“Okay.” She opened the screen door. “Better put some gas in the car too. We’re almost out.”

“Yeah.”

As he walked down the porch steps and across the gravel to the Bronco, he heard the television shut off, heard Trish talking to Billy. The sound of her voice, used not in anger but in concern, was nice and familiarly comforting, like the voice of an old friend not heard in a while, and suddenly he felt much better.

The Bronco was nearly out of gas, the fuel gauge on empty, and the first thing he did was stop by the Circle K and put in five dollars’ worth.

The second thing he did was drive to Howard’s house.

He pulled to a stop in front of the low ranch-style home. It now looked definitely abandoned. The lawn was tan, even the weeds dried up and dead. Next door, a man was just getting out of his pickup and Doug quickly got out of the car and tried to wave him down. “Hey,” he called.

The man took one look at him and hurried into his house.

Doug stopped walking. The whole damn town was acting squirrelly. He considered approaching Howard’s neighbors on the other side, knocking on their door, asking if they’d seen the postmaster, but he had a feeling that he wouldn’t get much cooperation from them. Or anyone else in the neighborhood.

He noticed that several other lawns were starting to look kind of ragged.

Knowing he would probably get no answer or response, he walked up Howard’s driveway and knocked on the door. Pounded on the door. Yelled for Howard to come out. But his entreaties were met with no response. Again he checked the front door, the back door, the windows, but again everything was locked up tight. A darker, more solid drape seemed to have been put up behind the original curtains because now nothing could be seen inside the house, not even a shadow.

He wondered if he should call the police. Howard’s house now showed definite signs of abandonment, and since no one except the mailman could claim to have seen him at all within the past few weeks, there seemed to him good cause to break into the postmaster’s house and see if he was all right.

But he knew calling the police would do no good. He had told them the same story last time, and they’d done zippity shit. Besides, they’d never even try to get a search warrant or break into Howard’s house unless they saw the mailman run inside the door with the postmaster’s bloody head in his hands.