IN THE LAST hour of the train ride, I had briefed Mara on every step of the journey so far, from finding the first clue in Birds of Tahoe to Sue Kopek’s abandoned mansion. By the time I finished, she had already pulled out her own small Moleskine journal and made the following chart:
WHAT WE KNOW
- APRIL 27 TRUCKEE, CA TO STAY WITH TIM, HIS SON
- APRIL 28 ELKO, NV TO SEE SUE KOPEK(?)
- APRIL 29 GREEN RIVER, UT TO VISIT BIG RAY’S SALOON / TO MOVE SUE?
- APRIL 30 DENVER, CO TO STAY AT THE MELBOURNE?
- MAY 1 ??????
- MAY 2 ??????
- MAY 3 ??????
- MAY 4 OHIO???
She’d noticed that the stops so far were about equal distances apart, which at the very least lent some consistency to the confusion. If the timeline and train schedule held, that would place him at the end of the train route, Chicago, the day before his death. But there were no trains from Chicago directly to the part of Ohio where he had died, so the theory wasn’t without flaw.
We’d talked tirelessly through the earlier journals, testing them against her impressive knowledge of the sixties and seventies. We agreed that chaos in the cold, wet veins of ch— was likely about Chicago; she said Lou and Sal’s tribute sounded like a statue she was familiar with.
“It’s not like we know nothing,” she said as we cut across a parking lot. Outside the station, it was already dark, the faint snowfall only visible in the small radius of light surrounding the streetlamps and windows. “It seems to me that the most crucial bit would be to figure why he went to these places, if there is a reason.”
“I mean, we do know why. Kind of.”
“Do we?”
“Because he’d done it before. He’s probably taking the exact trip he used to take all the time.”
She didn’t look at me, her eyes fixed forward on the street signs ahead of us. “Right, so we need to figure out why he decided to repeat the trip, in his old age.”
“And that starts,” I said, “with why he used to make it in the first place.”
“And perhaps the most important question of all,” she added. “Why he stopped.”
Mara walked briskly, her feet never leaving the ground for long, her head down as if it was pulling her forward. Her beanie was still flirting dangerously with the possibility of falling off the back of her skull, but never did.
“Something else is bothering me,” I said without thinking. “You know Sue, the woman in the mansion—”
“Yes, I know.”
“When she was talking to me, she talked directly to me. Like, ‘you,’ ‘Oh, Arthur, it’s just you.’ But then when she was talking about my grandfather’s napkin, or poem or whatever, she called it ‘his napkin’.”
“So?”
“So, if she thought we were the same person, shouldn’t it have been ‘your napkin’?”
Mara considered it for a moment. “She also thought it was a napkin, not a poem, and couldn’t get past five sentences with you. So I don’t think you’re going to get very far trying to derive some sort of meaning from this woman’s syntax.”
I nodded. “Well, then hopefully, you’re not wrong about this place.”
“I’m not.”
“Then hopefully his clue is easy to find.”
Mara drew a sharp, noticeably frustrated breath.
“What?”
“It’s just, that word you use, clue.”
“What about it?”
She didn’t answer right away, and we continued walking, fewer and fewer cars passing us as we got farther from downtown Denver.
“Let me ask you a question.” She interrupted the silence. “Do you think there’s something at the end of this? Some prize or musical number or . . . something?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, eyes fixed on my feet.
“And what do you think it is?” she asked.
Light snow crunched beneath our feet. “Answers,” I said with a small nod, but she didn’t respond, so I added, “I don’t know. Something.”
She inhaled slowly. “Have you entertained the possibility that maybe—I don’t know—there’s not?”
“Not really, no.”
“I think that perhaps you should.” She spoke slower than usual. I could tell she was being careful about offending me. “It’s spectacular, either way, finding these journals. But I think it might help to consider that maybe this isn’t . . . intentional. If he had Alzheimer’s, he might have . . .”
“Have what?” I tried to listen, to imagine that there wasn’t a purpose to the writing my grandfather was leaving behind, but it didn’t make sense. “He might have accidentally stumbled back to a bunch of places he’d been before?” I could feel the temperature of my voice rising without trying.
“Yes, accidentally.”
“And left clues behind, at every single place, that told me where to go next? That would be an insane coincidence.”
“Or”—Mara matched my volume—“a behavior pattern that’s consistent with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and dementia.”
“Look.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re trying to play—”
“Game?”
“Yeah, your angle or—”
“There it is again! Stop doing that!”
“Doing what?”
“Assuming you know everything about me! Assuming everything everyone does is conniving or self-interested or something. Not everyone’s got a motive. I just—” She stopped herself again. “I just want you to be careful.”
“Of what?”
“I just don’t want you to get lost in believing there’s going to be something there for you, or to be heartbroken if there’s not. I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret.”
I winced. “Then what are you doing here?”
Mara walked for a block without saying anything. “Your grandpa’s book was very important to my sister, and to me, and to all of the people around us. She built a whole life around his ideas, so if there’s more writing to be found—regardless of whether he knew what he was writing or not—that’s the answer, to me.” She didn’t look at me. “It’s just important, that’s all.” With that, she decided the conversation was over.
We walked without talking for several minutes. On the corner of two streets that looked exactly like the streets we’d just passed, she pulled out another joint and lit it. I stopped as we passed a bookstore, the large glass window in front covered with images of bright red birds.
“Why are you stopping?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said, studying the birds. “Tanagers.”
I watched her for a few moments. She smoked quickly, nervously, barely exhaling in time for the paper to hit her lips again. She kept shooting glances left and right without slowing her motion, like she wasn’t checking where to go so much as checking to make sure she noticed everything.
“Why are you walking so fast?”
She stopped and nodded across the street. “Because I know where to go.”
The buildings on the other side of Larimer Street were all attached, a series of redbrick storefronts, battered and decaying from snowfall. The windows of the shops were either boarded up or displaying mannequins, abandoned and naked in empty stores. We’d been walking for so long that we were outside the city center and into abandoned Denver, where there were no signs of life other than parking lots; old, industrial factories; and an old, black awning, on which white stenciled letters now read:
THE M LBOURNE YO TH HOSTE
“Quick, here first,” Mara whispered, and before I could protest, she was flicking her joint onto the street and pulling me through a door behind us.
I turned into an old mini-mart that had clearly missed its last few shipments of—everything. A man sat behind the counter, flipping through a magazine. He barely looked up as we entered and the bell on the door chimed.
Mara pulled a crumpled ten-dollar bill from her pocket. “Alright, go buy something,” she said, and nodded toward the register. I reached my hand for the cash, but she didn’t give it to me.
“Buy what?”
“Anything. Buy yourself some cigarettes. It’ll help.” Before I could ask what it would help with, she had disappeared behind a display of Hostess snack cakes.
I approached the counter and the man didn’t move, his face still buried in what looked like a Maxim magazine.
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah,” he said without looking up.
“Um, can I get . . .” I scanned behind the register. “A pack of those orange . . . cigarettes. American . . . Splits? Spirits? And a lighter, I guess.”
“Ten dollars,” he said without pushing any buttons on the register. I handed him cash and he tossed them to me. I picked a plain black lighter and I walked out.
Kaitlin would’ve killed me if she’d seen me smoking. Both of her grandparents had been lifelong smokers, and both had paid the price for it. Once, she saw Mason with a cigarette and almost tackled it out of his mouth. I guess she’d always cared about him like that, too.
Mara was waiting outside, a smug smile on her face. She opened her jacket, and under it was a bottle of Fireball Whisky.
“You stole that?”
“No! I paid for it. I left the money on the shelf where the whiskey used to live.”
I laughed.
“Look, I’m already breaking one law in this country. I’m not about to add theft as well. Besides, we’ll need this.”
“For what?”
She noticed my cigarettes and smiled. “Oh, nice. American Spirits. Now you can smoke cigarettes and look like a douche, all at the same time.”
“I mean, I just picked the, the one with the, the most colorful box they had, but now, now that I see they’re”—on the box—“‘made with one hundred percent organic tobacco,’ I’m feeling good about my selection.”
“I always thought that name—American Spirit—was delightfully ironic.” I didn’t feed her fire but she continued on her own. “Taking something notoriously deadly, dressing it up with adjectives so it doesn’t look so bad, giving it a perky, patriotic name—that is kind of the American spirit, isn’t it?”
I tried to think of a joke to respond with as we reached the hostel, but I couldn’t think of any British insults that weren’t three hundred years too late. “I’ve gotta say,” I tried, “your anti-Americanism is—”
“Kinda getting you riled up a bit, is it?” She winked and pushed open the door.
The inside of the Melbourne International Youth Hostel was about as impressive as the outside. The entryway was an all-white room containing nothing but an IKEA floor lamp and a desk in the center. Behind it sat an old man with bright white hair clinging to the sides of his head, and a collection of keys, all hanging from screws in the wall.
“We’d like a private room for the evening, please,” Mara said. My ears perked when I heard the words private room, but it was followed quickly by a smack in the back of the head, Kaitlin reminding me that she was still there and was still watching and that I was still expected to be faithful.
“Only got one bed in there, that okay?” He looked past her to me, as if I was the one that would have a problem with it.
“We’ll make it work,” Mara chimed.
We watched as the old man pulled out a giant, leather-bound book labeled “MELBOURNE 2001–2014 LOG.” I felt bad for him as I tried to work out the math of how few customers he would have to have in order to make thirteen years fit into a single book. His log system was almost hilariously simple, like a guest book at a funeral. Date of visit, name, birth date, phone number, room number, and a box for checkout.
“Name and birth date,” he grunted.
“Arthur Pullman,” I told him, and he stared down at the log, wrinkles across his face creased. “Arthur Pullman,” I repeated, louder, and he began writing.
“Should we inform him of the existence of computers?” Mara whispered.
“Thirty-one bucks. Cash only.”
“My dear Arty here will be paying,” Mara informed both of us. “Say, my husband and I”—she jerked her head back—“we’re fairly certain his grandfather stayed here a few years ago and we’re a bit curious. Is there any way we could see that logbook of yours, just to check and see?”
“Customer information is private,” he mumbled.
“Even for his dear old grandfa—”
“It’s private.” He took the logbook off the table and handed us our key. “Have a good stay. Don’t bother me.”
The common area of the hostel reminded me of the basement of my parents’ church. There were random pieces of furniture throughout the room; couches of assorted colors, likely gathered as second- or thirdhand donations, looking far too comfy to be safe from disease. Each wall had a different type of wallpaper that was chipped or fraying, as if twenty years ago, four different interior designers had finished their respective walls and said, “Fuck it.”
Mara marched across it with purpose, her head down. I stopped, realizing, “Hey! Room six is over here,” but she kept going. “Mara, our room is—”
She spun around and her facial expression stopped my sentence. She wasn’t smiling or being playful. She was almost timid and totally focused. “Right, then, Arthur, it’s time I tell you something. I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.”
Without clarifying, she continued across the room and I followed, a few steps behind. “Okay,” I asked, heart starting to race my footsteps. “What do you have to tell me?”
She stopped abruptly in front of the farthest door in the farthest corner, ROOM 16: DORMITORY. “I know this place because I’ve been here before. Several times, actually.”
My heart pounded inside my head. I smelled smoke, and from behind the door, I heard muffled voices.
“Wait, what? Why?”
Without answering, she tapped lightly on the door, a very specific rhythm:
knock, knock-knock, knock knock, knock
The voices behind the door went silent. Smoke slid under the tiny crack in the bottom of the door. Mara closed her eyes, either concentrating or trying to avoid mine. The pulsing in my head got louder.
“Mara, what’s going on?” I asked, but she didn’t answer, just swayed back and forth.
In an instant, I noticed how silent and deserted the hostel was, how remote its location was, and how little I knew about it, or the girl that had led me here. My eyes searched for an escape, increasingly aware that I might need one, but the windows were all boarded. My only hope was a dead sprint back across the open room and out into the wide-open, run-down inner city of Denver.
The door opened hesitantly. What felt like a silent eternity came to an end with the clattering of the lock chain behind the door tightening.
There was a face in the darkness behind the door, but I couldn’t make out any of its features.
“What do you serve?” its voice asked.
I looked to Mara frantically and she didn’t react. I wondered if she wanted me to answer—what do I serve? God? The devil? This fucking British girl?
But she didn’t expect me to answer. Her eyes opened calmly and met mine.
“I serve a Great Purpose,” she whispered, and from behind the door, I heard the latch slide off.