Free Death Takes Priority by Jean Flowers

formerly called “dead letter,” as Ben had labeled the one now on my mind. In my career, I’d seen standard anomalies like incomplete addresses, deceased addressees, damaged packaging, and failure to comply with a business code. More heartrending were letters to Santa and the Easter Bunny that would never find a home.
    An ordinary piece of UAA would be opened at the center and checked for enclosures or clues as to the identity of the correspondent on either end. Valuables like jewelry, coins, or electronics would be removed. If there was no way to determine who had sent the letter or who was to receive it, the rest of the contents would be destroyed to protect the privacy of both parties, whoever they were. Appropriate items would be sold at auction. Case closed.
    In this situation, I first had to answer Ben’s written question. Was this a dead letter? He couldn’t have known at the time that there was indeed a Quinn Martindale in town. To the best of my knowledge, Chief Smargon had told me, but not the general public, about Scott James’s earlier identity. Ben must have passed the letter on to me in case I knew someone that he didn’t, someone new in town named Quinn. He’d been half right.
    On the surface, the letter was UAA, undeliverable. It was lacking the necessary information for delivery by a postmaster. On the other hand, it
was
deliverable by this postmaster, me, since I knew the addressee and where helived. In fact, I knew where he was at that exact moment. I could simply drive a couple of miles to the police station and deliver the letter. Case closed.
    But not so fast. To further complicate things, I knew that Quinn Martindale was also Scott James only through a confidential discussion with the chief of police about a pending investigation. Unless she was wrong about that. I hadn’t actually heard Scott James admit to being Quinn Martindale. Case wide open.
    It seemed fruitless to keep debating myself, taking both sides over a single thin envelope. And how ironic that one of the most complex post office issues I’d ever had to deal with had arisen in North Ashcot, and not in Boston, where we handled a huge amount of mail daily and where you could stop at the post office to buy a greeting card, have a passport photo taken, or pick up a burial flag for a vet.
    North Ashcot offered phone books; that was it. And not always.
    I was dismayed by the lack of local response when I had needed a ride from the tea room earlier today, but I couldn’t bring myself to call Linda in Boston for advice. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I couldn’t handle my new job. She’d have my employee forms back in the HR active file in minutes. My own training and experience had to be enough to solve this problem. I hadn’t had to review decisions regarding privacy rights in a while, but I recalled a few cases and even some of the history as it pertained to the postal service.
    I corroborated my memory with an Internet search and found that, indeed, fourth-amendment rights had beenextended to mail during litigation in the nineteenth century. Unlike the decision for a person’s trash can, for example, the ruling for mail was in favor of privacy. Drop your trash into a container and push it onto the sidewalk, and the contents were fair game, all privacy bets off. The box from your last Thai takeout was now anyone’s bounty. But once a person glued an envelope shut and dropped it into an official mail repository, he was judged as having the expectation of privacy, even though he might have mailed the letter on the same sidewalk, a few yards from his trash can, or in front of a long line of people in the post office.
    For a “dead letter,” however, there was a kind of dispensation for postal personnel at the recovery center to open the letter, to search for clues as to the letter’s origin or destination. We often referred to them as the detectives of the