Undeliverable (2 page)

She blew him a half-hearted raspberry while she poked at the clasp. “Fine, Mr. Literal. Why do you know that?”

Ben hesitated, but he knew he’d have to answer these questions sooner or later. He hoped if he gave her noncommittal answers, she wouldn’t dig too deep since he didn’t feel like sharing certain details with a stranger, particularly one he was going to have to work with every day. “Tremont and Sons.” When her mouth opened to ask another question, he added, “I worked at an antique shop for ten years.”

“Ah.” Sylvia tilted her head to the side, curiosity piqued, and then decided to move on from the topic. “It still looks like a firefly on acid,” she decided and closed the drawer.

“On that point we agree.” Relieved, Ben handed over the next tray with a copy of
Catcher in the Rye
. “English shelf?”

“Naw.” She gestured to the shelves below the foreign books, and he noticed different signs for Fiction, Nonfiction, and Rubbish.

“Rubbish?”

“Mrs. Bunion, the last property clerk. She didn’t like anything that wasn’t ‘real.’ Fantasy, science fiction, all of it went onto this shelf. Just meant we had to sort it out later for the auction.” Sylvia slid the book into a spot between a tattered Jane Austen and an unread copy of
100 Years of Solitude.

Ben was slightly peeved, since he rather enjoyed the speculative genres, but he was willing to let it go in pursuit of the more interesting name. “Mrs. Bunion?”

“Mrs. Biun really, but she was such an old cranky lady and she was always complaining. Thus, Mrs. Bunion.” The empty tray landed back in the cart with a clatter. Ben quirked an eyebrow at her back and wondered what nickname he was going to end up with, before deciding he didn’t really care. His only goal was to keep this job as long as it was useful, as long as it didn’t get in the way of his search.

Ben pulled the empty trays off the bottom rack of the cart and dropped them onto the empty top shelf. “That can’t have been all the items for today, right?”

“Nope, that’s just one reader. There are nine other readers, nine other carts, and this cart was really empty today.” Sylvia grinned at the faint frown on Ben’s face. “C’mon, let’s go see what else the readers have for us in the bullpen.”

Sylvia maneuvered the cart out of the warehouse and across the industrial hall toward the bullpen. Here, the readers opened, scanned, and directed the inadequately addressed mail. The long, low room buzzed with the ripping of envelopes, the murmur of consultation, and the tick-tack of keyboards. Occasionally the sound of a box opener tearing through tape rent the background hum. As readers finished processing one bin of mail, they got up from their desks and retrieved another of the opaque plastic bins from the next room.

The sorting didn’t pause when they came in, and Sylvia approached one of the desks, trading her empty cart for the full one at its side. Then, instead of returning directly to the property storage warehouse, Ben followed Sylvia as she slipped out a door on the opposite side of the bullpen and entered an enormous garage lined with twelve bay doors, two of which were open. At one a truck was unloading sacks of mail, the burly postman simply heaving them into waiting laundry-type carts. At another, a truck was being loaded up with a much smaller load of sorted and re-labeled mail.

“I thought you might like to see the sorting process in action. We have twenty sorters working eight-hour shifts a day in here.” Sylvia parked her cart at one long table covered with mail and hopped up to sit on an uncluttered portion, her gray Converse dangling. “These guys figure out what’s what with all the mail that comes in. Returnable mail goes on the west wall; forwardable mail goes into the bins on the east wall. Mystery mail that might make it to the right people with a bit of detecting goes on the north wall to wait for the readers’ attention. Items found in boxes or loose in the bottom of mail sacks go in gray trays and then get taken into the reader room. And lastly, mail that has no chance of ever reaching the recipient or being returned to the sender goes in those boxes next to the shredder. That includes everything for fictitious figures such as Santa, Jesus, God, Satan, The Perfect Man, The Easter Bunny…”

She trailed off and started flicking through the stack of mail the sorter next to her had accumulated and received a smack on her hand from the swarthy woman. “Sylvia, you leave off. You should know better. Now stop playing at tour guide and git.”

Ben took note of how the woman dealt with his chatty assistant. No-nonsense and forthright, even if it didn’t seem to dampen Sylvia one bit. He was about to suggest that they go back to their warehouse and leave the nice woman alone, but before he could say something to that effect, Sylvia slipped one of the letters under the tailored vest she was wearing. Ben wondered if he should draw attention to what was probably a blatant violation of the Center’s rules, and most likely a few laws, but decided he should wait to see just how many rules he was going to want to bend himself before creating an image of the hard-ass for himself.

“Of course, Marta. I was only curious.” Sylvia scowled, then hopped off the table and reclaimed her cart, all while ignoring Ben’s pointedly raised eyebrow. “Let’s go get these onto the shelves.”

They made their way back into the warehouse and Ben was struck by the drastic change from the hectic environment of the bullpen to the calm, quiet dark of the shelves. It was the warehouse that had made him decide to take the job regardless of how much it might contribute to his search. It was the smell of it—musty paper and dust. It brought back his days as a Library Science major at Concord University, where he had met Jeannie, and they had stolen moments in the stacks away from their classmates and professors. He knew they weren’t the only students who had used the mostly empty archives for a rendezvous, but it felt delightfully illicit and had added a layer of excitement to their romance. That was before a life of antiques and restorations and fights. Before Benny.

Though, if he was being honest with himself, the warehouse wasn’t the only reason he had taken the job. The property clerk position would give him access to advanced search systems that browsed a wide variety of files—everything from mail forwarding requests to DMV and police records—all information that he could use while he continued his search for his son on his own. And so he had said yes, he would accept the position as Property Clerk at the Atlanta facility.

A white and blue binder was waiting on Ben’s desk when they got there, square to the front corner. He flipped it open, idly wondering who had dropped it off. It was titled:
A Manual for the Property Room of the United States Postal Service’s Mail Recovery Center by Mrs. Biun.
It was massive, indicating that Mrs. Biun had spent more time putting it together than he—or anyone else, for that matter—would bother to spend reading it.

He called out over his shoulder to Sylvia. “Hey, any idea where this came from?”

“Not really, but I’m sure one of the office ladies dropped it by. That’s the tome that Bunion wrote, isn’t it?”

Ben wrinkled his nose. “If you mean manual, yes. It seems quite extensive.”

Sylvia snorted. “You mean excessive.”

Even though he was in agreement, he still felt he should stand up for the absent woman. “Come on now, it can’t be that bad. If I have questions, did she leave any contact information?”

“No, she moved to a tropical island somewhere.” Sylvia pushed the cart into the warehouse and Ben followed, sure he hadn’t heard right. He had done the math before accepting the job and there was no way anyone could manage to retire to an island on the provided salary.

“How on earth did she afford that?” They stopped at the shelves and started to sort through the newest pile of offerings.

“I’m pretty sure she was fencing things for the mob.” Sylvia made a shushing motion and winked at him before turning back to the cart.

Ben picked up a hunting knife by the tip, examining the hilt, which appeared to be a skull carved out of bone. There was just no accounting for some people’s taste. “I didn’t know Atlanta had a mob.” He placed the knife carefully on a shelf that held contraband such as smoke bombs and fireworks.

“No, the knives go in that drawer over there.” The tool chest had labels marking the drawers: tools, knives, kitchenware, and office supplies. “Of course Atlanta has the mob. Every city has the mob.” Sylvia leaned on the cart handle and stared at him through wide eyes. “Aren’t you even the least bit curious how she did it?”

No, no he wasn’t. But he could tell she wasn’t going to drop the subject unless he humored her, so he decided to guess. “Fencing the items? I’d expect through the auction.” Opening the drawer, he placed the skull knife next to several pocket-knives and a machete.

“Well, duh. But I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I know exactly how she could have done it. Particularly since she was in charge of the warehouse. She could have all this mob stuff just sitting here, waiting to go to auction till the heat dies down, and then, bam! Auction it off under the table.” Sylvia dropped the empty trays back in the cart with satisfaction.

Ben couldn’t help trying to poke holes in her logic. “I thought the accountants came in to do the registers for the auction. Wouldn’t it be hard to sneak in unaccounted items and get back the money for them?” Ben took the cart this time, leaving Sylvia frowning behind him.

“You’re ruining the story, Ben. Sometimes you just have to suspend your disbelief. Anyway, that’s how she retired to France.”

“I thought you said she retired to an island.”

“Yeah, it was somewhere off of France.” Ben laughed and she scowled at him, but she couldn’t keep it up and shrugged. “Regardless, she didn’t leave a number or address.” Sylvia slid between him and the cart, jumping on the back and riding it down the hall. “You go open that manual of yours. I’ll just go get the next cart.”

Ben rolled his eyes as she sailed down the warehouse and returned to his corner where Mrs. Biun’s instructions were waiting. Surely the staid mind that had produced such a manual wasn’t going to participate in illegal auctions and then retire to some mysterious island off of France. He was pretty sure she was furiously pulling weeds out of the walkway of her little retirement-community bungalow in Florida.

The binder was one of those two-inch affairs with enough paper stuffed in its rings to make it a neat block, the whole of the 300-odd pages handwritten. A neat, trim hand had taken its time accumulating knowledge about the warehouse behind him, the handwriting exactly like his fifth grade teacher’s. He imagined they even looked alike: tight buns of white hair gathered at the napes of their necks, wearing cardigans and long skirts.

After a quick flip through the densely written pages, Ben decided that delaying just a little bit longer wouldn’t hurt anyone. Instead, he decided to go out to his car and grab the box of office supplies he had brought with him.

He almost got lost coming back in as he tried to navigate the warren of offices. After a few false turns, he made it back to his “office,” which consisted of a double-wide cubicle set off from the general warehouse by carpeted partitions. He dropped his box on the desk and sat, slouching with his elbow on the chair arm, fingers braced under his chin. He swiveled back and forth, taking in the pale blue walls with their navy blue detailing and the slightly newer industrial carpeting covering the concrete floor. A desk with an aging computer, some metal shelves, and a file cabinet completed his furnishings. He missed his workshop at the back of Jeannie’s store with the smell of wood shavings and sealants, and the sounds of the occasional customer as reminders of less painful times. But it was also full of reminders of what he was missing.

Ben started to unpack his file box, mostly filled with the usual personal accessories for an office taken out of his old desk drawers: some well-used research books on appraisal and antiques, a stash of peanut butter crackers and beef jerky, a mug referencing the old Prisoner TV show. At the bottom of the box, his hand brushed a picture frame.

He paused, running his fingers over the image of a smiling redhead and a young boy, about five, holding hands on the beach and waving. He had completely forgotten that he had thrown it into the box when he was packing up a month ago, and he propped it on the edge of his desk, trying to see if it felt right there. Tracing the line of her hair, and then touching their linked hands, Ben couldn’t tell how much of what made his chest tight was anger, sadness, or fear that he would never have an afternoon like that one ever again. After a long moment he tipped it into the bottom drawer where he had put his snacks. All he needed to feel right now was determination, and that picture wasn’t going to help him keep his head on straight.

He took a deep breath, trying to put the picture and the accompanying emotions out of his head. He would rather be out on the streets canvassing for possible witnesses, but he needed this job to keep himself afloat while he continued his search. And to keep it, he needed to figure out exactly what this job entailed.

Flipping back to the front of the binder, he adjusted himself in the worn office chair. There was no title page, just a table of contents. It included topics like
Sorting and Auction Preparation
, but his eye was drawn to the heading
Live Animals and Other Contraband
, pg. 209. Curious as to what kind of things Mrs. Bunion might consider contraband, he flipped through the pages until he found the right chapter.

Live animals are prohibited in the United States Post, but some imbeciles insist on sending them anyway. We have had occasion to receive everything from tarantulas to birds, bats, and occasional puppies. When you receive post that contains a living organism, your first task is to make sure it’s still alive. If it’s dead, contact the Georgia State Government Department of Community Health at (404) 206-6419. They like free samples to dissect in their lab. If the animal is still alive, contact Animal Control at (404) 794-0358. We have a special arrangement with them to hold the animals for ten days before they go to the local shelters for adoption. And for God’s sake, take the puppies for a walk so they don’t pee all over the office before Animal Control picks them up.