I professed ignorance, too.
We got to reminiscing about the past. “Remember when you used to write those complaint letters and get us free food and tickets to amusement parks and everything?” He laughed. “That was outrageous!”
The strongest memory he had from our youth was of me writing letters.
I was tempted to tell him everything. I wanted to be able to spill my guts to someone, and it was all I could do not to blurt out what I was and where I’d really been for the past year and a half. Maybe, eventually, I’ll tell him, I thought.
But I’d do it through a letter.
It was nearly ten o’clock when Edson went into his study and returned with a photo of his rental house. “There’s a map on the back,” he said, “so you should have no trouble finding it. It’s right off Harbor, close to the fairgrounds. Electricity’s on. Water’s on. There’s no phone, but I got a cell you can use. Here’s the key. You need me to come with you, help you pack, show you the place, whatever?”
“No,” I said. “I think I can figure it out. Besides, it’s getting late. I’ll call you if anything’s wrong. Otherwise expect to hear from me tomorrow.”
“You got it.”
“And… thanks,” I said again. I couldn’t seem to say it enough. “I really appreciate this. It means a lot—”
He grinned. “Get out of here, you weenie.”
I’d been thinking I had to go back to the hotel, but I realized now that I didn’t. I still had the key to my room, but there was nothing in it other than my old clothes, which I was planning to ditch anyway. I had no luggage, no belongings. Everything was in the car. I could just throw away the key and disappear, and since I’d paid in cash, there was no credit card tying anything to me.
So I drove to Edson’s rental house.
Located in the middle of a block lined with similar homes, it was not unlike the houses in Acacia in which we’d grown up. This one had a living room, a family room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a fairly large kitchen. It was fully furnished, and if the furniture wasn’t new, at least it was usable. The electricity was indeed on, and I immediately flipped on some lights and turned on the television. I’d grown suspicious of silence and wary of the dark.
Once more, I was nearly overcome with emotion. Yesterday, I’d been practically homeless. Three days before that, I’d been living in a bleak synthetic world and had been so despondent I’d wanted to kill myself. Now I was safely ensconced in a suburban house in which I could live for free as long as I needed while I looked for my wife and son.
I should have written fewer complaint letters, I thought. More letters of encouragement.
Which reminded me…
I looked around for the mail slot. There was none. This was obviously one of those houses with an outside box. I opened the front door and peeked out. Sure enough, a black rectangle with two curved underarms for magazines and oversized flyers was mounted on the stucco wall next to the door. Out of habit, I opened the top, felt inside.
My fingers touched paper.
I pulled out an envelope.
It was addressed to me.
I shivered as a rash of goose bumps passed over my arms. Closing and locking the door behind me, I brought the envelope inside and looked at the return address. It was from Kyoko.
I tore open the envelope, read the letter inside:
Dear Jason,
How can I ever thank you? You released me from bondage and returned me to my life, and for that I will be eternally grateful. Do not worry. I have no intention of seeing you again or writing to you (unless you initiate the contact). I do not know what came over me in that place. I do not know what made me act so crazy. The truth is that I am not obsessed with you but am happy with my own life here in Tokyo. I wish you well. You deserve it. Once again, thank you very much.
Yours truly,
Kyoko Yoshizumi
I read the letter again. So was Kyoko real or not? Had Stan been wrong?
Or was this letter fake?
I examined it more closely. It was impossible to tell for sure, but I thought I recognized a little of Ellen’s style in the use of underscoring.
Besides, how could Kyoko, in Japan, have known several days ago, when she would have had to mail this letter, that I would look up my old friend Edson and that he would offer to let me stay in his rental house?
A Letter Writer had written it.
What was the point, though? The letter told me nothing. Perhaps it was just a practice run, an attempt by the Ultimate to see if he could find me and get through to me even though I had no fixed address. Perhaps it was bait. Maybe he wanted to see if I would answer Kyoko, if she could elicit a response from me. Or maybe, just maybe, Ellen or whoever had really written the letter was attempting to get word to me, was relaying a secret message.
If so, that message was beyond my ability to decipher. I spent another hour attempting to spot a code within the words, to detect a hidden pattern in the arrangement of the letters. I even held the paper next to a lightbulb to check for the old invisible-ink routine. But finally, I threw it away.
Fuck it, I thought. If the Ultimate wanted to have his Letter Writers send correspondence to me, let him. Let them do their worst.
2
The letters started arriving.
This neighborhood had early mail delivery, and at nine o’clock the next morning, the postman dropped six envelopes into the box.
They’d definitely found me. They sent their best and brightest after me, literary heavyweights who knew how to manipulate the language in order to secure their ends, but after reading the first letter, I burned the others unopened, scattering the ashes in the backyard.
That first one had been a doozy. Dear Jason, it said. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your friend Stan Shapiro is dead. Stan killed himself early yesterday morning by repeatedly stabbing himself in the heart with a kitchen knife—
The letter had been signed by Beth.
I didn’t know if any of that was true or not, but I decided to assume not, until it was proved otherwise.
After burning the other letters and dispersing the ashes across the patchy lawn, I went back into the house. They couldn’t do anything to me, I realized. At least nothing physical. They might be able to write letters that destroyed my credit or froze my bank account or caused the Secret Service to think I was a threat to the president or convinced others to harass and intimidate me, but they could not attack me directly.
And I had the skills to fight back on their level, should they decide to take it there.
Assuming they would write to Edson and try to get me kicked out of the house, I sped over to a local Sav-on drugstore, where I bought a Mead five-subject notebook, a box of envelopes and a double pack of Bic pens. There was a stamp machine next to the door, and I used my change to buy ten first-class stamps.
I didn’t even wait until I got back. I sat in that cramped Volkswagen and wrote a letter to Edson on the notebook paper, telling him not to believe any letters he might receive that disparaged me; they were all lies. I tore out the sheet of paper, folded it, put it in the envelope, sealed the envelope, put a stamp on it and drove to a nearby post office, where I dropped it in the mailbox.
A letter of protection, I called it in my mind, and I wondered if this was where the concept of witchcraft had started, if some outside observer had put two and two together and figured out that some people could write letters that had power, that could predict the future or cause things to happen. The idea appealed to me, somehow.
After returning to the house, I called Edson at work and asked if I could use his cell phone to make long-distance calls, promising I would pay him back once the bill came. He said fine, go ahead, don’t worry about it, and I dialed Information to get the number of the Mesa Police Department. I then called the station and said that I was worried about my wife and her parents. She’d gone over there for a visit, but I hadn’t heard from her for over a week, and when I tried to c
all her parents’ house, I was told that the line had been disconnected. Could they send someone out to check and make sure everyone was all right?
I gave the police the names and address and phone number, and the sergeant I spoke with promised to call back as soon as he had some news.
He did call back about a half hour later—and he was mad. “What kind of trick are you trying to play?” he demanded. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you can’t be wasting our time with this frivolous nonsense. We have work to do here. Are you aware that it’s a crime to call in a false report?”
“What false report? I’m telling you the truth. I can’t find my wife and son.”
“Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but according to the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Reed sold their house and moved to Missouri six months ago. No one knows anything about their daughter or grandson. But no one’s disappeared. No one’s been kidnapped. There’s been no crime.”
“Do you have a phone number for their new house?” I begged. “Or an address?”
“You’ve wasted our time enough.”
“It’s not a joke! I’m serious! Just give me the neighbors’ names! Let me call them!”
A dial tone hummed in my ear as the sergeant hung up.
I wanted to slam that fucking phone into the wall. I was as helpless and powerless here as I had been there. My only option seemed to be to drive all the way to Arizona and talk to the neighbors myself. But what if the neighbors knew nothing? What if none of them had a forwarding address? Or what if they had been warned—
by letter
—to stay away from me and not answer any questions I might ask because I was dangerously unstable?
Maybe a private investigator was the best idea. I could take more money out of my bank account and pay for someone to track Vicki and Eric down—although there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t start receiving a shitload of letters with contradictory suggestions.
I had never felt so frustrated in my life. There seemed to be nothing I could do. I was stymied at every turn. If this was a game of chess, I was the player with one piece left, surrounded by my opponent’s full contingent, ready to attack me no matter which direction I moved.
In the kitchen, the phone rang.
I jumped, startled. Instinctively, I headed toward the kitchen to answer it, but halfway there I remembered that Edson had said the telephone wasn’t hooked up. Sure enough, when I grabbed the handset and listened, I heard no dial tone, no sound at all. I jiggled the catch. Nothing.
It was some sort of fluke, I told myself, a quirk that occurred periodically whether the phone was hooked up or not. One time, I remembered, my smoke detector had beeped even though there’d been no battery in it.
But I knew this wasn’t something like that.
I spent the rest of the day running around, buying enough clothes to last me a week, picking up a few meager groceries, searching on the Internet at a public library for Vicki and getting sidetracked trying to look up information about Letter Writers, although I found nothing about either. Edson stopped by that evening with pizza and beer, we shot the breeze for a while, and I told him I was thinking of hiring a private investigator. He thought it was a good idea and offered to ask around tomorrow, find a good one for me. I thanked him. He also offered to pay, but I told him no. Some things a person had to do himself.
After he left, the house seemed… strange. There were no more dead phones ringing, I heard no noises, I saw no shadows or eerie lights, but something seemed wrong, and I realized that it was because the house did not feel empty. No matter how much I tried to ignore it, I could not shake the feeling that there was someone else in here with me. I tried to rationalize it, tried to think about it objectively. Perhaps, I thought, belief in witchcraft and ghosts had both begun with Letter Writers. The other presence I sensed might be nothing more than my subliminal acknowledgment of a person living in a doppelganger house in the Land of the Letter Writers. For all I knew, that world and this coexisted in the same physical space, and on some molecular level there was crossover. Perhaps the family who now lived in my old house had even sensed my presence when I’d been trapped over there and pacing through the rooms.
Perhaps not.
For the impression I had was that this was not something that could be explained scientifically or even pseudoscientifically. Whatever was happening in this house defied easy logic.
Letter writing is an art, not a science, I thought, and that explained the difference perfectly.
I finally fell asleep, long, long after midnight, monitoring a tapping noise that sounded like water dripping in an empty bathtub but was coming from the center of the hallway.
In the morning, a used cereal bowl was on the breakfast table next to a half-finished glass of orange juice. The sports section of the Los Angeles Times was spread out nearby, though I knew no paper was being delivered to this address.
I flipped on the television for company, cranked it up so I could hear it in every room of the house and, after checking both the front and back doors to make sure they were locked, went through the entire place, opening every closet, every cupboard, looking for an intruder. Nothing. That did not make me feel any better, and I cleared off the breakfast table, drank a quick glass of orange juice myself and tried to think of what I should do next.
Get out, I decided.
I wasn’t tied to this house, I had Edson’s cell phone, so I drove to the beach, walked along the pier. Vicki and I used to do that sometimes when we were in college and too poor to go on a real date. We’d grab some junk food, then go out on the pier and sit with the fishermen, watching them cast, watching the sunset, watching the surfers, watching the waves. It had been fun in those happy early days, but it was a profoundly melancholy experience now, walking over the thick boards, smelling the salty air, hearing the cries of the gulls, thinking of times past. I felt old and lonely, and I wondered how I could have let my marriage go, how I could have been so stupid as to choose letter writing over Vicki.
But I hadn’t chosen, I realized. It was something over which I had no control.
Edson called just before noon with the name of a private investigator. “He specializes in missing persons,” Edson told me. “I had him checked out. He even did some work for a colleague of mine who was trying to track down a lost love. He’s good.”
Conveniently, the man’s office was located in Newport Beach, on one of the top floors of a high-rise that flanked Fashion Island. I called to make an appointment and was told to come right in. I had the feeling strings had been pulled, and although I refused to let Edson pay for anything, I was happy for his intervention. Each second that passed by without my knowing where Vicki and Eric were was like an hour in hell to me.
The detective’s name was Patrick Scholder, and he interviewed me for more than an hour about my wife and son, friends and relatives, work and play, trying to glean as much information as he could. At the end of the session I felt drained but vaguely optimistic. I was impressed by Scholder’s thoroughness, and I prayed that he would not start receiving letters that would convince him to disassociate from me.
I’d have to write him a letter of protection as soon as I got back.
I paid him an advance, signed a contract and then hurried down to the parking lot. Returning to the rental house, I tossed my keys on the coffee table, walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water—
And the phone rang.
The dead phone.
Filled with an almost overwhelming sense of dread, I picked it up. “Hello?” I said tentatively.
“Jason.” The voice was weak, whispery, and I hadn’t heard it for nearly two decades, but I recognized it instantly.
It was my mom.
“Jason.” She said my name again, and the way she said it gave me a chill. It was like something out of a horror movie, and the fact that she was talking to me over an unplugged phone only accentuated the macabre aspect of it.
“Jason.”
There was a click. Then silence.
I put the handset back in its cradle. What did this mean? Was she dead? That was clearly the implication; it was obviously what I was supposed to think. And that had been her voice.
There was only one way to find out.
I drove to my mom’s house in Acacia, back to the old neighborhood. It had been several years since I’d even passed down this street, but it felt a lot longer than that. Then, I had only been speeding by, spying on my mom, checking to see if she still lived there, if she’d moved or died. This time, I was actually going back to the house, and it felt as though I hadn’t been on this street for twenty years. I saw the corner where I used to turn around on my bike before I’d been allowed to peddle out of sight of the house. I recognized the thin section of Mrs. Baumgarten’s oleander bush that we’d used as a secret tunnel, even though we knew oleanders were supposed to be poisonous.
I parked next to the fire hydrant in front of our house.
I sat there for a moment in the car, hoping that my mom would come out. It seemed like it would be easier to talk if we met on neutral ground, if we were outside rather than inside. But the door didn’t open, the curtains didn’t part, and finally I forced myself to get out of the car and walk up the path to the front door.
I had a bad feeling about this.
I knocked, stood there, rang the doorbell, waited.
Rang the doorbell again.
Waited.
Maybe she wasn’t home.
I felt sure she was, though, and I stood on my tiptoes and felt around the edge of the porch light until I found the extra key that we’d always hidden there. I used it to open the door. “Hello?” I called. “Mom?” The word felt strange coming out of my mouth. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said it.
DISPATCH Page 31