Chapter 12: Sixteen Years of Letters

My father set the iron box on the table in the east parlor.

He unlocked it with a key he wore on a cord around his neck.

My birth mother sat beside me. She did not take her eyes off me.

Evander stood by the door with his arms folded.

He had washed his face, and he was trying very hard not to look at me.

Nobody mentioned the desk.

"I've never shown these to anyone," my father said.

"I didn't want to put them in front of you until I was sure."

He lifted the lid.

The box was full of envelopes, tied in bundles with kitchen string.

They were all addressed in the same heavy hand.

"Every spring on the day you vanished, I wrote to the Greenhaven Pack," he said.

"I wrote to the Alpha's house, because a child found in an evacuation zone would have been sent to the nearest pack."

"I asked if anyone had a girl of eight with a scar on her chin."

I picked up the first bundle.

The seal on the top envelope was unbroken.

Across the front was a stamp in red ink, and under it a line of writing.

Addressee deceased. Return to sender.

I turned over the next one, and the next. There were sixteen of them.

Every one was sealed. Every one had the same red stamp.

"They never opened one," my mother whispered.

"Somebody opened them," my father said. "Somebody read the address and stamped it and sent it back, every year."

I held the stamp up to the window.

It was a small, careful oval, with a thin ring of leaves around the edge.

I had seen that stamp every month of my life.

It was the household stamp for the Winslow accounts.

It lived in the second drawer of the desk in the front hall.

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