According to her bank on the mainland and her records, the check has not been cashed. My sister's handwriting is not very good; I suspect the mail people couldn't decipher the address.
ANSWER:The lost mail place for Hawaii is in San Francisco. Write to San Francisco Mail Recovery Center, 390 Main St., San Francisco, CA 94105-9602.
If your sister's letter reached Hawaii and the envelope was open, postal officials here would have tried to find your sister or you. If the letter arrived here, still sealed, and postal officials could not decipher the address, it would have been delivered to the San Francisco Recovery Center, said Felice Broglio, spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service in Honolulu.
Recovery Center officials are authorized to open letters to look for some kind of identification needed for either delivery or return. There usually is enough information printed on checks to enable post workers to return them to the bank or the owner.
You can file a mail lost report with your neighborhood post office or write to the San Francisco office. Your sister may want to stop payment on that check and write another.
Several readers have asked what happens to regular letters that go astray. Letters, still sealed, that reach the San Francisco Mail Recovery Center, are shredded if there is nothing of monetary value inside and there is not enough information to find the sender or recipient. If such a letter contains $10 or less in cash, the Post Office deposits the money in its account. If the amount of money in a letter is extremely large, the money is held by the Post Office during the search for the donor or intended recipient. If the owners are not found, the money eventually winds up in the San Francisco postmaster's general fund.