The two of them remained within the HQ for the rest of the morning, talking, looking at the pictures, reading aloud the party jokes, like the friends they had always been and had thought they always would be.

15

The entire town was talking about The Suicides. For that was how they thought of them now. The Suicides. In big capital letters. It had been easy in the aftermath of the funeral and the outpouring of public sympathy for Bob Ronda’s family to focus on the mailman’s life rather than his death, to dwell on his good points. But the fact remained that he had killed himself. He had blown his brains out with a double-barreled shotgun and had, in the process, pushed his wife over the edge of sanity and let down an entire town that had loved him, cared about him, believed in him.

And now Bernie Rogers had done it as well.

It was all Doug and Tritia heard about at the grocery store. The Suicides. Willis had had suicides before—Texacala Armstrong had shot herself last year just after her husband had been finally taken by cancer—but the deaths had been isolated and understandable: people dying of disease, people who had recently lost a loved one, people with no hope. Never, in anyone’s memory, had there been two suicides within two weeks of each other. And by seemingly normal people for no good reason.

The bizarreness of the coincidence was not lost upon anyone, and shocked grief was mixed with both morbid curiosity and superstitious fear as people talked in hushed whispers about what had happened. Even the worst gossips in town seemed to approach the subject reverently, as if suicide was a communicable disease and by not trivializing or sensationalizing the deaths they could somehow vaccinate themselves against it.

The afternoon before, after returning from the meeting, Doug had told Tritia about Bernie Rogers, about seeing the body, about his suspicions. She, in turn, had told him about the call from Ronda’s wife and about the letter from Howard, although she still, for some reason, could not bring herself to tell him of her nocturnal experience with the mailman. He wanted to go immediately to the police, to explain to them that he thought the mailman was somehow behind or responsible for both deaths, but she convinced him, after a heated name-calling argument, that as a teacher and supposedly respected member of the community, he could not afford to damage his credibility by making wild accusations. He still had the envelopes they’d retrieved from the creek, but he realized that everything else was entirely unsubstantiated and required not only a tremendous leap of faith but also a belief in… what?

The supernatural?