Dead Letters Anthology (3 page)

Whatever. I could imagine it’d be annoying for the move to have gone astray, but if the guy was no longer at that address, and had left no forwarding information, there wasn’t a lot that could be done about it.

At that moment I heard the sound of a car turning in off the street, and swore, and rapidly stubbed out my cigarette, and scurried inside.

* * *

‘What’s this?’

I was sitting at my desk, Scott standing beside me. He was bored, and had come in to say hi, hang out, and generally avoid doing the book report that was supposed to be his mission for the afternoon/week/summer.

‘Chess piece,’ I said. I’d put it and the other bits on my desk when I hurried back in. He picked it up.

‘Why’s it here?’

‘I found it,’ I said, to avoid explaining at length. I was in the middle of working, he wasn’t supposed to come in while I was busy, and though it made me feel a heel to be distant toward him, Karen would be pissed at me if I wasn’t, as it made her job of keeping him out of my hair during the summer days even harder.

‘What kind?’

‘A bishop.’

‘Is that the type that…’

‘Diagonally,’ I said.

‘Oh, okay. What’s the smell?’

I stiffened, thinking he’d caught a hint of cigarette smoke on me from earlier. He raised the chess piece to his face, however, and sniffed. ‘It’s on this.’

I took it from him. The odour was faint, but Scott has a keen nose. ‘Don’t know,’ I said.

‘Smells like disinfectant. The kind they use in big buildings.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Could be something like that.’

‘Why’s it wet?’

‘It’s not.’

‘Yes it is. The base.’

I turned it upside down and gently touched the felt. It was a little damp. ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t earlier. I mean, before.’

I looked at the part of the desk where the piece had been, but Scott was ahead of me, wiping his finger across it. ‘It’s not wet here.’

At that moment his mother hollered from the kitchen, expressing a hope that Scott wasn’t bugging his father and how was he doing with that book report, hey? Scott made a face like a frightened frog.

‘You’re fine,’ I said, winking. ‘But go.’

He smiled, and slipped out of the room.

* * *

Just before bedtime I wandered down the path toward the road. Our neighborhood is on the edge of town, in fact a little past it, and the houses are widely spread on heavily wooded lots. It’s kind of like being out in the country, except you’re not, which is my preferred combination.

‘Still on the old cancer sticks, huh.’

Our neighbor, Gerry, was standing at the head of his own path. He’s in his mid-sixties and the previous year, in the aftermath of his wife leaving him for some guy, had laboriously curtailed his own two-pack-a-day habit, on the grounds life couldn’t feel any worse.

‘Yeah,’ I said, annoyed at having been caught, especially as Scott was asleep and so I’d believed myself safe from censure. ‘Cutting down, though.’

‘Don’t work,’ Gerry said. ‘You’ll still be cutting down when those things cut
you
down. Clean break. Only way to get that job done.’

‘Worked for you, I guess.’

‘Sure did. Hurt like crap for a couple months, but I stuck with it. And you should, too. You’ve got a son. And that kid loves you.’

‘I know.’ Gerry and his wife never had children, a fact he has spoken of with regret several times.

‘Just saying.’

He nodded goodnight, and ambled back toward his own house, where he now lived alone, and drank.

* * *

I went for a run the following morning, but cut it short after 5k. Our area is home to just about every variety of tree known to man, which makes it very attractive but something of an allergy motherlode. There are few months of the year when something airborne isn’t wafting out of the branches to irritate the membranes.

I came out of the shower still coughing and sniffing.

‘The regime’s evidently doing you a power of good,’ Karen said.

‘And you last exercised… when?’

‘I exercise restraint on a daily basis, darling. Be grateful for that.’

Thus bested, I went to my study.

* * *

As anyone who works at home, and alone, knows, there are times when your focus drops. You can either beat yourself up over this — as I used to — or accept it as part of the ebb and flow of the creative process.

Put another way, mid-afternoon I found myself sitting staring into space. I long ago set up a system on my computer that disbars any interaction with the Internet during working hours, except for email, so that wasn’t a temptation. It would, of course, have been an ideal moment for a contemplative and focus-recharging cigarette, except Scott was home, up in his room, ostensibly doing his book report but more likely involved in covert work on his Minecraft empire. I could probably get away with it, as he’d be keeping his head down in case his mother checked on progress, but I don’t actually enjoy misleading my son. I could last out a couple more hours.

I could — and possibly should — call my mother. It had been a few days. I like my mother, and since my father died a couple years ago we’ve spoken twice a week. It’s a serious undertaking, however. My dad’s passing revealed my mother to be a more anxiety-prone person than I’d realised, something he’d been adept — consciously or otherwise — at diffusing. Without his buffer her energy coursed in scattershot directions, especially over the phone, an hour of which could derail my work mojo for the rest of the afternoon.

Eventually my eye happened upon the chess piece, still in position near the base of my computer monitor. I picked up my phone — not subject to the same Internet sanctions as the desktop machine — and googled ‘Patrick Brice’. The first several pages of results related to some up-and-coming movie director of that name. It seemed unlikely he’d be the intended recipient, or that he lived or had lived in Illinois. Wikipedia indicated he’d been born in California. After this were screeds of other randomers who happened to have the name, all doubtless leading perfectly decent albeit unremarkable lives. None were self-evidently long-distance chess players.

I put the phone down and picked up the bishop. As with any small object whose purpose inherently involves being touched, it was hard not to roll it around in the fingers, and to wonder who else had done so. What with me not being psychic, no answers were forthcoming.

When I touched my finger to the base, it was at least as damp as the day before. Which seemed odd, as the ambient temperature was reasonably high. I raised it to my nose, and thought the smell was a little stronger, too.

I closed my eyes and tried to get closer than Scott’s pretty decent summation. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to me to have something of hospital corridors about it. Disinfectant of a type both fusty and clinical, designed to do its job reliably rather than beguile the senses. This made me wonder whether one of the chess players — still assuming that’s what was going on — was mired in some kind of long-term hospital sojourn.

If so, there was all the more reason to try to get it back on its journey. I still had no way of doing this, however. Unless…

I opened the drawer where I’d stuffed the envelope, and took another look. This showed me something I should have noticed before. No stamps on it. No franking. To judge from the number of times it had failed to find a home, it should have had two or three pieces of evidence of passing through the mail system.

It had none.

* * *

That evening, when Scott was in bed and Karen was sleepily scrolling through Facebook on her phone, I took a walk down the path again. I enjoyed a cigarette in peace, though actually I’d been semi-hoping Gerry would be around, and when I’d finished, I stood at the road for a moment, making a decision.

It took a couple minutes for him to answer his doorbell. He was wearing old sweats and a T-shirt that had seen better days, probably the late 1970s.

‘Hey.’

He stood aside. I shook my head regretfully. ‘Just wanted to check something.’

‘Sure.’

‘I found something in my mailbox yesterday. Small envelope, looks like it’s been around the block a few times — and addressed to someone in Illinois.’

He frowned. ‘Okay.’

There were a few empty beer bottles on the table in the room behind him. ‘Weird thing, there’s no postmark. I just wondered… you didn’t put it there, right?’

‘Why would I do that?’

I smiled. ‘No idea. Just trying to solve a minor mystery.’

He nodded affably. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you, Matt? Got a box of Boont Amber open. Nice and cold.’

‘Some other night, okay? Soon.’

‘I’ll hold you to it.’

When I got back indoors Karen had taken herself upstairs. I could hear preparations for bed. The kettle was boiling. We’ve both long been in the habit of taking a cup of chamomile tea to bed, made by me.

While I waited for the water to boil I walked through into my study and stood at my desk. I hadn’t expected Gerry to be behind the envelope. He has, so far as I can tell, no sense of humour whatsoever, assuming that’s the quality you require for a practical joke of this type. I could ask our mail person tomorrow, if I caught her, but Marie is a stolid person of middle age and approximately pyramidal shape and I couldn’t imagine her playing a prank on me either. The mystery the bishop presented was therefore unsolvable, and frankly not terribly interesting.

I picked it up and examined it again.

The base was still wet. It still smelled a little weird. That’s all there was to be said about it. I carried it out to the kitchen, where I poured water onto the waiting teabags. Then I went out the back door.

I still didn’t want to put the piece in the trash. It deserved to continue on a journey of some kind, but I was bored of it, and I really didn’t like the smell, which was now beginning to pervade the study.

So I walked a few yards toward the woods, and threw the piece into the trees.

* * *

Next morning Scott had a dental appointment, which — for reasons too tedious to relate — meant going to a town twenty miles away, and thus — given the practice’s playful way of pretending they’ve never, ever seen you before, and making you fill in more forms and then jump hoops through dental nurses and assistants and senior assistants before you got to the maestro himself — at least three lost hours. I’d assumed I’d be in the frame for this adventure, but Karen volunteered.

I got a lot of work done, as is often the case when the house is empty and you’re free to work to your own rhythms. Which meant, in my case, a fresh cup of coffee and a cigarette about once an hour. I was on one of these breaks when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

I pulled it out quickly, assuming it would be Karen wanting my say-so on some unusually outrageous dental charge — or, I dared hope, her giving me news that they were going to make a day of it and come back the slow way.

The screen said no, it was my mother.

I winced. Partly because she’d called me, which meant it had been too long since I’d called her. Also because, goodbye productivity. But… she’s my mother.

She was in good form, generally, and spent the first twenty minutes on a free-form catch-up on the ins-and-outs of the tiny Midwestern town where she lives, delivered in a style that Garrison Keillor might be proud of, were he a little bitchier in nature (and presently without an editor). This segued into a list of the tasks she was currently undertaking around the house. In the last six months she’d acquired the decluttering bug, and while I feared this might eventually see her living in a house with a single chair, her phone, and no other possessions, it seemed more positive than how she’d spent the period immediately after my father’s death, restlessly going from room to room, weepily sifting through old photo albums and mementos, repeatedly, trying to arrange them into an order which no one — including her, I’d been confident — would ever comprehend.

‘One thing, though,’ she said. My attention had been wandering a little, I’ll confess, but this re-focused me. Over the last two years I’d come to realize these three words often signaled whatever her current low-key obsession had become. ‘Something’s missing.’

‘What?’ I asked, keeping my tone light. I had plenty of practice in deflecting these minor manias, at reassuring her that not being able to find the store receipt from when they bought the new dishwasher in 2008 was not a huge deal in the scheme of things.

‘The bishop,’ she said.

My mind spent half a second wondering which of the clerics in her town she was referring to, but my body was quicker. My heart beat hard, once. ‘What?’

‘Your father’s chess set.’

‘Dad had a chess set?’

‘Of course he did. You must remember it.’

I did not. ‘What do you mean, it’s missing?’

‘The bishop,’ she said, patiently. ‘I hoped I’d been reasonably clear about that. By saying… “the bishop”.’

It’s as well to remember that your parents remain potent individuals, however batty they may appear from time to time. ‘Sure, okay, sorry. But missing how?’

‘I was clearing through the drawers in his den, and found the set. I can’t get rid of it, of course. He never played much, well, he didn’t have the opportunity at home… I can’t play, and you never showed any interest, but I remember him buying it, not long after you were born. Lovely brown wood. You
sure
you don’t remember it?’

I felt short of breath. ‘No. The bishop, Mom?’

‘Oh yes. Well, it’s gone. One of them. All the other pieces are there — well I assume they are, I’m not sure how many of those pawn things there are supposed to be, but the others all come in pairs or fours. Quartets. Or quads. Or whatever the word is. Except the bishops. There’s only three of them. That can’t be right, can it?’

I had no recollection of my father owning a chess set. That didn’t prove anything — you don’t remember everything from childhood. But it seemed very odd to me that we should be having this conversation today.

‘It’s probably in another drawer somewhere.’

‘Nope,’ she replied, smartly. ‘Checked them all.’