The White Road-CP-4 by John Connolly

cut.
    Scarborough is an old community, one of the first colonies established on the northern New England coast that was not simply a transient fishing station but a settlement which would become a permanent home for the families that lived within its boundaries. Many were English settlers, my mother’s ancestors among them; others came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, attracted by the promise of good farmland. The first governor of Maine, William King, was born in Scarborough, although he left there at the age of nineteen when it became clear that it didn’t have too much to offer in the way of wealth and opportunity. Battles have been fought here—like most of the towns on the coastline, Scarborough has been dipped in blood—and the community has been blighted by the ugliness of Route 1, but through it all the Scarborough salt marsh has survived, and its waters glow like molten lava in the setting sun. The marsh was protected, although the continuing development of Scarborough meant that new housing—not all of it pretty, and some of it unquestionably ugly—had grown up close to the marsh’s high-water mark, attracted both by its beauty and by the presence of older, preexisting populations. The big, black-gabled house in which I now lived dated from the early nineteen thirties, and was mostly sheltered from the road and the marsh by a stand of trees. From my porch, I could look out upon the water and sometimes find a kind of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
    But that kind of peace is fleeting, an escape from reality that ends as soon as you tear your eyes away and your attention returns to the matters in hand: to those whom you love and who depend upon you to be there for them; to those who want something from you but for whom you feel little or nothing in return; and to those who would hurt you and the ones close to you, if given the opportunity. Right now, I had enough to be getting along with in all three categories. Rachel and I had moved to this house only four weeks previously, after I had sold my grandfather’s old home and adjoining land on Mussey Road, about three miles away, to the U.S. Postal Service. A huge new mail depot was being built in the area and I had been offered a considerable amount of money to vacate my land so that it could be used as a maintenance area for the mail fleet.
    I had felt a twinge of sorrow when the sale was finally made. After all, this was the house to which my mother and I had come from New York after my father’s death, the house in which I had spent my teenage years, and the house to which I, in turn, had returned after the death of my own wife and child. Now, two and a half years later, I was starting again. Rachel had only just begun to show, and it seemed somehow apt that we would begin our life as a couple in earnest in a new home, one that we had chosen together, furnished and decorated together, and in which, I hoped, we would live and grow old together. In addition, as my ex-neighbor Sam Evans had pointed out to me as the sale was nearing completion and as he himself was about to depart for his new place in the South, only a crazy person would want to live in close proximity to thousands of postal workers, all of them little ticking time bombs of frustration waiting to explode in an orgy of gun-related violence.
    “I’m not sure that they’re really that dangerous,” I suggested to him. He looked skeptical. Sam had been the first to sell when the offers were made, and the last of his possessions were now in a U-Haul truck ready to head for Virginia. My hands were dusty from helping him carry the boxes from the house.
    “You ever see that film The Postman?” he asked.
    “No. I heard it kind of sucked.”
    “It sucked sperm whales. Kevin Costner should have been stripped naked, soaked in honey, and staked out over an anthill for it, but that’s not the point. What’s The Postman about?”
    “A postman?”
    “An armed postman,” he