What he’d missed at the time and what he could not stop thinking about now was the absence of Jeeter and Amy Carrick from the service. He did not like them, never had and knew his father had not either but still. They should have been there. What bothered him more was he was sure Patrick Jackson had noted their absence also. And said nothing. Which meant he was also turning them over in his mind. Or he was accepting something. Foster wanted to know which. But would not contact Jackson to talk about it. He could not say why. Maybe nothing more than an echo of his father reverberating within him. But one night he went to his father’s bedroom where he’d not been in years and tipped open the door and turned on the light. He went to the small rolltop desk and sat and went through it, all the pigeonholes, all the drawers, all the loose papers scattered over the surface. He did not know what he was looking for but knew he would know it when he found it. Confident that willing or not his father had left some message for him. What he found was nothing close to his thoughts. One of the small drawers pulled out hard unless lifted up in its track. He got the drawer free and went down on his knees and reached back in and pulled out a small packet of letters bound with a rubber band. At first he thought they might be old letters from his mother to his father and was excited by the idea. But the most recent postmark was little more than two years old. He went back through them. All the same return address, an Abigail Pelham of Randolph, Vermont. The same handwriting. Postmarked every couple or three years. Each and every one addressed to his father but at a distant post office, General Delivery. Wells River. Conway. Berlin. He sat for a time, holding them in his lap, knowing he held something that would forever change what he knew of his father. From a box on the desk took one of his father’s cigarettes and lighted it and decided that some part of him would forever be trying to clarify that knowledge. And so opened the most recent of the letters and unfolded the single sheet. Pale ink gone brown on the page it began:

March 29, 1926

Dear Jamie,

Father has passed….