Dead Letter Day (25 page)

I AM GENERALLY A LITTLE MORE AWARE OF MY SURROUNDINGS than most people. I figure it’s a combination of having some extra senses, some extra sharp senses, and wanting to stay alive. It’s a potent blend. I was feeling a little extra aware because of my bun in the oven. Was my present state of knocked-uppedness contributing to my abilities?

Regardless of why, I felt a tingle almost the second we walked out the door of the apartment. I put my hand on Meredith’s arm to slow her down as she strode toward the Buick. “What?”

“Do you see something? Hear something?” I asked.

She stopped, then shook her head. “What am I supposed to be seeing or hearing?”

“I’m not sure. The tingle’s too weak.” I turned in a circle looking around my neighborhood. Damn it. The crows were back. “What about them?” I asked, pointing.

One of them cocked its head at me and winked. Cheeky bird.

“They’re kind of big, but otherwise they look like crows. It’s that time of year, Melina. You know there are a ton of them around here in the fall.”

True enough. Every fall there was a massive influx of crows into the area. They’d hang out, roost, caw obnoxiously loudly and cover cars parked under trees with poo. Not exactly my favorite thing. I turned and started again to the car and stopped. “But there are usually hordes of them. I’m just seeing two of them all the time and they’re huge.” I’d
been meaning to look them up. They just never seemed to rise high enough on my to-do list, I guess.

“There are hordes of them over at my place. Does that make you feel any better?”

“No. It makes me a little more concerned. Why are there only two here at my place?”

Meredith turned to look at them again. “You know you are a little sensitive on the subject, right?”

Like I needed to be reminded. “Humor me a little. Do they mean anything in particular?”

She shrugged, but didn’t take her eyes off the crows. “I doubt there’s a culture on the planet whose mythology doesn’t have a crow in it somewhere. Japan, China, the Norse tradition, the Greeks. They’ve all got crows.”

“How do I find out whose crows these are?”

“If they’re even somebody’s crows and not just two particularly big birds that have bullied all the other ones out of the neighborhood?” Meredith asked.

“Yeah, if that.”

“I don’t know. I’ll look into it, okay?”

“Okay.” I guess I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

We turned back toward the Buick again and that’s when I saw the package sitting on the hood and sighed. “We might have to make a slight detour.”

“Seriously?”

“Generally, the faster I deal with these things, the better off I am.” I’d found that delays meant tempting Messenger fate. The longer I put off delivering a package, the more likely I was to run into a string of bad luck. It was like asking to step in dog shit in your favorite boots. The consequences were simply not worth it.

“Where’s it going?” she asked.

“I won’t know until I get closer.” We walked up to the car and looked at the address.

Meredith looked from the envelope to me. “Well, at least that shouldn’t take long.”

It was addressed to me.

“ARE YOU GOING TO OPEN IT, OR JUST STARE AT IT?” Meredith asked after a few minutes.

“I’m going with open, but not out here on the street.”

“In the car, then?”

I shook my head. “Let’s take it back up to the apartment.”

“Whatever you say. You’re the expert.”

That’s the thing, though. I wasn’t. Not on this. No one sends me packages. At least, not meant for me as their final destination. Giving a package to me was like dropping it off at the post office, in more ways than one. I’m pretty sure I had the postal worker attitude down to a science.

I took a second to examine the envelope before I picked it up. It registered as ordinary to all my senses. Plain old manila. Finally I plucked it out from behind the windshield wiper where someone had put it and held it in my hands. Holding it, I finally got the tiniest vibration off it, but not much at all.

“Anything?” Meredith asked, keeping an eye on the crows.

I shook my head. “Not really. Let’s take it upstairs.”

Back in the apartment, I set it down on the kitchen counter to examine it more thoroughly. It was the type of manila envelope you can buy anywhere. Grocery store, drugstore, Costco if you want a lifetime supply. Anywhere. It had been folded shut and the little metal tabs had been flattened
down to keep it shut, but no one had put a wax seal on it or anything interesting and unique like that. They hadn’t even licked the envelope to moisten the flap. It was dry as a bone. Not that I had the resources to track DNA or anything, but it would have been something.

I know it’s gross, but body fluids do help with identification. I’d love to see what would happen if some DNA lab got hold of vampire saliva or something like that, but that’s not the kind of identification I mean. Think of it this way, there’s nothing more essentially us than the very substances that our bodies create. They can be like distilled essences of ourselves. I am not by any means advocating using vampire saliva as a perfume unless you have a pretty profound death wish. Still, I could often get a read off of what has been left behind.

No one had left anything behind on this particular envelope, which, in itself, felt like an important fact.

I was, however, getting something, but it didn’t seem to be coming from the envelope. I glanced around the apartment, trying to figure out what it was. I was going to need to shut it out if I was going to get anything off this envelope at all, but I didn’t see anything obvious.

“Now what?” Meredith asked, leaning over the counter on her elbows.

“Now we open it.” I straightened the metal tabs, unfolded the flap and shook a piece of paper out onto the counter.

We both stared at it as if we expected it to spontaneously combust or maybe fold itself into a paper airplane. It didn’t. It just sat there.

“That was kind of anticlimactic,” Meredith observed. “I expected something more grand. Maybe some smoke or a big popping noise.”

I didn’t say anything, but I totally agreed with her.
I picked up the piece of paper and turned it over. Things seemed suddenly much more climactic. The letter was from Paul.

Dear Melina,

I’ve heard through the grapevine that you’ve been looking for me. I’m writing to tell you to stop. I probably should have told you I was leaving town for a while. I’m sorry if I worried you. I’m fine and will be home soon.

Paul

I slid the piece of paper across the counter to Meredith and watched her read it. I didn’t want to say anything until I heard her verdict on the letter. I already had my own opinion.

She read it, slid it back to me and said, “Paul didn’t write that.”

“Nope. At least, not under his own steam.” It did look like his handwriting, but that was about it. Everything else about it screamed fake.

I carried it into the living room and sat down on the futon couch. Meredith sat next to me. “Something’s definitely wrong,” I said.

“Yep.” Meredith sat down next to me. “No way would he have written you. He’d have written me.”

She wasn’t being conceited or jealous. She was right. He wouldn’t have written me. Or if he had, the letter would have held a lot more insults and been a lot ruder. And absolutely no way would he have apologized.

“It’s all weird and stilted,” she said.

That was true, too. Paul had a poetic side and it tended
to come out when he held a pen and paper. This thing didn’t flow.

As I held the letter, trying to open myself to anything else on it that might be a clue, whatever else was in the apartment that was vibrating started sending out a stronger tingle. I was going to need to go find it to keep it from distracting me. If I shut it out, I shut out the vague signals I was getting from the letter.

“Hold on a second,” I told Meredith. I stood up, still holding the letter. The tingle was definitely coming from my room. I walked down the hall, motioning for Meredith to follow me.

There wasn’t much on my desk. My laptop, a sorter thing for my mail and a basket with a few papers in it. Nothing looked like it might be the source of my discomfort, although it was definitely stronger now that I was closer to the desk. I set the fake note from Paul down so both my hands would be free and the tingle got stronger. I opened the top drawer. The silver I’d found at Paul’s cabin was there and it didn’t take me more than a few seconds to realize that it was causing my problems. I went to pick it up and got a shock strong enough to make me yelp.

“Did you just zap that?” Meredith asked from the doorway.

“No. I think it might have zapped me.” I stared at it. “You pick it up.”

“You know, that’s a little like handing me something, saying it smells bad and asking me to sniff it.”

“So sniff it. I don’t care. But let’s take it into the living room. Something’s going on with it and I think it has to do with this fake letter from Paul.”

We headed back into the living room. The closer the letter
and the lace were, the stronger the signal was. The most obvious explanation was that somehow the two objects were related. The most obvious relationship was that they had been made by the same person.

The most obvious conclusion to come to—from a piece of silver and a letter trying to convince me not to look for Paul, both coming from the same person—was that Paul was indeed in trouble and it was time to shift into high gear and come to his rescue.

Oh, boy, was he ever going to hate that.

WE LAID THE SILVER OUT ON THE BREAKFAST COUNTER and the letter next to it. The low-level tingle from both of them was making me clench my teeth. Meredith seemed unaffected. I wondered what that would be like.

“So Cordie said this stuff was not a net.” Meredith nudged the silver with the end of a pencil.

“No and I figure she would know.”

“So what is it?”

It was the most pertinent question. “I’m not sure. Cordie said it looked like a doily.”

Meredith cocked her head to one side and looked at it from that angle. “She’s got a point.”

I fetched my laptop from my room and fired it up. I plugged doily pattern into Google and then clicked on the images. There were pages. And pages. And pages. We started scrolling through.

“There,” Meredith shouted.

I looked at her. “I’m right next to you.”

“Sorry. I got excited.”

I clicked on the image she pointed to. It did look a little like
our silver fragment. The page loaded. There were ten other examples, all of which looked a little like our fragment.

“It’s hard to tell which one since we only have a piece of it.” I peered closer at the screen. It wasn’t helping.

I could see how it could be the first one. The geometric pattern seemed pretty similar.

“Or it could be that one.” Meredith pointed to a second image and held the silver up next to it. Okay. It totally could be that one, too.

“Is it this close to all of these?” I pushed back from the screen.

She nodded. “You’ve seen one doily, you’ve kind of seen them all. Except they’re all different.”

“Like snowflakes, huh?”

“Exactly.”

“The ones that are closest seem to be that Norwegian Hardanger lace.” I checked the name of the website to make sure I had that right. Terrific. Half the area around Chuck’s place was Norwegian. I’m not sure that narrowed anything down at all.

“Maybe somebody who knew more about Norwegian fiber arts could help you pinpoint the pattern,” Meredith suggested.

I froze. “You mean like maybe somebody who had a yarn shop with a Norwegian bent to it?”

“Yeah. Exactly. You know someone like that?”

I put my head down on the counter. How blind could I be? Inge. She had to be involved. The lace had been buzzing in my pocket because I’d been standing next to her store, not because Kevin had been standing next to me on the sidewalk.

Inge, who whenever she was around made me slam my senses shut as hard as I could because of her grief.

But why? If the silver lace was a fragment of a much larger piece I could see the how, but the why completely escaped me.