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Back THE MAILMAN Save as PDF
Chapters (57)
  1. DEDICATION
  2. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
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  10. 8
  11. 9
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  57. 55

“I don’t know,” Doug said. And he didn’t. He suddenly wanted very badly to see what was written on that note pinned to the boy’s chest. He took a step forward.

“Stay back please,” the policeman warned, holding his hand palm-up in Doug’s direction.

“I have to see something. I was his teacher.”

“Only official personnel and family members are allowed near the body.”

“Just for a second.”

“Sorry,” the policeman said.

Doug turned away from the gym and pushed his way out the door, into the fresh air, needing more room, more space in which to breathe. The blood was pounding in his temples.

Bernie Rogers had been planning to work part-time at the post office.

The post office.

It didn’t make any logical rational sense, but in some twisted way it fit, and it scared the hell out of him.

He moved through the small crowd and leaned against a tree, gulping in the fresh air. He looked up, toward the road, and thought he saw, through the pines, a red car moving slowly away from the park toward the center of town.

14

Tritia sat alone on the porch, feeling uncharacteristically depressed. Both Doug and Billy were gone, Doug to his meeting and Billy off somewhere with Lane, and she was all alone. Usually she liked being by herself. She so seldom had time alone anymore that, when the opportunity presented itself, she was grateful. But today she felt different, strange.

The cassette player was next to her on the slatted wooden floor of the porch. It had been barely working the last time she’d used it, but she’d scavenged three batteries from one of Billy’s old remote-controlled cars and had found a fourth in a drawer in the kitchen, and now it was playing perfectly. She had the tape player turned loud. George Winston. Ordinarily, she liked to match the music to the day, choosing sounds to complement her feelings, but today the music seemed totally inappropriate for a sound track to her life. The soothing impressionistic piano, the deliberate spacing of clear notes and silences, went perfectly with the summer sky and green forest, but she herself felt hopelessly out of sync.

She stared out at the trees, at the hummingbird-feeders hanging from the branches, seeing them but not seeing them, her eyes using the feeders as a focal point, though her mind was off in space somewhere, thinking about something else.

Thinking about the mailman.