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I nodded and reached for my helmet.

“I only had to wash one hand,” he said proudly, holding up his glove. “Cool, huh?”

I forced a smile. “Hey, when do you think you can pay me back? I’m running a bit low on cash myself,” I said.

He unzipped his handlebar bag and fished out his wallet. He snapped it open and withdrew a pair of crumpled one-dollar bills. He held them out to me. “Sorry, man, that’s all I’ve got. We’ll find the right ATM tomorrow and I’ll give you the rest. My dad’s been giving me a hard time about the debit card statements—fees or surcharges or something.”

“You can use those cards to actually buy stuff now, you know,” I said, unable to look him in the eye as I took the money from his hand.

“Fascinating,” he said as he grabbed his helmet. “Don’t worry about the money. I’ll take care of it. Promise.”

I didn’t reply as I stepped onto my pedal and pushed away. Win followed, repeating, “Okay?”

I just nodded. I didn’t call him on his lie. I didn’t flaunt that I knew he had enough cash to keep us living like kings for the rest of the trip. Didn’t ask why he had to worry about his dad hassling him all the way out here. And the truth was, I didn’t because I was afraid of what I already knew.

“You never even asked him about the money?” Ward followed me out of the fitness center.

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“Figured he’d tell me eventually.”

Ward sighed. “Chris, he’s your best friend. Why didn’t he tell you?”

I’d been wondering this myself. “I don’t know. Probably the same reason he didn’t tell his parents about cleaning out his account. They’d have stopped him. I probably would have tried,” I said.

“Why didn’t you bring it up with them when you got back?”

“I guess I thought they must have figured it out by then. Or maybe they didn’t think it was important.”

“That’s a pretty major detail to hang on to, Chris,” Ward said.

“Then why didn’t his parents bring it up?” I asked.

Ward shook his head. “Fair enough,” he admitted. We walked several yards before he spoke again. “So, you knew Win better than anyone, even if he didn’t tell you. Why would he clean out his savings—nearly twenty grand—in a cash withdrawal the day before your trip?”

I was still stunned by the amount. I’d known holding it in my hand that it had to be somewhere north of ten thousand, but I’d had no idea Win had that much money at his disposal.

“How come the bank even let him take all that money out?” I asked.

“He was eighteen. The account was in his name,” Ward said, adding, “But Win’s father is asking some questions about that too.”

“Asking some questions” probably meant threatening the bank with legal action—or worse, moving his accounts. I doubted his father had any idea how much Win had saved. Though I was surprised, it made sense. When your parents toss guilt money at you, like Win’s were prone to, it’s probably easy to sock some away.

“But cash?” I said. “Why carry that much around? And with the debit card and all?”

Ward kicked a bottle cap along the sidewalk. “Only a few reasons, really,” he said.

“Such as?”

He crossed his arms, looked into the distance. “Well … Win was either nuts, engaged in some illegal activity …” He paused. “Or he was looking to disappear.”

“He isn’t crazy, or into drugs,” I said.

Ward nodded. “Didn’t think so.”

“But why does it mean he wanted to disappear?” Though I knew—probably knew the moment I found the money—that Ward was right. “Wouldn’t the debit card have left a trail?”

“He quit using it in North Dakota,” he said.

Win really had planned ahead.

“You’re sure you didn’t talk to him about the money, Chris?”

“Not a word.”

“Ever collect on a few of those debts without him knowing?” he challenged.

“No way,” I said. “He still owes me about seventy-five dollars.”

He walked beside me as I headed back to my dorm. Shadows grew longer across the quad in the waning light. Someone was burning leaves somewhere.

“I didn’t take his money,” I said after a long silence.

He nodded. “I know.”

“What else do you know, then?” I asked him.

He scratched his head. “Probably less than you. I have hunches, though. Win had a plan. Wanted to disappear, used the trip as a means to do so. He could have lived on that money for a long while without finding work.”

I was struck by how freely he used the past tense. “You mean he could be still,” I corrected.

We passed a group of guys kicking a Hacky Sack on the lawn of the student center.

“I don’t know, Chris,” he said quietly. “Sometimes I get the feeling I’m looking for a ghost. That we’re not finding Win because, well, because he’s …”

“Dead?” I supplied, because he clearly didn’t want to say the word. So much for the hard-boiled FBI agent. We walked a dozen yards before he spoke again.

“About ten years back this buddy of mine worked the case on that McCandless kid—the one who took off from his family, cashed out his life savings, quit college, and disappeared. Turned up a couple of years later in Alaska in a school bus he’d been trying to use for shelter out in the backcountry. Frozen solid. You hear about that one? Some guy wrote a book about it,” Ward said.

Of course. Win had done a book report about it for Kirkland’s class a couple years ago. He’d gone on for weeks about that guy, trying to figure out why he did it. “Yeah,” I said, “Win tried all tenth grade to get me to read that stupid book.”

“I wish I was more surprised,” Ward said.

I nodded, unsure whether he meant he already knew—like he’d known about honor society.

“Then, I have a really hard time believing it’s all coincidental. Here’s Win—from a wealthy family, with a load of cash, a good education waiting for him—probably engineering this little escape from the start. The stories are awfully similar.”

“But that doesn’t mean they necessarily end the same way,” I said, my voice cracking, surprising even me with the emotion. Ward pretended not to notice.

We reached the parking lot of my dorm, where Ward had a parking ticket slapped on the windshield of his black sedan. “Maybe you’re right, Chris.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“I think he escaped—one way or the other,” he said, pulling
the ticket from the windshield and unlocking the car. “I’ll be in touch.”

I watched him drive away, trying to make real in my mind that Win was more than just gone.

Could Win really be dead? It had of course been among the possibilities, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it before. It was sort of the option on a multiple-choice question that you dismiss first because it can’t possibly be the right answer. But then when you go through all the other choices, they don’t fit either.

But dead? No way. Not Win.

I was still wondering this as I jammed my room key into the mailbox slot and opened the door to reveal a large manila envelope from my mom. I broke the seal with my key on the way to my room. Inside the package I found a note from Mom, my mail from home, and the packet of photos she’d picked up from the developers.

I hadn’t seen pictures of the trip yet. When Win disappeared, he took the record of our trip with him. But I’d taken photos here and there along our route with those disposable cameras I’d packed. I’d always meant to mail them home when they got full, but they didn’t really fill up as fast as I’d figured, since we mainly used Win’s camera. And only one of mine had survived the trip.

The pictures were a random highlight reel of stuff I hadn’t really thought much about. There was one of Win riding past the Iowa state line sign I’d shot as I rode behind him, a detour we’d decided to take just so we could add another state to the list of ones we’d ridden in. We camped at this state park called Effigy
Mounds, where apparently a bunch of Native Americans had buried themselves and their stuff. I remember being pretty impressed, but in the few photos it just looked like a random field covered in grassy little hills.

Then there was the giant Paul Bunyan statue in Minnesota, complete with his blue ox sidekick. The photo showed them both from a wide angle, Win beneath the ox to see if Babe was male or female. We’d debated on this point.

A shot of a collection of old rusted cars randomly placed by the roadside. I’d taken a picture because it was the first thing of interest we’d seen in two days of riding through the mind-numbing landscape of North Dakota. Plus, old beat-up cars in somebody’s field made me a little nostalgic for West Virginia.

The pictures were nothing like the trip. Nothing like what we’d done or felt or seen out there. I wondered if Win’s were any more real.

I tucked them back into the envelope and reached for the stack of postcards. The sight of them made me temporarily forget that my oldest friend might be dead and that I was under investigation. Four postcards, all from girls we’d met on the road.

At home neither of us had ever had a girlfriend. But on the road it actually seemed possible. “Women love us,” Win had remarked one day as we left a Dairy Queen where a cute girl named Shayna had been sneaking us refills on soft-serve ice cream for the last several hours because we made her laugh.

It was true that biking cross-country was a good conversation starter. True that we seemed instantly cool, since we were doing something that everybody wished they could. I saw myself not as
all the girls I’d gone to high school with saw me—that is, one of the two skinny dorks who were always laughing at something stupid. For the first time we were cool, and we knew it.

Four girls across the country, spread out like a bread-crumb trail. Annie in Indiana—funny redhead we’d spent most of an evening with when we crashed her family reunion in a city park. Sarah from Minnesota, who’d been forced to listen to our stories while confined to her lifeguard stand at a city pool. Lifeguards were always Win’s favorites. Jessica in North Dakota. Jessica. The girl we met in a 7-Eleven parking lot who sang us the song she’d performed at the Miss Eastern North Dakota pageant (second runner-up) and pretty much made me fall in love with her in a few short hours. Hers was postmarked from the state university where she was a freshman, like me. All three postcards had
x
’s and
o
’s beneath curvy signatures—the closest I’d ever get to making out with any of them.

The fourth was different.

The handwriting was loopy and wildly uneven. Then I noticed the signature. It wasn’t a signature at all, but a set of letters—all cut from the same source, by the look of them—glued to the card. A corner of the last letter peeled away. I tugged nervously at the loose edge as I read the message.

Who the hell was Tricksey? I checked the postmark. She was somewhere in Montana. The Budweiser reference didn’t help. Win and I had shared that bit of insight with probably a hundred people, most of them girls our age we were trying to impress with our road knowledge.

But Tricksey? And if our time had been so special, why hadn’t she bothered to give me a return address on the card?

I thought about going for my journal but knew it wouldn’t be much help. I’d written maybe half a dozen pages the entire trip, in spite of my promise to my dad.

Tricksey.

Girls tend to travel in packs, and Win and I often ran into them in large groups. I’d sucked with the names, usually only remembering the cutest one or the one who seemed most willing to carry the conversation. Tricksey may have been one of those background girls. They were pretty easy to forget.

I flipped the card over and stared at the front.
WISH YOU WERE HERE
! it declared, the message hovering above a collection of random items, including a cardinal and a fat red flower that looked like a rose on steroids. In smaller letters below, it invited me to visit the Hoosier State.

I wished I’d thought to take pictures of all the people we’d met. I chucked the postcards and photos onto my desk and started to walk away, but something made me reach out and grab the mysterious one from Tricksey. I studied it again, trying to divine meaning from the random doodles of flowers and stars framing the words. Who was she?