The Pen Pal

Chapter 1: The Storage Unit

The padlock was rusted almost shut, and it took Megan Poole three tries with the bolt cutters before the shackle snapped. The sound echoed off the corrugated walls of the hallway like a gunshot, and she flinched, then felt stupid for flinching. She was alone. She'd been alone in worse places than a storage facility on Route 9 in Granton, Pennsylvania.

The roll-up door protested when she hauled it upward, grinding on its tracks. A smell rolled out — old paper, mildew, the ghost of her father's cigarettes. She pulled the chain on the single overhead bulb, and the fluorescent tube flickered to life, casting everything in a flat, institutional light.

Her father, Dennis Poole, had died eleven days ago. Heart attack in the parking lot of the Dollar General on Elm, bags of cat food and paper towels scattered around him. He'd been sixty-three. The paramedics said it was likely instantaneous, which was supposed to be a comfort. Megan wasn't sure it was.

They hadn't been close. Not for years. She'd moved to Philadelphia after college and built a life there — a job in data analytics at a healthcare company, an apartment in Fishtown, a small circle of friends she saw on weekends. She called her father on holidays and his birthday. He called her when he needed help with his computer, which was rarely. The distance between them wasn't hostile. It was just distance.

Now she was back in Granton, handling the estate, which was a generous word for what Dennis Poole had left behind. A rented house on Birch Lane that needed to be emptied. A 2009 Chevrolet Malibu with a cracked windshield. A checking account with four thousand dollars. And this: Unit 14-C at Keystone Self-Storage, paid up through the end of the year.

The unit was ten by fifteen feet, and her father had filled most of it. Cardboard boxes were stacked against the back wall, some labeled in his blocky handwriting — KITCHEN, TAXES 2008-2015, XMAS STUFF — and some unmarked. A rolled-up area rug leaned in the corner. There was a small bookshelf holding paperback westerns and a few framed photos she couldn't make out from the doorway. A floor lamp with no shade. Two garbage bags that, when she opened them, turned out to contain winter coats.

Megan had allocated three days for this. She'd rented a dumpster that was sitting in the storage facility's lot. Most of this would go. She wasn't sentimental about objects — she'd learned that from her mother, who had left when Megan was sixteen and moved to Arizona with a man named Phil. Linda Poole had taken almost nothing when she went. Just clothes, her jewelry, and the blue Honda Civic that Megan's father had bought her for their anniversary.

She started with the labeled boxes. KITCHEN held mismatched Tupperware and a set of steak knives still in the packaging. XMAS STUFF was a tangle of lights and a ceramic nativity scene missing two wise men. TAXES she set aside to shred later. She worked methodically, making three piles: keep, donate, trash. The keep pile stayed small.

By the second hour, she'd reached the unmarked boxes along the back wall. The first held old VHS tapes — action movies, mostly, the kind her father had watched on weekend afternoons while she did homework at the kitchen table. The second held tools. The third held her mother's things: a hairbrush, some costume jewelry, a Bible with her grandmother's name inscribed on the flyleaf, and a stack of greeting cards bound with a rubber band.

Megan sat on an overturned crate and flipped through the cards. Birthday cards from her mother's sister in Ohio. Anniversary cards her parents had exchanged. A Valentine from Megan herself, made in second grade with construction paper and glitter glue. She remembered making it. She remembered her father sticking it to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a trout.

She put the cards in the keep pile and reached for the next box.

It was a shoebox. Nike, men's size eleven. Light. She lifted the lid.

Letters.

Dozens of them, packed tight, all in envelopes. She picked one up and turned it over. Her name was written on the front in a child's careful printing: MEGAN POOLE. No address. The envelope had been opened, the flap tucked back in rather than sealed.

She pulled out the letter. Lined notebook paper, the kind with the wide ruling that elementary schools used. Blue ink. The handwriting was neat for a child's — deliberate, each letter formed with care.

Dear Megan,

Thanks for your last letter. I liked hearing about your cat. Orange cats are the best. My mom won't let me have a pet because she says our apartment is too small. Maybe someday.

I've been reading this book about pirates. It's really good. Do you like pirates? I think you would. You seem like someone who likes adventure.

Write back soon.

Your friend,
Eddie Beasley

Megan stared at the name. Eddie Beasley. She hadn't thought about Eddie Beasley in twenty years.

The pen pal program. Fourth grade. Mrs. Calloway — no, Mrs. Cunningham. Mrs. Cunningham's class at Granton Elementary. They'd been paired with a school in Delaware as part of a statewide literacy initiative. Each student was assigned a correspondent, and they wrote letters back and forth throughout the school year. Megan had been paired with Eddie.

She remembered it now, the memory surfacing like something rising from the bottom of a lake. She'd been excited about it. She was a shy kid, bookish, without many friends at school. Her parents fought in the evenings, and she spent a lot of time in her room with the door closed. Having someone to write to — someone who didn't know her, who existed in a separate world — had felt like a gift.

They'd written to each other for four years. Fourth grade through seventh. Long after the official program ended, they'd kept going. Eddie had been her closest confidant during the loneliest stretch of her childhood. She'd told him things she'd never told anyone — about her parents' arguments, about being picked on by Stephanie Goss at school, about her fear that her mother was going to leave.

And then, sometime in eighth grade, the letters had stopped. She couldn't remember why. Maybe Eddie had stopped writing first. Maybe she'd gotten busy with other things. Maybe adolescence had simply carried them apart, the way it does.

She sat in the storage unit, holding the letter, and felt something she hadn't expected: a deep, aching tenderness. For the girl she'd been. For the boy she'd thought Eddie was.

She began reading.

There were forty-seven letters in total. She counted them. They spanned from September 2000 to March 2004, though the gaps between them varied — sometimes a week, sometimes a month or more. She arranged them by postmark date and read them in order, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor while the fluorescent light buzzed overhead.

The early letters were simple. Eddie talked about school, his favorite TV shows, a dog he'd seen at the park. He asked Megan questions — what was her favorite color, did she have brothers or sisters, what did she want to be when she grew up. Standard pen pal fare. Megan's responses weren't in the box, of course; she'd mailed those. But she could reconstruct some of them from Eddie's replies.

The letters grew longer as the years went on. More detailed. More personal. Eddie talked about being lonely, about not fitting in at school, about a teacher who was mean to him. He told Megan she was his best friend. She remembered writing the same thing back to him.

But as she read, something began to bother her. Small things at first. In a letter from October 2001, Eddie wrote:

I hope your bike gets fixed soon. It's no fun being stuck walking everywhere.

Megan frowned. She remembered her bike breaking — the chain had snapped on the hill behind the library, and she'd scraped her knee badly on the pavement. But she was almost certain she hadn't written to Eddie about it yet when this letter arrived. She'd been waiting for her father to fix it, and she remembered composing the letter about the accident in her head while she waited. Eddie's letter had come first.

She kept reading. In a letter from February 2002:

Does your mom still drive that blue Civic? My mom drives a van. It's ugly. I wish she had a cool car like your mom's.

Megan's mother had driven a blue Honda Civic. But Megan didn't remember ever describing the car in that much detail. The color, maybe. But the make? She'd been eleven. She barely knew what a Civic was.

Then, in a letter from June 2002:

I bet you can see the whole street from your window. That big tree must be nice in the summer. Do you ever climb it?

There had been a large oak tree outside Megan's bedroom window. You could see it from the street. But from Delaware? Eddie had never been to her house. She'd never sent him a photo.

She put the letter down. Her hands were trembling, and she didn't know why — not exactly. It was a feeling more than a thought, a wrongness that she couldn't yet articulate. She picked up another letter, then another, scanning for details.

Eddie mentioned the color of her house. He mentioned the fence in her backyard. He mentioned the name of the grocery store on her street — Barton's Market — which had closed in 2006. He mentioned that her bedroom light was on late one night, and asked if she'd been reading.

Megan sat very still in the storage unit. The fluorescent light buzzed. Outside, she could hear the distant sound of traffic on Route 9.

She picked up her phone and searched for Granton Elementary School. The number was listed on the district website. She dialed it, and a woman answered on the third ring.

"Granton Elementary, this is Patty."

"Hi," Megan said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears — too calm, too controlled. "My name is Megan Poole. I was a student there from 1997 to 2003. I'm trying to get some information about a program we participated in. A pen pal exchange with a school in Delaware."

"Oh, sure. That was before my time, but I think we still have records from those programs. What do you need?"

"I was paired with a student named Eddie Beasley. I'm trying to find out which school he attended. The partner school in Delaware."

"Let me check. Can you hold?"

Megan held. She stared at the letters spread out on the floor around her. She counted the seconds. She got to one hundred and forty-seven before Patty came back.

"Okay, I found the program files. The exchange was with Brookfield Elementary in Wilmington, Delaware. It ran from 1999 to 2004. Let me look up your match." A pause. Keystrokes. "Huh. That's odd."

"What?"

"I've got your name on the Granton list — Megan Poole, Mrs. Cunningham's class, paired in September 2000. But the corresponding student on the Brookfield list is a girl named Tanya Whitman. Not Eddie Beasley."

Megan's mouth went dry. "Are you sure?"

"That's what the records say. Tanya Whitman. Want me to double-check?"

"Yes. Please."

More keystrokes. "Same result. Tanya Whitman. And I don't see an Eddie Beasley on the Brookfield roster at all. Not for that year or any other year in the program."

"Could he have been at a different school in the district?"

"Let me look at the full district list we were given." Another pause. "No. No Eddie Beasley in the Wilmington district records we have on file. I'm sorry. Is there something wrong?"

Megan thanked her and hung up.

She sat in the storage unit for a long time. The letters surrounded her like fallen leaves. She picked up the earliest one — September 2000, the first letter Eddie had ever sent her — and read it again.

Dear Megan,

My name is Eddie Beasley. I'm ten years old and I go to school in Delaware. I was so happy when I found out I got you as my pen pal. I have a feeling we're going to be great friends.

She'd been ten years old. She'd been lonely and shy and desperate for a friend. And someone — someone who was not a ten-year-old boy in Delaware — had written to her.

Someone who knew what her house looked like. Someone who knew what car her mother drove. Someone who could see her bedroom window.

Megan gathered the letters, put them back in the shoebox, and carried them to her car. She locked the storage unit behind her. She sat in the driver's seat with the engine off and the shoebox on the passenger seat beside her, and she did not move for fifteen minutes.

Then she drove to her motel and began making a list.