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Back THE MAILMAN Save as PDF
Chapters (57)
  1. DEDICATION
  2. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
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  8. 6
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  57. 55

And by the time she had driven home it was starting to sound pretty damn good.

39

The phone rang, and Doug was awake instantly. He reached over Tritia’s sleeping body and picked it up in the middle of the second ring. A feeling of heavy foreboding had awakened with him, and he glanced at the clock on the dresser as he brought the receiver to his ear, thinking with the fading vestiges of dream logic that he needed to remember the time of this call.

Two-fifteen.

“Hello?” Doug said. His voice was tired, tinged with annoyance at being disturbed, but there was an edge in it as well as he prepared himself for bad news. No one called at two-fifteen in the morning if it wasn’t bad news.

“Mr. Albin?” It was Mike Trenton. Doug’s throat felt constricted, his chest tight, and he had to force himself to swallow. The policeman sounded strange. Not exactly frightened, but something very close to it.

“What happened?” he asked.

“It’s Mr. Beecham. He’s, uh, he’s dead.”

Doug closed his eyes, letting his head fall onto the pillow, unwilling to make the effort anymore to keep it up.

“We found him on the floor of his cell,” Mike continued. “His forehead is completely caved in, and there’s blood all over the wall and floor. It’s hard to tell, but it appears as though he butted his head against the wall until he smashed open his skull.

“We took away his clothes and shoelaces when we admitted him, but he didn’t seem dangerous or self-destructive and we didn’t think there was any need to restrain him or—”

Doug reached over Tritia’s body and hung up the phone. After a second’s thought, he took it off the hook.

“What is it?” Tritia asked groggily.

Doug said nothing but simply stared into space, and a moment later she had again fallen asleep.

He did not sleep until morning.

40

The funeral was short and sparsely attended. Hobie Beecham had not been the most popular man in Willis during the best of times, and the mailman’s successfully slanderous framing of the auto-shop teacher had obviously taken its toll on Hobie’s already low popularity rating. As Doug stood next to the open grave, he found himself wondering if anyone would have shown up even if the murder hadn’t occurred. The mailman’s continued psychic assault on the town seemed to have drained a lot of the energy from people, had made them less social, angrier, less trustworthy. He wondered if even Bob Ronda could draw the crowd today he’d been able to draw a month ago.