He was a plump, cheerful young man who felt it was part of his job to give his important customers a preview of the day’s haul.
“Lots of throwaway stuff this morning, Mrs. Holbrook. And bills — I guess you can’t run a place like this without a bunch of bills.”
“Thank you, Harry, I’ll just take it and—”
“New issues of Reader’s Digest, Psychology Today, Audiovisual Journal. Letters for the kids, naturally. I always wondered, do they read their own letters or are they read to them?
“A catalogue of playground equipment. I’d like to borrow that when you’ve finished, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Holbrook. My kids are getting old enough now to use things like that in the yard.”
“I’ll save it for you, Harry. Goodbye.”
The box of mail was so heavy she could hardly carry it back to her office. The job of separating it was usually left to her secretary but this morning she did it herself. She found the letter from Roger Lennard almost immediately. It looked like any other letter, but it was the first she’d ever received from a dead man and it seemed to give off a faintly sour odor.
She called Aragon at his apartment.
“Roger’s letter has arrived,” she said. “I think you should be here when I open it.”
“Why?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if I did the correct thing. Yesterday it seemed so logical and right. Now I don’t know. I’m frightened.”
He hesitated. Then: “I should be there in about twenty minutes. Take it easy.”
“Roger meant me to have it. It’s not as though I took something that didn’t belong to me, do you think?”
“I think you should stop second-guessing until I get there.”
He came within twenty minutes.
It was a cool morning, with the sun just starting to break through the low overcast of clouds. Along the driveway up to the school there were patches of moisture under the big trees where the night fog had condensed and dripped from the leaves, the grey lace of the acacias, the leathery loquats, the prickly oaks and feathery pepper trees. It would be another three months before the rains started, and these night fogs were what kept the trees alive.
Rachel Holbrook was standing on the front steps talking to two girl students. When she saw Aragon she dismissed the girls with a smile and a gesture. They walked away, giggling, whispering behind their hands, glancing back at the new arrival.
“Good morning, Mr. Aragon,” she said formally and loud enough for the girls to overhear. “You’ve come about the accounting, of course.”
“Yes. It’s a good morning for accounting.”
“Come in.” She added, after she closed the door, “The whole school knows something is up. I don’t want to add any fuel to the fire.”
The drapes in her office were closed. Light came from the fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling and the draftsman’s lamp on her desk, angled to shine directly on the letter from Roger Lennard. The setting looked a little too theatrical. Aragon was not sure what role he was expected to play in the production.
She handed him the letter and told him to open it.
“Why me?” he said.
“It will prove that I haven’t already done so, for one thing.”
“And for another?”
She didn’t answer directly. “I’ve had a chance to appraise the situation and I realize now that I might have done something quite criminal.”
“There’s no such thing as quite criminal, Mrs. Holbrook. It is or it isn’t.”
“Very well. I removed evidence from the scene of a possible crime. But you will be my witness to the fact that I didn’t know what was in here and my motive in taking it was solely to spare Roger in case he survived.”
“That sounds very noble. But I don’t think Lieutenant Peterson is much of a believer in nobility.”
“Are you?”
“Sometimes.” This wasn’t one of the times. He had driven to L.A. the previous night on business for Smedler and hadn’t arrived home until three o’clock in the morning. He felt tired and hungry and irritable.
“I don’t claim that my motives were noble, Mr. Aragon. They were human, that’s all.”
“It’s your letter, Mrs. Holbrook. You open it.”
She slit the envelope with her thumbnail and shook the contents out on her desk. There were almost a dozen sheets of paper. Some appeared to be completed letters, some were half-finished and some sheets bore only a few words. One of the completed letters began Dear Mrs. Holbrook. She read it aloud in a low, cautious voice.
“Dear Mrs. Holbrook:
You have been more like a mother to me than my own mother. You have respected my work, which is all I’m good for, maybe not even that anymore. You have encouraged me and given me your friendship.
I am writing this to say goodbye and to thank you for your kindness and generosity. I know you will not judge this as an act of cowardice on my part. It is, quite simply, inevitable, something I have been considering for a long time.
Last year when I was excommunicated from the church you took me in and gave me back some of my self-confidence.
Since I have been a practicing homosexual I will not be able to join my family in the afterworld. I can only hope that there is another place, perhaps a better place, where I can be with truly good people like you. I go to my death believing there must be such a place.
I have been writing off and on all morning and now I don’t know what to do with the stuff. I just don’t think people will want to read what I have to say. I am putting it all into this envelope and you can do with it whatever you think best. I’ve always trusted your judgment.
Please remember me as someone who has felt blessed by your friendship.
Mrs. Holbrook got up and walked to the window as though she were about to look out through the closed drapes. She made no sound, but Aragon knew she was weeping.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll read the rest if you like.” She nodded and he sat down at her desk and picked up one of the other sheets of paper.
“To Whom It May Concern If Anybody:
I tried, I really tried. I prayed to God but he turned out to be a cruel old man in the sky who knows more about hate than about love. I tried, everyone laughed but I tried. And failed. Failed failed failed. Let that be my epitaph, Roger Lennard, he tried, he failed.
What message do I want to leave to the world? A curse on all pious bigots everywhere.”
Another letter was to his parents.
“Dear Mom and Dad:
It was good to hear your voices on the phone the other night. You sounded so happy, Mom, when I told you the news about my getting married. And I was happy too. I really thought it would work out. Cleo admires me and respects me.
I can almost hear you saying, the girl must be crazy. Well, she is, sort of. But she wants to have a family and so do I. I’ve always loved kids. My head was filled with hope. But all the time I had this terrible turmoil inside me, despair, hate, rage. It is impossible for me to make a family, impossible. Oh, how I can picture Dad scowling over that because he thinks that men are first and foremost created to make families. But what if they can’t? Can’t can’t can’t what if they can’t?”
Another unfinished letter was addressed to Cleo.
“Dear little Cleo, you should never have come to me with your troubles. I often told you at school that you could, but when you did, when you suddenly appeared out of the blue, I got carried away. I forgot I was supposed to be objective. I thought, why not? Why can’t Cleo and I have children like normal people? All of a sudden I had real hope for the future. I would change, you would change, we would change each other. We would have a family, I could be a good Mormon again.