Bea flicked the light on in the mailroom as it got darker outside. She thought back to the missing letters, a few days ago she had been freaking out about them but now they were just a few more letters she didn't have to shred.

The investigation of Evans' death had come to nothing. The police had called the investigation a cold case a few weeks ago, and after no new evidence was found by the group Bret had been keeping such a secret he'd called it off too. Bea could have kept looking by herself but she was tired. The investigation had been all consuming for the past six months, it was hard to forget when the mail was the number one source of evidence and Bea was in the mailroom all the time. It was time to move on, and shredding the mail was the best way to keep the investigation off of her mind. It was also the best way to keep the feds from arresting her for opening someone else's mail.

Bea picked up the next envelope and paused, surprised by its weight. She opened the envelope without a second thought.

Dear Mr. Evans,

We are very much interested in the set of sterling cards you offered to us to sell for you.  We have tried to contact you several times, and this is our last effort.  They are indeed worth a great deal and we would be happy to find a buyer for you.

Please contact us as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Mr. Jones,

Sotheby's Inc.

A business card fell out of the pages as Bea rifled through them. The card listed Mr. Jones' email, phone number, and also the email and phone number of one of his colleagues. The other pages contained a collection of articles and photos of what must be the Sterling Cards the letter had referred to. A few days ago Bea would have waved the card and letter in front of Ackeridge asking what he thought of them, now she didn't even bother to wake him from where he was napping on the counter before sliding the paper through the shredder. 

Bea checked the clock, gathered her things and Ackeridge, and locked up for the night. She made her way through the darkened lobby and stepped out the front doors to get some fresh air after being cooped up in the mailroom all day. As the Foxberry door closed behind her, Bea heard a muffled crash and yell from down the street. 

She stepped out into the road as if it would allow her a better look at where the sound had come from. She stood for a moment under the streetlight waiting for something else to happen, then there was another crash and the streetlight went out.

Happy World Frog Day From Ackeridge!

March 20th 2019

Bea sat in the mailroom, she had so far received five pamphlets from the man and woman hanging around the lobby of the Foxberry. Maybe she should start keeping a tally. The excessive amounts of pamphlets didn't seem odd on it's own, people who were giving out pamphlets were going to give out a lot of them, the odd thing was that they all had the same point on a list of actions circled..

5. Life forms - Realize that life isn’t limited to humans. Care for an animal, plant, or insect.

She supposed Ackeridge counted, but what "boils" would she be getting rid of? the only thing she could think of that was festering was Mr. Evans' murder investigation.

 'Hah,' she thought, 'Maybe Ackeridge will solve the murder, save us all the trouble.' Then she was shaken from her thoughts as the mailroom door slammed open.

Stephanie Greene strode in.

"Hey, Stephanie. I've got some more of your mail in the back let me grab it for you before you take everything back upstairs." Bea got part of the way out of her chair before Stephanie Interrupted her.

"I'm not here for my mail. I want to know what you think you're doing meeting with Dorothy Rose all the time lately."

"Excuse me?"

"We're all trying to solve this murder and you're fraternizing with our number one suspect?"

"No of course we're trying to solve the murder, I brought up the idea that Dorothy might have something to do with it when Ack-, when I found some more mentions of Roses in Mr. Evans' letters. But I haven't talked to Dorothy more than a polite hello when she gets her mail."

"Not at all?"

"Not at all." Bea was baffled, for lack of a better word. Why would anyone think she had been meeting with Dorothy? Unless Dorothy was going somewhere that looked like she could be meeting Bea while Bea wasn't actually there.

"Oh no." Bea got all the way out of her chair now.

"Oh no what?" Stephanie asked.

"You thought I was meeting her in here, right?"

"Yeah."

"She could have been stealing mail I was holding from Evans' pile. His whole case got stolen from the police station."

"Oh no."

Bea and Stephanie burst through the door into the back room, and opened the drawer where Bea had been keeping Evans' mail.

It was empty.

        Bea lay on her bed surrounded by letters and envelopes addressed to Mr. Evans. She flipped absently through a few looking for anything she might have missed. Some of the letters she had lost the night of the circus had been returned to her in the mailroom, some just thinking that it was lost mail and the Foxberry mailroom was the best place for it, others with questions, and one with an invitation. She wanted to see if anything in the new letters connected to the old letters.

"Stop!" Ackeridge cried, slapping himself over the letter Bea had been about to toss aside.

"Get your slimy Frog Fingers off the paper!"

"Look! It says rose!"

Bea squinted at the word that had been under Ackeridge's leg, "Maybe it said rose before you smudged it. Besides, why would that be any sort of clue? rose is a noun and a verb, it could really mean anything."

"No this was capitalized, like a name! That's why it stood out!"

"Well thanks to your slime, we'll never know."

"Let's look for other mentions of roses."

"Ok just yell of you see something, don't touch it this time."

Bea flipped through some of the letters she had originally discarded. Unfortunately it was difficult to pick out anything among the mentions of knives the Old Friend had collected. The more Bea read about his knives, the more creeped out she got. 

"Wait." Ackeridge said.

"What is it?" Bea asked scanning the letter again to see if she had missed something.

"Weren't you complaining about some guy who was mad about roses?"

"Why would anyone come to me about roses, I'm a mail clerk not a gardener."

"No, that Salimov guy thought you had delivered a package to the wrong person because it was kinda weird, had a rose printed on it, he hadn't ordered it et cetera? You were mad because he was questioning whether you could do your job properly"

"Oh yeah."

"What if that rose is connected to Evans and hid Old Friend? It was a strange package right?"

"Yeah, the return address was blacked out. Someone else got a package that day with a blacked out return. One of the Stephanie's, maybe we should talk to her about the package she got. I wonder if the rose on Salimov's gift is connected to the roses in the letters."

"We can at least have something to show at this mysterious meeting."

  Bea snorted, "What makes you think you're coming?"

"Maybe they'll be the next to die. You delivered packages to them, maybe the connection is that whatever was in those packages will cause them to die which will, of course, be your fault."

Bea pressed the heels of her hands harder against her eyes. She had finally dealt with the rest of the mail from a few weeks ago so she had more free time. Unfortunately that meant spending it with Ackeridge.

"Can't you think about nice things?" She asked loudly. 

Ackeridge just blinked.

"Fine," Bea sighed, "I'm going down to the circus," It was in town for a few days, if she liked it maybe she would go back a couple times. There wasn't much to do in St. Abel.

Ackeridge hopped to the door.

"And you're not invited!" She picked him up and dropped him into the sink, possibly rudely but she wasn't sure about what frogs considered etiquette.

"No wait!" his voice sounded amplified now, "Take me with you please! I'll say nice things! I'll say nothing!"

Bea considered this for a moment. If Ackeridge was going to shut up it might be nice to have some semblance of company, but then it was unlikely he would shut up.

"Fine." She scooped the frog out of the sink and grabbed her yellow raincoat. It wasn't raining but the pockets would fit Ackeridge best.

The circus was loud. There were animals, vendors, performers, and everything else Bea thought could be at a circus. It was all very overwhelming, so Bea decided to stick her head into one of the tents. 

It was dim, and Bea had the distinct feeling this was not somewhere she was supposed to be. However, she had done more snooping in the past few weeks than the whole rest of her life combined and she decided just a little more couldn't hurt. She moved toward the desk, almost in a trance. The dim lighting and dulled circus smell was making her sleepy.

The desk was messy. there were some pens and lots of paper, but also an old inkwell and what looked like a feather quill. Someone must have a flair for the dramatic, Bea thought. Ackeridge shoved his head out of the jacket pocket.

"Someone's got a flair for the dramatic," He said.

"So, I'm not the only one thinking it,"

Bea looked closer at the desk. She sucked her breath in, the letter was addressed to Evans! She flipped through the papers on the desk and found three more letters like the first. This was the Old Friend. He was releasing information to Bea, or whoever he thought was receiving the letters, on a timeline.

"Grab 'em and let's go!" Ackeridge hissed

"Since when are you the Devil on my shoulder?" Bea asked.

"The game's changed!"

        "Game!?"

Bea grabbed the letters and shoved them quickly in the pocket Ackeridge was not in. then she spun on her heel and made her way out of the circus as quickly as she could without looking suspicious. Once she was out of the gates she broke into a run, so anxious to get home and read the new letters that neither she or Ackeridge noticed when the flew out of her pocket into the night.

        Bea stood in the mail room with her hands on her hips. It seemed like each time she solved a problem, a new one cropped up. Just last night she had managed to get the window above her kitchen sink to close. She had been thrilled, the cold had been becoming a problem. She thought back to the victory dance she had done, now looking at the piles of mail in the mail room she wondered if the frog had been right. He had said the dance was too much, over the top, not appropriate given the recent events in St. Abel. It was a remarkably rude frog, Bea thought, maybe I should give it a name so I have something more specific to direct my anger at than, 'The Frog'.

Bea picked up a package from on top of the nearest bin. The package was for Jackie Redford, but the return address was blacked out, all Bea could make out was 'Ackeri'. Maybe it was the street name, possibly Ackeridge, no way to know for sure. From then on Bea called the frog Ackeridge.

Looking around at the rest of the mail Bea thought it looked like an infestation, there was never this much mail at the Foxberry. She decided to go ahead and run Jackie's package up to her in an attempt to feel like she'd gotten something done that day. She looked around quickly and figured it wouldn't hurt to grab the other packages that had been strewn about as well. She dropped the six packages into a rolling bin and headed for the service elevator. She dropped the packages off in no particular order, usually she would go all the way to the top floor that needed a package and work her way down. However, today she wasn't in any particular hurry to get back to the sorting that awaited her in the mailroom, and she enjoyed riding the service elevator.

She dropped the packages off as she pulled them out of the bin. Bret, Jackie, Billy Bob, Ren, Azula, Evelyn. She thought it was odd that they had all mentioned for her not to come into the apartment as the accepted their packages, she never came past the threshold on a delivery. Today though each package recipient had mentioned that they had gotten lice and didn't want Bea to catch any. Azula had mentioned that she'd gotten it a few days ago, and it probably wasn't an issue anymore, but had warned her just to be safe Which was nice of them, but how odd that all of the people who had received packages also had lice?

        Bea sat back. She had been through Evans' mail at least three times and couldn't find anything straightforward about how he may have died. Everything from his 'Old Friend' was cryptic, or outright absurd. He spent so much time talking about all of the antique knives he had collected, and not only in one letter. Almost every letter had a mention of a new knife 'Old Friend' had acquired.

Bea sighed exasperatedly. Then it hit her. The cutlery museum. She leapt up, grabbed her coat, and was out the door in a flash with the most recent letter still clutched in her hand. She ran so quickly down the street that she barely had time to realize how there seemed to be fewer frogs about than usual before she was throwing open the museum door. 

Once inside the museum, Bea made her way directly to the knives. For the first time since racing out the door, Bea realized how unprepared she was to go searching for murder evidence in a cutlery museum. Even if she did find something, how could she tell the police when opening the mail in the first place was illegal? She took another deep breath and shook out the letter she had brought with her. The first knife mentioned was a simple one, so old it was brown with age and didn't have any sort of fancy metal work. Bea found the knife quickly, but there was nothing about it that seemed special or out of the ordinary. the same went for two of the other knives mentioned in the letter. The last one though, an old carving Knife, was nowhere to be found. Bea bit the inside of her cheek, she had had a theory that the 'Old Friend' might work at the museum, but now she supposed that she may not have been finding the knives mentioned in the letter at all, just similar ones. She decided to make her way home and sleep on it.

Now that she wasn't in a hurry, the frogs became much more obvious. She picked her way home trying to ignore them, but when she got back to her apartment there was a frog right at her door. It turned to her with almost human like movements, and spoke. With the same voice as the voice inside her head.