Want a Story Prompt? Deliver the Mail

Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor—and mail carrier—who lives in a small town in western Washington state. He edited the Seattle-centric crime-fiction anthology The Killing Rain. This is the second time he wrote a piece on Facebook that was so fascinating I asked him to expand it for SleuthSayers. Enjoy.

— Rob

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Want a Story Prompt? Deliver the Mail

by Jim Thomsen

I rang twice.

She opened the door, wrapped in a towel with not much beneath but a bathing suit.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I said. “I’m your mail carrier. I have a certified letter that needs a signature.”

I showed her the screen on my blue USPS handheld scanner and handed her the stylus attached to it.

She reached for the scanner as well, but the towel started to slip, and she snatched at it.

“Could you hold it for me? I’ve only got one hand free.”

The towel? I almost blurted out.

“The screen thing, I mean,” she said with a self-conscious laugh.

I did so, meaning that I had to stand less than two feet away from her.

She scrawled, and sighed in frustration as the combination of slippery stylus and small screen teamed to make her signature less than legible. Every now and then, she looked at me. At last, she handed it back. “I’m not sure that’s very good,” she said. “I might have to do this inside.”

“I can wait,” I said from the doorway.

“You can come in.”

“Um. I’ll wait here.”

She gave me a long look, then sat in a living-room chair, re-tucking her towel, and bent over the scanner. A moment later, she got up again and handed it back to me.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

I looked at the scanner. Illegible scratch, but the signature field was filled. I smiled. “That’ll do.”

I turned to go, sensing that she was watching me as I started to retreat down her porch steps and back toward where my mail van was idling.

“Wait,” she said.

I turned back, heart beating a little bit faster.

“My letter?”

***

I am a mailman. I don’t particularly want to be. But, much like Stephen Starring Grant, author of the recent hit memoir Mailman, I’m forced into it by financial circumstance. For the last sixteen years, I’ve made my living as a book editor, following twenty-five years as a newspaper journalist. At least, I did, until my business abruptly collapsed at the time of last November’s election. I spent months trying to revive it, but after sputtering along and slowly draining my modest savings along the way, it was, sadly, time to find a “job-job.” It was dismaying to find that there wasn’t much I could do—or would want to do, a few months shy of my sixtieth birthday. I briefly explored taking a part-time newspaper gig, but the company wouldn’t budge off its barely-above-minimum-wage wage. The job listings on Indeed were bleak—lots of openings, but mostly for Amazon delivery drivers, night security personnel, and home healthcare workers.

Then I came across an Indeed listing for mail delivery workers in my small town on Puget Sound and, with a heavy sigh, filled out the application. I soon got a call. The job was not with USPS, but for a contractor called USA Mail, with an offer for a job with a flat daily wage: $150 a day, whether the day was six hours long (rare, but it happens once in a great while) or nine hours (less rare).

But the work had some appeal. I could come into the post office as late or as early as I wanted (within reason, though I usually show up between 6:45 a.m. and 7:15 a.m.). And from then on, there was a comforting routine: case the mail, sort the packages, load everything in a battered minivan repurposed with-right-hand-wheel drive, and deliver along the route. When I’m done, I’m done, and every next day is a new day. I don’t much have to deal with office politics, and I can dress as shabbily as I want (and I want).

Plus, it’s a profession that was practiced by some of our finest creative minds. Charles Bukowski delivered mail in LA, and even wrote a novel about it, Post Office. So did one of my favorite musicians, John Prine, not coincidentally one of our finest observers of the American human condition. Walt Disney did it, as did William Faulkner. Maybe this would be the salt-of-the-earth experience that would get my own novel off the ground. As Bukowski wrote in his novel: “Well, you had to work somewhere. So you accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.”

So, after passing a drug test—after being told, told my relief, that they were more worried about meth and heroin use than the CBD gummies I take to help me sleep—and a criminal background check, I started work in mid-April of this year. (Apparently, passing those tests is a high bar here, and my supervisor regularly laments not being able to scrape up recruits of sufficient pristinity.)

It’s been … not bad. A little stressful, as the bar is high for accuracy of service—tracked by the aforementioned scanner, which must be used on every package I deliver, and god help you if there’s a discrepancy between what the scanner thinks you should have delivered and what you actually delivered, which can lead to long and sometimes sharp discussions after the route with whoever sits in the postmaster’s seat.

It speaks to a baseline sense of pride in doing the job right, which I share with my coworkers; the same pride I take in catching every error in a client’s novel manuscript. It’s a big deal, and no less than a national trust: Getting what people want and expect into their hands when they want and expect it, and never letting them see how elaborately that particular sausage is made along the way.

But mostly it’s mundane, soothing routine.

***

What I like best about the job, as someone who works in the creative writing world, is how each day is a well-primed firing pin for the storyteller’s imagination. The route itself sets that particular table: my town has a dual nature, not unlike that of good and evil, and it’s easy to see only the good until you scratch beneath that shimmering surface. The waterfront is packed with high-end homes with highly serendipitous views. My mail route touches on a sliver on that, and a larger slice of sightly-above-middle-class basic-suburban neighborhoods. But, go inland a few miles, and I enter a Pacific Northwest edition of Deliveranceville: a world of long twisting dirt lanes, deep woods, dead vehicles, flapping tarps, sagging fences, lichen-crusted sidings, and dogs whose vicious barks may not be worse than their bites. There’s always stacks of lumber and mechanical parts. Rusting appliances. Aggressive PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. And American flags. Always. Lots and lots of American flags.

In addition to The Bath Towel Woman, I’ve encountered:

• A man who always jogs out to my mail van the minute I pull inside a fence and holds up a hand—go no farther!—and takes his packages before I can step out of the truck for an approach to his porch. There’s always the squalling of compressors and saws and pressure hoses in the deep background, and he aways seems to position himself in a way that seems meant to minimize what I can see. After taking the packages, he always points to a dirt-track turnaround so that I don’t advance an inch further onto his land. What he’s doing—and what he doesn’t want me to detect—are open questions that pinball around in my brain pan the remainder of the route. I always get images of the meth lab being built beneath the industrial laundry in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
• A farmhouse that always makes me think of the Clutter family home from In Cold Blood. It’s shabby but well-kept in a way that calls to mind a vacuum-sealed corpse. I deliver packages here maybe twice a week, and every single time, as I approach the weathered porch steps, I see a curtain twitch in an upstairs window, but never a face or even a silhouette. It brings to mind a line from a 1970s horror movie: “Why is Grandma’s room locked from the outside?” Or maybe, I think, it’s a real-life Flowers in the Attic. Should I try to break in and rescue the children?
• The Hamptons House. At the very end of one of those deep dark winding lanes is a tall, ornate wrought-iron gate, with a locker for parcels off to one side to which I deliver perhaps every other day. The approach passes almost nothing but tarpatoriums, as I call them. But, by peering through a tiny break in the evergreens, I catch a glimpse of a sprawling manor on at least twenty acres that wouldn’t look out of place on a Kennedy compound in Kennebunkport. Who are these people? What do they do? And why did they build here in my county’s version of West Virginia?
• The War of the Roses House. I rarely deal with actual residents on my route, which I understand—why come out to make excruciating small talk with a stranger on your front steps?—but on one occasion, the door flew open as I delivered a package and the next thing I knew, I was almost nose-to-nose with a man who was almost purple with rage, who looked like a cyst ready to rupture. For the next few minutes, I’m slowly backing away from a man who thrusts a pile of mail in my face, screaming that his ex-wife doesn’t live here anymore, g**dammit, and it’s very upsetting to get mail addressed to that f***ing c**t, and why am I rubbing his nose in his pain?

Tell me that line isn’t a launching pad for at least a million suspense-story permutations.

***

Like Stephen Starring Grant, I may not last a year in this job—if that. My book-editing business is coming back, and my days—and nights and weekends—are loaded with work. But can I trust that it will be sustainable? I can’t, at least not yet. So I will probably stick with the route and its guaranteed monthly check at least until after the holidays, a stretch of the year that my post-office colleagues speak about in a roundabout way in singularly intimidating tones.

But I’ll admit that, however long it lasts, when I finally stop delivering the mail, I’ll miss it in many ways. I’ll miss getting paid on a regular timetable, miss getting to listen to audiobooks for the five or six hours a day I’m on the road. I’ll miss the soothing properties of pure routine, and the mentally sonorous feeling of getting to surrender the critical-thinking part of my brain to the perfection of pure process execution. And I’ll miss getting a rare window into how others live, where they live, and how they can’t help but reveal something of their most genuine selves in a way you wouldn’t get from seeing these people in public.

Home is where the heart is, but hone is also, perhaps, where the heart is darkest. Especially if I ring twice.

I like that. As, I imagine, any storyteller would.

A Tiny Little Foot

We have a special treat today. Jim Thomsen, a newspaper reporter and editor for more than twenty years, has been an independent editor of book manuscripts since 2010. His short crime fiction has been published in West Coast Crime Wave, Shotgun Honey, Pulp Modern and Switchblade. He is based in his hometown of Bainbridge Island, Washington. Learn more about him at jimthomsencreative.com  

I should point out that this piece is about true crime and includes language and deeds you would not find in, say, a cozy novel. - Robert Lopresti

A TINY LITTLE FOOT

by Jim Thomsen

On June 28, 2018, a disgruntled reader walked into the newsroom of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland and shot several people, killing five. That evening, the survivors pushed aside their shock and grief because, as one reporter put it, there was no other choice. As he put it: “We are putting out a damn newspaper.”

That quote brought back to mind an incident that happened almost twenty years before, one with strong echoes of that tragedy. One to which I bore painfully intimate witness. This essay is adapted from a Facebook post.

August 20, 1998, just before nine a.m. on a sunny Thursday morning. I'm a reporter at the Bainbridge Island Review. Our offices are on the ground floor of a two-story building on Winslow Way West, at the edge of the excruciatingly touristy downtown, the sort of place where you can walk off the ferry from Seattle and buy a chunk of lacquered driftwood for $225 in any of a half-dozen shops. It’s my hometown. I love it and despise it in almost equal measure, which is a useful tension for a newspaper reporter to work from.

Most mornings, as I pulled into the parking lot in my battered pickup, I greeted Marge Williams, a retired city councilwoman and the building’s owner. I almost always saw her outside her second-floor apartment, tending to her plants and flowerbeds, or toting a tray of baked treats to the reception desk. But not this morning.

I walk inside to find our publisher, Chris Allen, staring at a damp red stain on the ceiling above the newsroom. Below Marge's bedroom. We think at first it might be spilled paint — after all, the building was a dark red in color and for the last week, Steve Phillips, a longtime islander and local handyman, had been pressure-washing and repainting the exterior. But it doesn’t look like that, quite.

"I don't think that's paint," Chris says.

"Maybe we should check with Marge," I say.

Chris frowns. "Maybe we should check ON Marge."

So we go upstairs. We knock. No answer. The door's unlocked. We go in. Nobody in the living room or kitchen. That left the rooms in back, including the bedroom. Chris tells me to wait as she goes down the hall. A few minutes later she returns, looking hollowed out and sick. She'd found Marge. Not in her bed. But wrapped in her bedding. Everything mummified from view except for —

"A foot," she says to me. "A tiny little foot."

*****

Things happen fast. Cops, everywhere. I didn’t know Bainbridge Island had so many cops. Flashing lights. Bursts of radio chatter and static. Miles of yellow crime-scene tape. I stand on the sidewalk with my colleagues, notebook in hand, all but forgotten. We're in little clusters, murmuring, eyes fixed on some invisible middle distance. Doug Crist pulls up as close as he can get, motions me over. He's in charge that week, as Editor Jack Swanson's on vacation. "What's going on?" he asks.

"Somebody murdered Marge," I say.

"Oh," he says.

And I understand, in that moment, why, when Paul McCartney was told about John Lennon's murder, he said, "It's a drag."

At moments like these, 99.99999 percent of you is somewhere else.

*****

Things happen fast. A couple of hours later, we're in nearby offices belonging to local PR guy/movie theater owner Jeff Brein, who's graciously given us space to work. We've managed a few notebooks, pens, computers, stuff from our own office, before Police Chief John Sutton politely, even apologetically, kicks us out. Jack, who's been vacationing at home, comes in, takes over. We watch from the parking lot as Seattle TV cameras set up at the edge of the perimeter.

We huddle up: Jack, Doug, Chris, education reporter Pat Andrews, photographer Ryan Schierling, I forget who else. Me.

We agree right off on a few things:

One, we’ve got a job to do. No losing our shit till later. Much later.

Two, it’s OUR story. It’s a Bainbridge Island story. It doesn’t belong to The Seattle Times or the Seattle P-I or the Kitsap Sun, the daily in Bremerton, an hour away. It doesn’t belong to KOMO-TV, or KING, or KIRO, or Q-13. Or anybody else. It belongs to the Bainbridge Island Review, a twice-weekly with a circulation of about 10,000. We don’t talk to the interlopers, we don’t make their jobs easier, we don’t act like eager freshman frat pledges for their fucking journalism farm team. Fuck them.

We plot out avenues of attack, and get to it. But first we meet individually with the cops and give our statements. Mine takes more than an hour.

*****

John Sutton is a smart cop, and beyond that, he’s a community cop. He gets it. That night, late, he lets us back into our offices once, I soon learn, he clears me as a suspect. He sits down with us and says, “OK, you guys, and you alone. What do you want to know?”

Why was I a suspect? I ask. Because, he says, I was at the newsroom late the night before, working, and then puttering around so I could listen to the Mariners beat the Blue Jays in extra innings. I later went to a friend’s house, and she verifies when I arrived and when I left.

We move on to questions about the autopsy, and it’s then that I learn that I missed the murder by two hours, three at most. It’s then that I wonder for the first of roughly 48,023 times what I would have done, or not done, had I been there when the killer started up the stairs. Always.

John patiently answers all our questions as best as he can, way past midnight.

Once we learn that Steve Phillips was arrested with a bloody golf club in his trunk, our Bainbridge-ness kicks into fifth gear. Steve’s estranged wife is a childhood classmate of mine. She agrees to talk to me, tells me about Steve, whose half-brother JayDee Phillips, a childhood classmate and occasional pal, was one of the island’s last murder victims, nine years before. She tells me about years of anger and abuse that go back at least that long. Jack gets some great stuff on Marge’s background; Doug, Pat, everyone does heroic work. And, as we learn the next day, paying loose attention to the TV stations and the other papers, mostly exclusive work. Chris gives us everything we need to function, and above her, Sound Publishing President Elio Agostini pledges every possible resource.

Friday afternoon, after stretching press deadline as far as possible, we put the Saturday edition of the Review to bed. Then we keep reporting. There are press conferences. Prosecutorial maneuvers. People who hug me in Town & Country and have something to share, sometimes something worth chasing. We keep chasing. We’re too tired to stop.

*****

Somewhere around 7 p.m., someone in the newsroom says to knock it off. It’s time to give ourselves a break. We did it. We kicked the living shit out of the story sixteen ways from Sunday. We did it. Now it’s time to stop looking at the stain on the ceiling and grieve our friend Marge. And drink. Drink heavily. We take over an outdoor table at the Harbour Public House, or maybe it was Doc’s Marina Grill. There’s fifteen or so of us. We’re grubby, weary, not especially articulate.

But we toast to Marge, and we toast to ourselves. We had a damn newspaper to put out, and by God, we put out a damn newspaper.

A few months later, Steve Phillips was convicted of aggravated, premeditated first-degree murder and sentenced to life with no possibility of parole. I testified at his trial. It turned out that he finished the painting job, drank and gambled it away at the tribal casino just across the bridge from the north end of Bainbridge Island, and decided in that state that he hadn’t been paid enough. He drove back to Marge’s apartment, angrily confronted her in the middle of the night, and when she refused to give him more money, he beat her to death with a golf club.

I stayed on at the Review for another year, then moved on to other papers and other places. I finished my newspaper career with a long run as the night news editor at the Kitsap Sun, the paper I helped misdirect during the pursuit of the Marge Williams story. I have no regrets about that. That’s what a good newspaper person does, and I hope I was a good newspaper person. Or at least one who got out the damn newspaper every night. No matter what.