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“Try. Tell me all about your pen pal in”—she squinted at the postmark—“in … what’s this word—Virgin? Virgin, Montana. They can’t name a town that, can they?”

“Shh!”

She stared at me. “You shushed me!” she said.

I grabbed the card, took a peek at Jacketman. He hadn’t stirred. “This is the library,” I said.

“Chris, you’re acting weird. Spill.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Male or female?”

The question caught me off guard. Did that mean she was jealous?

“It’s complicated,” I said. I’d told her a little bit about Win and the investigation when she asked again about the trip one day after class. If I gave her a few minutes more, she’d figure it out on her own. She’d picked up the Hobbit reference in no time. I’d taken nearly a day to grab that one, though to be fair, this time Win had added the
H
for insurance.

I started to speak, thought I saw a stir of green leather, and grabbed a scrap of paper. I wrote quickly.
Male. Win
.

Her mouth dropped open. “But I thought …”

I shook my head and pointed at the paper.

She rolled her eyes and grabbed a pen.
How do you know? Just do. Shouldn’t tell you anything else
.

She huffed, scribbled furiously.
Did you tell the FBI guy yet
?

I read as she wrote, shook my head no.

Anybody
? she added to the note.

I pointed at her.

“Jeez,” she said, lapsing out of note-writing mode as she sank back in her chair. “What are you going to do?”

“Figure out what the heck Coleridge is talking about,” I said.

“I mean about—,” she began.

“I know what you meant. Maybe go out there.”

“Chris, this is serious. You should tell somebody,” she whispered.

“I just did.”

She smirked. “Besides me.”

I grabbed the paper and wrote.
Tell them what? Two postcards from the same place? Win could still be anywhere
.

She stared at me for a long moment, then wrote,
Do you want to find him
?

I sighed, whispered, “I don’t know. On the one hand, I think if I do, all this will stop and my life will be normal again. On the other … I don’t know, Vanti.”

The little alarm on her watch began to beep. She snapped to attention. “Crap. I have practice.”

“And I’ve got several hours of indecisive postcard staring ahead of me,” I said.

“We’ll talk about this later, though?”

I shrugged.

We walked out together, the late-afternoon sun still warm and bright in the August air.

“Hey, Collins,” I heard that familiar voice say.

“Please, God, no,” I said under my breath.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” Ward called out, gesturing toward Vanti.

“I’m Avantika,” she said. “And I’m also late for soccer.” She turned to me. “Call me later, okay?”

I nodded, and both Ward and I watched her go.

“You must be doing something right,” Ward said. I didn’t
bother asking him how he’d found me. I’d quit being surprised at his ability to track me down on a campus of 25,000 students.

“What is it today?” I said. “Threats? Allegations?”

“Just wanted to check in,” he said.

“You fought rush-hour traffic to say hi?”

“Coggans is getting impatient, Chris. He won’t be able to stall Dartmouth much longer. Win’s going to lose his spot.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sort of running into a wall here,” he said. “I’ve got a caseload that I’ve been neglecting to work on this thing.”

Still I said nothing.

“Anything else you can give me to move this thing along? ’Cause if you can’t, I might have to tell Win’s dad I’m writing it off.”

I didn’t believe that for a second.

“I can’t help you,” I said.

He nodded. “Then, I guess I’m about done here. I might have a few papers for you to sign next week. Will you be around?”

I played along with his bluff. “Labor Day. Long weekend. Even longer since they’re upgrading the networks. No classes Thursday or Friday either. What do you want signed, anyway? I thought this was all sort of unofficial.”

“Heading home, then?” he asked, ignoring my question.

We had reached my dorm, and I had the handle of the door in my hand. “Probably,” I said.

He stared at me. Again, not nearly as intoxicating as when Avantika did so. “What are you going to do, Chris?” he asked. Something in his tone told me he didn’t just wonder about my plans for break.

“Just send whatever you want signed to my address here,” I said. “And have fun with Win’s dad.”

He put his hands in his pockets and watched me disappear inside the building. I knew that wasn’t the last I’d see of Abe Ward.

When I got back to my room, Jati was eating tuna fish straight from the can and watching pro wrestling on TV. He didn’t acknowledge me as my cell phone began buzzing in my pocket.

My father’s number flashed beneath the words “incoming call” on the phone’s tiny screen.

“Dad?” I said, answering and slipping back into the hallway.

“Chris,” my father said. “And your mom says you never pick up.”

“She calls when I’m in class,” I said.

“We need to talk,” my dad said. “I don’t want to worry your mother, so if we could just keep this between us—”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

He sighed. “Winston Coggans came to see me today. Out at the job.”

“Coggans came out there?” I tried to picture Win’s dad in one of his expensive suits amid the dirt and machinery of one of my dad’s sites. It didn’t fit.

“Says he’s worried about Win. Wanted to know if we knew anything. Wanted to know if you’d heard from him,” he said.

I wondered what it would mean to tell my father about the postcards. What advice he might have for me. But I couldn’t make him responsible. “Did he stick around long?”

“Maybe half an hour.” My father paused. “Long enough to make sure we all knew he’s the one who bought George out.”

My stomach jumped. “He what?”

“Yeah,” my dad said, “Titan’s the new owner. With George retiring, Coggans made it clear he’d need someone to run things.”

“He offered you a raise?” I said, confused. This didn’t sound like Win’s dad putting the hurt on my family’s cash flow.

“Not exactly. I think he called it an exchange.”

“Exchange?”

“Yeah. In his mind it’s a good deal. He seems to think you can produce Win. That unless you do, well, something might happen.”

“Something?” I asked.

“Yeah. That’s the thing with Coggans. He never came out and said anything. It was like talking to the wind. Things kept changing direction so fast that I’m still not sure if I got fired or promoted.”

“Dad. I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t seem like you’ve got anything to be sorry about, Chris.”

But I sort of did.

“Did you tell him anything, Dad?”

He laughed. “Told him I didn’t know anything to tell. Told him
my son
makes his own decisions.”

I hesitated. If I told him, he’d have to lie if Win’s dad asked again. He’d have to lie to Mom.

“You know something, Chris?” It wasn’t a question.

“Maybe,” I said.

“The postcards?”

“How did you—”

“Your mother. She thought it was cute or something that you’d
been getting those cards. Showed the second one to me. I thought it sounded strange. Sounded like …”

“Like Win?” I offered.

“A bit,” he said.

“Did you tell Win’s dad about them?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Not really. But he spent quite a bit of time with George, looking over financial statements, asking about the payroll.”

My heart sank deeper.

“Dad, I—”

“Listen, Chris. Win’s father will do what he’s going to do. I need you to do what you think you should—nothing more.”

“But your job—”

“Will be fine,” he said, “one way or another.”

“I can’t let him do this.”

“Let me worry about Coggans. I trust you to do what’s right here.”

I couldn’t reply. My dad loved me. He loved his job. But he also loved Win.

“What are you going to do, Chris?” he asked. I realized that was the third time in an hour I’d been asked that question.

“I don’t think I’m coming home for the weekend, Dad.”

“And I have a feeling I don’t want to know where you’re going,” he said. “What should I tell your mom?”

“Tell anybody who asks that I’m going backpacking on a section of the Appalachian Trail with some guys from my floor.”

“Got it,” he said.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked him.

“Absolutely. Do the right thing,” he repeated.

“That’d be easy if I knew what it was,” I said.

“You’ll know.”

“At least I know where to start looking,” I said.

Fifty miles turned out to be a lot harder than we’d anticipated. The wind kicked up that afternoon, swirling dust around our faces. My mouth felt like cotton, and I burned through my water without thinking. The wind crept in around my sunglasses, drying out my eyes. The pain was so bad that I was riding now with my chin tucked to my chest, keeping the white line inches from my front wheel. I’d look up periodically to make sure nothing had appeared in the shoulder in front of us, and then duck back down before my eyes began to tear up again, making it impossible to see.

“This wind is evil,” Win shouted, his voice almost carried away before it reached me. The space we’d allowed to stretch out between us over the last few weeks had snapped back, and
now Win drafted off me, only a foot or two separating my rear wheel from his front.

“It’s just wind,” I said. We’d faced headwinds before—the fact that wind sweeps predominantly from west to east across the country was something we learned the hard way. But I’d never felt so beaten by it. “It can’t be evil.”

It began to blow even harder. We plowed on in silence for another half an hour, crouching low on the handlebars to minimize surface area. My panniers caught enough air to make it seem at times like I was pedaling a stationary bike instead of one that had carried me more than two thousand miles. Even in my lowest gear I fought to keep the bike moving forward, my legs burning, throat crying out for a drink. And we couldn’t stop—we had to make it to a town to get water.

And then Win started screaming.

I was so alarmed that I almost tipped over. I managed to unclip a pedal, put a foot down, and half turn in time to see Win jumping off his bike and throwing it to the shoulder of the road.

“Flat?” I asked, though I was pretty sure this wouldn’t have elicited such a reaction.

He just kept screaming. Then he tore off his helmet and threw it lamely into the wind. It wasn’t heavy to begin with—just some hard foam covered with plastic and a few straps—so it only went forward a few feet before the wind overtook the force of Win’s toss and shoved it right back. It nailed him squarely in the chest.

“See! It
is
evil!” he said, as if this event were proof, before he resumed screaming and thrashing at the air.

I said nothing, just dismounted my bike, wheeled it back a few yards, and laid it next to Win’s. I took off my own helmet and set it on the ground, then perched myself on top of it. This could take a while.

Win continued to yell. Truth was, I might have freaked out on the wind if he hadn’t first, but now that I saw him, so pathetic and futile, I felt numbed. So I just watched and listened and let him get it out of both our systems.

And then Win did something surprising. He started to cry—something I’ve seen him do only twice in all the years that we’ve been friends. Both were after his father called him into his study, closed the door, and left me outside to wonder what was going on. I never heard voices raised or the snap of a belt or anything like that. But both times Win emerged barely holding back a flood of tears. The crying waited until he was safely in the backyard, hurling rocks at a tree.

Now he was hurling gravel by the handful at a speed limit sign.

“It’s trying to push me back!”

It seemed unwise to point out that he had been drafting behind me for the sixteen miles we’d managed since our lunch stop at the phantom post office.

“I’m not going back!” he screamed into the air, sounding like a four-year-old threatening not to go to school.

“The wind’ll die down, Win,” I said, but he wasn’t listening to me.

“I’m going to make it,” he shouted again, but with less vehemence.

Then I realized that he wasn’t saying “we.”
I’m not going back
.

But before I could ask him what he meant, another voice pulled my attention away.

“Nice day, huh?” I turned to find another cyclist braking to a stop as he crossed the road. Since he was riding east, he actually had to brake pretty hard to overcome the force of the wind.

“This wind is murder, isn’t it?” he said as he climbed off his bike and took a swig from his water bottle.

We’d met other cyclists on our journey, even ridden with this young couple for a day or two right after we crossed into Minnesota. This guy’s appearance was unusual only in the way he’d sort of sneaked up on us. He must have just crested the hill, and since he had the benefit of the tailwind pushing him along at probably thirty-five miles an hour, he was here before I had a chance to notice him. All his gear was brand-new and looked expensive. Instead of saddlebags, he was hauling a two-wheeled trailer attached to the rear fork of his bike. It had a ridiculous caution flag fluttering about seven feet up a reedy pole. In the wind it bent down to brush his helmet.

“I tell you,” the stranger shouted, “this wind’s enough to make a man crazy.” Win ignored him, kept a safe distance, where his tears could not be seen.

“Damn flag keeps knocking into my eyes,” he said.

I couldn’t think of anything to say to the old fart complaining about a tailwind that had him cruising along in his highest gear.

“You guys got any patches?” he asked. “I ran out back at Glacier.”

I pushed up off the pavement. “Yeah, I got a couple you can have,” I said, reaching for the zipper on my pannier pocket. I’d
just bought a kit yesterday. I fished out two patches and handed them over. “Here.”