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He took Emmy into his office, where he shut the door. Calen studied Emmy to see if she was indeed on the verge of a meltdown. No. This wasn’t the precursor to athey didus wrongrant.
“Okay, what the heck is this all about?” he demanded.
“I found this in the attic when I went home for lunch,” she said, patting the bulging canvas sack she was carrying.
Though the explanation was short, it took Calen a couple of seconds to wrap his mind around it. She no doubt meant the attic of the house she’d purchased eighteen months ago. The house, and therefore the attic, that had belonged to Calen’s father, Waylon, who’d died over two years earlier. Emmy had bought it shortly thereafter because Calen already owned a small horse ranch on the outskirts of town. Calen’s mother had long since passed away.
“Is there something illegal, or dead, in thatbag?” he asked.
She didn’t exactly jump to answer. “Yes to the first,” she finally said. “I’m not sure about thesecond. Maybe.”
Calen groaned. Then cursed.
Hell’s bells. He’d never known Waylon to use drugs, but because of his father’s rotten childhood and the loss of his wife a decade earlier, the man was what everyone called a miserable old coot. Waylon had also had an extreme hatred of all things holiday related, thanks to his unhappy childhood memories. So, maybe his father had…what? Severed someone’s finger or something when they’d gushedyuletide cheer?
But that didn’t make sense.
If any severing had happened, no way would the severee have just kept quiet.
“When I went home for lunch, I heard something scurrying around up in the attic,” Emmy continued, “so I went up to check for mice. There were mice droppings, all right.” She shuddered in anickkind of way. “And this. It was tucked in a corner, so you must have missed it when you cleared things out right after I bought the house.”
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 mail carrier for most of his adult life and had continued the job right up to his death. Maybe he’d kept his old bag and usedit 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 packageshad 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 forthe 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 seventeen years ago. December 22. 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 2
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 thepostal service.
