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Emmy unhooked the canvas bag and dropped it onto his desk. It was larger than an average school backpack, and it landed with a thud. When Calen had a closer look at it, he realized it was an old mail bag. That made sense because Waylon had been the town’s postman for most of his adult life and had continued the job right up to his death. Maybe he’d kept his old bag and used it for storage.
Calen opened the bag, peered in and saw an assortment of letters and small packages. Dozens of them. He took out some, looking at the addresses and the postmark dates. And he cursed again.
“These are from four years ago,” he pointed out.
She nodded. “And it’s not the only bag. There are three more, one in each of the other attic corners. I only glanced inside them because, hey, there were those mice droppings, but some postmarks go back more than twenty years. There are dozens of them, Calen. Maybe hundreds.”
Calen opened his mouth to curse again but realized there was no profanity harsh enough for this. Instead, he continued to sort through the mail and spotted what the letters and packages had in common.
Christmas.
There were holiday-themed stamps, stickers and such on each of the items. He went through more than two dozen and didn’t see a bill or any junk mail in the mix. Nope. These were obviously Christmas cards and gifts that his father hadn’t delivered.
The question was why?
“Yep,” Emmy verified when Calen finally came up with a single curse word that seemed to fit the situation. “There’s more,” she went on, pulling out an envelope from her purse. “This was on top of the pile in one of the other bags. As you can see, the corner of it has been gnawed off, but the to and from addresses are still readable.”
Everything inside Calen went still when he recognized the look she gave him. Because he’d been on the receiving end of it for the past year.
Sympathy.
Steeling himself up to face, well, whatever crap he was about to face, he took the envelope and saw the postmark was from eighteen years ago. December twenty-second. There was no name on the return address, but the street was listed. It had come from San Antonio, about a half hour’s drive away, and it had been written in a child’s scrawl. He recognized the address the letter had been sent to.
There was a name, too.
Daddy.
Well, hell in a big-assed handbasket. Calen knew bad news when he was looking at it, and this wasbad.
Chapter Two
When Emmy had planned Calen’s and her weekly get-together to bad-mouth their cheating exes, she certainly hadn’t had this in mind. Of course, she also hadn’t planned on noises in the attic, mouse droppings, or discovering two decades’ worth of old letters and packages. That included the one letter that had caused Calen to look as if someone had punched him.
The one sent to his father’s address.
Calen had yet to open or discuss it, but he would eventually have to do both. Emmy didn’t want to think about the laws Calen’s father had broken by not delivering all this mail, but she was certain that would have to come up. Especially since Calen would have to report the omission to the postal service.
For now though, Emmy just focused on the immediate problem of what the heck they were going to do about the piles of mail that were now on her living room floor. A place they’d brought them shortly after Calen had retrieved the other three bags from the attic. Considering he’d cursed his way through a good portion of that retrieval, they’d both decided they needed privacy. No way would he have gotten that privacy in his office.
While Calen had started the counting and sorting, Emmy had changed out of the fairy costume. Iridescent gossamer wings were great for playing mystical woodland creatures, but they sucked for pretty much everything else. She needed to sit down to get through this.
Once she’d returned from changing into jeans and her favorite Harry Potter T-shirt, Emmy poured Calen a drink, grabbed a Pepsi for herself, and located pen and paper to make notes.
“Sixty-eight letters and cards in this one,” Calen announced after he’d finished counting the contents of bag number four. “And four small packages.”
Emmy jotted that down and did a quick total. The four bags had contained two hundred and twelve letters and cards and thirteen packages.
Well, that total was almost true.
Emmy wasn’t counting the letter she’d removed from the bag before she had ever taken sack number one into Calen’s office. It’d been a shock to see it. The kind of shock that made a person say bad words and get weak in the knees. Both of which had happened. Because the letter had been from her.
And sent to Calen.
Seventeen years ago.
So much angst and agony had gone into the writing of that particular correspondence when she’d been eighteen. She had nearly chickened out many times before she had finally dropped it into the box outside the post office, certain it would end up in Calen’s hands. Clearly, it hadn’t, because it’d been sitting in an old mail bag in Waylon’s attic all this time. Seeing it there had certainly clarified a few things.
Like why Calen had never mentioned her letter.
