CHAPTER 2: A HOUSE I DIDN’T WANT
My name is Daniel Mercer, and I was forty-one when I returned to the town I had spent twenty years avoiding.
My father, Thomas Mercer, had lived alone on Alder Street after my mother died.
He repaired watches in a small room behind the kitchen and kept his bills organized in shoe boxes labeled by year.
He could fix a clock that had stopped in 1952, but he couldn’t explain why he stopped speaking to his only son in 2010.
Our last argument had been about my sister, Laurel.
She was nineteen when she walked out of our house on a rainy November night and never came home.
The police found her car near a bus terminal two towns away.
They found no evidence of violence.
Her coat was gone, her bank card had been used once, and the missing-person investigation eventually stalled.
My father believed she had chosen to disappear.
I believed he knew why.
Neither of us forgave the other for saying so.
When his lawyer called to tell me the house was mine, I almost declined it.
Then I remembered Laurel’s room at the end of the hallway.
I had been afraid that if I let strangers move in, the last place she had called home would disappear too.
So I moved back with three suitcases, a laptop, and no plan for staying.
Patricia Voss greeted me on the first afternoon with a plate of lemon bars.
She called my father a good man and asked whether I intended to repaint the front fence.
She also stared for a long time at the blue mailbox.
“Thomas meant to change that thing,” she said.
“He never got around to it.”
I assumed she was making neighborly conversation.
The next morning she asked again.
By the end of the first week, she had mentioned the mailbox six times.
I told her it worked perfectly well.
She answered that some things should be replaced even when they still worked.
At the time, I thought she meant the rusted hinge.
Now I knew she had been talking about what the mailbox might contain.
