The Chief's Mail

The man in the fire-department windbreaker filled the doorway of a dead woman's apartment like a verdict. Chief Amos Boone, Fig Hollow Volunteer Fire Department, thirty-one years of service, held the letter out flat in two enormous hands, the way a man carries something he's afraid is going to go off. "Miss Marsh," he said. "I'd like to know who's writing my newspaper." Delphia took the letter. It was a clipped Aunt Persimmon column, three weeks old, from the issue she'd ghostwritten her second week — before the Harlow letter, before the cedar chest. The question was about a widower with a grown daughter, a woman he'd like to marry, and a first marriage no one in town remembered, because it had happened two counties away, forty years ago, and lasted eleven months. The advice had been printed in Aunt Persimmon's name: "A woman you love deserves to meet the whole man, not the corrected edition. Tell her about the first one, and let her decide if she's marrying a widower or a secret." Delphia had no memory of writing it. She checked her files, heart going, and there it was in her own night drafts, in her own hand. She'd written it in the ordinary course of business, answering a letter she'd assumed was from a stranger. "I never sent that letter," Boone said. His voice was careful, the voice of a man who'd spent thirty-one years walking into burning buildings and had never once, apparently, figured out how to walk into this conversation. "I got the paper like everyone else, and there I was. First marriage and all. Nobody knows that but me, my daughter, and the county clerk in Hessler, and the clerk's dead." He paused. "And whoever wrote in pretending to be me. Because the paper don't print what you don't send, Miss Marsh. So somebody sent it. And now I need to know who knows a thing I have spent forty years not telling my children." Marv Kettle, in the kitchen doorway with Fudge on his shoulder like a bad-tempered parrot, said a word the Gazette would not have approved of. It took Delphia ten minutes of careful questions to understand what she was actually holding. Someone in Fig Hollow was writing letters to the column in other people's names. The goat letter had been real — she'd checked, and Annoyed in Auburn had turned out to be a real woman with a real goat and, as of the pie festival, a new fence and a reconciled neighbor. But Boone's letter was forged, and it had been aimed. The advice she'd written back was true, and kind, and it had put a forty-year-old secret into print without its owner's consent. Aunt Persimmon's margin notes floated up in Delphia's memory: the mayor's second mortgage. The fire chief's first marriage. The pie festival's suspiciously annual insurance payouts. A dead woman who had known exactly where not to build — and a building full of maps. "Chief," Delphia said slowly, "if someone wrote to the column pretending to be you, they did it to see what came back. To test whether Aunt Persimmon was really gone. Like the Harlow letter." She looked at Marv. "Whoever it is knew what would land. They knew your first marriage. They knew what Persimmon knew." "Or they found it where she kept it," Marv said, and his eyes went, involuntary and unwilling, toward the direction of the Gazette — where a cedar chest's clippings now sat in Delphia's night drawer, and where, four nights a week, she wrote the county's most trusted column in a dead woman's name. Boone sat down, heavily, on Persimmon's good chair. He looked at the letter in Delphia's hand like it might answer him. "Forty years ago I married a girl in Hessler who took the county pie money with her when she left me," he said. "And my daughter's getting married in June, and the woman I love is named Deb Kowalski, and I am seventy-one years old, and I do not intend to walk into another man's church with this in my coat." He looked up. "So I'm going to tell Deb myself, tonight, and get it over with, because the paper's right even if the paper's crooked. But you find who's forging my mail, Miss Marsh. You find them before June."