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He sighed. “Yeah.”

I bolted inside without bothering to answer. Halfway to my room I pulled my cell out of my bag and dialed home. The phone rang in my ear as I cradled it against my shoulder while I unlocked my door. Mom answered on the third ring, just as I chucked my bag on my bed and reached for my kitchen uniform.

“Hey,” I said.

“Chris!” She sounded surprised. She had a right to be. I usually waited on my parents to call me. “Any news about Win?”

“Um, no,” I hedged, wondering if I should tell her or Dad about the postcard.

“I’m really starting to worry, Chris,” she said, though I knew she’d crossed over from worry to panic weeks ago. “Even Win wouldn’t go this long with calling,” she said. “His poor mother—”

“Mom, has anything changed at work lately?” I asked. I didn’t know if I could fake concern for Win’s mother now that I knew Win was still out there somewhere.

“Work? No, it’s fine—”

“What about Dad?”

“Christopher, do you need money?” I could hear the tinge of alarm in her voice now.

“No, Mom,” I said, “I’ve got plenty.” They didn’t have it to spare anyway. “What about Dad?”

“Dad’s good. Work’s good. Are you sure you’re all right?”

I breathed for the first time since Ward’s implication.

“I’m fine, Mom, really. Forget it,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. So nothing’s new at work?” I asked again.

“Not really. Well, George sold Mencken’s, but I don’t see how that’s big news,” she said.

“What?” Mencken’s was my father’s construction company.

“I know, weird, isn’t it? The business has been doing so well, and George was talking about apprenticing someone to your father to have him start doing more bids—”

“Who bought it, Mom?” I asked, tugging on the grimy running shoes I wore in the kitchen.

“I’m not sure … somebody corporate. Your dad can tell you.”

That wasn’t too alarming. Dad had told me once that bigger companies approached Mr. Mencken all the time, but he was never ready to sell. Dad got offers from those same outfits, but he’d been working for George so long he’d earned his pick of jobs.

“Must have been a sweet deal,” was all I managed to say.

She paused. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “But I’ve got to get to work.”

“Classes okay?”

“Fine, Mom. I’ve really got to go,” I said.

“Is that agent still hanging around?”

“No,” I said quickly. I was afraid if I talked with her any longer, she’d manage to drag the truth out of me. “Mom, I’m going to be late—”

“Wait a second. You got some more mail today—actually, it’s
been piling up for a while. Do you want me to send it, or do you think you want us to come get you for Labor Day weekend?”

The holiday weekend was barely enough time to get back and forth to West Virginia. I knew Mom would drive down to pick me up if I asked, but it hardly seemed worth it. I still hadn’t let her know what I wanted to do. “What kind of mail?” I asked, rummaging on my dresser for my name tag.

“A cycling magazine, a few postcards, another one from that weird girl. The one with the awful handwriting you had that special time with,” she said. “Do you want to come home for break, Chris? We really don’t mind the drive.”

“You’re reading them?” I shouted, ignoring her plea.

“Chris, they’re postcards. Nobody expects that the message will be private when they send them. This Tricksey’s the only one who’s written twice. You must have made quite an impression on her.” I could hear the smile in my mother’s voice.

“Send it, Mom. As soon as you can,” I said.

“Well”—she sounded surprised—“apparently she made quite an impression on you, too. I’ll send it all Priority tomorrow.”

“Thanks. I’ve really got to go,” I said.

“All right, honey. Love—”

I punched the end-call button on the phone before she finished. But instead of rushing out the door and down campus to work, I sank back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. The second postcard meant that Win was definitely still alive, and maybe even staying put. Nothing was really clear, but everything pointed to one irrefutable fact.

I had to find Win.

“Let’s eat,” I said as we pedaled through a flat stretch of Montana, the seventh week of our ride.

“Anything on the map?” Win shouted from behind me.

I shook my head. “Not much. That was the last biggish town for a while we just passed. Looks like there’s a little place called Virden about two miles up.”

“We don’t have any food,” he said.

“Yeah, we do.”

“No way. We haven’t bought groceries in, like, two days.”

I sighed. “Actually,
you
haven’t bought groceries in two weeks. But the stuff we bought Wednesday is holding out.”

“What, are you growing food in your panniers now?”

“I can’t even grow a beard. We’ve still got everything because
we crashed that T-ball team picnic yesterday, and you decided we had to get pizza last night,” I said.

“Ah … the all-you-can-eat buffet,” he said dreamily.

I ignored him. “So, short of a wedding reception we can invite ourselves to, I think we’re on our own today. Let’s eat anyplace that will give us water.”

“How much do you think we ate last night? I think I had at least two whole pizzas,” he said.

“Win? Water?”

“Whatever.”

A few minutes later we reached Virden. The dot on the map was actually a lot more impressive than the town itself. A few run-down buildings clustered together around a church and a general store that looked to have been closed since the Nixon administration.

“I hear this place gets crazy on the weekends,” I said.

“Clubs,” Win deadpanned as we rode through the nothing town. We stayed on Route 2 and passed the last house three minutes after entering, without seeing so much as a park bench.

“That wasn’t a town!” Win cried. “How did that ruin get a whole dot on the map? We’ve gotta call AAA.”

“Is that a rest stop?” I asked, pointing thirty yards up to the right of our lane.

“Think so. And a welcome oasis it is after bustling Virden,” he said.

We steered our bikes off the road and into the parking lot. There were no cars—it seemed as deserted as the town we’d just left. At the center of the compound, atop a knoll of Day-Glo green grass, stood a small picnic shelter. It was flanked on either side by
a pair of toilets. In front stood a stone water fountain, complete with a spigot for filling larger containers. Across the small parking lot was a tiny brick building—about the size of a garden shed. A sign above the only window identified it as the U.S. post office for Virden, Montana.

“This’ll do,” I said, swinging my leg over the back of my bike and stepping off before I’d even braked to a full stop.

Within minutes we had our lunch spread out on the splintered wooden table. I was cutting off slabs of cheddar and arranging them on my onion bagel with a layer of salsa. Win licked his fingers as a mixture of peanut butter, jam, granola, and honey oozed from a stuffed flour tortilla.

“Chips?” he asked me between mouthfuls.

“Over there,” I said, gesturing with my pocketknife toward a bag half buried under the bagels.

Win grabbed it with his free hand, put one corner in his teeth, and pulled.

“Dude, wait. …”

But it was too late. The bag exploded, showering the tabletop and concrete pad, surrounding us in generic Ruffles.

Win smiled. “I hate reaching into the bag anyway.”

I shot him a look.

“What?” he said. “Gets my arm all greasy.” He dropped the sack and scooped up a handful of chips from the middle of the table. “Mmm … extra crunchy.”

I shrugged, topped off my bagel, and snatched a chip. Win rose and ambled around the small rest area, clutching the burrito in his balled fist. At the edge of the maintained area a line of brush
formed a natural fencerow, separating us from a farmer’s field.

He swallowed, wandered back to the table for more chips, but stooped just inside the shelter to eat a few that had fallen there. “Feels big out here, you know?”

I looked around. All I saw were the two bathrooms, this shelter, and the tiny post office. It seemed dwarfed by its open surroundings. “Yeah, huge.”

He smiled. “Not this. Not Virden.
Here
.”

I looked a little beyond, where the sky seemed so deep and empty it almost hurt to look at it. The crops stretched out in all directions, hemmed in to the west by the giant, craggy peaks of the Rockies.

Win was right—it was huge.

“A guy could do some thinking in space this big,” Win said, almost whispering.

“And manage to keep in touch,” I said, nodding toward the post office.

I grabbed a handful of chips and stood, crossed the empty parking spaces to the brick building. Win followed.

“What’s a post office doing out here in the middle of nowhere at a rest stop, anyway?” I asked.

Win shrugged. We studied the hand-painted sign on the drawn shade. “Closed, too. Only open Monday through Thursday.”

“Are post offices allowed to be closed?” I asked between bites.

“Virden makes its own rules,” Win said.

We ate in silence for a few seconds, studying the building.

“You know what this is?” Win said. “It’s like some place that Unabomber guy would have come to send his mail.”

I stared at him.

“C’mon. You know what I’m talking about. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, he could drive up late at night and toss something in that slot,” he said, pointing toward a letter drop in the front door. “Then he just drives away. Nobody would ever know who sent it. And he could be anywhere within a hundred miles of here. You’d never find him.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have quit therapy,” I said, returning to the table for my water bottle.

“I’m just saying a guy can sort of get lost out here,” he said.

I grabbed both bottles and crossed to the tap in front of the shelter. “Good thing we’ve got a map, then,” I said as I uncapped the bottles and turned on the water.

Win popped the tail of his burrito into his mouth and shrugged. “Never mind.”

“You done?” I asked, switching the bottles under the tap. “We’ve got an easy afternoon, but there’s not much for another fifty miles or so. If the dots on the map turn out to be anything like Virden here, we could be in trouble.”

He didn’t respond.

“So fill up your water now, just in case.”

Still he said nothing.

“Win?”

My friend crossed his arms and looked around one last time. I turned off the water and returned to the table, where I began cleaning up our mess and shoving food back into our panniers.

“Win?” I repeated. “Give me a hand?”

He nodded. “Yeah, okay. Virden’s getting kind of old already anyway.”

“‘Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink’ … what the heck does that mean, anyway? Chris? Chris, are you listening?”

“Sorry?” I said, turning to Vanti.

“Chris, this is important. We need to do well on this assignment. And we need to figure out what the heck this Coleridge guy is trying to say,” she said.

“Water, right. He’s saying something about a lot of water,” I said.

She stared at me.

“But they can’t drink it,” I sputtered.

She rolled her eyes. “You suck.”

“What?” I said.

She sighed and held out her hand. “Give it.”

“Give what?”

“The postcard you’ve been sneaking looks at for the past half hour.”

I shrugged. “It’s sort of personal.”

“Personal? So are my GPA, my academic eligibility, and my future. If that postcard’s so important, then the least you can do is tell me why I’m sacrificing those things so you can sit here and be distracted.”

I sighed. “Sorry. I’ll focus.”

She stared at me some more. Ward should be taking lessons from this girl. Granted, I liked staring at her.

“Okay,” I reached into my book for the postcard, and slid it across the table. “Here.”

She raised it to eye level, leaving me to stare at the picture on the reverse—a photo of a potato stamped with an outline of the state of Idaho, superimposed above the words
THIS SPUD’S FOR YOU
.

Vanti read in a voice befitting the library. “‘Hey, Chris. Hope things are okay there. Wondering why I haven’t heard from you yet. The sky seems bigger every morning, and I actually saw the northern lights for the first time last week. Your friend, Tricksey H.’” I looked around as she read. I don’t know if it was my imagination or if Ward’s constant presence had me paranoid, but I was pretty sure that the guy sitting with his back to us in the study carrel twenty feet away was the same one I’d seen on a bench outside the sciences building yesterday when I left physics.

It was the jacket that tipped me off. This green leather number with something on the shoulder—what were they, dice? Not that a guy with questionable fashion sense hanging around campus and then studying at the library was cause for alarm. But this guy had to be at least thirty-five. By itself, that wasn’t that unusual. There were plenty of nontrads and a few eighth-year seniors on campus. But this guy never carried a bag or a book. Which either explained his lack of timely matriculation or my paranoia. Fact was, if he wanted to, I’m pretty sure Coggans could get the reference librarian to try and take me out.

Vanti lowered the postcard. “Are you kidding me? That’s the most impersonal thing I’ve ever read. I’ve read juicier stuff in the student handbook.”

“There’s some good stuff in there—,” I began.

“Chris!”

“Sorry.”

“So you’re obsessing over the most boring postcard ever from some
Lord of the Rings
freak instead of studying with me? You sure know how to make a girl feel special,” she said.

“You know Tolkien?” I asked, surprised at this new reason to worship her.

She rolled her eyes. “This is an engineering school, for God’s sake. Of course I know Tolkien. It’s like an admission requirement. But stop trying to change the subject.”

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” I said.