Undeliverable (3 page)

Despite himself, Ben was drawn in by the sardonic attitude of Mrs. Biun. He pulled open the top desk drawer and took out a notepad emblazoned with the USPS logo. Using the fountain pen that was always in his pocket, he started a list of questions. First, just how often did they deal with live animals? Second, what exactly was the arrangement with Animal Control? He turned back to the beginning of the binder, determined to start making his way through more when Sylvia returned with another cart.

“Enjoying Bunion’s work?”

Ben got up and followed her into the warehouse proper. “Sure, I guess. She seems like she was a special woman; at least she looked at things in a…well, interesting light. Do you mind finishing the sorting today while I get settled? I might have some questions for you later.” Like, just how sane were the rest of the employees? Mrs. Biun and Sylvia were quirky enough. He wondered if the Center drew unusual people to it or if dealing with lost letters made them that way.

Sylvia laughed, open and un-selfconscious. “I’ll be in and out of your office every ten minutes with a cart. Just holler.”

Ben thanked her and returned to his desk. Before he re-opened the manual, he heard the first strains of a whistled waltz echo, out of tune. Wincing a little bit at the discord, he sat back down and started in on the first chapter of protocol;
The Property Room.

Your job as property clerk is to ensure that all of the items that get lost in the mail don’t end up permanently lost. You are the accountant. Don’t lose an item, and don’t put an item up for auction that someone might claim later.
He wondered how he was supposed to predict whether or not someone wanted an item back or was beyond caring about it.
You will sort the items as they come in and keep track of their entry dates so you know when they are to be auctioned off. Four years is the standard with exceptions for live animals and perishables. See those respective chapters.

If an item is particularly valuable or personal, at the end of four years, it is moved to the long-term storage bay. It then becomes a judgment call as to when those items are to be auctioned. My rule of thumb was journals after fifty years, jewelry after ten. Some things should never be auctioned. Uncle Shem is one of those. Familiarize yourself with the contents of bay five.

The empty cart clattered through his office, and Ben glanced up to nod at Sylvia before he got up to go explore bay five as instructed. This one was organized differently than the other bays and was much smaller. He started at one side and worked his way slowly over the three walls, noting shelves for journals and diaries, file drawers for photographs, shelves full of paintings, and a safe bolted to the floor. Centered on a shelf on the back wall was a black and gold marbled urn. The bronzed plaque on it read
Beloved Uncle Shem, 1934-1989.
He lifted the lid and gazed in at the pile of ash, closed it, and picked up the tag.
Posted from Storm Lake, Iowa. 89-12-26-78
. He couldn’t believe that no one wanted to claim the old man; no one cared enough to find out what happened to him. There was surprisingly little dust on the urn, especially compared to the rest of the objects on the shelves above and below.

The door swung open. “You in here, Ben?”

“Over here. Meeting Uncle Shem.” Ben stepped back from the shelf, scrubbing his hands on his pants to rid himself of phantom particles of his new uncle.

Sylvia poked her head around the shelf, grinning. “Isn’t he wonderful? The one relative you never have to worry about entertaining. Or disappointing. He’s been here a long time.”

“Twenty years by the tag. No one ever found his family?”

“Don’t know. All I know is no one paid to have him shipped home. Could be they never found his family; could be they didn’t want him. Haven’t looked up his claim log though.” She patted the jar fondly. “He’s a good listener, you know? And I’m not the only one who thinks so, either. Jillian, the reader? She comes in and talks to him all the time. She only does it after hours, but I’ve seen her.” She drifted back to her cart. “Any other questions?”

“A couple. How many live animals do you get here?” Ben followed her back around to the 2010 bay.

“Oh, I’d say about one or two a month. My favorite was the bat. He was just the most precious thing ever! A little fruit bat that would hang off your finger or curl up in that little hollow by your collarbone.” She indicated the spot with an unconscious caress. “I wanted to keep him, but the animal control guy said that bats carry rabies, and I shouldn’t have taken him out of his tank. He just looked so scared I couldn’t help myself.”

“Are bats common then?” He picked up a jar of preserved peaches and tucked it on the shelf next to several mason jars of vegetables. He prayed she would say no, since he really didn’t care for the creatures. They were firmly in the realm of freaky for him.

“Oh no, mostly we get reptiles. They’re easy to ship ‘cause they get all lethargic. Once we had this six-foot ball python; she was just darling. We called her Cuddles because all she wanted to do was curl up around you. Well, I called her Cuddles. No one else would touch her.”

“For good reason, I should say.” Ben leaned his elbows on the handlebar of the cart. “Sylvia, just how long do live animals stay with us?”

“Oh, until Animal Control can pick them up. Not long. Maybe a day or two at the most. Though, that hedgehog was with us for almost a week. I just about took him home myself. When Spike wrinkled his nose, it was just the cutest.”

Bats, snakes, and hedgehogs, oh my
, rang through Ben’s head. “And who takes care of the animals during that time?” He was really hoping she wouldn’t say him. He wasn’t any good with other living beings; just ask Jeannie, she’d be happy to elaborate on all his faults.

“Well, I guess you do. Sometimes I would help Bunion with them. But it’s not often we get any,” she added quickly, seeing the frown on Ben’s face. “And Jordy can typically pick them up same day they come in.”

Ben rubbed his hands across his face, trying to clear enough cobwebs from his mind to keep up with the jumps in Sylvia’s thought process. “Jordy is Animal Control,” he clarified.

“Yup. And when he comes, he picks up whatever pet stuff is due for release. It’s the arrangement we have with them. We get pet bedding, leashes, food, chew toys. After its time is up, he takes it. Whenever there is an animal to retrieve, that is.”

Ben held up a hand. “Got it, thanks.” The information that Sylvia was providing wasn’t going to stick unless he made some notes in the manual at the appropriate places, so he turned back to the office and sat down once more with Bunion.

For the most part, the manual consisted of straightforward advice about how to organize his day and month to make the best use of his time. Spend a little time each day prepping for and transferring old items to the auction area for the monthly auction. Make sure to enter each item that appears into the spreadsheet on a daily basis so you know what to retrieve for each auction. Stock up on Band-Aids for paper cuts until you form calluses. Throw out any perishables in the packages and do not allow them to find their way to the lunchroom, as there was once an incident with a poisoned—well, laced with laxative—coffee cake. Ben made it through half of the manual before realizing that it was past four, and he hadn’t seen Sylvia in over an hour. He picked up his tablet and worked his way out to the bullpen to inquire after his wayward assistant.

The readers ignored him so he approached one on the end. “Hey, sorry to interrupt, but do you know where Sylvia is this time of day?”

The man finished scanning the letter in his hands before looking up. “Typically shredding. She shreds at nine and four.” He put down the letter and picked up its envelope, looking at an address that was short a line. Google Maps was up on his screen, and he started slowly scrolling through listings for Bourbon Street.

“Thanks.”

When Ben found his way back to the shredder, it was humming softly, but not active. The behemoth took up an entire corner of the sorting garage, and was perched on scaffolding that allowed rolling carts to be filled with the shredded correspondence. Sylvia was sitting on the top stair, a half-full bin sitting beside her. There was a piece of stationery in one hand, her chin propped in the other and a small smile on her lips. When she saw Ben standing at the foot of the stairs, she stuffed the letter she was reading in a back pocket of her jeans and stood up, tossing the contents of the bin into the shredder. The shearing sound filled the air for a minute as the machine chewed its way through the paper and then muted to dull humming again.

“Done with the manual already? You read faster than I thought.” She wouldn’t quite meet his eye as she spoke, one hand checking to make sure there wasn’t any paper sticking out of her pocket. Ben decided it would be better to pretend not to have noticed, rather than call her on one of Bunion’s cardinal rules, listed on page five: “
NO READING ALLOWED.
”

“Not quite, just about done with half and the day’s almost over, so I thought I’d track you down and wrap up for the day.”

“Sure, sure, have a seat while I finish this up.” Sylvia, all smiles again, picked up another box of letters and used it to gesture to the steps. Ben made his way up to the top and sat leaning against the railing. It was impossible to hear over the shearing, crunching sound of the paper, so Ben waited until the last bin of letters fluttered into the machine and Sylvia hit the kill switch, leaving the room silent.

She flopped down onto the stairs beside him, a little too close for comfort. “So, how’s Bunion treating you?”

She smelled of vanilla and warm paper, with just a hint of paint thinner. He wondered where that last scent came from, and then realized it would be impolite to lean forward for a better whiff like he wanted to, and shifted as far into the rail as he could. “There’s certainly a lot to remember. But there was one thing; she mentioned Hail Mary’s before an auction? I was wondering what sort of things we might be able to use to find an owner that the readers missed.”

“Well, if something seems particularly obvious, like the reader overlooked the address written on the tongue of a boot, then you get to double-check their research. Otherwise nothing, really, you just store and sell ‘em. It’s super rare to find something; they hardly ever miss anything.” The last comment had been a bit rueful, and Ben wondered what a reader found Sylvia doing to make her sound so bitter about their observational skills, but decided this wasn’t the time to ask.

“Have you ever heard of them selling something that someone tried to claim later?”

“Ha. No. After a year or so, no one is looking for anything. It just sits there. The only reason we hold onto journals is ‘cause we hope whatever titillating bits are in them are long out of date, and we hold onto expensive jewelry in case someone tries to file an insurance claim. That’s it.”

They sat in silence a moment, Ben acutely aware that their knees were touching. He hooked an arm around the railing above him and hauled his gangly form erect, not quite avoiding jostling Sylvia. “Well, thanks. That answers my most pressing question.” He peered into the hole leading to the shredder. “What were you shredding today, anyway?”

“Letters. Undeliverable and unreturnable; the ones without anything else in them, like photos. Just…letters that never make it anywhere.” She shivered, then pulled on his arm, hauling him away from the opening. “Leave ‘em be. You’ll go mad if you think about them too much.”

A
s Ben drove home, he noticed that the liquor store was still open. After a quick mental calculation involving his new paycheck and how much he needed to be setting aside for his search, he swerved into the parking lot. At the coolers, his first inclination was to reach for the cheap 6-pack of Budweiser, but his eye was drawn to the sale signs below the Peachtree Pale Ale. It had been his favorite beer since he left college. He normally felt guilty spending the money on a microbrew now, but with the sale price, he could allow himself to splurge on it.

When he got home, he stashed five of the beers in the fridge and took the sixth into the living room. The room was nearly empty except for a battered desk in the middle of the floor. The desk faced the one uninterrupted wall. On the left was a map of Georgia, a close-up of Savannah in one corner. The map was riddled with pushpins and these were wrapped in yarn and twine, connecting an aura of papers to the map. There were printouts and news articles, sticky notes and photographs. The map was ragged as though someone had torn it repeatedly from the wall and the perforations created by the constellation of pushpins gave it the look of old lace.

On the right-hand side of the wall was an enlarged map of Atlanta. A handful of pins had begun their march across the surface roads and a few of them were connected by strings. Centered above the two maps was a black and white photocopy of a poster. There were only two lines of text; the top line read Missing, and the bottom:
Have you seen this boy?
They framed a photograph of his son, taken from the same photo that Ben had put in his desk drawer at work.

This is where he knew his time was supposed to be spent, at this web of interconnecting data. The job at the warehouse was only a means to the end, a way to earn enough money to have someplace to put up these maps and spend every moment he could sifting through the mountains of data that the police ignored. Those men relied only on their computers to sift through all the tips that came in to tell them if something was related to a cold case. Ben hated that phrase—cold case. It made everything impersonal, like they couldn’t even be bothered to care about it anymore.

Ben popped open the beer on the corner of his desk and took a long pull while studying the maps. He was looking for holes and clusters. Tracing from one pushpin to the next, his fingers danced across the strands of the map, and he felt at peace, for a moment, seeing how much he’d accomplished already. After a few minutes, though, he started to feel restless again, so he put the beer down and picked up a large wooden box from his desk. The box had seen better days; it was cracked and there were slivers of wood missing, which made the intricate parquet of the lid uneven.