“Nobody you know, Peg,” Roger answered, and the wind on the line made his voice sound far away and a little bored. “A friend of mine. Marla. She stays in the old house sometimes. Do not go over there.” I looked at the thin smoke rising from the Halvorsen chimney, at the fresh tire tracks leading into the barn, at the manila envelope in my hand. Larry had written five words on the back of a photograph and then hidden it in a mailbox so that a woman who loved him would one day find it. “Roger,” I said slowly, “where are you right now?” There was a pause. Then he said, “Closer than you think.”
A black pickup crested the hill behind the farmhouse. I recognized it at once. I had washed it with my own hands, in the first weeks of our engagement, when Roger insisted that he owed me an afternoon of normal life. It came down the long gravel road without hurry, trailing a flag of dust, and it stopped at the cedar post ten feet from where I stood. Roger climbed out. He wore his good postal jacket and the gold watch I had given him at Christmas, and his face was perfectly kind. “Peggy,” he said, “give me the envelope.”
I did not give it to him. I tucked it inside my coat and put my hand flat against the front of my jacket. My son stood a quarter mile behind me, I thought, on the county road in his truck, as I had asked him to stand, with a pair of binoculars and the telephone number of a man named Inspector Dale Kroeger of the United States Postal Inspection Service, an old friend of Larry. I had texted Danny from the car, before I opened the box, in four words. Watch the mailbox. Call Dale. Now I only had to keep Roger talking.
A birdhouse shaped like a post office finally delivered a letter that took four years to arrive.
“What was Larry not delivering, Roger?” I asked. He sighed, and leaned against his truck, and told me the whole thing in a voice as flat as a mail sorting table. The benefit checks. Social Security, veteran pensions, disability payments, thousands of envelopes a year addressed to old people on isolated routes. Roger and a woman named Marla Pruitt had been intercepting them at the distribution center, steaming them open at the old Halvorsen house, and cashing them through a ring of shell accounts. A hundred and ninety thousand dollars a year. Larry noticed that his old widows had stopped getting their checks.
“He started a list,” Roger said, looking at the box. “He put the undelivered envelopes in there, one at a time, for a year, like a squirrel with acorns. He would not stop. I told him it was a clerical error, and he told me he would go to the Inspector on the first of March.” He shook his head. “I never wanted to hurt him. I only drilled a small hole in the tailpipe. A small hole, Peg. I thought he would turn back when the storm came, as any sensible man would. But Larry always finished the route.” His voice cracked. “He was too good at the job.”
That was when the barn door of the farmhouse burst open. A woman in a red parka ran out, carrying a duffel bag, and sprinted for a pickup parked behind the machine shed. It was Marla. She had been listening from the window. She got the truck started, but she did not get it far, because at that instant three cars with flashing lights came over the rise from the county road, and the pickup of Danny was behind them, bouncing hard. Inspector Kroeger stepped out first, a stocky man in a postal windbreaker, with his badge on a chain. He did not draw a weapon. He simply stood in the road.
Roger looked at the Inspector and then at me. He did not run. A kind of weariness came over his face, and he took off his cap, and I saw how thin his hair had grown. “Peg,” he said, “you were the best thing in my life, and I used you to keep watch.” He held out his wrists to the Inspector. As they closed the handcuffs, I took off the ring and set it in the empty mailbox, on top of the pile of unclaimed envelopes, and shut the little rusted door with a click I could hear all the way back to the gate.
Eleven hundred and twelve checks were recovered from the farmhouse, along with the ledgers, the shell accounts, and the steaming kettle. Over the next months, the Inspection Service returned every one of them to its rightful owner, with a letter of apology and a government check for the delay. Roger pleaded guilty to mail fraud, conspiracy, and the murder of Larry, and was sentenced to life. Marla received twenty years. Inspector Kroeger drove out to my house the day the sentence was read, and sat on the porch, and told me how much he had admired my husband.
The postal service named a new route in honor of Larry. It runs a hundred and twelve miles across the Sandhills, and the carrier who drives it, a young woman named Tess, stops at my mailbox every day at noon and asks if I want to ride along. Some days I do. We take the old gravel roads at a steady twenty five, with the windows down and the radio low, and I point out the houses where the widows used to wave. Tess says the route of Larry is the only one in the county with a nameplate bolted to the dash.
Danny repainted the birdhouse in the spring, little red post office and all, and rehung it under the porch eave. A pair of wrens built a nest in it that May. On quiet evenings I sit on the swing and watch them going in and out with bits of straw, one at a time, delivering their small parcels. I did not understand until then how much my husband loved the plain work of getting things where they belonged. I put a stamp on the porch rail, in his memory, a first class Forever stamp, and the wrens do not mind.