Death Takes Priority

by Jean Flowers

  I picked up the first-class DLO/MRC letter to a person in Ashcot, Massachusetts. No street address. No clue about the sender through a return address label or a return zip code. Also, there was no such town as Ashcot. The letter had been delivered first to South Ashcot, whose postmaster forwarded it to us. In itself, not an unusual occurrence. At least a couple of times a month, mail was addressed either to North Ashcot when South Ashcot was intended, or vice versa. The two offices cooperated fully, not designating a letter officially “dead” until both facilities had signed off on it, in which case, the letter would be forwarded to our recovery center in Atlanta.

  This letter had an added complication, however: The name of the person to whom it was addressed was QUINN MARTINDALE.

  The name Sunni referenced as Scott James’s real name.

  I nearly fell off my stool. My amateur handwriting analysis led me to believe the envelope had been addressed by a woman. The modest flourish, especially in the upper case letters, and the tiny circles used to dot the i’s gave the words a distinctive feminine flair. Finally, a dead giveaway to me was the peacock blue ink the sender used.

  The day just got better and better. I stuffed the letter in my desk drawer and locked it. Later I’d decide what the official disposition should be.

  A banging on the front door further startled me. I peered across the retail counter and was relieved to see, not a burglar, but Tim Cousins, the architect who had bought the abandoned old church down the street. Not that I knew Tim very well, but at least he wasn’t a stranger on a killing spree through our town, which was one of my first thoughts. A murder at my doorstep had affected me on many levels. It didn’t help that Tim was a tall man, all in black this evening.

  I figured Tim saw the light over my desk and thought I was open for after-hours business. I waved to him, shook my head and mouthed what I hoped was a clear, “Sorry. Closed.”

  Tim waved back but kept pointing at me and then the door, signaling that he wanted to talk to me. I had no interest in establishing a precedent that said any time a customer saw me in the office, I was fair game for service. On the other hand, could I really afford to leave a bad taste in the mouth of any potential friend? If I could be nice to Tim, my friendship score for today would balance out. One friend lost to the police, one gained if I gave Tim a little leeway.

  Continuing our nonverbal conversation, I motioned Tim to go to the side door, where I’d meet him.

  “Hey, Cassie,” he said, seeming delighted to have a chance to talk to me. “I heard about all the excitement today. Sounds like you were in the thick of it.”

  Tim had a boyish look about him and the physique of a desk-bound architect rather than a carpenter, though I knew he was doing most of the rebuilding of the church himself and I’d even seen him in action on its roof. I guessed he was probably at least five years younger than me. He’d made an effort to enter my building as soon as I opened the door, but I discouraged him by standing firm in the doorway.

  “It’s been a long day, as you can imagine, Tim, and I’m just about to pack up. Was there something you needed?”

  “No, no. I’m just curious, you know. It’s not every day something like this happens in North Ashcot.”

  “It’s very sad for the family of whoever the victim is.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. They’re all sayin’ he’s a local, huh?”

  In spite of his charming Southern accent, he was starting to annoy me. I was eager for him to be gone.

  “I don’t know any more than you do, Tim, and I really would like to finish up here.” I smiled through my tense jaw. “I’ll be back in the morning, same as always.”

  I made a move to close the door again, with me on one side and Tim on the other. I had a creepy feeling, which subsided when he didn’t resist. It was hard to account for my reaction. Tim hadn’t been intimidating in any way, and it was early, after all, not even five-thirty in the evening. But it was already dark and there was no one else around. I chalked my reaction up to exactly what Tim had observed: It wasn’t every day that someone was killed in North Ashcot.

  In any case, Tim backed off. We agreed we should have lunch sometime, and said good night.

  I watched his car drive off, then rushed out to my car and headed home.

  * * *

  I knew that the house I’d inherited from Aunt Tess didn’t need to reflect her taste any longer. The trouble was I couldn’t decide what my taste was. Aunt Tess’s furniture was heavy, characterized by dark wood trim even on the living room chairs. Too old and serious for me, but neither did I want light and pretty cottage chic. I couldn’t see myself curling up with my laptop or e-reader on a white wicker chair with floral cushions.

  My one-bedroom apartment in Boston’s West Fenway neighborhood had been small enough to remain undefined as far as style. A simple beige couch, vertical blinds instead of curtains, an eclectic mix of concerts and plays represented in posters—the Boston Symphony Orchestra on one wall, a revival of Blithe Spirit on another, along with an oversized movie still from Casablanca. And to keep in touch with my hometown roots, some C&W tunes from Reba McEntire or Tim McGraw on my computer.

  Linda, whose apartment had a definite modern twist, mostly black and chrome with touches of red, claimed I hadn’t moved on from the college dorm motif. Whereas, if she changed one item in a room, the rest of the furniture had to go as well. I had to admit I preferred to surround myself with images that meant something to me personally, rather than worry about whether the pillows and bedspread provided the proper color accents for the drapes in the bedroom.

  Adam, who agreed with Linda, had tried to reshape my environment and bought me furnishings and accessories more suited to his executive suite. Geometric, abstract wall art in primary colors; a kitchen chair that looked like a giant suction cup on a pedestal; a lamp with a cylindrical chrome shade and a base that resembled a triad of alienlike legs. As far as I knew, they were now all part of the flea market scene or the landfill around Boston.

  Right now, I was glad I’d had my faded blue glide rocker and ottoman shipped here last summer. I’d kept Aunt Tess’s grouping of two stuffed easy chairs on either side of a coffee table, but added my glider to the arrangement.

  Sobered by the thought that I could no longer call downstairs and order-in from several different ethnic eating establishments, I’d fallen back on my second favorite meal plan: When in desperate need of food, sprinkle bits of cheese over whatever’s left over in the fridge, nuke the mound of food, add bread, and eat. I plopped onto the rocker and dug into a hot, cheesy faux-casserole of broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes, and zucchini.

  Something seemed off about the angle of my rocker this evening, as if someone had moved it. Impossible. Nevertheless, I put my plate on the coffee table, stood back, and surveyed the configuration. It wasn’t my rocker, but one of the easy chairs that was off. Probably nudged the last time I vacuumed. No more vacuuming, I vowed, as I fixed the setup and smiled at my own joke. I couldn’t help thinking that Adam would have been proud of me, fussing about a couple of inches left or right. I was tempted to shove everything around to annoy him in absentia, but decided he wasn’t worth the effort.

  Back on my rocker, I bit into a stale-but-warmed buttermilk biscuit and pondered the current events of my life. Starting with the most recent, I mentally listed pressing concerns.

  Priority one: I needed to decide how to handle the first-class letter to Scott/Quinn that I figured was burning a hole in my desk drawer at the office. At least I hadn’t already broken the rules by taking it home with me. By now I’d convinced myself that an old girlfriend had written to beg him to come back—wherever that was. I warned myself that I was on the edge of investing in a friendship that was doomed. But I wasn’t exactly famous for heeding my own advice.

  There were a number of reasons for a piece of mail to be designated UAA—Undeliverable As Addressed, form
erly called “dead letter,” as Ben had labeled the one now on my mind. In my career, I’d seen standard anomalies like incomplete addresses, deceased addressees, damaged packaging, and failure to comply with a business code. More heartrending were letters to Santa and the Easter Bunny that would never find a home.

  An ordinary piece of UAA would be opened at the center and checked for enclosures or clues as to the identity of the correspondent on either end. Valuables like jewelry, coins, or electronics would be removed. If there was no way to determine who had sent the letter or who was to receive it, the rest of the contents would be destroyed to protect the privacy of both parties, whoever they were. Appropriate items would be sold at auction. Case closed.

  In this situation, I first had to answer Ben’s written question. Was this a dead letter? He couldn’t have known at the time that there was indeed a Quinn Martindale in town. To the best of my knowledge, Chief Smargon had told me, but not the general public, about Scott James’s earlier identity. Ben must have passed the letter on to me in case I knew someone that he didn’t, someone new in town named Quinn. He’d been half right.

  On the surface, the letter was UAA, undeliverable. It was lacking the necessary information for delivery by a postmaster. On the other hand, it was deliverable by this postmaster, me, since I knew the addressee and where he lived. In fact, I knew where he was at that exact moment. I could simply drive a couple of miles to the police station and deliver the letter. Case closed.

  But not so fast. To further complicate things, I knew that Quinn Martindale was also Scott James only through a confidential discussion with the chief of police about a pending investigation. Unless she was wrong about that. I hadn’t actually heard Scott James admit to being Quinn Martindale. Case wide open.

  It seemed fruitless to keep debating myself, taking both sides over a single thin envelope. And how ironic that one of the most complex post office issues I’d ever had to deal with had arisen in North Ashcot, and not in Boston, where we handled a huge amount of mail daily and where you could stop at the post office to buy a greeting card, have a passport photo taken, or pick up a burial flag for a vet.

  North Ashcot offered phone books; that was it. And not always.

  I was dismayed by the lack of local response when I had needed a ride from the tea room earlier today, but I couldn’t bring myself to call Linda in Boston for advice. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I couldn’t handle my new job. She’d have my employee forms back in the HR active file in minutes. My own training and experience had to be enough to solve this problem. I hadn’t had to review decisions regarding privacy rights in a while, but I recalled a few cases and even some of the history as it pertained to the postal service.

  I corroborated my memory with an Internet search and found that, indeed, fourth-amendment rights had been extended to mail during litigation in the nineteenth century. Unlike the decision for a person’s trash can, for example, the ruling for mail was in favor of privacy. Drop your trash into a container and push it onto the sidewalk, and the contents were fair game, all privacy bets off. The box from your last Thai takeout was now anyone’s bounty. But once a person glued an envelope shut and dropped it into an official mail repository, he was judged as having the expectation of privacy, even though he might have mailed the letter on the same sidewalk, a few yards from his trash can, or in front of a long line of people in the post office.

  For a “dead letter,” however, there was a kind of dispensation for postal personnel at the recovery center to open the letter, to search for clues as to the letter’s origin or destination. We often referred to them as the detectives of the postal service.

  My cell phone rang. Linda Daniels, with perfect timing. In spite of my attempt at bravado, I wanted nothing more than to discuss the letter to Scott/Quinn with her.

  We set up a Skype call and after a bit of juggling, we were face-to-face, or computer-camera-to-computer-camera.

  “I’m working late, subbing out here in South Station and I need a break,” she explained.

  I surveyed the scene behind Linda on my laptop screen. Her back was to her window, overlooking a T station, part of the oldest mass transit system in the country, and a convenience I’d taken for granted nearly every day I’d lived in Boston.

  “Anything new in North Ashes?”

  I ignored the timely slur and told her about my disastrous lunch and the subsequent discovery of a murder victim at the edge of town. I heard and saw her gasp and immediately clarified that it wasn’t I who’d found the body.

  Linda gasped again anyway. “Still, that’s a lot more than petty theft. Or even grand theft. How are you holding up? You should have called right away.” Linda’s words came out in a rush, her face moving closer and closer to her camera. I could feel her concern and was sorry I hadn’t called the one person I knew would always be there for me.

  I took a breath and told her the rest of the Scott James/Quinn Martindale story. “So now I have this letter. Well, it’s in my desk at work.”

  “And it’s calling to you. You have to make a decision, Cassie, and get it off your mind. Not that I think there’s an easy answer. But in this case, you actually know the destination of that letter. And the general policy is, if you can deliver it, do so. You’re probably the only postal employee who knows where it was meant to go.”

  “That’s my point. Can I just call this a fluke of circumstance and deliver it? And if so, to whom? To Scott or to Sunni, since he’s in her custody?”

  “I’m thinking,” Linda said. Though she wasn’t there now, I had a mental picture of her in her shiny office in downtown Boston, her red-soled designer shoes on the floor under her desk, her perfect navy blue jacket on the chair behind her. Unlike me, Linda could look as put-together and sharp at the end of a day’s work as she did at the beginning. “If Ben were still running the office by himself, or had chosen not to call the letter to your attention, he’d have sent the letter off to a recovery center, to be dealt with by designated postal staff, right?”

  “Right, but what if there’s some evidence in the letter or maybe the letter itself is evidence, whether exculpatory or incriminating. You know how much volume the recovery office gets; it could take forever for this letter to come to the top of their list. Meanwhile, anything could happen to Scott. Shouldn’t I bring it to the attention of the police who are holding him?”

  We went a few more rounds on the protocol for letters written to people in interrogation rooms. Was Scott technically a prisoner, whose correspondence, in either direction, was up for grabs? Unless it was from his lawyer. But Sunni had told me he didn’t have a lawyer. The questions made my head hurt. I needed to call it quits until the morning. Tomorrow, I’d look more carefully for a return address or informational postmark on the ordinary, size ten, white business envelope; there was nothing more I could do tonight.

  Linda and I ended with a meeting of the minds—I should take the letter, unopened, to the police, in the person of Chief Sunni Smargon, and let her take it from there. Only the police knew Scott’s official status and rights.

  We signed off with the familiar Skype chirp.

  I had one more task to see to before bedtime: Search for Scott James and Quinn Martindale on the Internet and see if the names collided. And a related task, search for a mother accused of murder.

  Usually, whatever the question, I’d be on my laptop clicking around the various online-pedias for information, specious or otherwise. Why hadn’t I rushed to perform this search? I could only guess that I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer. I quit stalling and went for it.

  An hour later I was no closer to the truth about my lunch date. Pulling a Scott James out of the more than half a billion hits was hopeless, as I’d expected. Too bad I wasn’t trying to find the songwriter or the snowboarder at the top of the list. It occurred to me that I was bumping against a deliberate play by the man—choosing a name that m
ade it impossible to single him out.

  Isolating a Quinn Martindale wasn’t much easier, however. I scrolled through the first of only half a million options, many of them female. I flopped back as far as I could on my rocker, nearly slipping off, headfirst.

  Another washout was my search for Scott’s mother, the murder suspect in San Francisco. If I’d even heard correctly, that is. I scrolled through stories of ongoing investigations, but neither victims nor suspects in homicide cases were identified. Was Scott’s mother the woman who was accused of shooting a neighbor in a South San Francisco brawl? Or the woman arrested in a case called the Road Rage Murder on a freeway out there? Without at least one other fact, like the date of the crime or the arrest, or the weapon, I had no way to narrow my search. Not even the San Francisco newspaper site was helpful, reporting only the most recent incidents. The crime I was interested in might have happened last week or ten years ago.

  I closed my laptop. The evening stretched before me.

  I needed a hobby. In college, I’d given knitting and crocheting a shot, but I was hopelessly impatient to do well at either one. One dropped stitch or twisted loop, and I gave up.

  Oddly, I’d never tried stamp collecting, but I ruled it out quickly. A friend at one job I had was a collector and was in a constant state of stress over whether he could afford to acquire a triangular issue, or how much his Falkland Islands sheet was worth. When I’d asked, “Shouldn’t a hobby be relaxing?” he’d given me a strange look.

  Hobbyless, I settled for a large bowl of ice cream and the opening scenes of a crime drama on television to distract me from the insurmountable task of learning anything concrete about my newest almost-friend. On the television screen, the heroine of the drama, a prosecuting attorney who’d received a threatening phone call, walked into a dark, deserted parking garage late at night, her high heels tapping on the pavement, ominous music in the background. I clicked the remote. OFF.