You read it,” he said to Bertha.
Bertha cleared her throat and read:
“Dear Mrs. Belder, Who was the woman who came to your husband’s office Monday afternoon — a woman who threw her arms around him and kissed him as soon as the office door had closed? Perhaps you’ll be willing to meet me and talk with me; perhaps you prefer to live in a fool’s paradise. In any event, please believe that I am your sincere friend and well-wisher.”
Bertha raised her eyes over bifocal glasses to regard Everett Belder’s startled countenance. “Who,” she asked, “was the girl?”
“Good heavens! No one knows about her.”
“Who was she?”
“Dolly Cornish.”