By Kira Deveraux. A free reader bonus.
The Letter in December
A bonus scene from Controlled Damage — The Halcyon Group Series, Book Two
Kira Deveraux
***
The letter came on a Tuesday, which was the day Fran Delacorte did her post.
She had done it that way for thirty-one years at Bellwether and she had not seen a reason to stop when she left. Tuesday morning, kitchen table, the good knife from the drawer by the sink, and everything opened properly rather than torn, because a woman who spent three decades in accounts payable has opinions about how an envelope should be treated.
There were four.
A card from her niece in Dayton, early for Christmas as always. A statement from the credit union. A flyer about gutters.
And a long white envelope from a firm in Hartford she had never heard of, with her name and her address typed properly, not printed on a label.
She looked at that one for a while before she picked the knife back up.
*
Fran was eighty-one and she had been getting envelopes from Hartford for six years.
Not many. Two a year, sometimes three. Always the same size, always the same firm, always the same single sentence in the middle of an otherwise empty page.
Enclosed please find a distribution in respect of your former participation in the Bellwether Systems Retirement Income Plan.
The first one had come in March of a year she could tell you exactly, because she had been in the middle of deciding which of two things to stop doing. It was four hundred and eleven dollars. She had sat at that table and read the sentence eleven times and then rung the number at the bottom, and a young woman with a pleasant voice had confirmed that it was hers, and that there was no error, and that no, she was not able to say anything further about the source.
Fran had asked one question.
"Is it somebody's money, or is it the company's?"
And the young woman had been quiet for a moment and then said, "I'm not able to say," which is not the same as the company's, and Fran Delacorte had been an accounts payable clerk for thirty-one years and she knew the difference between a payment and an answer.
*
She had a theory about it and she had never told anybody.
Not her niece, not the two women she played cards with on Thursdays, and not the man from the union who rang every couple of years to ask whether anything had changed with the pension, and to whom she always said no, because it had not, officially, and because the other thing was hers.
Her theory was that it was one person.
She had worked it out from the amounts, which were never round. A company pays round numbers. A company pays four hundred dollars, or five hundred, or a percentage of something. The amounts that came from Hartford were four hundred and eleven, and six hundred and eighty-two, and nine hundred and six, and once, memorably, one thousand two hundred and four dollars and fifty cents.
Those are not policy numbers. Those are what is left when somebody has divided a thing up carefully and given away all of it.
And there was the other thing, which was the timing. They came in March and in September, and once in an odd little run of three across one autumn, and a company does not do that. A company has a quarter.
A person has a year that goes wrong.
*
She slit the envelope along the top and took out one page.
It was different immediately. Thicker paper. A letterhead she did not know, with a foundation name on it and a trustee's name under that, and a telephone number with a state code she recognised.
And more than one sentence.
Fran put her glasses on properly, which she did not usually bother with, and read it twice through before she let herself take in the number at the bottom.
Dear Ms. Delacorte,
I am writing to you as trustee of a foundation established this month to complete the payment of benefits accrued to you under the Bellwether Systems Retirement Income Plan and not paid at the time of the plan restructuring in 2007.
Following the acquisition of Bellwether Systems by Meridian Industrial, the full obligation to all nine hundred and four affected participants has been funded as a condition of that sale. This letter concerns the balance owed to you.
The amount below represents the difference between what you were promised and what you received, together with arrears calculated from 2007. It is not a settlement and it is not a gift. It is a debt that was owed to you and is now being paid.
There will be no further partial distributions. This is the whole of it.
If you wish to discuss any element of this letter, my direct number is above and I will take your call personally.
And then the number.
*
Fran Delacorte sat at her own kitchen table on a Tuesday morning in December and did not move for some time.
It was not the amount, though it was a great deal more than she had expected and rather more than she had ever had at one time in her life.
It was the paragraph.
It is not a settlement and it is not a gift. It is a debt that was owed to you.
Six years of a single sentence on an otherwise empty page, and a young woman on a telephone who was not able to say. Six years of a thing arriving with no name on it, which she had accepted the way you accept weather, and which she had never once been able to describe to another human being without sounding as though she had made it up.
And here was a page that said owed.
She read it a fourth time.
Then she put it down on the table and put both hands flat on either side of it, and she said, out loud, in her own kitchen, to nobody:
"Well."
*
She rang the number that afternoon, because she had been told she could, and because she had a question that had been sitting in her for six years and this was the first time anybody had offered to take a call personally.
A man answered on the second ring and said his own name.
She said hers, and he said, "Yes, Ms. Delacorte. Thank you for ringing," in a way that suggested he had been expecting her specifically, which she did not think was likely and which she appreciated all the same.
"I've a question and you'll probably not answer it."
"Try me."
"For six years I've been getting money from Hartford," Fran said. "Two or three times a year, in numbers nobody would choose. I want to know whether that was the same thing as this."
There was a pause on the line.
"It was," he said.
"Was it a person?"
Another pause, longer.
"I can tell you that the obligation is now funded in full and permanently, and that no part of it depends on any individual any more." He said it carefully, the way people say a thing they have been instructed about. "I can also tell you that the earlier distributions were not made by Bellwether Systems."
Fran Delacorte closed her eyes.
"I knew that," she said. "I've known that six years. I do accounts. Nobody pays four hundred and eleven dollars."
*
"Ms. Delacorte." The trustee's voice had changed slightly. "May I say one thing that isn't legal advice?"
"Go on."
"You are the first person on that list. Alphabetically. Which means that for six years, whoever it was — every single time — started with you."
*
She sat in the kitchen after she put the phone down until the light went off the table.
She thought about a young man in a good suit who had come through the Bellwether accounts floor in his second week on the job, a very long time ago, and had stopped at her desk when nobody made him and asked her what she actually did all day, and had listened to the whole answer.
She had told him he had a kind face and that it was a shame.
She could not remember whether he had laughed. She thought perhaps he had.
Fran Delacorte was eighty-one years old and she had spent thirty-one years being the first name on a list nobody read, and she had no way at all of knowing whether the thought she was having was true.
But she got up, eventually, and put the letter in the drawer by the sink with the good knife, which is where she keeps the things she intends to look at again.
And on her way past the window she said, out loud, to nobody, in a kitchen outside Akron in December:
"Thank you, whoever you are."
***
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