July the twenty-fourth, the day that the Hogwarts letters went out, was always a big day for the Department of Magical Education. Lots of important people from elsewhere in the Ministry, up to the Minister himself, showed up for the ceremonial moment first thing Tuesday morning when all the owls took off to make their deliveries. Cornelius Fudge actually tried to push the ceremony back to what he called a "decent hour" once, but somebody had pointed out that the children were used to their letters being there when they woke up, and so they woke up early. Fudge had managed some good grace as he back-pedalled from the idea.

But the rest of the day, after Fudge and the other department heads left, was busy too. Cormac Kettleburn, the department Communications Manager, was busy until four in the afternoon, casting the read-receipt spells for all the new incoming students, just to be sure that they'd all read their letters. Nobody had to send the official reply in for a week, but it was a good idea to make sure that the wheels were turning at least this far in the various student homes. Most of the names were unfamiliar to him, but he recognized some of them by their parents; Lucius Malfoy's boy would be starting this year, and yet another of Arthur Weasley's.

Cormac had a few names to check again after going through the list once, but then there were only two boys who hadn't read their letters. Harry Potter and Vincent Crabbe. Well, no trouble. They'd send out duplicate letters to each boy in the morning, and that'd be that.

Harry Potter. Cormac stared at the name on the list. Wasn't that a thing. Little Harry Potter would be starting at Hogwarts. Had it really been that many years since you-knew-who . . . And he hadn't read his letter from Hogwarts. You'd think his parents would have-

Then again, his parents didn't have a say anymore, did they? Come to think of it, Cormac didn't know who'd be looking after the boy now. He was with family of some kind, right? The list of students didn't say; it had a spot for parents. James Potter, deceased, and Lily Evans Potter, deceased. The address was in Surrey, and didn't seem like a very wizardly place. Little Whinging, really?

He redid the address spell, and it was mostly the same. They'd moved the boy to a different bedroom, it seemed, but surely that wouldn't actually keep him from getting the letter. Of course, kids always loved seeing that the letter had their bedroom clearly spelled out on it. Perhaps Harry had refused to look at it because the bedroom was wrong?

Curious, Cormac pulled out a sheet of paper and dashed off a quick note. "To whom it may concern, I am investigating Harry Potters failure to read his first Hogwarts letter today. Do you have information on young Harry's home and guardians? Am particularly interested in their level of familiarity with the wizarding world. Thank you." He added his job title, signed it, and addressed the note to the Department of Information.

"Ember, do you mind?" Ember was his own personal owl, and he trusted her more than any of the owls that were assigned to the department. She hooted once, took the envelope, and flew out the door. In just a few minutes, she was back, with a larger packet marked "Confidential Information" on it.

"Thank you for your inquiry, Mister Kettleburn. Please respect the confidentiality of the people whose information you have asked for and do not disseminate it.

"Since the death of his parents, Harry Potter has been living with his wife's sister, Petunia Evans Dursley, as well as with Petunia's husband Vernon and their son Dudley. The Dursleys are Muggles, but have been informed of the existence of the Wizarding World. According to our records, Albus Dumbledore himself left a note when entrusting Harry to their custody."

Cormac sat back and considered that again. An Aunt, an uncle and a cousin-all muggles. Had Lily been Muggle-born, or was Petunia a throwback? Perhaps their parents had also been one of each. It wasn't really his business.

In fact, he'd been prying too much, but there was one more thing he should find out before the magic faded with the day. Adapting the read-receipt spell, he checked to see if Vernon Dursley had read the letter.

He had. Well, that was alright, then. He'd make sure that Harry read the next one.

#

Cormac was finished his spells and completely stumped before ten on Wednesday morning.

No, Harry had not read this morning's letter either. And he wouldn't, either, as it had been burned. Mister Dursley had read this one again. Cormac wondered if he should have checked if yesterday's was intact before he lost the magic for it at midnight.

"Ember?" He'd sent Ember specially to deliver both of the backup letters that morning. Crabbe had read his before she was even back.

"Hoo?"

"Just where did you leave Potter's letter? In the mailbox?" Like many wizards who worked with postal owls a lot, Cormac had rather a knack for understanding what they wanted to say.

"Hoo!" No, not the mailbox. There had been Muggle mail just sitting on the doormat, so she'd left the letter for Harry there too.

"Well, thank you. I'll have another one for you tomorrow, I suppose." That was in the Ministry regulations about the Hogwarts letters; they couldn't send them more than once a day, or contact the prospective students other than via official letter. If Harry insisted on burning the letters, then he'd have to talk to somebody higher-up. But that wouldn't happen. One more letter would do the trick, it simply had to.

#

The Thursday letter definitely didn't do the trick. Ember seemed eager to report as soon as she got back to the Ministry; a large man with a mustache had leaped out of the door to get the letter as soon as she'd dropped it off. That must be Vernon Dursley, Cormac figured. This time, he hadn't read the letter either, and it was definitely destroyed; torn to pieces.

Something wasn't at all right. Cormac tried another scrying on the letter, working quickly before the pieces could be scattered too far. Had Harry Potter touched it with his own fingers?

No, he hadn't. So he couldn't have torn it up, not himself. Had he told his family to destroy it? Possibly his cousin? Or were the Muggles trying to keep him from the Wizarding world? Perhaps they wanted to keep Harry all to himself.

"Tomorrow, make sure the letter gets close to Harry," he muttered to Ember, before starting to go through all the student replies that were coming in.

#

Ember had such a lot to report Friday morning that Cormac took nearly an hour to get it straight. The first thing she noticed when approaching the house on Privet drive was that the mailbox had been nailed up tight.

"The mailbox? But all the mail was just left on the doormat. Even the muggle letters, right?"

"Hoo."

"Okay, so what next?"

Apparenly, what happened next was that because of his instructions the day before, and the implied message of the closed mailbox, Ember had made multiple copies of the letter and sent them under the door, and also through any open windows she could find.

"You made copies? In flight, I mean? I didn't realize that you could do that."

"Hoooh!" Apparently it was magic that all official Ministry postal owls could use when they'd been given sufficiently strong instructions.

"But you're not an-oh, right." Just because she was personally assigned to him didn't mean that Ember wasn't a Ministry postal owl, he realized. "Okay, let's see if it worked."

Apparently none of Ember's copies had done the trick. It seemed that some of them had passed through Harry's fingers, but he hadn't read any, and they were all ashes before eleven in the morning.

"Let's build on that idea for tomorrow. I'll make official Ministry copies, and together we can find some way to get them inside the house. Maybe with one of those Trojan Horse tricks; sneak the letters inside something that they'll want to bring in."

#

It took them all night to work it out together. The Dursley's neighborhood still had door to door deliveries from the milkman, and Petunia's order was for two dozen eggs. Cormac shrunk the letters, and prepared the spell that would hollow out every eggshell from inside and substitute the letter inside. Ember seemed a bit miffed that she would only be delivering her charge as far as the dairy and then letting a muggle finish the job, but Cormac managed to persuade her that only a very clever and conscientious owl could do it this way.

It all seemed to work perfectly. Ember was watching for a distance as the eggs were handed in, and heard the exclamations that told Cormac that the letters had been discovered. But still, somehow, they didn't get through to Harry. Was the boy even trying?

If it wasn't the weekend, Cormac would have reported his failures then, but he couldn't bring himself to call anybody who might not agree that it was a clear emergency situation. He gave Ember even more letters to deliver on Sunday morning, and she seemed disheartened too, reporting that she'd sent them flying down the chimney as hard as she could. Still no luck on the read-receipt spell.

Cormac called in his department head, Griselda Marchbanks, on Sunday afternoon, and explained the situation. "Okay, don't panic young man, let's take it step by step. Have you confirmed the address?"

"Yes, every evening before I prepare the letter for the next morning."

"Well, let's do it again." Griselda took the list and worked the address spell in just a few minutes. "Hmm, that's strange," she admitted, looking at the enchanted quill in front of her. "Take a look."

Cormac was already staring. Instead of a proper address, the quill had simply written "Indeterminate."

"How is that possible?"

"Let's see." Griselda was already doing a more conventional scrying on a map of the London area. "Harry Potter and the Dursleys are not in Little Whinging at the moment. I believe they are on the motorway, in a muggle automobile."

"But even so, the spell should be able to determine their destination for the address."

"Perhaps." Griselda shook her head. "That spell can only see into intent. If nobody in the family has a particular destination in mind." She shook her head. "I'll have to use a stronger divination on it; precognition, I expect. But that'll be less stressful if I wait until the evening. Perhaps they'll even have settled on their destination by then. Why don't you go off to the Leaky Cauldron or something, rest yourself? You've been working hard all week, I don't expect you've seen anything but this office and that tiny flat of yours, have you?"

"No, I..." Cormac stood up and waited for the dizziness to pass. "I expect you're right. An afternoon in the pub should do me a world of good, and I'll be back in time to..."

"I don't want to see you back here until nine thirty, tomorrow morning," Griselda told him. "I'm serious."

He knew she was. It wasn't worth the effort to fight Griselda on something like that.

#

When he got back to the Ministry in the morning, Griselda was in a fowl mood. "Nothing on the read receipt?"

"Nothing good," she growled. "I spoke with your Ember a bit and wondered if the two of you had been over-doing it on intrusiveness, so I sent just a few more owls with her, and they left ninety-nine letters at the front desk of the Railview hotel this morning. Figured I'd let the muggles at the hotel deliver their mail, that's their job. A few letters got incinerated, the rest of them drenched in a puddle of mud. And the Dursleys are on the move again, destination 'Indeterminate.' What exactly is going on in that family? We've never had this much trouble with the Hogwarts letters in all of my time-"

"And just what is this," a loud voice boomed from the door, "about Harry Potter not getting his letter?"

Cormac looked up and saw a very broad, very tall man with a rough face standing there. "Un- unexpected difficulties currently being worked on..."

"Mister Hagrid," Esmerelda said frostily. "I hardly see how this is the business of the Keeper of the Keys."

"Well, Albus Dumbledore has asked me to look into this personally," Hagrid said. "Is it true that owl delivery hasn't been working out?"

"Well, n-not so far," Cormac stammered, as Ember hooted in exasperation.

"Well, then we've got an-an "alternate solution," Hagrid pronounced. "I'll deliver the next letter personally."

"You can't!" Cormac exclaimed. "It's tradition. The letters can't be delivered by a wi-" He broke off. If this was Reubus Hagrid, Keeper of the Keys at Hogwarts, then he wasn't officially a wizard. You heard stories about how he'd been thrown out when he was a student himself. "That is, all letters must be delivered by-"

"Do shut up, Cormac, before you put your foot further into your mouth," Esmerelda snapped. "Mister Hagrid, that seems to be an excellent solution. Dumbledore has made sure you have a means of transport? You may need to travel quite far to find Harry by midnight. We can't attempt a delivery again today, you understand."

"Yes, I'll be able to follow him if you tell me where to go."

"Excellent. I'll begin work on the divinations." Esmerelda gathered her crystals and her maps and also, by the look on her face, as much concentration as she could muster.

"Can I borrow paper to post word to Dumbledore?" Hagrid asked, and Cormac scrambled to provide him with paper, and a pen, and an envelope, all the while keeping his mouth shut. Hogwarts letters had to be delivered by a magical creature, but-well, he'd heard that Hagrid's mother was a giant. To stretch a point, that might just make him...

Hagrid dashed off a quick letter, produced an owl from under his jacket, and sent it off. There was an awkward silence through the office, and Cormac felt that it was his responsibility to quietly divert Hagrid so that he didn't disturb Esmerelda's concentration. However, he couldn't think of what to say for a moment.

Well, start with what he knew about Hagrid. "So, it's been a long time since I've been back to Hogwarts. Are the-um, the grounds doing well?"

"Oh, well enough, well enough. They wouldn't let me plant Gobbling Grass in the west expanse, something about a danger to student safety. I mean, even a first-year can handle Gobbling Grass if he pays attention, and-oh, sorry, hang on a moment."

Hagrid's owl had burst into the room, carring a larger envelope. Hagrid took this, doted on the little owl for a moment, then tore open the envelope and scanned it. "Listen," he said in a low whisper after a moment. "Miz 'Merelda, is she going to be long getting me set up?"

"Umm, yes, I suppose so. It's not that easy to pre-divine where Harry will be and prepare the address. At least an hour, I'd say."

"Good enough. I'll just nip off and do some shopping then. I'll be back in an hour, sure enough." And before Cormac could figure out whether to thank him or not, Hagrid was out of the room.

He left the envelope and the page behind, and Cormac fought a quick battle against his curiosity and lost. A note from Albus Dumbledore himself?

"Hagrid,

"Let me know at once as soon as you have placed the letter in Harry's hands. At that point, you may proceed as you think best. A birthday treat for the boy would not be amiss, and perhaps tomorrow you can show him to Gringotts and take him shopping for his school supplies. I daresay that Mister and Missus Dursley would not be much help in that respect.

"In a strange way, I suppose it is better this way than if he had simply read the letter without any clear idea what to do about it. As soon as Harry is sorted out, come back directly on the train. You know how hard we struggle to attend to things properly when you're not around.

"-Albus."

Cormac looked up where Hagrid had gone, but of course there was nothing to see. Still, somehow, thinking about the big man and the letter he'd be delivering today made him smile.