Please Forgive Me (34 page)

Her friend frowned and set the bottles of Corona down on the coffee table. ‘Different in what way?’
 

‘Take a look at the front of it.’

It was the letter she’d opened by mistake around Valentine’s Day, Nathan’s first (or in reality his most recent) letter. She didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed it before – possibly because at the time she’d been so rough with the envelope it was difficult to spot, but now that she had realised the difference, and more importantly, what it could mean – it sent a shiver down her spine.

‘There’s no postmark on this one.’ Alex said, seeing it immediately.

‘I know.’

‘So it didn’t come through the mail?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Shit.’ Leonie could tell by her expression that Alex had come to the same conclusion. ‘So he’s out?’

Leonie’s thoughts whirled. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think at all now.’

The most recent letter was markedly different to the others in the sense that it had no postmark on the envelope, and although the handwriting was the same, it only had Helena Abbott’s name and the apartment number written on the front of it. Which could only mean that someone had dropped it off by hand.

‘Looking back, I suppose that first letter was always that little bit different to the others, but once I’d opened them all I never really noticed it. It was only a short note, whereas the others were longer and more detailed …’

‘None of that really matters now,’ Alex said quickly. ‘What matters is where this guy is. All this week we thought he was in prison, which I’ll admit at first I thought was a long shot, but like you said it fit.’

‘It did. And reading through them again, I’m still convinced that’s the case. But
-
’

‘But people in prison can’t put notes through letterboxes Leonie.’

‘I know. But maybe he could have had someone else drop it off –’

Alex shook her head. ‘There are far too many maybes here,’ she interjected exasperated. ‘Maybe Helena’s dead, maybe she’s not, maybe Nathan’s in prison, maybe he’s not!’ She threw up her hands in despair. ‘I don’t know and to be honest, I’m not sure if I even
care
anymore. We’re tying ourselves up in knots with this thing.’ She looked at Leonie. ‘I’m sorry and I know this means a lot to you, but all this is turning out to be a complete waste of time. We don’t know what the story is behind these letters, and if you ask me we’ll never know.’

‘No, we can’t just give up,’ Leonie argued, although she two was thrown by this most recent discovery. She’d been so sure …but then again as Alex kept pointing out, they really couldn’t be sure of anything any more, could they?

‘But what else are we supposed to do? We’ve already tried everything we can think of at this stage to locate either one of them. It’s not as though we can go around state penitentiaries asking if they have any inmates called Nathan, or keep grilling every person called Helena Abbot to see if its her. She could very well be dead, and we don’t even know his surname!’ Alex was just about at the end of her tether.

‘I know,’ Leonie shook her head at the hopelessness of it. ‘I know what you’re saying and I’ve racked my brains too. I don’t want to give up but it’s hard to see what else we can do to find them now, short of talking out a full page ad in a newspaper or
 
– what?’ She stopped short when Alex gave her an odd look.

‘That’s it!’ the other girl exclaimed, wide-eyed.

‘What?’

Alex slapped a hand to her forehead. ‘Why the hell didn’t I think of it before?’ she groaned, while Leonie just sat there, waiting to hear what she had in mind. Alex took a notebook out of her handbag and began writing furiously in it.
 
‘Up to now we’ve been trying to pick out a needle in haystack,’ she said, ‘When all along we should have been using a damn magnet.’
 

The following morning Alex pitched to Sylvester her grand idea for a potential
Today by The Bay
slot.

Deciding it would be best not to betray her connection to the origins of the story, she began by telling her boss that some interesting letters had been sent by a member of the public to the station. The truth, or indeed any other explanation would have greatly lessened the likelihood of his allowing her to run it.

‘I think it’s right up our street,’ she told him. ‘The guy has been sending love letters to this girl who no longer lives at the address, yet they can’t be returned. I think whoever sent them to us thought they were too important to ignore, and while they couldn’t find the guy, maybe we could.’

‘I think I like it,’ Sylvester said, after some thought. ‘And the public will go crazy over it.’

The thinking behind the TV piece was that they’d run a heart-warming story about undelivered mail from a man called Nathan searching for his lost love Helena and with such exposure, maybe somebody who knew (or had known) either one of them would see it, realise the significance and arrange to contact the station.

‘We should use some of these,’ Sylvester said, flicking through the letters that Alex showed him. ‘The fancy handwriting’s good – it’ll fit with the slushy theme. They’ll have to be subtitled though.’

‘Wouldn’t we need to get copyright permission to do that?’

‘How can you, if there’s no return address? Anyway, for all we know, it could have been the guy himself who sent those letters to us in the hope that we’d put them on TV. If you’re worried, I’ll talk to the lawyers about it, but as the letters were sent to us, I’m pretty sure it’s legal,’ he went on, and Alex gulped.

Having got the go-ahead from Sylvester, the piece was due to go out the following week. While Leonie had reservations about how much personal information they should disclose in the report, she and Alex had both agreed that getting some form of result was more important.

‘We’ll only use first names and leave out the Green Street address too,’ Alex agreed with her, while putting the piece together in its early stages. She also agreed to leave out of the piece (and in the initial pitch to Sylvester) their suspicions that Nathan may have been writing the letters from a prison cell.

‘It’s the sort of thing that will bring all kinds of whackos out of the woodwork,’ Alex told Leonie. ‘And not only that but it runs the risk of alienating the public or frightening either one of them away too.’

‘Do you really think there’s a chance they might see it?’ Leonie couldn’t contain her excitement about it all. Alex knew her remark about putting out a full-page ad was borne more out of desperation than anything else, so when she’d come up with the idea of appealing for them on TV, Leonie too couldn’t believe they hadn’t thought of it before.

‘Who knows?’ Alex replied. But it was the last throw of the dice as far as she was concerned and if nothing else, it would make damn good TV.

The following Thursday evening Leonie sat glued to the telly, waiting for the six o’clock news to hurry up and finish, so that the
Today by the Bay
slot could air.

But even better, and much to her delight, all throughout the lead-up SFTV news kept running ‘teaser’ spots about the upcoming story, which meant that by the time the piece about the letters did appear, there was an even greater likelihood of a captive audience.

Alex had explained that there was a possibility the station would in fact do this, but she couldn’t be sure. ‘It depends on how much of an impact they expect it to make,’ she’d told Leonie beforehand, when the slot was recorded and the finishing touches being put to it. ‘And of course on whether or not it gets bumped for some whacko with a shot of a UFO hovering over the Golden Gate,’ she added dryly.

But it was obviously a quiet day for the whackos, as before every ad break the station ran during the news was the teaser preview of the upcoming
Today By the Bay
piece, which they’d entitled ‘Please Forgive Me’.

‘It’s coming up soon, so stay tuned to SFTV News,’ the news anchor repeated for the umpteenth time. Leonie still found it hard to get to grips with the way the TV stations seemed to assume that all viewers had the attention span of a goldfish. Why else did they feel the need to bombard people with teasers and practically beg them to ‘stay tuned’?

It was frustrating, because she had to sit through almost a full hour of irrelevant guff before the
Today by The Bay
slot finally appeared.

Leonie hugged herself and felt a shiver up her spine as the piece began with a gentle female voiceover against a background of tear jerking, Oprah-style piano music.

‘With today’s dependence on email, cell-phones and all kinds of quick fix modern communications technology, it’s heartening to find that some of the old-fashioned methods of reaching someone still exist.’

The voice paused for a moment, while the music cranked up and onscreen a blurry montage of faceless people in the physical act of writing letters was displayed. Leonie smiled, amused at the idea of Alex being associated with something so utterly devoid of subtlety. Yet she knew it would be compelling to anyone watching; hell the piece was compelling to her and she already knew every last detail!

‘But this old-fashioned and very simple act of writing letters might just be the final act in one particular love story,’ she continued, and at this, Leonie felt a lump in her throat.

‘Meet Nathan,’ the breathy voice intoned, as one of his letters appeared onscreen, the distinctive ink handwriting immediately recognisable to Leonie, but illegible to most other people – which was why his words were helpfully subtitled underneath.

In my head I can still see your smile, hear your laugh and feel your arms around me … It’s driving me crazy to think that I might never see you again. I’m so sorry for what I did…I never meant to hurt you. Please forgive me.

‘Touching words, I’m sure you’ll agree. But the problem?’ the voice paused for dramatic effect. ‘None of the letters have actually reached the person they’re addressed to. It’s kind of like a modern-day version of that old Elvis classic, except these letters weren’t returned to sender, they were sent to us here at SFTV.’

Leonie realised she was holding her breath as the voice went on to explain how there were in fact ten letters, all addressed to a woman called Helena whose whereabouts appeared unknown.

‘So how she can forgive Nathan if she doesn’t know he wants her to?’ The speaker paused so viewers could consider this very important question. ‘Well, we at
Today By the Bay
think this man deserves another chance. So Helena, if you’re out there, and you recognise Nathan’s handwriting, or maybe even his words, get in touch with us at this number.’ An eighteen hundred number flashed across the bottom of the screen ‘We’ve got a pile of love letters just for you.’

The brief but Leonie had to admit, very moving piece cut back to the studio, where the presenters were both wearing ‘aw shucks’ smiles.

‘Well I don’t know about you Ken, but I’ve forgiven him already,’ the blonde co-anchor commented to her colleague. ‘

‘Yes, he certainly sounds like a keeper, Megan. Let’s just hope she gets in touch before it’s too late.’

A day later and the response to the slot could only be described as overwhelming.

Telephone calls and emails to the station were coming in by the bucket load, the majority of which were from women claiming to be Helena and declaring everlasting love for Nathan ‘no matter what.’

Others were from viewers who insisted that if Helena wouldn’t forgive him then they would, and one woman even asked that SFTV News put forward a marriage proposal to him. Almost everyone had been touched by the letters and especially moved by Nathan’s fruitless pleas for absolution.

A few responses also came from men who insisted the letters belonged to them and who were planning to sue the station for broadcasting them without permission. While Alex had known in advance that they were likely to get some unusual and downright wacky responses, she was now especially glad that they’d withheld the fact that they didn’t have Nathan’s permission to run this piece, to say nothing of letting them know where they suspected his location to be.

Unlike Leonie, she was sceptical that either one of the couple would see it (personally believing that Helena was in fact dead), but at the same time, was content to go through the motions. Which was why Alex spent much of the following morning at the station returning calls to the various women claiming to be Helena. She’d also forwarded some emails to her personal email account so that she and Leonie could go through them in their own time, and weed out the whackos from those who looked any way promising.

Midway through that morning, she got a surprise call from Seth.

‘Interesting piece yesterday,’ he said, without preamble. ‘Did you find your guy then?’

‘Not quite but I doubt he was scuba diving last year, not unless he was trying out an escape route,’ she joked, filling him in on their suspicions about Nathan’s whereabouts.

His reaction was predictable, which was exactly why Alex had mentioned it. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me! The guy could be a freakin’ psycho for all you know!’ Seth exclaimed horrified, and she smiled, absurdly pleased she’d got a rise out of him.

‘Seth, remind me again why this is any of your business?’

‘Because I don’t want you involved in that kind of trouble! If the guy’s banged up, then who knows what you’re getting into?’

‘How touching. But like I said before, this is none of your business, so keep out of it.’

‘It is when my wife is getting herself mixed up with a bunch of cons
-
’

‘
Ex
-wife.’ Alex retorted through gritted teeth. ‘Despite what you think I don’t actually need a piece of paper to tell me that.’ Unfortunately she did of course need that, but she wasn’t going to admit as much to him.

‘Just remember, that this is classic con stuff Alex, you know – manipulating people to feel sorry for them…’