Free Sugartown by Loren D. Estleman

While I was waiting I got up and looked at some pictures in gold frames on a corner of the mantelpiece not occupied by brittle martyrs. Mr. Evancek — grayer than in his wedding pieture but healthy — standing, thumbs in his vest pockets, before a commercial building with Cyrillic characters on the sign. I figured it was the restaurant where he had worked in Cracaw. A family shot of an older Joseph in a sport shirt with one hand on an ordinarily pretty blonde’s arm and the other resting on a nine- or ten-year-old Michael’s shoulder, the boy in a red sweater with his white shirt collar spilling over the neck and his dark hair tousled, next to his sister, beaming in a pink dress, all golden curls and shiny red cheeks. Another picture, very old, of a young Martha Evancek with a couple in the styles of another century, their faces faded to blank ovals. Her parents, probably. Four generations pictured and only one member known to be still living. You start out playing solitaire with a crisp new deck full of promise. Sometimes you win. Oftener you get all the aces out and still run dry. You mount pictures lovingly in the family album and someday someone will turn the pages and wonder who the people are.
    Karen McBride came in carrying a thick sheaf of yellow curling envelopes with a faded brown ribbon tied around it. “I just looked at the return address,” she said, holding it out. “They all came from the same place in Hamtramck. She had them in one of Mr. Evancek’s old cigar boxes in the bottom drawer of the bedroom bureau.”
    I accepted them. Her fingertips grazed mine accidentally. This close she smelled of soap that would be pink, but she wouldn’t choose it for the color. I couldn’t decide if she used perfume. The sheaf felt like a stack of dried leaves.
    “I’m hoping these will tell me something of Michael’s interests,” I said. “Sometimes you can track a person down through them.”
    “Young boys have a lot of interests. But they change them like socks.”
    “Maybe one or two stuck.” I looked at my watch. “I missed breakfast this morning. Can we go somewhere and eat? I guess you’d call it brunch up here.”
    Something glinted in her eyes. “Is this business or a pickup?”
    “I guess that depends on how far your cooperation goes.”
    “Its tongue is silk,” she said. “I promised Martha I’d keep an eye on the place until I leave for work. Also I’m sort of involved with someone at the moment.”
    “ ‘Sort of.’ ” I tapped the bundle of letters against my open palm. “That falls somewhere between ‘I’m pinned’ and ‘What color should we paint the bedroom?’ Which is it?”
    She smiled the smile. “Your switch is stuck again.”
    I didn’t have a topper. I collected my hat and got away from her while I still owned a watch.
    I caught a ham sandwich at the counter down the street from my office and let myself into the thinking room. No one stopped me on the way through the little room where the customers cooled leather. There was no one to stop me. My mail on the floor inside the slot all had little windows in it. I picked it up and carried it reverently to the desk and filed it in the top drawer next to the whoopee calendar from the police supply house where I’d bought my first set of handcuffs five years ago. Loyalty, you take it where it comes in my business. I sat down and got the bundle out of my inside breast pocket and undid the ribbon.
    Some of the letters were in a thick, jerky hand with Joseph’s signature at the bottom. They were in English. The first one was dated two and a half years before the shooting; it would be the language he was most comfortable with by that time. The last had been written a full month short of it. The letters got fewer and the dates got farther apart as months went by, as they will the longer a son stays away from home. Others had been written by his wife Jeanine with easy open loops and cheery circles over the i’s. Joseph got a