Mail Carrier 06 - Post Mortem, page 2
“You’re going to have plenty of time with her at the farm this year with all the spring babies. The weather is going to be fabulous this week. So wouldn’t you rather have her when she’s awake?” He made a perfect point.
“You’re right.” Both of us sat on the couch. Mac propped his foot up on the coffee table as I reached for the remote. “Here, I’m beat. You pick.”
“Let’s just sit here in silence. I’ve been in meetings all day. I’m sure Julia told you she’s been holding down the office.” He curled me to him before he tilted his head back to rest on the back of the sofa.
“No. She didn’t mention it. She rarely talks about work now. I’m guessing it’s because of us.” I squeezed him around his midsection and dug my head deeper into his chest, taking in a deep inhale, letting his cologne fill my heart with joy. He was always put together, complete with a spray of his signature scent.
“I’ve been so busy with new clients building houses or adding on that I’ve not had much time in the office. I’ve got to carve some time out this week to get in there and lay out all of the plans.” Mac was an architect, and he did everything from residential to commercial since he was the only architect in town. “I told her she could bring Clara in, but she seemed hesitant about it.”
“Hhmm, that’s weird. She hasn’t even asked me to babysit on my day off. I don’t even recall her asking for my schedule.” I was off one day a week so Monica could get out into the field and work.
Monica loved to deliver the mail and always wanted a route, but when she had to take over for me for a few weeks, she pretty much decided she would just like to fill in on occasions and not do it every day. The job wasn’t for everyone.
I enjoyed it so much. I loved talking, for one, and for two, it was great exercise. I’d been trying really hard not to let the extra menopause weight grab me, but it appeared my yoga didn’t ward off the extra cookies I’d been eating from Iris, who had me as a taste tester.
What were friends for?
“Did you happen to see Jeff Faulkner before we left or anytime you were at the fundraiser?” I asked.
“I told you I didn’t before, and I didn’t see him any time after that. Why do you keep asking?” he asked in a muffled voice.
I pushed myself off of him and lay back on the arm of the sofa to face him. He didn’t bother looking at me. He was still stretched out with his feet propped up on the coffee table, and now that I wasn’t taking up the space on his chest, he’d crossed his arms. His head was still back, and his eyes were closed.
“I can’t get the worried look on Rachel’s face out of my head. She just seemed so upset, like he was in trouble, but I did overhear Bruce Kline and he got into an argument. I wonder what about though?” I sighed. “What do you think?”
Silence. Dead silence came from Mac.
“Mac?” I rolled up on my knees, sinking into the cushion to look at him. “Mac?”
When he didn’t move or answer, I knew he was asleep.
The stillness surrounded me, which was eerily strange with a dog and cat in the house. I glanced around and saw Rowena was curled up in the corner of the armchair near the front window and Buster was lying on my mail carrier bag underneath the table.
I shook my head, knowing the little rascal could smell the delicious scraps of food I had in there earlier from the Wallflower Diner, which I would throw to a duck that lived across the street from our house on Little Creek. Buster always had the nose for any food, and he’d eat it too.
A set of headlights swept across the front windows and into my house. Even though I got up to see who it was, I knew it was Grady and Julia there to pick up Clara. And in a matter of minutes, the house was empty except for me, Rowena, and Buster.
Chapter 3
The engine of the LLV, my work mail carrier truck, grumbled, rumbled, and shook before it finally settled on a loud bang, sending all my coworkers into the air and causing a sudden jerk of their heads before all eyes were on me.
“Good morning,” I trilled into the darkness. My voice echoed off the mountains surrounding Sugar Creek Gap, Kentucky. “It’s a fine day here in the holler.”
That garnered a few snickers from them.
“I’ll go get Monica.” One of my coworkers put his clipboard in his LLV and disappeared into the early-morning darkness to head inside of the post office to retrieve the clerk.
Monica Reed was pretty knowledgeable about the LLVs and anything having to do with the post office.
Not sure what the problem with the LLV was, I still did my walk-around with my clipboard in hand, marking off anything and checking everything like we did each morning.
This was a ritual we mail carriers had to do before we headed out on our route to deliver the daily mail. It never failed that someone generally had an issue with one of their vehicles. The post office wasn’t about to buy us new delivery trucks, and that was why they were LLVs, short for Long Life Vehicles.
“What do we have here?” Monica came out and gestured for me to get into my truck. “Turn her over,” she instructed.
Nothing.
“Are you turning it over?” She craned her neck around the arm of the side mirror on the driver’s side.
“Yes,” I said and sighed, turning the key again but this time saying a little prayer. “Please, please, please.”
Nothing.
“Looks like we’ve got us a goner.” She walked over to my side of the LLV and frowned. “Do you want me to get Colvin Batty to come on down?” She pulled the phone out of her pocket, as she appeared to be checking the time.
“No. It’s too early.” I got out of the truck, headed around to the back, and slid the garage-style door up to get the first loop of mail I’d already put in there. “I’ll deliver the first round to the nursing home by foot. I’ve done it all the times before.”
Over the winter, the post office must’ve felt bad for me, or Monica had given the postmaster general a good talking-to, because I’d been delivering mail by foot for as long as I had worked as a carrier. It wasn’t like it was a rough route. My first loop of delivery was to the nursing home located right behind the post office. Neither that loop nor my downtown loop was a big deal to walk. In fact, I really enjoyed it.
It wasn’t until the third loop, and the houses that were in the neighborhood that had started to grow, that the walking took up more of my time than the actual delivery of mail.
I would never admit to being old or even older, even though I was in my early fifties, but the freezing temperatures over the winter took a toll on my body during that time. I hated to admit it, but I went slower, and that made the days go longer. Monica had to thaw me out a few times with some super-hot coffee and a space heater in the back of the sorting room at the end of the day, which made me believe it was Monica who had pushed the idea that I needed a truck. When the temperatures were in the single digits, I was truly grateful for the truck.
Truly, the only thing the truck did for me was take the load off of my back, literally.
“It’s going to be a gorgeous morning. I have no problem walking. Besides, I need the exercise.” I patted my backside.
Over the past couple of years and going through menopause, my body had morphed into something I barely even recognized. After I had my only child, Grady, I thought my body was awful and would never be the same. My mom always told me to appreciate my body before I hit menopause because it was going to throw me for a loop, and a loop it had.
All the shops were lined up on the left, and the old Mill Creek ran along the right. There was a working mill wheel that still turned at the top of the creek, even though it was put in way before my time when the settlers had named Sugar Creek Gap. The preservation committee did a great job all of these years making sure the wheel was kept in tip-top shape.
Recently the first bookstore opened, The Mill Bookstore, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
“Good morning,” Leotta Goldey welcomed me when I walked into Social Knitworks. “I’ve got a few pieces.”
I made my way through the shop and found her sitting on the ground with a lapful of knotted-up yarn balls that had seen much better days.
“My goodness.” I had to force myself not to snicker. “That looks like a mess.”
“I swear if these mothers don’t start making their yungins mind, I’ll do it.” She shook a ball of yarn in the air. “Not Julia. Clara can do whatever she wants in here when she’s a toddler.”
“Oh my, don’t make her any older than she is.” My heart sank at the thought of my sweet granddaughter, Clara, growing any faster. “The time has already gone too fast for me.”
“Enjoy it while you can. You’ll blink your eye, and Clara will be an adult, doing her own thing if you don’t mind the time.” Leotta shook her head and stood up. “How do you think the fundraiser went last night?”
“I’ve not heard.” I dug down into my mail carrier bag and found the mail for Social Knitworks in a rubber band. Monica had already bundled it for me. I replaced it with the outgoing mail Leotta had in the basket. “I was going to ask Grady about it last night when they picked up Clara, but he and Julia were in a hurry to get home.”
“I reckon they did all right. I heard it on the morning talk show on WSCG. You know Lucy Drake in the morning?” She stood up and looked down at the rest of the yarn that needed to be unknotted. She pushed back her hair. “That’s just gonna have to wait until I’m not frustrated. Anyways, Lucy said Sable Kline was happy to report an increase in donations from last year. She believed it was due to the wonderful idea Aidy Moora had to actually host it at the country club, since she had gotten the facility for free and they didn’t have all the overhead from previous years.”
“Did she?” I had to let any feelings I was personally having about the fundraiser’s change from casino night to golf outing slide off of me. Even though I was the one who started casino night, I didn’t have high school children and honestly stayed in the booster club to be involved with Grady and his life.
Boys seemed to be so different than girls. I could see it on the families in my route. Grady would never think to tell me they were thinking about changing up the fundraiser, because he just sees it as making money for the school. It was the mothers of daughters who seemed to relish in the why and how and any sort of gossip that might come with it.
“I hope they made a lot. I love the fundraiser. I think it’s a lot of fun to see everyone in one big room.” It brought me back to recalling Jeff Faulkner.” How long did you stay?”
“I ended up gabbing up into the wee hours. I even helped Iris bring some of her trays back to the bakery.” The bell over the door dinged. “That’s my nine a.m. beginners’ knitting group.” She hurried over to the counter and started to grab the various tools she let her students use while they were in class. “Will I see you tomorrow night?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I headed to the door and waved goodbye over my shoulder.
The shops were starting to get customers, which made it easier to deliver and pick up any outgoing mail because the shop owners were too busy with their customers to spend any time talking to me.
“Iris must be beat.” I looked around Pie in the Face Bakery for Iris, but she wasn’t there. “Is she in the back?” I asked Geraldine Workman, Iris’s employee.
“She didn’t come in today. She said she was up all night with a feeling.” Geraldine tsked. “You know that woman and her crazy feelings. I told her to just stay there until the feeling passes, because once that woman lets you know she’s had some weirdo vibe, it seems to put it out into the world, and it comes true. And I don’t want no part of that.”
Geraldine wagged her finger before she reached over the glass bakery counter and took the mail.
“You got anything going out?” I asked, and she shook her head.
My next stop was the Wallflower Diner. I would be there a little longer than any of my stops.
The Wallflower Diner was altogether different. My parents owned it, and my mom had a good round-about time that I’d be there with their mail. I also brought over her personal mail, even though she and my dad lived in the retirement community at the Sugar Creek Gap Nursing Home.
“Get on in here!” Mom waved me over when I walked in the door. She picked up the remote control from behind the counter and held it up to the television, turning it off.
“Hey, honey.” My dad twirled around from his usual stool at the counter where he and his friends met every morning to solve all the world’s problems according to their opinions.
“Hey, Dad.” I gave him a light kiss on the cheek, dropped my bag on the floor next to the open stool, and plopped down, pushing their mail down the counter for him to thumb through.
“I had to save back some pancakes for you. They are especially delicious this morning.” Mom grabbed the short stack of pancakes sitting under the heating lamp of the pass-through window. “And two turkey sausage links because I know you’re watching your figure.”
“Watching your figure?” My dad jerked his head up from the stack of mail. “I don’t see nothing wrong with my baby girl to watch anything.”
“Dad, I’m trying hard not to get diabetes or any heart issues.” I reminded him of the various issues he had. “And eating turkey sausage isn’t going to hurt anyone.”
Mom sat a to-go coffee cup on the counter along with a small Styrofoam box.
“Eat up.” She pushed the plate a little closer to me. She patted the box. “Now give Rowena the turkey. She loves that turkey, and Buster can have the ham. It’s low sodium.”
She was always sending home food for the fur babies.
“I’ll take the pancakes to go too. My LLV wouldn’t start this morning, so I’m walking now and riding my bike to the neighborhood.”
“The syrup will slide right off if you do that.” Mom didn’t like the idea that she wasn’t going to see me enjoying her food. “But I guess you’ve got bills to pay just like us.”
She pulled a couple of envelopes out of her pocket and handed them to me.
When she went back to the kitchen to grab another to-go box, I quickly looked through her mail to see what bills she had that didn’t get paid through the automatic bill pay we’d set up online with the bank.
“Don’t you be nosy.” Iris snuck up behind me. I shoved the bills down into my bag. “I timed it perfectly. I figured you’d be in here about now.” Iris looked at her watch. “I had a feeling last night. I almost called you, but I wasn’t sure if you were all snuggled up with Mac, and I didn’t want to disturb anything.” She winked.
“There’s not much disturbing these days. Mac is super busy, and I barely get to see him.” I took the box from Mom and put the pancakes in there. I picked up the mail carrier bag and shoved the boxes in there. “Nothing for the ladies?” I asked about the Front Porch Ladies, who were my neighbors that lived right behind the diner. They were one of my my next stops.
“Nope. I didn’t hear from them.” Mom took the dishrag and wiped down the counter.
“That’s weird.” I shrugged since I was always delivering some sort of ordered food to them, since they took me as their personal Uber Eats deliverer as well as their mail carrier.
“Did you hear what I said about my feeling?” Iris asked and watched me sling the bag across my body.
“I did. Geraldine told me.” I patted my dad on the way past him and held up my fingers to my ears like a phone so my mom knew I’d call her later. She was taking an order from a customer, and I didn’t want to bother her.
We talked several times a day, so I knew it wasn’t a big deal that I’d not verbally said goodbye to her.
“Don’t you want to know who it was about?” Iris baited me.
“I don’t.” I gave her question a hard head-shake no.
Geraldine was right. Iris had been having these feelings since we were in grade school, and all of them had some sort of truth to them. I always laughed at them until she insisted I call Richard when he was out of town on business. It was then that she had a feeling something was wrong, and it wasn’t too long after that that the state police had shown up at a Sugar Creek Gap High School football game to tell me Richard had been killed in a car wreck.
“I’m going to tell you anyways.” She slipped her hand in the crook of my arm and decided to walk the rest of the way with me. “You know Jerry Faulkner that you kept asking about last night?”
“Unhun,” I hummed and walked in the community center to drop off their mail.
Iris knew when to stop talking and when to talk, so she did stop when we walked into the rest of the downtown businesses, including Tabor Architects, where I had to drop the mail in the mail slot on the door. I put my hands up over my eyes and looked into the office to see if Julia was in there with the door locked.
All the lights were out.
“What?” she asked.
“I was just going to say hello to Julia.” I sighed. “She must be at lunch.” There was a bit a concern since Mac had mentioned Julia was the only one in the office and doing all the office work.
Not that she couldn’t do it, but I loved Julia as much as I loved Grady and wanted to make sure she was okay. I also wanted to remind her that if she needed anything, including keeping Clara, that I was more than happy to rearrange my work schedule.
“Anyways, apparently he’s missing.”
I slipped the mail of the WSCG radio station in their mail slot since I noticed the on-air sign that hung on the outside of the building was lit up. The studio was small, and any noise that I made would be heard on air.
I waved at Lucy Drake on our way past her and turned the corner to deliver the mail to Little Creek Road with Julia on my mind.
“Did you hear me?” Iris asked, nudging me out of my head. “Jerry Faulkner is still missing. His wife has that tracker thingy on her phone, and she did locate it. They found it on the ninth hole of the golf course in some trees. It’s the hole where he and Bruce Kline got into it.”
“Missing?” I blinked and stopped on the pedestrian bridge that went over Little Creek and where my duck was greeting me with his quacks.
