The Returned. Jason Mott

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СКАЧАТЬ to let him know that she was not angry just yet. “Keep your secrets. I trust you,” she said, and left the room.

      The pastor’s typing was even worse now that his wife had said that she trusted him, thereby implying that there might be something in his writing of the letter that required not only her trust but, even worse, a reminder of that trust.

      She was a very skilled spouse.

      

      

      To Whom It May Concern,

      

      

      That was how far back he’d gone. All the way to the beginning. He huffed and wiped his furrowed brow with the back of his hand and continued.

      Peck. Peck. Peck. Peck-peck. Peck...

      

      

      I am writing to inquire

      

      

      Pastor Peters sat and thought, realizing now that he knew very little about exactly what he wanted to ask.

      Peck-peck-peck...

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch. I received your letter stating that Miss Pinch was trying to find me.

      

      

      Delete, delete, delete. Then:

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

      

      

      That was closer to the truth of it. He thought, then and there, about simply signing his name and dropping the envelope in the mail. He thought so hard about it that he even printed the page. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at the words.

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

      He placed the paper on his desk and picked up a pen and marked a few things out.

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

      

      

      Even if his mind was unsure, his hand knew what he was trying to say. It lifted the pen and launched it at the letter again. Scratching and drawing through until, finally, the truth of everything was there, staring back at the pastor.

      

      

      I am writing about Elizabeth.

      

      

      What else could he do then but crumple the paper and toss it into the trash?

      The pastor logged on to the internet and pecked Elizabeth Pinch’s name into the search bar. All that came back were dozens of other people named Elizabeth Pinch; none of them were the fifteen-year-old girl from Mississippi who had, once upon a time, owned his heart.

      He refined the search to display only images.

      Pictures of women populated the screen, one after the other. Some smiling, facing the camera. Others not even aware that the camera was there. Some of the images weren’t pictures of people at all. Some of them were images from movies or television. (Apparently there was an Elizabeth Pinch in Hollywood who wrote for a very highly rated television crime drama. Images of the crime drama appeared on page after page of the search results.)

      Pastor Peters searched on the computer well past when the sun went from gold to auburn, then back to gold just before it slipped beneath the horizon. Though he had not asked for it, his wife brought him a cup of coffee. He thanked her and kissed her and shooed her gently from the room before she could study the computer screen and see the name in the search bar. But, even if she had seen it, what would she have done with it? What good would it have done her? At the very least, seeing the name would have made her suspicious, but she was already suspicious. The name itself would have given her nothing more.

      He had never told her about Elizabeth.

      Just before bedtime he found it: a newspaper clipping uploaded from the Water Main, the small newspaper back in the small Mississippi town that Pastor Peters grew up in not so long ago. He hadn’t imagined that technology had made it that far, reached out all the way to a Podunk town in a humid corner of Mississippi where the greatest industry in all the county was poverty. The heading, grainy but legible, read Local Girl Killed in Car Accident.

      Pastor Peters’s face tightened. A taste of anger rose up in his throat, an anger aimed at ignorance and the incapability of words.

      Reading the article he wished for more detail—exactly how Elizabeth Pinch had died in a tangle of metal and sudden inertia. But the media was the last place one should look for truth. A person was lucky to find the facts, let alone the truth.

      In spite of what the article lacked, the pastor read the small newspaper clipping over and over again. After all, he had the truth inside him. The facts only served to bring it all back to him in sharp relief.

      For the first time all day, the words came easily.

      I am writing about Elizabeth. I loved her. She died. Now she is not dead. How do I behave?

      * * *

      Harold and Lucille sat watching the news and very silently fidgeting in their own way. Jacob was upstairs, sleeping, or not sleeping. Harold sat in his favorite comfortable chair and licked his lips and rubbed his mouth and thought of cigarettes. Sometimes he inhaled, held the breath, then pushed it out firmly through lips perfectly shaped to the circumference of a cigarette.

      Lucille sat with her hands in the lap of her housecoat. The news was being irrational.

      A silver-haired news anchor with perfect and handsome features sat in a dark suit and had only tragic and unfortunate things to say. “In France, there are reports of three dead,” he said, a little more unemotionally than Lucille would have liked. “That number is expected to rise as police are still unable to contain the pro-Returned protesters, who seem to have lost the thread of their own protest.”

      “Sensationalism,” Harold spat.

      “Lost the thread?” Lucille said. “Why would he say it such a way? He sounds like he’s trying to be English.”

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