The story of the man with the box continues…and here’s the fiction archive, if you feel lost (or want to catch up on the story).

Henry Makepeace sensed, rather than actually saw, the postman on the porch, and since he was expecting a package, he dashed out to catch him, but he had already gone, striding off down the street in his blue shorts, and there was a yellow slip sticking out of the mailbox, informing him that he could pick up his “oversized mail” after three. He dashed down the street after the rapidly vanishing postman, gesticulating wildly and waving the yellow slip, but the postman didn’t seem to hear, and Henry made his way wearily back to the house. He was almost certain the postman hadn’t knocked, and he felt like the postman should have knocked, with a package, although the issue appeared to be a losing battle.

He had recently moved here, to the house on Lamprey Street, after breaking up with his girlfriend. Henry decided he couldn’t keep living in Atlanta, on the off chance that he might run into her somewhere, perhaps at the park, and so he indulged a wish which had been lurking in his dreams since childhood: he opened up an atlas at random, stabbed a finger on the map, and moved to the place he pointed to.

Being a practical sort of man, Henry Makepiece used an atlas of the United States, and he took out Georgia, because he didn’t want to live in the same state with his ex-girlfriend, along with Florida on principle, New Jersey, and Arizona, because he didn’t want to live in the same state as his mother. He didn’t recognize the name of the town his finger eventually landed on, but it sounded good, and the insurance company didn’t seem to care, as long as he was willing to travel to incident sites as needed. Since he already had to travel to most of the scenes he investigated, the arson rate in Atlanta being fairly low, Henry Makepeace didn’t think this was too much of a sacrifice, until he learned that the closest airport to his new home was four hours away. Unfortunately, at that point he had already made a down payment for the house on Lamprey Street and arranged for a moving company to pack his things, so he figured he would make the best of it.

The town was not what Henry had expected. He’d spent his whole life living in cities, not sleepy small towns with lazy postmen. When he arrived at his new house, he saw that it had a lawn which he was expected to mow, along with a neat row of bright flowers, which his neighbor informed him were begonias. (”And feel free to use my mower, until you settle in,” the neighbor said.) After his first battle with the lawnmower, Henry Makepeace hired a gardener, who was recommended to him by the clerk at the grocery store, who mentioned it because her cousin had seen Henry attempting to mow the lawn backwards. The gardener was the clerk’s cousin also. Or maybe her husband’s cousin? Henry was unclear on this point.

The town unsettled Henry. People waved at him in the street, and his neighbors came over, one by one, with platters of desserts. “Just to welcome you to the neighborhood,” they said, peering around his doorframe to inspect his furniture. While he had thought that living in a quiet small town would allow him to become a hermit, the opposite seemed to have happened, and he found himself attending City Council meetings, volunteering on Coastal Cleanup Day, and offering to assist the fire department with a scheduled burn.

Oddly enough, Henry Makepeace liked it. He liked his neighbors, and he liked the City Council meetings. He even spoke at a Planning Commission meeting, when a proposal to change the name of Lamprey Street was put forward by George MacInroe, a lawyer down the street, who felt that people were put off by the thought of visiting a law office on a street named for a bottom feeding eel. Makepeace argued persuasively and eloquently, drawing on years of experience in the witness stand, and the measure was voted down, six to one.

As long as he was trapped at home without whatever would have been in the package, probably photographs from the Meyers fire, to work on, Henry Makepeace puttered around the house, mopping the floors in the bathrooms and waving at the gardener when three finally came around and he walked to the post office to collect his package.

This was becoming a weekly ritual, and he wondered if he should ask the insurance company to send evidence and documents via UPS, to avoid the post office problem. They were certainly good for the money, being a national leader in the industry, and Henry knew that he was probably their best arson investigator, especially after his rather brilliant work in a fraud case about five years ago, when he was able to categorically prove that the fire had been set when a lesser investigator was willing to call it quits and say it was the wiring. Surely he was worthy of UPS delivery, rather than the vagaries of the post office. Despite trying to convince the post office to ask the mailman, whom he had never actually seen, to just leave packages on his porch, Henry Makepeace found himself there several days a week, collecting packages which he could have gotten at home, if the clerk had simply knocked, since he was almost always at home during the day, working in his office.

The clerks at the post office all knew him, and by the time he reached the counter with his bright yellow slip, the clerk had brought his package out from the back. It was much larger than he expected, a big brown box. Perhaps, Henry Makepeace thought, they are sending evidence to examine, along with the pictures. His address was written in a neatly rounded and suspiciously familiar hand, though, and when he looked at the return address, his heart sank. “Jennifer Thackeray,” it said, listing the address the two had formerly shared. Possibly Jennifer was sending something he had left behind in Atlanta, uncovered on one of her periodic closet cleanings. Whatever it was, Henry Makepeace was surprised, and rather unsettled, as he walked back home via Main Street, so that he could stop by City Hall and pick up the minutes of the last City Council meeting.

Along the way, he watched with some astonishment as a young woman walked directly into a utility post, and he set the box down while he waited to make sure that she didn’t need assistance. A crowd started to gather, and she tried to get up, but Henry could see a trickle of blood running down her face, and he thought that perhaps he should call the ambulance, just to make sure, and when he finished his call, he walked over to her.

“You hit that pole pretty hard,” he said. “Why don’t you lie down for a minute?”

The paramedics arrived a moment later, pushing him aside, and he fluttered at the edge of the growing crowd, feeling some sort of responsibility for the young woman, but not wanting to get in the way. Eventually a policeman arrived and talked to the paramedics, and Henry Makepeace stepped forward.

“Henry Makepeace,” he said. “I called the ambulance, just to be sure. She looked like she might be, you know, badly injured. She just walked right into that utility pole, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Of course,” said the policeman. “Good,” and his eyes drifted toward the box.

“It’s from my ex-girlfriend. She’s a biologist,” Henry Makepeace said, wondering why he had added that particular piece of information. “I don’t know what it is, but I had to go to the post office to get it, because the postman didn’t even knock, just left a package slip on the door. Lazy.”

“Ah,” said the policeman, studying the crowd. The two stood in silence for a moment, and then the policeman, who had a smear of what looked like chocolate cake on his badge, strode forward to disperse the crowd, while Henry examined the flowers in the flowerbox on the corner, installed by the city as part of the beautification campaign. Cyclamen, he noted. He was learning flowers, thanks to his gardener, who turned up every week with something new to plant, turning his garden from a dull expanse of lawn and orderly flowers into a riot of colour. Although Henry was a bit concerned that eventually the garden would overflow, either into the street or into the yards of the neighbors.

The policeman drifted back, and, not knowing what else to say, Henry Makepeace mentioned that he had just moved, on a whim, and then explained that he was an arson investigator, expecting at least a flicker of interest, but the policeman with cake on his badge seemed content to gaze watchfully at the scene. The young woman seemed agitated as she talked with the paramedics, muttering about Henry’s box and not having insurance, and as she was strapped to a backboard and loaded into the ambulance, the policeman turned to him.

“It was good of you to call,” he said. “It might be nothing, but better safe than sorry, right? Some people wouldn’t take the time of day, even here. They would have just walked right by, you know?”

The victim waved at them.

“It’s fine, really,” Henry Makepeace said. “I just thought I should call, you know, to be sure.”

Henry waved back at the victim, wondering what her name was and figuring he would read it in the paper next week, and then, to his astonishment, the policeman seemed to slip on nothing, teetering like a marionette on the sidewalk for an instant before falling down. Henry leaned over the policeman to offer a hand, squinting to read the badge.

“Are you all right? Officer? Uh…Car-lizzle?”

“Carlisle. Yes,” and he gripped Henry’s hand surprisingly strongly and pulling himself up. “I must have just lost my balance for some reason. Well then. I suppose that settles things. I guess I have your address if I need anything, yes?”

“Of course. Have a nice day,” Henry said, picking up the box and walking home.

When he got home, Henry Makepeace realized that he had forgotten to stop by City Hall, so he set the box on the table, intending to open it later, biked downtown, grabbed the minutes, and then hurried to the regional offices of Halcyon Insurance, where he was supposed to be attending a birthday party for one of the local staffers, Lindsey, turning 22.

The party went late, as these things often do, and a tipsy Henry Makepeace gratefully dropped his bicycle into someone’s truck and accepted a ride home at the end of the evening. When he arrived, he stashed his bike in the garage, noticed a new plant which Gregory must have dropped by, and found upon going inside that the box had fallen to the floor.

“That’s odd,” Henry Makepeace said, looking around for some rational explanation. Perhaps someone had dropped something off and knocked the box over accidentally, or maybe the neighbor’s cat had come in through the window to sun herself and pushed the box off the table. The window was closed, though, and in an even more puzzling state of affairs, the box had come open. And it was empty.