Chapter 15: Return to Sender

The house in Tacoma was a yellow duplex with a chain-link fence and a dead hydrangea by the steps.

Nathan parked the truck at the curb and cut the engine.

"I can come in," he said.

"The landlord will talk to one person. Colin said so."

"Colin said a lot of things."

"I'll leave the phone on," I said. "Call me if I'm gone ten minutes."

I walked up the cracked path alone.

The landlord was an old man in a cardigan who lived in the other half of the duplex.

He opened his door on the first knock and looked at my face for a long time.

"You're the other one," he said.

"The other one?"

"You've got his chin. The principal's."

I had not told him my name, or my father's job.

"Does Simone come here often?" I asked.

"Every Christmas, with an envelope. She sits on the floor of the front room for an hour and doesn't turn on the lamp."

"She pays you to keep it?"

"She pays me to keep it exactly. Same curtains, same chair, same shoebox." He stepped back. "You want to see the box."

It was not a question, so I went in.

The front room was small and clean and cold.

A recliner faced a window with yellow curtains, and a shoebox sat on the sill in a patch of winter light.

"Her mother wrote to the principal every Christmas," the old man said. "She sat in that chair and wrote it by hand."

"To my father."

"For sixteen years."

He took the lid off the box.

It was full of envelopes, all addressed in the same slanting blue hand to Mr. Gordon Ellingwood at a school in Bellevue.

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