The Letter in the Deposit Box

The letter came to Amos's house, not the office, in a plain envelope with no return address and a Columbus postmark, and inside it was a single sheet of paper with eleven lines on it in ink.

Amos — I am not going to be at the next dinner, and I am not going to be in the building much longer either. I have arranged things badly and I have hurt people and I do not expect you to agree with the way I have done any of it. There is an envelope in your office with my name on it that I put there myself, nine years ago, and that you have been decent enough not to open. Keep it sealed while I live. If I am still alive and still myself when this reaches you, burn it. If I am not, you already know what to do.

It was signed with the initials A.V.

Amos sat with it for a long time. Then he took it to the office and laid it on the table beside the condolence card Voss had sent when Amos's father died, so that the two of them could be looked at together.

He laid them out under the lamp like a man dealing cards.

The two of them were the same hand — cramped, backward-leaning, faintly impatient, with the tail of the s abbreviated and the r done as a small flag. There was no difference between the letter on his kitchen table and the condolence card, except one, and it took him a while to see it, and when he saw it he sat back. The condolence card had been signed Adrian. The letter had been signed A.V. In twenty-two years Amos had never once seen the man shorten his own name. And that person had written I do not expect you to agree with the way I have done any of it, and had put the sheet in a plain envelope with no return address, so that nobody at the post office could guess, from the outside of it, that Adrian Voss wrote letters to anybody.

Amos put the papers back in the folder, and put the folder in the drawer, and then got up and went and stood at the window of his office for a quarter of an hour, because he had just understood something he did not want to know.

He put the two pages side by side again and squared their edges with two fingers, and then pressed his thumb down flat on the small flag of the r, on both of them at once, as if he could feel a difference the eye had been told not to look for.

At the bottom of the drawer, under the correspondence, was the thing the letter had told him would be there, which he had not looked for in nine years and had never once forgotten: a sealed envelope in Voss's hand, addressed to Amos Whitlock, Esq., with the instruction, in the same hand, in the corner where a return address goes: NOT BEFORE. He weighed it on his palm. Then he put it back, exactly where it had been, and shut the drawer, which took him three tries.