CHAPTER THREE: A STREET FULL OF SMALL LOSSES
By evening, the inspectors had visited four more houses.
They did not announce the purpose of their investigation.
The neighbors did that for them.
A retired teacher named Paul Renner had missed two notices about his pension health coverage.
The first replacement arrived with a forwarding sticker that listed an unfamiliar collection point.
A woman on Birch Street had spent three months trying to find out why letters from her daughter stopped arriving.
A mechanic on Larch Street had received a final warning about a municipal hearing he had never known was scheduled.
Every person described a different inconvenience.
None had imagined that the inconveniences belonged to one story.
Trevor heard the details at the corner grocery, where people gathered beneath the buzzing light of the refrigerated drinks case.
Paul slapped a stack of photocopies on the counter.
“I thought I was getting forgetful,” he said.
“My daughter thought I was ignoring her.”
Mara stood beside him with her arms folded.
“Someone made you doubt yourself,” she said.
The grocer, Sima Patel, stopped ringing up a customer’s oranges.
“My supplier mailed a credit notice in March,” she said.
“They insisted it was delivered,
but I never saw it.”
“Did you ask Evelyn?” Trevor asked.
Sima gave him a sharp look.
“Why would I ask Evelyn?”
“Because she knew I was getting a letter before I opened it.”
Silence spread through the little store.
Sima reached beneath the counter and took out a notebook.
“She came here in February,” she said.
“She wanted to know which delivery companies used the back entrance.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her to buy something or leave.”
Paul looked toward the door.
“She told me the postal service was changing the neighborhood routes.”
“Did you believe her?” Mara asked.
“She knew my wife’s name,” Paul answered.
His wife had died seven years earlier.
Trevor felt the conversation change.
This was no longer a collection of lost envelopes.
Someone had used private details to make frightened people accept explanations they would otherwise have questioned.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE BLUE ROOM
The next morning, Inspector Dana Ruiz asked Trevor to come to the postal inspection office downtown.
She met him in a small interview room with blue walls and a metal table.
Her partner, Inspector Leon Grant, placed the torn envelope inside a transparent sleeve.
“We are not asking you to investigate your neighbor,
” Ruiz said.
“We need you to tell us precisely what you saw.”
Trevor described the afternoon, the groceries, Evelyn’s hand on the envelope, and her remarks about trouble coming into the neighborhood.
Grant wrote slowly.
“Did she mention a particular person?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did she mention a date?”
“She said I would invite someone here.”
Ruiz looked up.
“Why did you contact the Language Access Partnership?”
“I help people prepare for public meetings,” Trevor said.
“I used to interpret for my father when he dealt with city offices, and I remember how often people pretended not to understand him.
”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I design captions for educational films.”
Grant closed his notebook.
“We found your letter because the sender contacted us after a separate complaint,” he said.
“Someone had called the partnership and demanded a list of participants.”
Trevor leaned forward.
“Did they give it?”
“No,” Ruiz said.
“The caller claimed to be arranging transportation for the neighborhood.”
“Evelyn?”
“We have not established that,” Grant answered.
Ruiz slid a blank sheet across the table.
“Write down the names of anyone who knew about your volunteer session before the letter arrived.”
Trevor listed the coordinator, two instructors,
Mara, and his landlord.
Then he stopped.
His landlord had asked whether the session would attract a crowd.
Trevor had assured him that the library, not the house, was the venue.
“One more thing,” Trevor said.
“Evelyn knew the subject of the letter without reading it in front of me.”
Ruiz’s expression sharpened.
“Tell me exactly what makes you think that.”
“She said I was inviting people into the neighborhood.”
“That could have been a guess.”
“It could,” Trevor agreed.
“But she was right about the event, and she was wrong about the location.”
Grant drew a circle around something in his notes.
“That difference may matter,” he said.
