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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
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9
  12. 10
  13. 11
  14. 12
  15. 13
  16. 14
  17. 15
  18. 16
  19. 17
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  30. 28
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  33. 31
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  35. 33
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  37. 35
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  39. 37
  40. 38
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  42. 40
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  57. 55

“I don’t think the first one was either,” he said, anticipating her question. “I don’t think Don got a job in Phoenix, I don’t think the Jennings are moving to Arizona, I don’t think he wrote to me at all.”

Tritia felt a tremor of fear pass through her. “That’s an awful lot of trouble for someone to go through just to play a practical joke,” she said. “That first letter was so detailed. Whoever wrote it either knew Don or knew you, because there were things in there that a stranger couldn’t possibly’ve known.”

“It wasn’t a joke,” Doug said. “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a joke.” He held out his hand. “Let me see your letter.”

She didn’t really want him to read the letter, but she handed it to him anyway. She watched his eyes dart quickly from left to right as he scanned the words.

“That’s what I thought.”

They were silent for a moment. Tritia looked over at Billy, who was watching TV, pretending he hadn’t heard what they were talking about. He’d heard, she knew. But she was glad he was pretending he hadn’t. She didn’t want to talk to him about this, didn’t want to explain what she couldn’t explain.

She turned away from Doug. She didn’t want to talk about it to him either. She didn’t want to talk about it at all. She began unpacking groceries.

16

“That’s a very interesting theory,” Stockley said. “Very interesting.” He broke open a fortune cookie, reading his fortune, throwing the slip of paper away and slowly chewing the cookie as he mulled over what Doug had just told him.

A slovenly paunchy man in his mid-fifties, Ben Stockley looked like a stereotypical reporter. His pants were always black, his shirt always white, and both were always wrinkled. His hair was gray and thin, combed back over his scalp, and was slightly too long for both his age and contemporary fashion. Stockley’s face was rough and leathery, with blunt Broderick Crawford features, and he always seemed to be sweating, no matter what the temperature. In his lower right desk drawer, the editor kept a box of risqué fortune cookies he ordered directly from some company in New York. He bought the fortune cookies because he loved them and said he didn’t want to have to pay for a whole meal just to get one, but he also enjoyed giving the cookies to unsuspecting visitors and watching the reactions on their faces as they read their usually obscene fortunes. He particularly liked giving the cookies to bashful young women and prim old ladies.

“Well, what do you think?” Doug asked.

“You going to blame the mailman for poisoning dogs, too?”

Doug slumped in his seat. “You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that.”