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?"