Still, Eberly was on ice and the concert was safe, no trouble there. Mitch and Amy had about the best seats in the house, and afterwards they’d go back stage where there’d be a kind of reception, just for the VIP’s. So all in all, things weren’t too bad. They could have been worse, much worse.
The Problem of the Pink Post Office
by Edward D. Hoch
© 1981 by Edward D. Hoch
Join Dr. Sam Hawthorne as once again he consults the file-cards in his memory-casebook and relates the puzzling circumstances of another “impossible crime”... Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” first appeared in 1845, and ever since, these past 136 years, it has been a standard detective-story concept — with innumerable variations. Here is a variation of 1929 — of October 24, 1929, to be exact; but this time the purloined letter, looked for everywhere, was nowhere to be found — or so it seemed...
“Now this is what I call a summer’s day!” Dr. Sam Hawthorne said as he poured the drinks. “Makes me feel young again! We can sit out here under the trees without a care in the world and reminisce about the old days. What’s that? I promised to tell you about the Northmont post office and what happened back in 1929 on the day of the stock market crash? Well, I guess that was a memorable affair, all right — and it presented me with a problem unique among all the cases I helped investigate during those years. Unique in what way? Well, I suppose I should start at the beginning...”
The date, I well remember, was Thursday, October 24, 1929, (Dr. Sam continued), and in future years it would be known as Black Thursday, though several of the days that followed were even worse for the stock market. In the morning, though, it was just another autumn day in Northmont. The sky was cloudy, with the temperature in the low fifties, and there was a threat of rain in the air.
It was the day that Vera Brock finished painting her new post office, and since business was slow at the office my nurse April and I strolled down to see it. Until now the post office had always been located in the general store, and we viewed it as a sign of progress that the old sweet shoppe opposite the town square had been taken over by the government for a post office.
“Now we’ve got our own hospital and our own separate post office!” April exclaimed. “We’re growin’ bigger all the time, Dr. Sam.”
“Boston better start worrying,” I said with a smile.
“Oh, now you’re makin’ fun of me, but it’s true. Northmont’s going to be on the map.”
“The post-office map, at least.” I spotted our postmistress, Vera Brock, hurrying along the street with a can of paint. She was a solid woman in her forties who’d run the post office in the general store for as long as I’d been in Northmont. “Vera!” I called out to her.
“Morning, Dr. Sam. You an’ April coming for your mail?”
“We wanted to see the new post office.”
She hefted the can of paint. “This is opening day and I discovered one whole wall I forgot to paint! Can you believe that?”
She unlocked the post-office door and we followed her inside. “It’s pink!” April gasped, and I don’t think she would have been more startled if the walls had been covered with tropical vines. “A pink post office!”
“Well, the paint was cheap,” Vera Brock admitted. “Hume Baxter ordered it by mistake and he gave me a good price on it. I figured I’d save the government some money. Just last month the Postmaster General estimated this year’s deficit at a hundred million dollars and said the cost of a first-class letter might have to go up to three cents.”
“I can’t believe that,” April scoffed. “The two-cent letter is a tradition.”
“We’ll see. Anyway, I figured a cheap coat of paint wouldn’t do any harm.”
“But pink, Vera!” April exclaimed.
“It don’t look so awful to me, but then I guess I’m a bit color blind anyhow.”
The new post office was a good-sized room about twenty feet square, which had been split across the middle by a counter where people could go to pick up their mail or purchase stamps and postcards. The back wall was lined with the usual wooden pigeonholes where the mail was sorted for pickup. In those days, of course, there was no home delivery. Everyone had to come to Vera Brock’s post office for their mail.
“Well, I don’t think it looks half bad, Vera,” I said. “This town could stand some perkin’ up.”
The words were hardly out of my mouth when the door opened and in came Miranda Grey, the perkiest thing to hit Northmont in many a moon. I’d met Miranda the previous summer, during the business on Chester Lake, and we’d dated regularly for a few months. With the coming of autumn and the reopening of school, there was the usual increase in illness, and in my house calls. What with one thing and another, Miranda and I saw less of each other, though I suspected the fact that she’d stayed on in Northmont past the end of summer meant she had serious intentions. Maybe they were more serious than mine.
“Hello, Sam, how are you?” she greeted me. “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you since last Saturday night. I was beginning to think you’d moved to Boston.”
I tried to see if her eyes were laughing as she spoke to me, but they weren’t. She was downright upset at my not having called her for five days. “This damp weather’s brought on a lot of illness, Miranda. I’ve been busy day and night.”
“I thought the new hospital was taking some of the load off you.”
“It is, for serious illness. But they still call on me for the flu and the chicken pox. I just don’t have as much free time as I had in the summer, Miranda.”
Through all this exchange April stood to one side, eyeing Miranda with something like apprehension. I think April saw her as a threat to the office, and to my ability to devote all my time to our patients. For whatever reason, Miranda was a danger in April’s eyes, and I’d become increasingly aware of it with each passing month.
About that time Vera Brock must have realized she wasn’t going to get any painting done on the opening day of her new post office. We were there and more people were coming by all the time, no doubt attracted by the pink walls seen through the front window. She stood for a moment contemplating the unfinished job — the right-hand wall as you entered was still a dull yellowish-tan from the counter to the front. “I’m gonna ask Hume Baxter if he can close up his store for an hour and come paint this for me,” she said. “I just don’t have time to do it today.”
“I can’t believe you forgot to paint that whole part of the wall,” April said.
“This big cabinet with all its pigeonholes was out there against the wall when I painted. They moved it back here yesterday and I discovered I’d forgotten to paint behind it.”
“Wish I had the time, Vera,” I said. “I’d do it for you.”
“No, no, Dr. Sam, I wouldn’t hear of it! Hume can be over here in ten minutes if he’s not busy.”
The idea of Hume Baxter ever being busy almost made me chuckle. He’d opened his paint, hardware, and farm-supply store right in the center of town about a year earlier, but how he managed to keep going with the small amount of business he did was more than I could figure out. Farmers didn’t like to get all dressed up for a trip into town when they needed supplies in a hurry, and the amount of business he got from the townsfolk was minimal.
Still, everyone liked Hume Baxter because he tried so hard to please. And sure enough, within ten minutes he appeared at Vera’s post office, paint brush in hand: He was a sandy-haired fellow in his mid-thirties, just a little older than me, and he was barely in the door when Miranda began flirting with him.