Lisa Atkinson - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

When Ms. Stevens still didn’t come, Phyllis sighed, raised the flag to indicate there was mail to pick up, and returned to her house.

It seemed a mere moment later when she glanced outside and saw that the flag was down again.

On Monday, Sarah Bodine read the note from her Great-Aunt Phyllis and started to cry. When her mother, Amy, took the note from Sarah’s shaking hands, she started to rage.

“I could kill her for doing that!” Amy told Sarah’s dad that evening.

“How bad was it this time, and how did Sarah get hold of it?”

“You read it, you’ll see how bad it is! Sarah read it because she got home before I did and picked up the mail before I could get to it first and throw the damned thing away.”

“Why does your aunt do things like that?”

“Because she’s a bitter, nasty old witch who doesn’t have a kind bone in her body! She called Sarah’s learning disability ‘so-called’—”

“What? My God—”

“Yes, and she said our stationery was too good for Sarah.” Amy’s face, tearful by now, twisted with bitterness. “According to Aunt Phyllis, dime-store paper is good enough for Sarah.” She blew her nose on the tissue her husband handed her. “Sarah and I picked out that stationery together, and we picked the best we could afford, because we agreed we wanted to show people how much we appreciate it when they give us presents.”

“If there is such a thing as karma...” her husband said, letting the implication linger. His wife took up his sentence and finished it for him, “...then my Aunt Phyllis is going to die of a thousand paper cuts!”

He almost laughed at that, because it sounded so silly, but then he looked over at a photo of their ten-year-old daughter, thought of how hard reading was for her, how she struggled with spelling words and composing paragraphs, and a rage to equal his wife’s came over him.

“She was a teacher!” Hal Bodine was indignant. “For how many years?”

“A hundred and fifty,” Amy said with a half-sob, half-laugh.

“Would you mind if I had a word with dear Aunt Phyllis?” he asked, his tone dripping cold contempt for the woman.

“No!” Amy exclaimed, and then she said gratefully, “I wouldn’t mind at all. Somebody needs to say something.”

Sybil Carson opened the creamy envelope with some trepidation.

Fan mail was such a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it could lift her spirits on a bad writing day. It could propel her back to her writing feeling as if she had magic in her fingers. Mail like that made her feel blessed and grateful to get to do what she did for a living, however small that living was these days. But it could also plunge her into black despair on days like today. She was already teetering on the edge of giving up on her latest novel, even though she couldn’t afford to give up. One more hard knock might bowl her over. It wasn’t as if she could easily find another line of work. For one thing, she wasn’t young, and for another she didn’t have any other skills. She’d been writing novels for thirty years, always thinking the next one would make enough money to let her relax a little bit. So far, that hadn’t happened. People assumed writers were all rich, but she made just enough to barely hang on until she fulfilled her next book contract. And she wasn’t even doing that this time. This book had been due three months earlier, but the story just wouldn’t come. She had tried every writing trick she knew to fool herself into getting going again, and still nothing happened on the page that anybody would ever want to read. If she didn’t meet her deadlines, she didn’t get paid. If she didn’t get paid, neither did her bills...

Please, she thought as she slowly opened the pretty envelope, please be a nice note. I just can’t take any criticism right now. Nasty “fan” mail felt like a slap out of the blue, like a hand shoving out of the envelope or computer to strike her hard enough to leave marks on her psyche, if not on her face.

Sybil pulled the notepaper out and unfolded it.

Maybe I shouldn’t read any fan mail right now, she thought, before looking down at the words. Maybe I shouldn’t take the chance of letting it demoralize me. But then she chided herself, Don’t be a baby. Sticks and stones...

Sybil read it clear through, and then laid it gently down in her lap.

Words can never hurt me?

What an abominable lie that was and always had been.

Maybe, she thought, as a sob rose in her throat, I should write a novel about killing one of my readers...

“Hey, Boss, Ms. Grimshank rides again.”

Marvin Frolich’s secretary tossed the weekly Monday missive onto his desktop with a grin. They had dubbed their “volunteer” editor “Ms. Grimshank” as a play on her real name, which was Phyllis Shank. Once a week, like clockwork — which she would have derided as cliché — her copies of their articles arrived, all marked up in blaring red ink.

“Sometimes,” Marvin admitted to his secretary, “I like to imagine that all that red ink is her blood...”

“Boss!” His secretary laughed. “You’d never get away with it.”

He sighed. “I know, but wouldn’t it be nice.”

What really ticked him off was that she was sometimes correct in the letter, if not the spirit, of her corrections. He had even learned a few things from her “editing.” But that learning wasn’t worth the price of how nasty it all seemed, and it wasn’t worth the pain it caused the reporters who had seen that awful acronym, “AAH.” Affirmative Action Hire? What colossal arrogance! One of the victims had been a young black reporter with budding talent, but no confidence to match. The bigoted remark had set her back months. Only last week, it had infuriated an editor who may have fit the definition of “handicapped” in terms of his paralyzed legs, but who was anything but handicapped when it came to brains and ability. Marvin had never meant for either of them to see the mailings from Ms. Grimshank, but both of them had, by accident.

“One of these days,” Marvin predicted to his secretary, “our Ms. Grimshank is going to get what’s coming to her.”

She grinned. He didn’t.

“And what is that, Boss?”

“She’s going to get edited out.”

When Diane Stevens didn’t find the usual stack of ivory envelopes in Ms. Shank’s mailbox on Monday, she sensed that something was wrong. Maybe the old biddy was out of town, but Diane doubted it, because Phyllis Shank never seemed to venture beyond her own mailbox. She even had her groceries delivered.

Probably so she can tell the boy to tuck his shirt back in, Diane thought.

“Or maybe,” she muttered to herself as she stared at the small house down the short walkway, “so she can tell him that canned goods really should be double bagged, and what was he thinking to put the frozen vegetables in with the loaf of bread?”

Diane tried to get herself in hand. The old woman could be sick in there.

She went up the walk, hurrying to make up for her previous ill will. But when she reached the front door, she took the few seconds required to make sure her uniform was on straight and to pat down her hair. Not that either action would silence dear Ms. Shank. No, no, if your uniform looked good, and you’d just got your hair done, she’d still ask you if you really thought those shoes were suitable.

Diane smiled a little as she rang the bell.

It was funny, really, the way she hid from this resident so they wouldn’t meet at the box. There was a conveniently placed tree, wider than Diane’s own butt (which Ms. Shank had remarked could benefit from the exercise of the job!), where she could wait until she heard the front door close and the locks click. Then she counted to ten, ran to the box, opened it, pulled out the letters, stuck in the new stuff, and ran off to the neighbor’s house before she could get caught. If the Postal Service had an Olympics for fastest mail carrier, Diane thought she might win it.