The mailman was a paradox. Doug hated the man, but as he had told Howard, the man had been delivering the most consistently good mail they had ever received. Of course, the carrier had nothing to do with the contents of the mail—if the messenger was not to be blamed for the message, he was not to be congratulated either—but it was hard not to associate the two.

He glanced over at Tritia, peacefully looking out over the creek at the cliffs beyond. He was surprised that she had not felt any real dislike for the mailman, that she had not picked up on the unnaturalness that seemed to be an inherent part of his makeup. Ordinarily, she was by far the more sensitive of them, noticing instantly any behavioral aberrance, making snap judgments based on intuition, which were usually correct. He did not see how she could be so blind this time.

He opened the book on his lap. Why had he been thinking about the mailman so much lately? It was beginning to border on the obsessive. He had to force himself to stop it. He had to quit sitting around, worrying, fretting, and find something else with which to occupy his time. Instead of thinking about the mailman, he should be getting to work on that damn storage shed.

But Howard didn’t like him either.

That meant nothing. Two negative reactions to a person’s personality did not mean that that person was evil.

Evil.

Evil.

There. He had thought it, if not actually said it. For that was the word that had been floating in the back of his mind since the day at the funeral when he had first seen the mailman. It was a simplistic word, almost cartoonish in its romantic-pulp implications, but much as he hated to acknowledge or recognize it, it was the word that best described what he felt about the mailman.

The man was evil.

“What are you thinking?” Tritia asked.

He looked up, startled and embarrassed to be caught in his ruminations. “Nothing,” he lied, turning back to the book in his lap.

“Something.”

“Nothing.” He was aware that she was staring at him, but he chose not to acknowledge the fact. Instead, he concentrated on the words in front of him, on the meaning behind the words, on the thoughts behind the meaning, trying to lose himself in the prose. Eventually, he succeeded. Just as he used to fall asleep as a child while pretending to be sleeping as his parents checked in on him, he now began reading while pretending to read.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, he heard Billy’s voice, only a fraction louder than the creek song but rapidly gaining in volume. He looked up from his book.

“Dad!”