Both sides of the creek were littered with envelopes, white and brown and tan and beige. Hundreds of them. They were everywhere, like rectangular patches of snow or some bizarre form of fungus that grew in precise geometrical patterns, covering everything, caught on bushes, sticking out from between rocks. Most of them were wet and waterlogged, in the mud at the edge of the creek. Still others were perched in the branches of nearby trees.

“Weird, huh?” Billy said excitedly. He pulled an envelope from the branches of a sapling next to him.

Doug picked up the two nearest envelopes. Bills. He recognized them immediately from the preprinted return address and the clear window with the name, number, street, city, state, and zip code of the intended recipient. He looked around him. Nearly all of the envelopes seemed to be of the short squarish type that ordinarily housed bills or bad news. Very few were of the long less formal variety or were the small cute envelopes of personalized stationary.

He stared, stunned, at thirty or forty envelopes that looked like they were growing on a tree.

The mailman had been dumping mail at the creek.

It was an inescapable conclusion, but it still gave Doug a strange feeling to acknowledge it. Why would the mailman do such a thing? What was the point? What was the reason? The very strangeness of it was frightening, and he could not understand what the mailman hoped to gain. It was crazy. If he had simply wanted to get rid of the letters, he could have burned them or buried them or dumped them someplace more convenient. He looked around. The spot was so far off the beaten track that Doug did not see how the mailman could even have known about it. He would have had to hike in a mile and a half from the road to get here, carrying the mailbags, since there was no path to this location that was wide enough to drive upon.

He glanced over at Billy. His son must have seen the expression on his own face, for he had dropped the envelope he was holding. The excitement was disappearing from his eyes and was being replaced by what looked like understanding.

And fear.