What Nobody Saw: Day 2

Word Count: 12,116

Summary of Events:

When Walker went up through the attic opening to see how much there was for papers in the attic so that he could bag them up before they fell on his head he had spied a box in the far corner of the attic, after lunch he was able to make enough progress tearing the ceiling down to get closer to it so that he could remove it before it crashed down on his head and injured him . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

Indeed, the boxes — as he now saw there was more than one — were close enough to reach, and he brought them down. There were two quite full boxes, and a third check revealed that there were no small loose pieces lying around nearby, so he turned his attention to the two boxes and was quite shocked.

Both of them were full about to bursting with envelopes, as well as some small parcels, and as he pulled some of the envelopes out of the boxes to look at them he discovered that they were all unopened, addressed envelopes with some of the oldest postage stamps that Walker had ever seen.

The writing styles on the envelopes were different, as were the return addresses, but the addressee was the same, in part.

Some were addressed to a Mrs. Schissler, some to a Mrs. Warner Schissler, and some to a Mrs. Jolene Schissler.

To Walker logic suggested that all three were the same woman, sometimes referred to just by her surname, sometimes by her husband’s name, and sometimes with her own name, depending on who was writing to her.

As he looked through the boxes more and more it became abundantly clear to him that not one single letter or package in the two boxes had been opened, and he was severely baffled.

Why wouldn’t Mrs. Schissler have opened her mail? What was the use of stashing it all in a couple of boxes in a faraway, difficult-to-reach corner of her attic? Had she meant to open it but forgotten about it? But why would she go hiding it away in such a place as the attic? It didn’t make any sense, no matter how Walker might try to slice it.

He returned the letters to the boxes and put them underneath the bags of recyclables waiting to be hauled out to his truck, his mind still swirling with the strangeness of it all, and finished off scooping out insulation before pulling down the last of the ceiling.

With that done he hauled the last bag of insulation and some of the last of the ceiling pieces to the bin, where he tossed them inside before fetching the remaining ceiling pieces and then starting to haul the recycling out to his truck, where he used the bags of recycling to cover the boxes of unopened mail.

There was no way in the world he was going to ship all that mail to the recycling centre unopened, after all, what if Mrs. Schissler was alive? She might want to read her mail now, for whatever it might be worth.

And even she wasn’t alive, maybe her kids would want it for some reason. He didn’t want to discard the mail without checking to see if it had any sentimental value to the family, or maybe even some historic value to the province, after all, Walker felt like he knew the Schissler name from somewhere.