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seem to understand—my files are highly confidential.”
    “Confidentiality is one of our specialties. I’ll call you.”
    As she minced toward her black Mercedes SUV, I lifted my middle finger. “Call this,” I muttered.
    Alvin scowled at me. “She seemed very professional. Knows what she’s talking about. I bet she can sell anything.”
    “Well, she’s not selling this house, Alvin. And I think we’ve seen the last of her.”
    I took advantage of having the front door open to snatch the mail, which must have been still sitting there from the day before, the office assistant once again asleep at the wheel. The mail contained the usual slim bundle of pizza delivery ads, fitness centre come-ons and bills, which were no longer a big problem for me.
    This time there was also a single white unstamped, unaddressed number ten envelope. Sealed. I opened it.
    Alvin always hovers when I get the mail. He likes to be in charge of all that exiting stuff. “I must have forgotten to bring the mail in yesterday. I’ve been busy with my cooking project. There are thousands of recipes for oatcakes.” He frowned as I stared at the note.
    I lowered my voice. “It says Rollie Thorsten.”
    “I honestly thought it was your brother-in-law, Stan, sending those jokes.”
    It would be just like Stan to try to creep me out by sending unfunny yet unsettling jokes in plain envelopes. This was the man who’d inserted whoopee cushions, fake dog turds and ice cubes with insects into every MacPhee family gathering that I could remember. I thought back to the stick-on cigarette burns on my sister’s custom upholstery, the piles of plastic vomit under the coffee table. And those were just the highlights. This envelope business was all very Stanlike. But Stan was on the Mediterranean cruise with my sisters and the other two brothers-in-law and my father.
    Maybe he had an accomplice. But Stan was as cheap as he was cheerful. His money went on Buicks and joke novelties. I couldn’t see him paying anyone to do this. To the best of my knowledge, he had no cronies outside the family. My sister Edwina kept him on a short leash.
    “Trust me, Stan isn’t killing people, Alvin. He didn’t even stay mad at me when I wrecked his Buick. Remember?”
    “Who could be doing it?”
    “I don’t know, Alvin. Some pathetic soul with an axe to grind. I still don’t believe it really has anything to do with me.”
    “If you say so,” Alvin said.
    He likes to have the last word.

    “How crazy is that?” I said to the light of my life, Ray Deveau, doing my best to fill up the thirteen hundred minute block of telephone time we manage to talk every month. It’s a necessary part of our long distance relationship. “Not that there’s anything funny about the joke business.”
    “Maybe, just a…”
    “Okay, but you live in Cape Breton. Here in Ottawa, we’re more serious. All that Parliamentary protocol and everything.”
    “Not while you have Alvin with you, you’re not serious.”
    “That’s true. Remind me to send him back to Sydney, and the Ferguson family dog too.”
    “Returning to the jokes,” Ray said quickly. “So you’re saying you got these same notes too, and Alvin threw them away?”
    “He showed them to me because they were lawyer jokes and he wanted to annoy me. But he didn’t say where they came from and he didn’t say anything at all about the names. I don’t think he noticed them. They just went straight into the recycle bin unless, of course, Gussie ate them. Alvin figured I wouldn’t be insulted by them, and that’s no fun, and he couldn’t figure out why anyone would send them, so, toss! No discussion.”
    “And Bobby did the same thing?”
    “Bunny. Well, no. He doesn’t get mail, I guess, just flyers, and he would look at anything with his name on it suspiciously. You know, the ‘how did someone find my address?’ kind of suspicion. He thought getting these things in a plain envelope was weird.”
    I couldn’t