Keep This Quiet: What came in the ordinary mail

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Tuesday. His mother's kitchen, after dark.

The front seat had been the polite part. Reeve Callahan had had more than a month to understand that.

A deputy had held the door for him outside a laundromat, like a man at a hotel. Reeve had got in by himself. The other way of getting in had been plain in the man's hands.

They drove without a word to a green sign with the county's name on it. His own car was waiting past the sign, on the shoulder. The tow sticker was gone.

There the manners ran out.

A hand on the back of his neck. The roof of his own car, sun-hot against his cheek. It was quick.

It had been done before, by that hand, to other people. His arm went up behind him for a count of three.

Then a second hand, inside his jacket, where the folder had worn its shape.

"Hand luggage," the man in the hat said mildly.

He wrote out a slip for it against the roof, beside Reeve's face. One folder. Typed pages. Photographs, twelve.

He put the slip in Reeve's shirt pocket himself, then patted it flat.

Everything Reeve had fit in one hand. He had said so to the wife once, like a boast.

He drove south with both hands empty. He had been at this counter ever since, in the kitchen where the first envelope had found him. His mother set a plate in front of him every night. She asked nothing, which he had not known she could do.