Undeliverable (7 page)

Sylvia already had a few items sitting on his desk. “These all came in during August 2006. They’re ready for auction. First things first: determine whether something needs to go into long-term storage.” She waved her hands like a magician over the pile. “Does anything look like it might be valuable or volatile?”

He shifted the top of the pile to the side and then squinted at it. “Isn’t that a journal there?”

“Yes, sir, you have won the prize! Ding, ding, ding!” She grabbed the journal and tossed it at him. “Fifty years in long-term storage! First, mark in the database that it is going into storage. Second, shelve it. The journals are shelved chronologically as to when they came in. So put it to the far right of the shelf.”

“Got it. Where do I put it into the database?”

“Already done, and I’ll shelve it when we’re done here. Now, the fun part. Go through this database.” She called up a program. “And make sure that none of the things match any pending claims in the logs. And take another look and see if there was anything obvious the readers missed, like a license plate or something.”

“How does that help?”

“We can access the DMV records and see who owned such and such a car in such and such a state with such and such a plate.” She swiveled in the chair to face him. “Pretty neat, huh?”

“Yes.” Ben handed her the journal. “Why don’t you go shelve this while I get started, then you can double check my work?”

“Right’o boss man. Have fun!” She took the journal and headed down the warehouse. “And put some music on. It’s like a graveyard in here!”

He turned to his computer and called up the local oldies station on the internet, starting the live stream.

“Gah! Not this crap!” She came back down the aisle. “Go to 89.1! Lord. Some people’s taste.”

Ben rolled his eyes and paged over to the Brenau University jazz station. “I thought everyone loved the oldies.”

“I do, but just the deep tracks. Much more interesting and musically mature.” She came back around the corner into his office.

“Really, now. So you know your music.”

“Absolutely. Grandma has an extensive vinyl collection. B-side and deep tracks all the way for me.”

“That’s the way I’ve always felt too, but I sometimes enjoy a good A track. Even if they are overplayed. Now. Can you show me what we’re actually doing with this stuff?”

Sylvia fished a bagged and tagged framed photograph from the pile. “Okay, we’ll start with this. Open the file.” Ben typed 06-07-23-11 into the prompt box and waited while the program retrieved the pertinent file. “Okay, first double-check item against description. One framed photo of a couple in front of a house. Check. Next you check the research log. Hmm, looks like the reader tried to search for the address using the house number and the town it mailed from. Hah! But they didn’t try searching the town it was mailed to! See, it says in the partial delivery address box that the town was clear, it was everything else that got messed up on the package. So, here’s where the fun starts. See the icon of the map? Pull it up. Google helped us put together our own tool for this. Type in what we know—house number and town. Search.”

They waited while the list of possibilities started and then continued to grow. When it stopped, there were forty-five.

“Damn. Knew it wouldn’t be that easy. Okay. Any other clues we can draw from?”

Ben started to get the same sort of feeling that he had while digging through the lists of tips and names, an excitement he wasn’t sure was entirely due to searching for his son, but was also connected to the thrill of the hunt. He scanned the digital ticket for any clues they might had yet missed. “It says there was a G in the street part of the address.”

“Okay, that narrows it down. Only street names with a G in them.” They applied the restriction and watched the list narrow to fifteen.

“Better, but still not great. What else, what else?”

They racked their brains for a moment, trying to figure out if there was any other way to narrow the parameters. “Is there a program that allows you to search by the kind of house or construction?”

“No. But there is Google Maps Street View! Genius.”

Together they put the fifteen addresses into the computer one at a time and pulled up the street view. Fourteen houses had it, but none looked the same as the one in the picture.

“Man, I thought this one had a chance.” Sylvia started to dismantle the frame, to file the picture in long term and to put the frame into the auction.

“Hold on, can’t we access the white pages for this last one?”

“You just don’t give up, do you? Yeah, I think we get unrestricted access or some such to phone numbers. Not sure as I wasn’t ever given access to those programs.” She pointed to a Yellow Book logo on his desktop and he logged in.

“Okay, time to make some calls.” Sylvia picked up his phone and handed it to him.

He grimaced, but knew he’d probably have to get used to it someday. So he picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone for a second before dialing the number. He held his breath.

“Hello.”

“Hi, this is Ben Grant calling from the—”

“Psych!”

Ben growled under his breath. He hated this kind of voicemail message. It always struck him as immature and pointless dicking around.

“This is the answering machine for the Geralds. Leave a message and maybe we’ll get back to you.”

“Hi, this is Ben Grant calling from the Mail Recovery Center of the United States Postal Service. We have here an item, a framed photograph of a couple, that may have been meant for you about four years ago. If you could give me a call back at,” Sylvia held up a notepad with a scribbled number on it, “1-800-ASK-USPS, that would be great. Once again, that number is 1-800-275-8777.” He hung up the phone and turned to Sylvia. “I hate those kinds of voicemails.”

“Really? I always think they’re kinda funny.”

“To each their own.” He hefted the frame. “What do you do with this in the meantime?”

She took it from him and tossed it onto one of his bookshelves. “Pretend they’re your cousins or some such until they return that call. Or you call them back, or you give up and put it into the sale.”

“I can just give up? Won’t I get in trouble for that? What if they call back two months later?”

“Meh, their loss. Obviously they haven’t been looking for it all that hard.”

“I guess.” Ben picked up the squat Santa figurine that was next in the pile. “Well, I’m going to start on this. You go do some shelving or shredding or something and then come back to double-check me?”

“Thought that’s what I was already doing.” She slipped off the edge of his desk and headed out to the bullpen. “Holler if you need me!”

Ben worked his way through the pile meticulously, double- and triple-checking before he entered it into the sale spreadsheet along with his appraisal of its value. He pulled up a couple sites dedicated to collectables once or twice, but there wasn’t anything really exciting. An hour later, he flagged down Sylvia as she trundled another cart into the warehouse.

“Okay, I think I’m pretty well set with these. Tell me if I missed something.”

Sylvia shooed him out of his seat and settled in with the trackball mouse, swiftly alternating between screens. Ben grabbed the cart and wheeled it down to the appropriate bay and started shelving. In the second tray, a green Hess truck leered up at him. He picked it up, and carried it back to his office.

“Hey, Sylvia.”

“Go away, Ben, I’m not done yet. Do some shelving, or something.” She grinned at him.

“Sure. But afterwards, do you think you could show me how that DMV database works?”

T
hat evening, as Sylvia hollered, “Goodbye, don’t stay long,” from the door of the warehouse, Ben pulled up the DMV database to put what she had taught him into action. He started poking around in the database settings, getting familiar with the search restrictions for car registration by color, partial license plate, make, model, state, and even county and city.

He narrowed his search to the state of Georgia: green pickup trucks, and hit the search button. There were 2,763. In the state of Georgia. It was an impossibly high number, and there was no way he could check out everyone who owned the elusive vehicle. He stared at the screen trying to decide what to do next and then narrowed it down to just the counties surrounding Savannah. There were still 1,579. Better, but still too many to try and track down just on his own. He’d have to get more specific in his search by going back and seeing if there were any other details that the eyewitnesses reported. The printer took a long time to spit out the list of fifteen hundred trucks, but he was determined to bring it home with him to see if anything aligned with the tips waiting at home.

He was just about to log off of his computer when his inbox chimed. He opened the message titled, “Your Report.”

“Well, someone thinks their time is valuable,” Ben muttered to himself as he grabbed his briefcase. Bureaucracy at its finest, but if they didn’t think a safe full of missing goods was important, he wasn’t going to waste his time on it either. He shut down his computer and shoved the leftover half of a sandwich from lunch into his briefcase, crumpling a few of the Missing flyers. He pulled them out and tried to smooth them. He’d gone through quite a lot of flyers that weekend, a couple hundred at least, and he was angry for ruining even a few. His working theory was that you never knew which flyer was going to be the one to bring his boy home. Plus, all the copying was starting to get pricey.

Tossing the ruined flyers into the recycling bin under his desk, he headed out toward the front door. He passed the industrial photocopier in the hall and he paused. There were still a few good copies in his bag; what would it hurt to run a few off in the office? It would only be a few, not too many, and he doubted anyone would even notice. He made twenty-five copies and thrust them into his bag before hurrying out into the evening.

Ben arrived the next morning with a list of details about the green truck that he had pulled from the tips and planned on diving back into the search engine since the list he had printed had just been too long to wade through in an evening. But as soon as he entered the warehouse, he was derailed from his planned research by Sylvia, who bounded out of his office chair when he walked in.

“Ben! We have a
claim
!” She grabbed him by the arm and towed him over to his computer. “Log in! Geoffrey said he sent the form to you this morning. God, I love these days.” Her excitement was a bit over the top for his hangover to handle, and Ben wished she had just taken care of this herself before he’d gotten there so he could just dive back into the database.

Sylvia circled his chair like a caged animal while he logged in and booted up his email. The first email did indeed read, “Claim.” He opened it, found the retrieval tag, and headed back into the warehouse to find it. “So I take it we don’t get many of these.” He told himself he didn’t really care, but Sylvia’s enthusiasm was infectious. She was literally skipping down the aisle ahead of him.

“Maybe two or three a week. We manage to just return a lot of the mail. Most of this stuff, though, people don’t care about. So I really like these days.”

It turned out that the object in question was a taxidermied armadillo from 2008, frozen in a state of half-curled agitation. It sat on its back and rocked gently when nudged. Sylvia set it in motion and laughed. “This thing is kinda cute, isn’t it?”

Ben grimaced. He didn’t think taxidermy should ever be practiced as it always just looked creepy to him. “I don’t know. It’s trapped in an eternity of exposed fear. Not sure ‘cute’ is the right word.” He scooped it off the shelf and was surprised by the heft it had. “One armadillo, returned to its rightful hunter.”

He returned to his desk with the creature in question and turned to the filing cabinet. “Any other forms I have to fill out for this poor sod?”

“Nope, just the communal log, and then that log over there where you sign it, and then take a photograph of it and upload it to the database, and then I’ll go pack it up for you.”

A sigh escaped him. It was a ridiculous amount of paperwork just to return something to its rightful place. “Well that’s not much at all, now is it?”

“Compared to how these systems used to run, it’s hardly anything at all.” She reached into the recycling bin to find a piece of paper to write down the claim’s address. “In the 1890s, it was all paper forms, and no one knew how to find them again once they’d been filed. This is much better.” She flipped over the paper to see what she was writing on and Benny’s face stared back at her.

Ben looked over to see what had silenced her and felt the heat rising in his face. He didn’t want to share this with her. Not now. But he had been stupid enough to leave those here, so he tried to cover his pain and embarrassment with nonchalance. “Sorry, they were in my briefcase and got messed up when I was on my way out yesterday.” He tried to snatch the flyer from her, but she moved the paper out of his reach.

She examined him just as closely as she had been examining the paper. “Don’t want to talk about it, huh? Fine. But I’ll figure it out, you know.” She turned it back over and smoothed it out, grabbing a pen and jotting down the address of the armadillo’s owner. “I’ll just go get this part started.”

Ben stared after her as she left the room and then realized his hands were gripping his chair tight enough to cause his fingers to tingle. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t pried, like everyone else did. She didn’t start offering false sympathy. He told himself that was a good thing, and he didn’t want to explain it to anyone, let alone her. But she had hardly even said anything about it. He wasn’t sure which was worse. He was so used to people just diving into the burden of his life without asking, but when she saw it, she said nothing, and it had hurt.