Secret Lives Read Free

“No,” Troy said, “but now I know that I want to be a detective.” The detective stared at Troy for a second, then sighed. “I should have known. I came into the business in a similar way. You start with self-disclosure and before you know it, you want in on everybody’s secrets . . . Mr. Knutson, you don’t really want a secret life. You just want a window into the secret lives of others . And that’s more of a burden than people think. It will change you in so many ways, and some of them aren’t good ways.” The detective took another swig of scotch, gave Troy a penetrating stare. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?” he asked. And Troy said, in a perfect imitation of Roger Rabbit, “I was born ready, detective.”

THE SECRET LIFE OF
    LYNN MINNEMAN
    Lynn Minneman is a stamp collector and a retired survey statistician. For a long time, he had been content with his life and with his friends and his family. However, one day he received a set of Lewis & Clarke commemorative stamps from the post office that changed his contentment to restlessness. In examining the stamp set through the clear protective envelope, he noticed a small, triangular stamp trapped in a corner, the illustrated side facing away. The back of the stamp had yellow discoloration, indicating some age, the glue having melted.
    Generally, Minneman didn’t like to open up his stamp sets right away. He liked to appreciate them from afar, and then, only later, examine them in detail. But the little triangular stamp intrigued him. He wanted to see what was on the front of it, for one thing. As a child, one of his greatest satisfactions with stamp collecting had been the exotic quality of it, the images hailing from far-off lands. Minneman has long forgotten this, but his mother had once given him a dozen stamps from “Nippon,” all with delicate traceries of cherry blossoms and storks and other images that conveyed an otherness he treasured. At the time, he had not realized “Nippon” meant “Japan,” and so the country itself had been a mystery, a place not found on the globe, waiting to be discovered.
    A flicker of this memory sparked across his vision as he took a pair of tweezers and extracted the odd stamp from the envelope. He turned it over and set it down on the kitchen table, on top of the envelope. It was an etching, very carefully rendered, of a mountain range, with a river winding through the foreground. Whoever had created the stamp had managed to mix monochromatic colors—greens, blues, purples, and browns—into a clever tapestry of texture. Even though it was heavily pixilated, it conveyed authenticity, reality. For a moment, the river even seemed to move, and Minneman drew in his breath. Across the three corners of the stamp lay the words “Republic of Sonoria.”
    Minneman raised an eyebrow. Sonoria? In all his days of stamp collecting, he didn’t think he’d ever heard of the Republic of Sonoria. It sounded faintly Eastern European, and it was true he still had trouble keeping track of all the former Soviet provinces that had become independent, but it still sounded false to him. He stared at the picture on the stamp one more time, shivered a little as if a breeze blew across the grassy plains surrounding the river. Something about the image not only startled him, it stirred some deeply buried recognition.
    Carefully, as if the precision were important, he picked up the stamp using the tweezers and placed it back in the envelope, in the same position, with the front facing inward. Then he walked over to the map of the world framed in his living room, and he looked for Sonoria. First, he tried Eastern Europe, then Central Asia, then randomly, letting his gaze linger where it liked, and then systematically, starting from the left and traveling down and then up, down then up. No Sonoria. No Sonoria in Asia, Europe, South America. No island named Sonoria. No isthmus. No province. No state. No city. Nothing. Unless it