Chapter Eighteen
The wooden trunk arrived unsolicited and was delivered by two sullen state employees driving a seventeen-year-old state truck that wouldn’t pass inspection if it was a private vehicle.
They lugged it to the front door of the Bennett Place, which was locked because legislative budget cuts limited staffing to two days a week, dropped it on the porch, and returned indifferently to their rusted vehicle, satisfied they had completed their delivery of a priceless piece of history.
It should’ve arrived at Bennett Place ten days earlier, and perhaps even when the place was open for business, but the state mail system sent it to the Department of Culture Resources, where the bureaucrats x-rayed it for bombs and screened it for anthrax because such wasted effort added meaning to
