Short story · 3 min read · Set in Tanner's Lane ·
The Parcel That Came Open
A parcel is delivered sealed, delivered again opened, and delivered once more restored, three calls at one door inside a fortnight.
The first delivery came on the Tuesday. Ronald Peake of Tanners Lane signed for a brown paper parcel, string tied in his sister's particular crossing, the knot she had tied since they were young. Inside, when he cut the string properly, were a scarf and a sealed tin of toffees, two dozen of them, which he counted out of habit because his sister counts everything twice before posting and he counts once to keep her company. Twenty-four toffees. He entered nothing in any book, because a man does not enter his sister's parcels in a book, and ate two that evening, and set the tin on the dresser.
The second delivery came the following Thursday. The same postman, Alan Reddish, at the same door, with the same parcel. The paper was opened, folded neatly back along its own creases, the string lying loose in the fold like a thing politely collared. The tin inside was shut and the scarf was as scarves are. Reddish did not remember making the call and said so on the step, cheerfully, the way a man says a thing he means to forget by supper. There was no second signature asked for, so none was given. Peake counted the tin again out of the same habit. Twenty-four. He folded the paper back down over the tin, out of no idea what else to do with it, and put it back on the dresser.
The third delivery came the Tuesday after that, one fortnight nearly to the hour from the first. The parcel was restored this time. The string was tied in the sister's crossing, tied tight, the knot exactly where the first knot had sat. The paper was folded under at the ends the way she folds it, crisp, unbroken, the wax where her packages always carry it. It looked, if anything, better kept than the first delivery had, as though the parcel had spent the fortnight being practised rather than carried. Reddish was not the man on this call. The man had a delivery book, and asked for the signature.
It was at the book that Peake stopped. Three lines were ruled for the address, and all three were filled in, and all three bore his signature. The first line held the signing he remembered doing. The second line held a signing he had not done, in the middle of a Thursday he had spent in the washhouse. The third line waited open, and he signed it, because the man was waiting and the book was official, and his signature settled under the other two as though it had always been intended to be the last.
The man went. The book went with him. Peake stood in the hallway with a parcel that had been delivered three times and opened once, and set it on the dresser, and cut the string properly, and counted the tin out of habit. Twenty-four.
He sat with his tea a long while before he touched the toffees. The count had never varied, the tin had never been light, and nothing in the house was missing. The question he could not put down, and which he knew he would carry to bed, was only this: which of the three deliveries was the one his sister had posted — and, if the count was right on all three, who had been keeping the parcel so carefully between them?