Postcards from the Missing Groom

Mel and Camila had been dating for three years now, ever since they met in a community college night class when Mel was fifty-nine and Camila was fifty-five, and they had agreed a long time ago that weddings were the best free entertainment a couple their age could ask for. Mel was sixty-two now, an electrician with bad knees and a good laugh, and Camila did taxes for half the county, which meant she could smell a lie at forty feet, so the two of them made a decent little detective team when the situation called for it, though nobody expected it to call for it at a wedding reception.

The reception was at The Gilded Spoon, which was the fanciest restaurant in town by a wide margin, and the kitchen was clattering away behind the swinging doors while the band played something slow and the guests milled around with their champagne looking happy and slightly bored in the way guests do during the gap between dinner and cake. The bride was a woman named Prudence, and the groom was a fellow named Lawrence, and honestly Mel barely knew either of them, because the invitation had come through Camila's side, some tax client connection that Camila claimed was ironclad and Mel claimed was a mystery.

"More wine?" Camila asked, holding the bottle over his glass.

"Just a splash, I'm already warm," Mel said, and she poured him a full glass anyway because that was their whole marriage-in-progress in one exchange.

It was around nine o'clock when the band stopped mid-song, which was the first sign, because bands at weddings do not stop mid-song unless something is wrong or the father of the bride has grabbed the microphone, and in this case it was both, because there stood Ronald, the bride's father, a retired librarian of sixty-seven who had a face like a worried owl and a microphone in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.

"Everyone, please, if I could have your attention," Ronald said, and the room went quiet in that lurching way rooms go quiet. "I'm afraid there's been a, well, a development. Lawrence is missing."

A murmur went around the room like wind through a field. Camila set down her glass.

"Missing?" somebody called out. "Missing how?"

"Missing as in nobody has seen him since the photographs," Ronald said. "The photographs ended at six, and it is now nine, and he was supposed to be at the head table twenty minutes ago, and Prudence is in the back room and I would thank all of you not to imagine the worst, because I have been imagining it for the better part of an hour and it has not helped one bit."

Mel looked at Camila and Camila looked at Mel, and neither of them said anything out loud but a whole conversation happened anyway, the kind couples develop after enough years of shared dinners.

Then Ronald came down off the little stage and walked straight through the crowd, past the cake table, past the drunk uncle near the restrooms, and stopped directly in front of Mel and Camila, which was when Mel realized that the worried owl face was pointed at them on purpose.

"You're Mel, right? The electrician?" Ronald said. "Prudence's cousin said you fix things. I need somebody who fixes things."

"I fix wiring mostly," Mel said. "And the occasional garbage disposal."

"Good enough. Lawrence left a note." Ronald held up the piece of paper, and his hands were shaking a little, which made the paper shake, which made it hard to read, so he read it out loud instead, quietly, just for the three of them. "It says, and I quote, 'Check the archive. I'm sorry. L.'"

"The archive," Camila repeated.

"The university special collections archive, where he worked until last year, as a junior archivist," Ronald said, and he reached into his jacket and pulled out a single brass key on a green ribbon and pressed it into Mel's palm like he was handing over a live coal. "I have the key to the building. I volunteered there for thirty years, they'd never take it back from me. But I can't go. I cannot leave my daughter in that back room with two hundred guests asking me questions, and I'm too old to run across a campus in dress shoes, and you two look like people who get things done."

"Do we?" Camila said.

"You look like it very strongly," Ronald said. "Please. The restaurant is two blocks from the campus. Go, look, see if he's there, and come back and tell me something, anything, even if the something is bad."

"We'll go," Mel said, because Camila was already nodding and because Mel had never in his life been good at saying no to a man holding a shaking piece of paper.

* * *

The walk over was brisk and confusing, because the campus at night all looks the same, all brick and hedges and lamps with moths around them, and they got turned around twice before Camila spotted the special collections building squatting at the edge of the quad like a grumpy old toad. It was a stone building with tall windows and a heavy oak door, and Mel's breath was fogging by the time they got there, because October had teeth this year.

The key turned with a heavy clunk and the door swung in, and the smell that came out was old paper and cold air and that particular library dust smell that some people love and some people sneeze at. Camila sneezed. Twice.

"Cozy," she said, wiping her nose. "Very romantic. If he's in here hiding, he picked a gloomy spot."

The main room was huge, high-ceilinged, with steel shelving running off in long rows into the dark like the ribs of some enormous animal, and there was a low green lamp on in one corner, which was the only light in the whole place, which Mel did not like one bit. Under the lamp was a reading table, and on the reading table was a stack of postcards, a thick stack, forty or fifty of them at least, all face up, all addressed to Prudence in the same careful handwriting.

"Camila," Mel said, and she came over and looked, and they both stood there like a couple of statues.

"He wrote her postcards," Camila said slowly, turning one over. "From places. Look at this one, it's got a lighthouse on it. And this one's a beach. And this one is, what is that, a diner?"

"All addressed to her," Mel said. "None of them stamped."

"None of them mailed." Camila picked up another one and read the back, and her face did something complicated. "Oh, Mel. This one says he's sorry. This one says he hoped she'd understand someday."

"So he didn't just run off with the cocktail waitress," Mel said. "He's been writing to her for, how long do you figure?"

"There's dates on these. These go back two years." Camila set it down gently, like it might break. "Two years of postcards he never sent, sitting on a table in the archive where he used to work, on the night of his own wedding. That's not a man running off. That's a man with something to say and no nerve to say it."

"Well, let's find him and make him say it, then, the poor sap," Mel said, and he pulled out his phone and clicked on the flashlight, because the green lamp was doing nothing for the far reaches of those shelves.

They split up, which in hindsight was a bad plan, but it seemed sensible at the time, Camila taking the rows to the left where the subject cards were and Mel taking the rows to the right where the older collections lived, and Mel got exactly four rows in before the shelves all started looking identical. Steel shelves, gray boxes, brass labels, another steel shelf, another brass label, and every row looked like the last row and sounded like the last row, and his footsteps made a hollow tap on the old floor that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

"Lawrence?" Mel called out, and his voice went up into the ceiling and came back down sounding smaller. "Lawrence, it's Mel, from the wedding, we're friends of your father-in-law, sort of, loosely, we're here to help!"

Nothing. Just the hum of the climate control in the walls, which was a good hum, an efficient hum, the kind of hum Mel respected professionally, but it was the only sound in the whole building and it made the whole building feel like a sealed jar.

Mel turned down another row, and another, and took what he was pretty sure was a left and was almost certainly a right, and then he was genuinely, honestly lost, standing in a canyon of gray boxes with no idea which way the door was, and that was when he heard it. Somewhere off to his left and behind him, a door slammed. A real, heavy, wooden door slam, the kind of slam a person makes when they're shutting a door on purpose and fast.

Mel's whole body went still, the way it does when an electrician hears a breaker trip somewhere it shouldn't. He clicked off his flashlight, which was a stupid instinct but a strong one, and stood there in the dark listening.

"Lawrence?" he whispered. "That you, son?"

The climate control hummed. And then, faintly, from somewhere deep in the stacks, came the sound of footsteps, hurrying away.

Mel did the electrician's thing and traced the circuit. The oak front door was behind him and to the right, and he had pulled it shut himself. The slam had come from his left, from deep in the stacks, and there was no door deep in the stacks. He had walked four rows and seen steel, gray boxes, brass labels. Nothing with hinges. Nothing wooden at all.

* * *

Camila stood in her row of subject cards with her phone light in one hand and a growing feeling in her chest that she couldn't name, and she had pulled maybe a dozen boxes down and peeked into them before she found the one that mattered. It was a shallow box on the third shelf, labeled in fading pencil, and inside it, sitting on top of a nest of tissue paper like it had been placed there on purpose and recently, was one more postcard. It was different from the ones on the table. The others had been tourist pictures, lighthouses and beaches and diners, but this one was just plain gray cardstock on the front, no picture at all, and the handwriting on the back was pressed so hard into the card that it had nearly torn through.

She read it three times to make sure. It said, "Pru, if you are reading this then you found the box and you already know the real reason, and I am sorry, I am so sorry, I was going to tell you at the reception but I couldn't do it in front of all those people. Ask your father. He knows. He has always known. L."

"Well, that's not ominous at all," Camila said out loud, to nobody, and her voice came out steadier than her hands felt. "The real reason. The real reason for what, Lawrence? The wedding? The running off? The postcards? You can't just write 'the real reason' on a card and vanish, that's the cruelest thing I've ever..."

She stopped, because she needed Mel, and she flipped open her phone and called him, and the phone did that thing where it thought about it for a second and then showed her the little bar that said No Service. "Of course," she said. "Of course there's no signal in a stone building full of steel shelving. That's not a building, that's a Faraday cage with dust." She tried anyway, held the phone up over her head like that would help