When Alice Phelps left home that day to go to her judo class, she told her husband Ralf to clean off the front walk before he left for work.
“Is that alright with you?”
But Ralf never did what his wife told him to do.
When Ralf returned home, there was a body lying on his front stairs. It was the mailman. He had obviously slipped on the ice that Ralf hadn't cleaned away and broken his neck. Ralf, fearing the wrath of the Letter Carriers Union, carried the body into the house. He decided he would put the body into the trunk of his car and dump it somewhere before anyone noticed that the mailman was missing.
A problem struck him. If the police investigated the disappearance of the mailman, there was a rather obvious clue. All the houses on the mailman's route preceding his own would have had the mail delivered that day. Those after his would not. Ralf wondered if he should turn himself in. He remembered that a mailman had once broken his leg on a friend's property and that had cost the friend a lot of money. A broken neck was probably considered as bad as ten broken legs.
Ralf poured himself a drink to steady his nerves. Then he undressed the mailman and, leaving the mailman comfortably in the living room chair, put on the mailman's uniform and went out to deliver the mail. No one noticed that it was Ralf delivering the mail instead of the regular mailman.
When he got home he found that his key was still in his own pants, not in the mailman's pants. He tried to get in a window. He was spotted by some policemen in a passing police car. They accused him of trying to break into the house. Ralf claimed that it was his own house. The policemen were doubtful that a mailman could afford such a large house. Ralf remembered that there was a body in his living room and dropped the subject. As they were taking him away a policeman told Ralf that he was a disgrace to the Letter Carriers Union.
When Alice came home, she found that the window had been forced open. She found the mailman, the pile of clothing and the opened bottle. She'd had an affair with the mailman some months before. She'd broken off with him, but it seemed he had come back. He had broken into the house to see her and, not finding her, had drunk half a bottle of whisky, ripped off his clothes and fallen into a stupor. It was just like him, she thought.
Fearing that Ralf would return soon and find him there, she dressed the mailman, put him in the car, drove to his apartment, carried him up the stairs and put him to bed. She gave him a last kiss before leaving. For the first time she noticed he wasn't breathing. And for the first time another possibility occurred to her. Perhaps the mailman had been surprised by Ralf, and Ralf had killed him. Perhaps Ralf was out buying a gun, right at that moment, to kill her too. Alice drove away to another province and started a new life under the name Patricia.
Meanwhile Ralf was being released from the police station. The Letter Carriers Union still under the misapprehension that Ralf was the regular letter carrier had paid his bail. When he got home he noticed the body had disappeared. He burned the mailman's uniform and resolved to forget the whole thing.
When the trial day for the mailman arrived, he did not show up. The authorities went to the mailman's apartment and found that he had passed away in his bed. One of the policeman noticed that he looked different, but another said that was just because he was dead. The coroner was surprised to find that the mailman had died of a broken neck... in bed. He surmised that the mailman, filled with remorse for his crime, had dreamed that he was being hanged. The resulting reflex of his neck muscles had snapped his neck.
After a while Ralf stopped worrying about the fact the body had disappeared and that his wife had never come back. And in all the long and happy years that followed, Ralf never cleaned the walk