Undeliverable

by Rebecca Demarest

  “Just so we’re clear, I don’t think this will do anything for me, got it?”

  He stared a moment longer, sighed, then stared at the floor. He certainly wouldn’t be able to say anything while looking at the urn, it just made him feel childish, like this was all a flight of fancy. He turned his back on Shem and pulled up a Chippendale chair to straddle while he talked.

  “It’s been nice this last month, no one hovering, no one asking how I’m doing, how it’s going, wondering if there’s been any word, or leads, or tips. I—I don’t know if asking for help will start that up again. I don’t want to watch them, the readers and sorters, process the information and make the connections to that haggard man on the TV last year. I want them to help but not feel sorry for me. God, the worst is when they feel sorry. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’”

  “Well, get over it.” Ben yelped, whirling to face the bay’s opening. Sylvia was peeking around the shelf. “Forgot to ask whether you wanted mustard or not.”

  A blush of embarrassment rose in his cheeks. “Mustard, definitely. Thanks.” He got up, cursing himself soundly that he’d been caught. And that Sylvia had heard his maudlin and self-centered worry.

  “And he’d totally tell you to get the hell over it already. Be matter of fact when you ask, look them in the eye, don’t get all flustery yourself, and no one will think twice about it.”

  “Thanks,” Ben mumbled. It was sound advice, but it wasn’t going to take while she was still standing there with an amused smile on her face. He made shooing motions. “Sandwiches?”

  “Leaving now, promise.” She grinned and skipped to the warehouse exit. Ben groaned and covered his face with his hands, rubbing briskly. It’s not like anyone could say he hadn’t tried the whole talking to Uncle Shem thing. It just wasn’t for him, that’s all. He turned to the jewelry chest and rummaged around until he found the heart pendant that Celine had talked about and took it to his desk to look up its history.

  He’d hardly opened the search protocol before his phone rang. He stared at it a moment. It had never rung, not in the two weeks he’d sat there. If anyone needed something, they walked down to the warehouse if for nothing else than to stretch their backs, sore from hunching over indecipherable letters. How do I answer, how do I answer?

  He grabbed the receiver on its fourth ring. “Mail Recovery Center, Property Department, Ben speaking.”

  “Heya dude, you the one that left the message on my machine?” The voice on the other end of the line was male and sounded fairly young.

  Ben thought quickly, then realized what the man was referring to. “Do you mean the message about the photograph that we found?”

  The man slowed down his speech as if he were talking to someone slow. “Yeah man, that one.”

  Ben ignored the tone shift. “Yes, that was me. Is it your photograph?”

  “Dunno, is it a rakish-looking, black-haired dude and a devil-like skank of a whore?”

  Taken aback at the vehemence in the man’s epithet, Ben paused. “I—let me check.” He turned around to the shelf behind him and grabbed the photo. “It’s definitely a dark-haired guy wearing aviators and a tall, thin woman with red hair? Standing in front of a brown two-story house?”

  “Yup, that’s my photo. Man, how long’ve you had it?”

  “It came in during August four years ago.”

  “Huh. So Jeff really did send it. Wondered about that.”

  The man trailed off and Ben set the photo down and grabbed a pad of paper. “Is there an address I can forward this photo along to?”

  “What, no! Burn that fucking photo.”

  Now Ben was truly confused. “I’m sorry? Don’t you want it, or the frame, back?”

  “Absolutely not. That cunt slept with half my friends, the gardener, and my father before I found out. Though I’m pretty sure it was the gigolo her friends hired in Mexico for the bachelorette party who gave me the crabs.”

  “I—see. So, you don’t want the photograph back then?” Ben wondered if all that were true, and, if she had been sleeping with that many people, how he knew who had given her crabs.

  “For all I care, you could send it to hell signed, ‘Can’t wait to see you!’”

  Ben sighed. “Well then, thank you very much for your time. Could I get your name please?”

  The man sounded less agitated now that he was sure the picture was not coming back to him. “Sure thing. ‘S Jerry.”

  “Last name?”

  “Marshall.”

  “Thanks, Jerry, we’ll take care of this for you.” Ben tucked the pad of paper under his keyboard.

  “Thank you. Burn that fucking thing for me, will you?”

  “Absolutely.” Ben hung up the phone and stared at the photo in his hands. The couple looked so happy, smiling foolishly at each other, caught by the photographer before they had really posed. The man’s eyes were covered, so it was harder to read his expression, but his smile was full, and the woman looked like she didn’t have eyes for anyone other than her husband. In fact, she looked a lot like Jeannie did in the picture on the beach. Happy and relaxed. Pictures could be such liars sometimes, he reflected, hiding all the pain and anger and perfectly content to ignore the fact that life was going to get hard the second the camera came down.

  Sylvia came back into the room and found him contemplating the picture. She dropped his sandwich on the desk. “Oh hey, did they call back?”

  “You could say that.”

  “So they want it, right? Such a cute picture.” The crackle of her sandwich wrapping interrupted her momentarily. “They look so giddy.”

  “No, no they don’t. I believe the phrase he used to describe her was ‘devil-like skank of a whore’ or something. She slept with everybody on the block and gave him crabs.” He heard the sounds of choking and leapt up, dropped the picture frame, and went around his desk to pound heartily on Sylvia’s back. She waved him off, swallowed, and dissolved into laughter.

  “Crabs. She gave him crabs. Oh, I need to remember that description, too. What was it? Weaselish whore of a slut?”

  A reluctant grin started across Ben’s face. “Close enough.” He carefully worked the picture out of the frame and set it on the edge of the desk to take to the shredder later. The frame he put back on the shelf to enter into the auction logs.

  Sylvia took another big bite of her sandwich and spoke around the mouthful. “God, some people. Oh, that is such a great epithet. Think he practiced it often?”

  “Only every time he talked about her, I’m sure. Rolled right off his tongue.” He was laughing now, along with Sylvia. When viewed more objectively, the man’s reaction had been highly humorous, if for nothing else than his choice of language.

  “Man.” Her laughter slowed and she took a deep breath, wiping a small tear from her cheek. “Oh, I needed that.” She perched on the edge of his desk and proceeded to take another monster bite of her turkey club sandwich. She chewed slowly and swallowed before turning back to Ben. “I think you broke a couple ribs with the back slapping there. Hey, if I’d choked right then, would you have given me the kiss of life?”

  He started stuttering and turned red, and Sylvia just winked and pranced out of the warehouse, off to bother someone else with her lunchtime. He turned back to his desk to take another look at the photo, but it was gone. The floor was clear, and there was nothing under his desk, so he figured Sylvia must have taken it with her to recycle. The log entry for the locket he’d retrieved was still blinking at him from his computer, so he pulled up his chair and set to studying it.

  After five minutes, he was certain no one was going to look for it again, so he dropped it on top of the frame to enter into the auction logs after lunch and took his sandwich down to the break room. When he entered, Sylvia was entertaining a corner of the room, taking bets to see just h
ow much of her sandwich she could fit into her mouth at a time. The breaking point seemed to be four inches of her overloaded hoagie, and the spectators paid up as she chewed.

  Ben found his way over to Celine’s table and sat down. “So, I found this gorgeous little necklace in long-term storage today that should probably go to auction.”

  She set aside her Tupperware of bean salad. “I see. And what was special about this necklace?”

  The innocent air he adopted as he leaned back in his chair was overly campy. “Nothing much really. It had been put aside because it has an inscription in it, but it’s not particularly valuable in its own right, so I put it into the auction.”

  “Gee, that’s great.” She picked out a couple of marinated green beans with her fork. “Hope no one comes looking for it later.”

  “Doubt they will. Nothing traceable at all on the packaging, washed clean by being dropped in a puddle. And it’s sat there for so long, it’s likely no one will ever want it back.”

  Celine beamed at him and popped her loaded fork in her mouth. “I have several returns to send out today, a couple damaged packages.” She swallowed. “And for some reason, there seems to be extra pages in them. It’s weird how that happens. Funny how the universe aligns sometimes, isn’t it?” She clapped him on the shoulder as he chowed down on his sandwich.

  He finished the bite and hesitated before asking, “Anybody else noticing an abundance of paper in their recovered mail today?”

  “It’s possible, it’s definitely possible. I’ll look into it.” Celine nudged her open chip bag over towards Ben. He accepted gratefully.

  After lunch, Ben returned to his computer to find an email entitled “Your Incident Report.”

  Once again, thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. We respectfully request that you take an inventory of the area in question and inform us of what is actually missing as soon as possible, preferably before the next auction. Thank you. We will be in touch.

  He went to the hallway and called over to the bullpen, “Hey, Sylvia, come take a look at something.” Back at his desk, he started counting days until the next auction on the computer’s calendar. “Jesus.”

  Sylvia came around the corner. “What’s up, el jeffe?”

  Ben leaned back in his seat. “You know how I filed that incident report about the empty safe a week or so back?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, what about it?”

  “They apparently want us to take an inventory and tell them what’s missing.”

  Sylvia groaned, tugging at her pigtails. “That’s going to suck.”

  “Best part is, we have a ‘suggested’ deadline.” He leaned forward again and rested his chin in his hand, cursing his responsible nature that had made him feel he had to report the missing items.

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” Sylvia propped herself on the desk next to his elbow.

  He stared woefully up at her. “Before the next auction.”

  She leapt up. “But the next auction is in a week!”

  “Do we get overtime?” Ben slouched in his chair and contemplated the calendar.

  “Only if it’s deemed justified, and for some reason, the powers that be never deem it justified.” She flopped onto his desk in a mirrored pose then jumped up again and saluted him. “Plan of action, sir!”

  He waved his hand in her direction. “Please, I’ll take any suggestions.”

  “Actually, I was hoping you had one.” She grinned and relaxed again.

  “Ah, well then.” He brooded for a moment, hands steepled. How was he going to be able to do the regular responsibilities of his job in conjunction with a massive inventory and still find time for the search? “First things first, grab an extra couple carts. We’re going to try and pull everything that’s got to go up for this next auction. I’m going to run a report to see what items are supposed to still be in here.” Sylvia saluted and started to make her way out of the warehouse. “Ah, Sylvia?”

  “Yeah?”

  He colored slightly. “How do I run that report?”

  She snorted. “How about I do that and you go get the carts?”

  Ben wandered into the bullpen and grabbed two carts, pushing one in front of him and dragging the other so that he would fit through the doorway.

  “Okay, got two carts. How’s the list?” Sylvia sat staring at the printer, which continued to spew out paper. After a minute it stopped. As she riffled through the stack of papers, she mouthed the count aloud.

  “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. Thirty-one pages.”

  He pulled the carts up against his desk and leaned on them. “That’s not so bad, is it? How many items on each page?”

  “One hundred. A page. Organized by date, not type of item, because there was no way to sort for that. So, we have over three thousand items to account for.”

  Ben stared at her. “There can’t be that many items in the long-term storage bay! Are you sure you discarded everything that was supposedly already auctioned?”

  “Yup.” She frowned at the list, leafing through it. “I guess we could cross-check items against the list. I think that’d be the least hassle.”

  “Absolutely, but it’ll take us a month at least to make it through there, let alone get everything else done, like prepare for an auction.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be as bad as that; there can’t be more than a thousand items in there right now. It shouldn’t take all that long to determine that most of this list isn’t there.” Sylvia started to wander down to the bay.

  “Are you sure you got the right list?” He was panicking now. There was not enough time to get the inventory done before the auction, and have the auction ready, too. He needed this job; it was just starting to prove useful in trying to find his son. “Not the list of items already sold at auction?”

  “Nope, it’s the right one.” She popped around the corner holding a journal. “This is entry 487.” She came back down the aisle and laid the list down on the table.

  “Crap.”

  “That about sums it up, though I would have used ‘shit.’ More evocative in this instance.”

  Ben snorted. “Shit it is then. Let’s work on a plan of attack.”

  “Simple, we’ll alternate days, one person entering the new items and prepping for the auction, the other inventorying. We’ll mark shelf by shelf. Work for you?”

  “Works for me.”

  “Good, I’m starting in the storage bay; you can do the cataloging for today.”

  “And what about the shredding?”

  Sylvia flipped a hand as she walked away. “It can wait. This is more important.”

  “Well then, let’s get started.”

  They worked amicably for the next few hours, Ben ferrying items from the bullpen to his desk, then to the storage bay, and back again. He made it through five cartloads before he decided to take a break and look for more auctionable items. He poked his head into the long-term bay on his way and caught Sylvia reading a leather-bound journal.

  Ben cleared his throat right behind her. “How is that inventory coming along?”

  She leapt up from the stool she was sitting on, hiding the journal behind her back. “Great, just great. Made it through,” she glanced over at her list on the shelves, “half a shelf?”

  “I see. Maybe we should trade now; you go look for some auction stuff to enter.”

  Blushing, she muttered a reply, threw the journal onto the appropriate shelf, and headed out of the bay. Ben wandered over to the shelf, glancing over his shoulder to ensure that she had truly left, then picked up the journal she had been reading. The front was embossed with flaking gold leaf, reading Journal, and it had a matching leather cord that wrapped around it widthwise. He opened it to the first page and found an inscription.


  To our darling daughter, with her wild imagination and wonderful tales.

  He flipped to the next page and found an immature scrawl, probably a young girl not much out of middle school.

  Darling daughter, right. Funny. They just want me to shut up and write in here instead of talking to them. “Here, now you can write it all down,” they said. Then they left for the party. A party. Who knows which one…

  He skipped to the middle of the journal. The writing had improved somewhat, though the entries seemed to all be about the length of the first one.

  Bobby is so cute, I could just eat him up, but Jessica has totally laid dibs on him, though I think he’d much rather be going with me than her fat butt.

  Ben snorted, then returned the journal to its appropriate spot in the lineup of journals—chronologically by date received. It had only been there ten years, so it was nowhere near its release date. He picked up the next journal in the line and searched for it on the list. He worked like this for another ten minutes until he heard people start trickling past in the hallway, leaving for the day. He sighed and put the list down to go find Sylvia.

  She was at his desk with a pile of auction items, frowning at the computer screen. “Nothing fun in this pile. All totally researched and shelved. No fun at all.” She hit the return key and tossed another book into the cart of items to go to the auction storage bay.

  “So, it’s five o’clock. How late are we staying tonight?” He came around behind her and leaned on the chairback to look over her shoulder at the screen. She typed in the code for the next item, but brought up an error screen. “I think you mistyped that number; I don’t think it was the thousandth item cataloged that day, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Slip of the keys. I think we should stay as late as we can stand it. Order a pizza or something for dinner.” She entered the right numbers and found the hedge clippers she had been trying to look up.