Stockley was right. He should go to the police and tell them everything.

The editor opened a drawer, drawing out a stack of mail. “Newspapers always get a lot of mail. A lot of weird mail. We get put on every crackpot mailing list imaginable. Nazis want us to give them free publicity, communists want us to cover their causes, religious fanatics want us to explain to people how the anti-Christ has infiltrated the government. For two weeks—the two weeks after Ronda died—we got nothing but good mail, like you said. Subscriptions were up, letters of praise rolled in, even the chronic cranks stopped harassing us. That was weird enough in itself. Then, a few days ago, we began to get these.” He picked up the top letter from his pile. “Here, read this.”

Doug took the letter and quickly read it over. It described in detail the sexual torture and mutilation of someone named Cindy Howell. He grimaced. The description was so grisly and so disgusting that he could not finish reading it. “Who is Cindy Howell?” he asked.

“My daughter,” Stockley replied.

Doug looked immediately up.

“She’s fine. Nothing’s happened to her. She lives in Chicago, and I called her right away. I called the Chicago police and told them, sent a photocopy of the letter to them, in fact. They’re keeping a surveillance on her house as a favor.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“That’s because I never told anyone in town. She was from my first marriage, and I never told anyone about that, either.”

“How do you think the mailman found out?”

“I’m not sure it is the mailman. Read the postmark. It’s from Chicago. It could be from enemies I made there or from some crazy who’s after my daughter. Or it could just be a harmless threat from some crank. Notice that it’s written in the past tense. These are all things that’re supposed to have happened already.”

“But you said you thought the mailman was—”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything.” He hefted the pile of letters. “These are all similar. They’re postmarked from cities all over the country and involve people I’ve known throughout my life. They’re not all sexually explicit like that one, but they’re all equally sick. They could all be part of some organized effort to harass me, although I can’t see a reason why; or they could all be part of some outrageously unlikely coincidence. I’m inclined to believe you about the mailman because I’ve noticed the same pattern in my mail as you have. And because other people have hinted about it to me as well. I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but it does seem to be centered around the mail and it does seem to have started after this John Smith took over.”