I shoved the yellowed envelope into my shirt pocket and scanned the dark newsroom. The overhead fluorescents were off, but dim light shown through the windows along both sides of the long room, illuminating the ten desks that would be occupied by the dayshift in a few hours. The only motion that caught my eye was the slow turn of a metal desk fan that someone had left on at the end of the work day.
Over the sound of the relentless rain on the windows, I heard the faint ding of an elevator chime from two floors down. I ran towards the closed elevator doors at the end of the newsroom and saw that the ground-floor light was illuminated. Someone - no doubt the person who'd left the envelope - was exiting the elevator in the building's lobby.
I ran to the window and looked down into the cobblestoned street, expecting to see the person step out onto the sidewalk. I watched for what seemed like a long time and no one appeared. I stood there as long as I could stand it, then bolted for the stairs.
I burst through the stairwell door and bolted down the dark wooden stairs. The only light in the empty stairwell this time of night was the faint red glow of emergency lights over the fire alarm pull stations. Near the bottom of the last flight of stairs, I tripped over my feet and fell into the crash bar of the lobby door.
I plunged loudly into the lobby, causing Flynn Ewell, the nightwatchman, to jump behind the "Vampires Everywhere" comic book he was reading. "What the hell!" he cried as I ran across the room and to the main doors. Without answering, I attempted to shove my way out the heavy door, only to find that it was locked.
I spun on my heels and faced Ewell. "Who just came through here?" The white-bearded octogenarian was at a loss for words.
"What are you talking about?" he asked as he stepped from behind the desk that he'd occupied every night since Big Jim Folsom's last term in office. "Aside from the weather, the building's been as quiet as a church all night. Even the cleaning lady's got the night off."
Minutes later, I stood behind Ewell, watching as he rewound the footage from the lobby surveillance camera. Small drops of blood dripped from the gash in my forearm caused by my fall in the stairwell. On the monitor, I could see Ewell seated and reading moments before I burst into the lobby in pursuit of the person from upstairs.
"There, right there, stop the tape," I said, pointing at the screen.
Ewell had his cheaters on and leaned in with his nose almost touching the screen. "What do you see?" he said. "There's nothing there."
"Rewind it a few seconds then play it," I said, leaning in so close that I caught a whiff of Ewell's uniform, a smell akin to garlic. He hit play and I pointed in the background, where you could clearly see the first-floor light of the elevator wink on a second before the doors slide open and then closed. No one got off, and Ewell was obviously so hard of hearing that he hadn't heard the elevator.
As the footage continued to play, a few seconds passed before I could be seen running across the lobby and into the front door. Ewell turned in his chair. "See, wise guy, no one got off the elevator."
"No one that can be seen on camera anyway," I replied.
Ewell gave me a puzzled look. "Son, maybe you should take the night off. You're obviously overworked."
Ewell saw my bleeding arm, opened a desk drawer and produced a roll of paper towels. "Here, you're making a damn mess," he said. "You better be glad the cleaning lady didn't come in tonight."
Ewell tore off a paper towel and made to pass it to me. "I see you got your envelope," he said, his eyes focused on the old yellowed envelope I'd jammed into my shirt pocket. As I looked down into his face, it took me a few seconds to make sense of his words.
Ewell explained that when he'd begun his shift the envelope had been sitting on top of his desk. The words "For Eli McMorn" were scrawled across the front, so after he'd made his first round, checking to make sure that all ground level doors were locked, he'd gone upstairs and slipped the envelope under the McMorn's locked office door. "But that was hours ago, probably around eight o'clock," the old man said.
My forearm had nearly stopped bleeding, but I held the paper towel tight against the small wound to make sure it didn't get going again. "You gonna open it?" Ewell said. "Might be some money in there."
In all my running around the building, I hadn't thought to see what was inside the envelope. Ewell rummaged around on his desk and then handed me an antique letter opener. In faded white letters across its black handle were the words, “Claiborne Bible Society.”
I stuck the tip of the opener under one corner of the sealed envelope, careful not to damage anything inside. The opener was surprisingly sharp, slitting the envelope with the quickness. "Jesus Christ!" Ewell yelled as a black widow spider crawled out of the envelope and onto my hand.
Acting on instinct, I shook the spider off my hand and watched its malefic shape drop to the floor. Before it could skitter away, I slammed my boot down on it. I raised my foot to make sure I hadn't missed and saw its milky remains smeared on the floor.
I let out a sharp breath and turned to Ewell. In the excitement, I'd dropped the envelope, the contents of which had spilled out at Ewell's feet. He stooped to pick up the envelope and the single sheet of paper it contained.
"Can you read that?" he asked as he handed it back.
I looked at the paper and saw that it was covered in words written in an unfamiliar alphabet. "Looks like some kind of code to me," I said. "Can you read it?"
Ewell shook his head. "No, but I've seen it before."
I looked at the paper more closely. "Where?"
Ewell glanced out into the rainy night with the look of a man who was unsure of what to say. "I think I saw it on the cover of a book in my niece's store."
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
