Woodton was fourteen miles southeast of Grand Plain. A bank and the post office filled one side of the block-long main street. I walked into the post office lobby at twelve fifteen. Though it was lunchtime, I was the only customer, and my running shoes made loud squeegee noises as I crossed the polished marble floor to the small wall of brass postal boxes. Their numbers stopped at 75, six short of my number 81. I went over to show Louise’s will to the young girl in the service window.
“Do you have any mail holds for this woman, Louise Thomas?”
“No, we sure don’t,” she said right off. Then she stopped, pursed her lips, and turned to open a small wooden box. A second later, she produced a three-by-five index card. “Leastways, we’re not getting any mail addressed to Louise Thomas. But a person of that name did fill out a hold request last year. We do that for people who are gone a lot.” She smiled a good, white-toothed smile of youth, told me she’d be right back, and disappeared through a door at the back of the mail sorting room.
Five minutes later, the interior door to the lobby opened and a thin, sour-looking fellow emerged. His narrow face was pinched and wrinkled, as though from spending his entire life squinting at poor penmanship. He was carrying a plastic tub, stenciled with U.S. MAIL on its side, as though it were half-filled with bricks instead of thick tan envelopes. He dropped the tub at my feet, sending a loud thud echoing through the marble foyer.
“Perhaps you can get in here more frequently,” he groaned, wiping his brow in anticipation of any perspiration that might bead there.
The right thing would have been to remind him that mail piling up would no longer be a problem, since his clerk must have told him I’d showed her Louise’s will. Instead, I put on a happy smile and bent down to pick up the box, one-handed. It was heavy, but not like bricks. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“I’ve heard that before,” he said.
Already the tub was tugging my hand. “When was she in last?”
“The woman? Not for a while. I meant the fellow before you. He said he’d make sure it didn’t pile up.” He shook his head. “He hadn’t even bothered to bring authorization, just asked for the mail. Like I’d hand it over to a stranger?”
I tried to give him what I hoped was a sympathetic smile-clearly the man’s life was a soap opera of unwarranted indignities-but the tub was beginning to tear the ligaments out of my shoulder, and I was afraid my face was showing the pain. I shifted the tub to my other hand, in what I hoped was an unobtrusive manner. “This fellow-when was he in?”
“Two weeks ago. No, maybe the week before that.”
“He wanted her mail?”
“Can you believe?”
I could believe, if he’d murdered Louise Thomas and hadn’t found what he was looking for in her cottage.
“What did he look like?”
The postmaster gave a dismissive shrug. “Ordinary, very ordinary, like you. Your height, but older. He was slimmer, though.”
“Hair color?”
He shook his head. “He wore a knit hat, pulled low, for the cold.”
“Eyes?”
“Our conversation was very brief.”
“What about Ms. Thomas? What did she look like?”
“Like the star of a trashy Dracula movie.” He laughed, trilling against the marble on the floor and the walls. “I mean, every time she came in for her mail, she had on a hooded dark coat and dark glasses. Summer, winter, it didn’t matter; she was always shrouded.”
“She’s dead.”
“So my clerk told me.”
I shifted the tub back to my right hand. My entire body, from the shoulders on down, was throbbing. “I’ll have her mail forwarded to me, so you won’t have to bother with it anymore.”
He walked me quickly back to the counter and produced a forwarding authorization form. I set down the tub, as grateful as I’d ever been for anything, and reached for the counter pen with a trembling hand.
“Mind you return it,” he said.
“What?” Confused, I turned to look at him.
“The container.” He gestured at the tub on the floor. I nodded, gave him his form back, and picked up the tub, again one-handed. As soon as I was outside, I put both hands to it so it wouldn’t fall from my trembling arms.
There was a white stucco diner across the street with a sign in the window advertising the day’s special of chicken-fried steak for $4.99. Chicken for lunch is a requirement of good health. I went in and set the tub beside me on the seat of a red vinyl booth by the window. It was one ten, and like the post office, the diner was empty. I was too hungry to care why nobody was lingering there after lunch.
A matronly waitress in a pink uniform came over. I waved away her offer of a menu, told her I’d have the special. “But only put half the gravy on it,” I said. I’d begun the day by skipping Oreos; now I was cutting back on gravy. Soon my ribs would emerge.
She peered over her reading glasses. “We could hold the gravy altogether if you’re dieting.”
“Half the gravy should do it, thanks,” I said, smiling up.
“We could hold the potatoes. You could have fruit.”
“Fruit’s got a lot of sugar,” I said.
“We could hold the fruit.”
“Just as I ordered it, please,” I said. “Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, half the gravy. And coffee, black.”
“You know the chicken fried steak isn’t really steak?” She wasn’t going to yield.
“Is it chicken?”
“Some of it comes from a chicken.”
“Will I be able to tell what’s under the breading?”
“Probably not,” she said, conceding the point, “but to make double sure, we cover the meat and the breading with lots of thick gravy.” She tore my order from her little pad and walked to the grill window.
I pulled one of the large envelopes from the tub. It was addressed simply to H. D. and had been mailed two weeks before, from a Smith’s Secretarial on Windward Island, in Florida.
It was the same island where the oldest of Louise’s newspaper columns had come from.
My waitress came back with the coffee, a basket of rolls, and a dish of little butter tubs the size of sliced doughnut holes. She made a show of turning to walk away, but she was moving slow, hanging back, daring me to butter a bun. I managed a smile for her and went back to the envelope.
By now my fingers were tingling. I ripped open the envelope. Inside was a loose bunch of smaller envelopes along with some photocopies. I turned the big tan envelope to slide everything out onto the table.
Most of the smaller envelopes were white and business-sized, but a few were square, in neon green, yellow, and pink, the kind for greeting cards. I spread them out across the surface of the table. All had been mailed to Honestly Dearest, care of the Bayonne, New Jersey, Register. None had been opened.
The photocopies looked to be mock-ups of Honestly Dearest newspaper columns, set in newspaper type.
Reader letters and copies of future advice columns, forwarded up from Florida to an H.D. in Woodton, Michigan.
My mind did loops around the impossibility of it, as I saw again the clutter of newspaper sheets strewn all around inside the tiny, frozen cottage in Rambling, and the old, black typewriter in the bedroom.
I fumbled at opening one of the regular white envelopes. “Dear Honestly Dearest,” it began, “I’m a middle-aged housewife, trite I know, who’s been having romantic fantasies about the man…”
I dropped it back onto the pile and tore open another of the thick tan envelopes forwarded up from Florida. More small envelopes addressed to Honestly Dearest were inside, along with another mock-up of a future column. Something new, too: a white envelope that had been addressed with merely a name, handwritten in large, cursive letters: Carolina.
I slit it with my fingernail. “Carolina!” the same large scrawl had been written on a sheet of white typing paper. “We’re about out of backlog! Have you succumbed to the beach in sunny Ef El A?!! RUSH MORE!!!!! Charles.”