Chapter 1: The Hammer
The first strike sounded like a wrench dropped into an empty bathtub.
I looked up from the breakfast table and saw a woman in a gray cardigan standing beside my pink mailbox.
She lifted a red-handled hammer and struck the metal door again.
The box buckled around the brass number seven.
She hit it twice more, with the determined expression of someone completing a terrible chore.
I recognized her as Florence Keene, the seventy-one-year-old widow who lived four houses down on Marigold Lane.
I had spoken to Florence exactly three times since moving into the neighborhood.
Our longest conversation concerned the library’s closing hours.
She looked toward my house, saw me through the window, and stopped swinging.
Then she started walking away.
I left my coffee where it stood and ran outside in my blue plaid shirt.
The mangled mailbox swung from one screw as I passed it.
I did not slow down to see whether any mail remained inside.
Florence walked quickly toward the corner, gripping her hammer against her coat.
I called her name.
She moved faster.
I ran because I had seen something in her face when she recognized me.
It was not triumph or rage.
It was the same fear my mother had worn on the night she disappeared from our family, seventeen years earlier.
Florence reached the sidewalk beside the vacant municipal flower garden and stumbled.
I caught up just before she fell.
She turned and held the hammer between us without raising it.
“Don’t make me go back,” she whispered.
I stepped away and raised my empty hands.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I told her.
Her eyes darted past my shoulder toward the street.
“You don’t understand what they’ve put inside that box.”
I glanced at the hammer.
“You smashed it.”
“That wasn’t enough,” she said.
A white utility van rolled past the corner at the speed of a funeral procession.
Florence lowered her head as it passed.
I followed her gaze and noticed its rear license plate was folded upward at one edge.
The driver did not look our way.
Florence gripped my sleeve with surprising strength.
“Did you open the pink envelope yesterday?”
I remembered a pale envelope bearing no return address.
It lay unopened beneath a cookbook on my kitchen counter.
“No,” I said.
Her knees nearly gave out.
“Then we still have time.”
Chapter 2: The Question at the Corner
My name is Martin Bell, and I restore wooden furniture for a living.
