|
|
Book of the Month Club
Part 1
By: T.G. Browning
“No—I mean. I’m not a member of any damn book club. I haven’t ordered anything. Not from Time-Life, not from BOMC, not anything! But I keep getting them and they’re expensive. I saw one of them in a bookstore and it runs forty bucks. What am I going to do ?”
Doris looked up quickly from her coffee. Say what? Out loud, she asked, “You sure? Sometimes you click on the wrong thing on the web and then next thing you know, you’ve got ten boxes of Hickory Farms cheese headed your way.”
“I don’t have internet. I don’t even own a computer!” Hugh managed to look a bit superior saying that and Doris reflected he might have a point. Still, this didn’t look like a Toledo PD can of worms.
“Hugh, this is a US Postal problem, not something we can help you with.” She thought for a moment. “Did you try sending them back? Return to sender?”
“I can’t! There’s no return address. They come by mail in a US Priority Mail envelope. What am I going to do?”
Doris sat back in her chair for a moment, nonplused. “They don’t come book rate?” Who the hell would be wasting money on priority mail when the book rate was so much cheaper?
Ding!
An alarm went off in Doris’s head. One of the things that made her one hell of a good cop was a feel for things that didn’t mesh. Things that rattled when they should have rolled. Things that ought to be round but had edges and faces instead. Maybe if she ducked really quick…
* * *
An hour later, her head just starting to feel less like a curse, Doris sat down at the kitchen table and opened a beer. Her husband, Milt, who happened to be the chief of police for the neighboring town of Newport, closed the oven door and adjusted the temperature. “Got about another twenty minutes I guess. Go on with your story.” Milt ambled back to the kitchen table and took a chair across from Doris. He looked expectantly at her.
“There’s nothing to tell. Somebody is shipping books, over-priced books by the way, to Hugh Scholander and he’s about off his nut worrying about some debt collector making his life miserable.” Doris could understand that worry. But Hugh had a tendency to start chanting “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” as soon as the first hail stone bounced off his head.
Milt shook his head. “Did you straighten him out?”
“Hugh? Don’t be silly. Of course not. He left still all a-jitter but secure in the knowledge of where to find help. I told him to take it up with the post office. That was the best I could do. I didn’t bother to wish him luck because frankly, I don’t think luck’s gonna have much to do with it.”
Milt cocked his head? “You want to explain that?”
“Milt, something’s not kosher about the story Hugh’s telling. Oh, I don’t mean I think Hugh’s lying or anything. He doesn’t have a reason to lie and I strongly doubt if he’d have the guts to lie to a cop. He’s not what I’d called the most stalwart of souls. What bothers me is the fact that the books are coming by priority mail. Must cost whoever is sending them twice what it would normally.”
Milt frowned and then idly grabbed a carrot from the plate sitting in the middle of the table. He chewed for a moment, swallowed and then shook his own head. “That is weird.”
“Ah, it’s not worth worrying about. If I can stand not knowing who wants to be a millionaire, I can stand not knowing who’s sending books to Hugh Scholander.” With that, Doris got up, opened the fridge and started pulling out salad stuff. She started peeling cucumbers.
Milt, finding himself free for the next fifteen minutes or so, gave her a quick hug and went out into the front room to start going through the mail. He’d gotten home before Doris and had simply dumped it all on a table near the front door. Over his shoulder he called to her, “Got a letter from that friend of yours in St. Louis. The rest seems to be either junk mail or bills.”
1 2 3 4
|
