Read Online Undeliverable by Rebecca Demarest - Free Book Online Page B

and he was angry for ruining even a few. His working theory was that you never knew which flyer was going to be the one to bring his boy home. Plus, all the copying was starting to get pricey.
    Tossing the ruined flyers into the recycling bin under his desk, he headed out toward the front door. He passed the industrial photocopier in the hall and he paused. There were still a few good copies in his bag; what would it hurt to run a few off in the office? It would only be a few, not too many, and he doubted anyone would even notice. He made twenty-five copies and thrust them into his bag before hurrying out into the evening.
    Ben arrived the next morning with a list of details about the green truck that he had pulled from the tips and planned on diving back into the search engine since the list he had printed had just been too long to wade through in an evening. But as soon as he entered the warehouse, he was derailed from his planned research by Sylvia, who bounded out of his office chair when he walked in.
    “Ben! We have a
claim
!” She grabbed him by the arm and towed him over to his computer. “Log in! Geoffrey said he sent the form to you this morning. God, I love these days.” Her excitement was a bit over the top for his hangover to handle, and Ben wished she had just taken care of this herself before he’d gotten there so he could just dive back into the database.
    Sylvia circled his chair like a caged animal while he logged in and booted up his email. The first email did indeed read, “Claim.” He opened it, found the retrieval tag, and headed back into the warehouse to find it. “So I take it we don’t get many of these.” He told himself he didn’t really care, but Sylvia’s enthusiasm was infectious. She was literally skipping down the aisle ahead of him.
    “Maybe two or three a week. We manage to just return a lot of the mail. Most of this stuff, though, people don’t care about. So I really like these days.”
    It turned out that the object in question was a taxidermied armadillo from 2008, frozen in a state of half-curled agitation. It sat on its back and rocked gently when nudged. Sylvia set it in motion and laughed. “This thing is kinda cute, isn’t it?”
    Ben grimaced. He didn’t think taxidermy should ever be practiced as it always just looked creepy to him. “I don’t know. It’s trapped in an eternity of exposed fear. Not sure ‘cute’ is the right word.” He scooped it off the shelf and was surprised by the heft it had. “One armadillo, returned to its rightful hunter.”
    He returned to his desk with the creature in question and turned to the filing cabinet. “Any other forms I have to fill out for this poor sod?”
    “Nope, just the communal log, and then that log over there where you sign it, and then take a photograph of it and upload it to the database, and then I’ll go pack it up for you.”
    A sigh escaped him. It was a ridiculous amount of paperwork just to return something to its rightful place. “Well that’s not much at all, now is it?”
    “Compared to how these systems used to run, it’s hardly anything at all.” She reached into the recycling bin to find a piece of paper to write down the claim’s address. “In the 1890s, it was all paper forms, and no one knew how to find them again once they’d been filed. This is much better.” She flipped over the paper to see what she was writing on and Benny’s face stared back at her.
    Ben looked over to see what had silenced her and felt the heat rising in his face. He didn’t want to share this with her. Not now. But he had been stupid enough to leave those here, so he tried to cover his pain and embarrassment with nonchalance. “Sorry, they were in my briefcase and got messed up when I was on my way out yesterday.” He tried to snatch the flyer from her, but she moved the paper out of his reach.
    She examined him just as closely as she had been examining the paper. “Don’t want to talk about it, huh?