Page 8 of Wrong Mail

"Portland."

“Portland, again?” She takes a bite of toast and nods at the little brown skyline of packages I haven't finished with, the envelope face down among them. “That's a lot of mail. You running up David's credit card?”

“I wish.” I hesitate. It's only half a second, but Julia catches half seconds too, which is the trouble with clever friends. “One of them wasn't mine. Wrong address. I opened it before I looked.”

"Ooh, scandal. Whose?"

"Some guy up the road. The Langford house. He’s new. Henry something."

"The mystery buyer." She lights up. "Frank's been beside himself. Nobody's laid eyes on him." She has the envelope off the island before I can stop her, tipping it toward the window, working the top clipping halfway out with one finger. "What is it, love letters?"

I take it back. Not fast, just firm, and I slide the whole thing under a catalog.

She's already seen it. I watched her read the headline upside down in the two seconds she had it, and the amusement goes out of her face.

“It’s just newspaper clippings," I say. "Old ones. Dozens of them. Crime stuff. A string of unsolved murders from Oregon."

"The Cascade Killer," she says. "Ten years, give or take. They put about twenty-eight murders on him, forty-odd sexual assaults, and the best part of ninety burglaries."

"That's a lot to pin on one man," I say.

"That's just it. It's attributed, all of it. Nobody ever counted it properly, because nobody ever caught him, so that's only what they think is his. Could be more. The assaults are the one part they could prove, one man's DNA running through the lot, and it never matched a soul. Some of the victims lived. That's how the stories survived too. Then he stopped, and it all went cold, and nobody knows why."

Long before anyone called him the Cascade Killer he went by other names. The Portland Prowler. The Willamette Valley Rapist. Different departments treated them as different men for years, until the evidence finally said otherwise.

"And let me guess," I say. "You know why he stopped."

Julia nods. Julia is a true-crime junkie, maybe a bit too much of one. It's part of why we became friends, along with my background as a freelance crime journalist and the strange road that had carried me to Hunts Point. She can recite case numbers at a dinner party. She has opinions about podcast hosts and thinks, in another life, she would have made a good detective.

“I think our killer got married, settled down, had kids," she says.

"Possibly. Or he's in jail. Or dead."

She looks at me for a second with an expression I can't read. Then she grins, wide and wicked, and leans across the island toward me, dropping her voice into a stage whisper.

"The murders stopped two years ago. That's around when you and David moved here, isn't it?"

I grin, because I know exactly where this is going.

"No, hear me out," she says. "Your husband. Handsome David. From Oregon originally, yes? Travels constantly. He's always at some conference, in some other city. Comes and goes at all hours because he's on call, which is very convenient. Has surgeon hands, access to medical records, and a face people open doors for." She ticks it off on her fingers, delighted with herself. "Has anyone ever considered that David might, in fact, be a serial killer?"

I laugh. It comes out easy and real, because it’s absurd, because it’s Julia, because this is the game we play—the two of us taking the frightening size of the world and making it small enough to hold.

"He can't even find the milk in the fridge," I say.

"That's what they all say. He seemed so normal." She grabs the last of my toast, stands, and brushes the crumbs off her impossible stomach. "So what are you going to do with the envelope?”

“Tape it up and drop it off."

She stops brushing. "Drop it off? As in, walk it over there. To his house."

"That's the neighborly thing to do."

"Oh, honey." Julia puts a hand on the island and leans in like she's about to explain gravity to me. "Clearly you have not lived on Hunts Point long enough. The neighborly thing to do is put it back in the mail and let the people who are paid to make this mistake un-make it. You opened someone else's mail, Mallory. Besides being humiliating, I'm fairly sure that's illegal."

I laugh. "Don't be silly. That's only if you do it on purpose. It was a simple mistake."

"A simple mistake." She repeats it back to me slowly, rocking her head from side to side with each word, mocking me with her whole body. "So seal up the simple mistake, write Return to Sender on it, or Not At This Address, and put it back in the box. Don't go strolling up the road to hand-deliver it to a man nobody on this street has laid eyes on."