A Mystery to be Solved
It started with an email. It said, “Be prepared; you have 3 days.” The Sender was unknown, so I just put it into my junk mail.
I got a similar email for the next two days, “you have 2 days.” followed by “tomorrow’s the day.”
Even though I had put all of those emails into the junk mailbox, I was a little apprehensive as to what was going to happen the following day, the day I was supposed to be prepared for.
I checked my email throughout the morning and into the early afternoon, but there was nothing suspicious in any of them.
About mid-afternoon, I went out to get my regular mail from the mailbox in front of our house, and there it was…a letter. It was addressed to me, with no return address. The most peculiar part of the envelope was that it was addressed in red ink. (Or at least I hope it was ink.)
I chose not to open it up in the house but rather outside as I wasn’t sure what I was going to find in it. I carefully tore open the envelope and looked inside. Inside there was a ticket. The kind of one you bring to the post office to collect a package. My name was on the ticket, and it stated that I had to redeem the package from the post office by the end of the day. There was a second slip of paper in the envelope that said the contents of the package would disappear again if I delayed pickup.
Well, what would you do? The mystery was too compelling and, if I had to admit, very anxiety-provoking. I went to pick up the package.
When I got to the post office, the clerk there asked me for multiple forms of identification. Satisfied that I was who I said I was, the clerk went into the back and returned with a locked wooden box. I was given a key to the box and asked not to open it inside the post office. I was not to return either the box or the contents of the box. I was even escorted from the building by a security guard. I didn’t even know that the post office had security guards.
I didn’t want to open the box in public, so I took the box home.
When I got there, I went to my back porch, took out the key, and unlocked the box. I opened it slowly.
Inside was a piece of paper. On that paper was a list of ingredients for Holiday cookies to bake. They were broken up by years going back as far as 2011 and ending in 2020. The box also contained a blue Covid face mask and I few other items that had been missing from our house over the years. And finally, there was a simple card, which read, “Sorry for the delay, I forgot to return these when I returned the red spatula that I returned last week, that I had taken. I hope you weren’t searching for them for too long.” It was signed, Herman, your house ghost.
We always assumed Herman had taken all of the things that we were missing from our house. The fact that he had returned the red spatula to the drawer that we had searched in every day for the three weeks it had gone missing had been a total mystery to us. We blamed Herman since neither Christina nor I could find it. We always made reference to Herman’s thievery whenever things went missing, though it’s more as an excuse for our misplacing things or accidentally throwing things out than a real belief that Herman existed. But now this?
So now, we’ve got to believe that he is real. Unless…because of the way this box was sent and the precautions that were made by the post office staff before giving it to us, maybe there is something or someone more nefarious that has access to my home?
All I know is that I have to be more vigilant should this happen again. And I will definitely make sure if it does, that I’m prepared.
