Episode 25: E, In Person

Previously on the Chicken Chronicles... Chester finally read Henrietta the letter Gregory left him — not about the mystery, but about her. Chester's own mother had known Estrella long before any of this started, and had asked Gregory never to say so. Before they could decide what to do with that, Henrietta's phone rang. The area code was +63 77. E was downstairs. She said she'd come herself when it was time. It was time.

E, In Person

Henrietta buzzed her up and then stood by the door like it might need holding shut.

"You don't have to do that," Chester said.

"I know what I'm doing."

She didn't, not really, and they both knew it, but neither of them said so, because the stairwell light outside had just clicked on, which meant someone was on the landing.

The knock was two soft taps, not three, not a fist. Henrietta opened the door on a woman who was smaller than the voice on the phone had suggested — not old, not young, hair pulled back hard enough to mean business, a canvas bag over one shoulder that looked like it had crossed a lot of provinces. She didn't step in until Henrietta stepped back, which Henrietta noted and filed away.

"Henrietta." Not a question. E's eyes moved to Chester behind her. "And you got the letter read to you tonight. Good timing. I didn't plan that, for what it's worth."

"You knew about the letter," Henrietta said.

"I knew there was a letter. I didn't know when he'd open it." E set the bag down by the door, not on the couch, like she wasn't assuming she'd earned a seat yet. "May I sit?"

Henrietta gestured at the couch. E chose the chair instead.

"You said 'we' on the phone once," Henrietta said. "Three weeks ago. Not 'I.'"

"I did." E folded her hands. "There's a group of us. Small. We started as people Gregory wrote to when he needed something moved that couldn't go through the mail — a letter, a photograph, a warning. After he stopped writing, we kept moving what he'd already sent. That's most of what we are. Not detectives. Couriers who got attached to the story."

"Attached enough to write a name on the back of a letter you didn't write," Chester said.

"Attached enough to spend three years deciding when to hand it to you." E looked at him steadily. "I have the name of who paid for the 2012 visitors. I've had it the whole time. I'm not going to say it tonight."

"Why not," Henrietta said. It came out flatter than a question.

"Because the name isn't the interesting part. A company paid some people a small amount of money to take a letter from an old woman fourteen years ago. Companies do worse for less, every day, and nobody blinks. The interesting part is that after they took it, nobody ever came back. Not for the rest of the letters. Not for Estrella. Not for you two, until you went looking." E let that sit. "Someone got what they needed in 2012 and stopped watching. I want to know why they stopped. That tells you more than a name on a registration form."

E stood to reach for her bag, and that was when she said the other thing, almost as an afterthought, the way people say the heaviest sentence in a conversation while already halfway to the door.

"Chester. Call your mother before Sunday. Not after — before." She looked at him with something that wasn't quite apology. "I already know part of what she'll say. I'd rather you hear it from her first."

Chester didn't answer. Henrietta watched him not answer, and let it go, because that wasn't the thing she was looking at anymore.

E had reached down for the bag strap, sleeve riding up her forearm, and there it was — a burn scar, semicircle, pale against the skin, in exactly the place Mayen's sat on her left wrist. Except this one was older. Years older. The edges had gone soft the way a scar does after decades, not one.

Henrietta didn't say anything. She filed it, the way she'd filed the knock, the way she'd filed the chair over the couch.

E straightened, bag on her shoulder, already at the door.

"Same time next week," she said. "I'll bring more than a name."

Next week on the Chicken Chronicles: the scar on E's wrist, and the call to Cabanatuan.