The Returned. Jason Mott

      He would find her and everything would be the way it was always meant to be.

      Six

      PASTOR PETERS GRUMBLED in concert with the keystrokes. Only God knew how bitterly he hated typing.

      In spite of still being a young man, just forty-three—youngish, at least—he’d never been any good at typing. He had the bad luck of being born into that ill-timed generation of people for whom the epoch of computers was just far enough away that they were never given any reason to learn to type and, yet, the rise of the machines was just close enough that they would be forced to always suffer for their lack of understanding in regard to QWERTY and its arrangement of home keys. He could only wield two fingers at the keyboard, like some huge, computer-dependent mantis.

      Peck. Peck-peck. Peck, peck, peck, peck-peck, peck.

      He’d begun the letter four times now. And he had deleted it five times—he counted the time he’d deleted everything and turned off the entire computer out of frustration.

      The problem with being a poor, mantis-fingered typist was that the words in Pastor Peters’s head always ran far, far in front of the words his index fingers took entire eras to construct. If he didn’t know any better, he would have sworn on any stack of consecrated tomes that the letters on the keyboard shifted position every few minutes or so, just enough to keep a person guessing. Yes, he could have simply written the letter longhand and then taken the time to type it through only once, but that wouldn’t make him any better a typist.

      His wife had come into his office once or twice, offering to type the letter for him, as she oftentimes did, and he had politely declined, as he oftentimes did not.

      “I’ll never improve if I keep letting you do it for me,” he told her.

      “A wise man knows his limitations,” she replied, not meaning it as an insult, only hoping to start a dialogue, a powwow, as he himself had said to the Arcadia townspeople not long ago. He was distant in the past few weeks, more so in the past few days. And she did not know why.

      “I prefer to think of it more as a ‘loose boundary’ than a limitation,” he replied. “If I can ever get the rest of my fingers to play along...well...just you wait and see. I’ll be a phenomenon! A miracle unto myself.”

      When she began walking around the desk, politely asking to see what he was working on, he quickly deleted the few precious words that had taken him so long to assemble. “It’s just something I need to get out of my head,” he told her. “Nothing important.”

      “So you don’t want to tell me what it is?”

      “It’s nothing. Really.”

      “Okay,” she said, holding up her hands in submission. She smiled to let him know that she was not angry just yet. “Keep your secrets. I trust you,” she said, and left the room.

      The pastor’s typing was even worse now that his wife had said that she trusted him, thereby implying that there might be something in his writing of the letter that required not only her trust but, even worse, a reminder of that trust.

      She was a very skilled spouse.

      

      

      To Whom It May Concern,

      

      

      That was how far back he’d gone. All the way to the beginning. He huffed and wiped his furrowed brow with the back of his hand and continued.

      Peck. Peck. Peck. Peck-peck. Peck...

      

      

      I am writing to inquire

      

      

      Pastor Peters sat and thought, realizing now that he knew very little about exactly what he wanted to ask.

      Peck-peck-peck...

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch. I received your letter stating that Miss Pinch was trying to find me.

      

      

      Delete, delete, delete. Then:

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

      

      

      That was closer to the truth of it. He thought, then and there, about simply signing his name and dropping the envelope in the mail. He thought so hard about it that he even printed the page. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at the words.

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

      He placed the paper on his desk and picked up a pen and marked a few things out.

      

      

      I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

      

      

      Even if his mind was unsure, his hand knew what he was trying to say. It lifted the pen and launched it at the letter again. Scratching and drawing through until, finally, the truth of everything was there, staring back at the pastor.

      

      

      I am writing about Elizabeth.

      

      

      What else could he do then but crumple the paper and toss it into the trash?

      The pastor logged on to the internet and pecked Elizabeth Pinch’s name into the search bar. All that came back were dozens of other people named Elizabeth Pinch; none of them were the fifteen-year-old girl from Mississippi who had, once upon a time, owned his heart.

      He refined the search to display only images.

      Pictures of women populated the screen, one after the other. Some smiling, facing the camera. Others not even aware that the camera was there. Some of the images weren’t pictures of people at all. Some of them were images from movies or television. (Apparently there was an Elizabeth Pinch in Hollywood who wrote for a very highly rated television crime drama. Images of the crime drama appeared on page after page of the search results.)

      Pastor Peters searched on the computer well past when the sun went from gold to auburn, then back to gold just before it slipped beneath the horizon. Though he had not asked for it, his wife brought him a cup of coffee. He thanked her and kissed her and shooed her gently from the room before she could study the computer screen and see the name in the search bar. But, even if she had seen it, what would she have done with it? What good would it have done her? At the very least, seeing the name would have made her suspicious, but she was already suspicious. The name itself would have given her nothing more.

      He had never told her about Elizabeth.

      Just before bedtime he found it: a newspaper clipping uploaded from the Water Main, the small newspaper back in the small Mississippi town that Pastor Peters grew up in not so long ago. He hadn’t imagined that technology had made it that far, reached out all the way to a Podunk town in a humid corner of Mississippi where the greatest industry in all the county was poverty. The heading, grainy but legible, read Local Girl Killed in Car Accident.

      Pastor Peters’s face tightened. A taste of anger rose up in his throat, an anger aimed at ignorance and the incapability of words.

      Reading the