Seventeen
“YOU KNOW WHAT THIS means, Tom.”
I look up from yet another letter written to Theia from K. Helen and I have read a half-dozen over the last thirty minutes, each a heartfelt expression of love mixed with a desperate dissatisfaction with K’s marriage to a woman he describes as “half-mad” and “prone to hysterics.”
“No, Helen,” I say slowly. “I don’t.”
“Oh, come on, Tom!” Helen exclaims. Picking up the letters, she says, “Kent Stirling was having an affair with Theia Stewart.”
“No, it looks like Theia Stewart was having an affair with someone named K. There’s no real indication that K is Kent Stirling.”
“This one says, ‘He’s going to Cincinnati on business for the bank for the next three days, and Harriet is going down to Hot Springs with her mother for the week. I can get awa
