March 10

March 10 marks the interception of the six letters Andy McGee mailed from Bradford, New Hampshire, and the moment his attempt to communicate becomes another part of the Shop’s pursuit. The date links two sharply different scenes: Andy and Charlie McGee’s quiet day across the lake, and a roadside seizure of their correspondence that ends with the letters on Cap Hollister’s desk. The letters are not read aloud in the account; their contents are already familiar to Cap, while their interception makes clear that the family’s apparent isolation has not protected its communications.

A winter day divided between home and pursuit

There was no post office in Bradford, nor in Tashmore, Vermont; both were too small. The nearest post office to Bradford was in Teller, New Hampshire. At 1:15 p.m., a small postal truck from Teller stopped at the Bradford general store and collected the mail from the standing box beside the place where Jake had once pumped Jenny gas. The mail included Andy’s six letters and a postcard from Miss Shirley Devine, a fifty-year-old woman writing to her sister in Tampa, Florida. At that same time, Andy was napping across the lake, while Charlie was building a snowman.

The postal route carried the letters away from the family in stages. Robert Everett, the postman, put the mail in a bag and drove on to Williams, another small town in Teller’s ZIP-code area. After turning around on what Williams residents jokingly called Main Street, he began the return drive to Teller, where the mail would be sorted and sent onward at about three o’clock. Five miles outside town, a beige Chevrolet Caprice blocked both narrow lanes. Everett stopped beside a snowbank and got out to see whether he could help.

Two men approached from the car, showed Everett their credentials, and explained what they wanted. He resisted their demand for the mail. The confrontation placed an ordinary postal worker between a federal-looking operation and the privacy of the people whose letters he carried; Everett’s protest was not a matter of knowing what Andy had written, but of recognizing that the seizure itself was wrong.

The roadside interception

Everett eventually handed over the small sack containing mail from Bradford and Williams. The men opened it beside the road and sorted through the contents. Everett felt anger and shame as he watched them handle the U.S. mail, and told them they would hear about it. The men selected six letters, all addressed in the same careful hand. Everett recognized them as the letters taken from the Bradford general-store box. OJ put them in his pocket, and the two men returned to the Caprice, leaving the opened mailbag on the road.

The threat that followed extended the seizure beyond the roadside. When Everett shouted again, OJ warned him to speak to his postmaster before speaking to anyone else, invoking Everett’s Postal Service pension. The warning made the power imbalance explicit: the agents had not only taken private correspondence but could also make the witness fear professional consequences for objecting. Everett’s immediate anger was thus turned toward silence.

That silence lasted. Cobham, a fifty-six-year-old Postal Service employee with thirty-five years’ service, was badly frightened; eventually he communicated his fear to Everett as well. Everett never told anyone—not even his wife—about being robbed on the Teller Road between Bradford and Williams. He nevertheless never forgot the episode, or entirely lost the anger, shame, and disillusionment it left behind. The intercepted letters therefore produce a lasting consequence for a witness who is not part of the McGee family: the Shop’s reach suppresses not only the correspondence but also the account of how it was taken.

From the mailbag to Cap’s desk

The day’s chronology sets the interception against the family’s continuing domestic routine. By 2:30 p.m., Charlie had finished her snowman and Andy had risen from his nap, somewhat rested. Orville Jamieson and his new partner, George Sedaka, were aboard an airplane. About four hours after the snowman was completed, Andy and Charlie sat down to play five hundred rummy; supper dishes had been washed and were drying in the drainer. By then, the letters were on Cap Hollister’s desk. The correspondence had travelled from a village collection box, through a roadside seizure, into the Shop’s files while the people who wrote it went about an unremarkable day.

Cap opened the McGee file and removed the six letters Andy had mailed less than two weeks earlier. He shuffled them without reading them: they were essentially the same letter, and he knew their contents almost by heart. Beneath them lay glossy photographs, some taken by Charles Payson and others by agents on the Tashmore side of the pond. They showed Andy walking along Bradford’s main street and shopping at the general store, as well as Andy and Charlie by the boathouse, with Irv Manders’s Willys Jeep appearing as a snow-covered mound in the background.

One photograph recorded a more intimate moment: Charlie sliding down a crusted slope on a flattened cardboard box, her hair flying from beneath an oversized knitted cap. Andy stood behind her with his hands on his hips, laughing. Cap had returned to that image often and looked at it for long, sober intervals; sometimes his hands trembled when he put it aside. The account connects the intercepted letters to his desire to find the two of them: amid the Shop’s many demands, the matter of Andy and his daughter was the one that occupied him above all.

The date’s narrative significance

March 10 is structured around a contrast in knowledge and reach. Andy and Charlie are shown at home, unaware that their letters have been stopped; the postal workers and the reader see the mechanism that carries those letters into the Shop’s possession. The ordinary details—the postcard, the snowman, the rummy game, the drying dishes—do not interrupt the pursuit plot. They measure how completely it enters ordinary life, while the agents’ control of the mail creates distance between the family’s daily experience and the danger gathering around them.

The sequence also gives the interception a human cost beyond the loss of privacy. Everett recognizes the wrongdoing and objects, but the threat to his pension and Cobham’s fear prevent him from speaking publicly. At the same time, Cap’s file converts the family’s letters and photographed moments into materials of surveillance. March 10 thus joins private communication, institutional coercion, and Cap’s personal fixation in one chain of events: the letters are taken from the road, the witness is silenced, and the family’s ordinary life is preserved in images for the man directing the pursuit.