Dearly Departed by David Housewright

Author:David Housewright [Housewright, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: USA, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
ISBN: 9781453239582
Google: Wpi9voYqJ8AC
Amazon: B006OTPRUO
Barnesnoble: B006OTPRUO
Goodreads: 656165
Publisher: Forty Press
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

sixteen

The Northland had grown considerably greener in the three weeks since I last drove through it, and the natives were dressed as if they actually believed the rumors that winter was over. I, for one, was skeptical. Some areas in the Northland reported snowfall on Memorial Day. I didn’t witness this event personally since I was visiting my parents in Fort Myers, Florida, a place where winter never comes, and spring is marked not with rain and slush but with the arrival of catchers and pitchers at the training camp of the Minnesota Twins. Still, I believed the reports. In the Northland, a snowball’s chance in July wasn’t all that remote.

“The Northland” is the title given by advertisers—“Visit the Northland’s number-one used-car dealership”—to a rather vaguely defined region in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin noted for its countless lakes and forests. And if you hail from Des Moines, I could see how the place might seem to embody the sense of wilderness that the sobriquet implies. However, if you hail from the true north, from Fairbanks or Prince Albert or even Edmonton, the Northland seems more like a suburb of Kansas City. Certainly the traffic jam I joined when I approached Deer Lake had an urban familiarity. It took twenty minutes to creep from the city limits sign to the intersection at the center of town.

“What’s going on?” I asked the county cop who was directing traffic. He growled at me and waved me through the intersection. I drove in the direction his hand pointed, obedient as any driver’s ed student, and followed the traffic without knowing where it was taking me until I came to the Deer Lake branch of the U.S. Post Office. I escaped the caravan and pulled into the parking lot.

I noted the post office’s address: 4001 Capitol Street. I reread the address I had written in my notebook for Alison: 4001 Capitol Street, #314. A mail drop. Give the lady credit; she understood the value of a mail drop. Her mail comes to 4001 Capitol Street, P.O. Box 314. She then picks it up or it’s forwarded on to her; her identity and location are known only to the postal employees, who are legally bound to keep it to themselves. However, like I said before, Alison had genius but not experience, otherwise she might have known that the U.S. Postal Service Manual contains a provision that clearly states that the post office must disclose the street address of a boxholder to someone needing the address to serve process. You can make good money as a process server. I’ve done a little of it myself.

I went inside and waited in the short line at the counter until it was my turn. The postal clerk spoke with a natural courtesy very few public employees possess. She was short and thin and black, probably the only African-American I’ve seen in the lily-white Northland outside of Duluth who wasn’t on vacation. She laughed at my surprise at finding her there

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