Just before two o’clock they stepped out of the airport and found that winter in Iowa was a different animal than it was in Vermont. The cold was sharper, the wind laid bare. They looked around and saw nothing in the distance. No trees, no mountains. It was as if she and Keller had entered a room devoid of furniture, a landscape without context. Strangers, Alex thought. We’re strangers here.
Shivering off the wind, she followed Keller to the rental car. It was a small Mazda, better than the rugged little car of her father’s she drove back at Jasper.
“Go on,” he said, reading her mind.
“Thanks.”
He tossed her the keys and Alex got behind the wheel, gunning it out of the lot. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him grab frantically for the handle above the window.
They found a Ramada five miles from Hamlet. “There it is,” Keller said, pointing. “Our war room.” Alex pulled off the road, tires screeching. When she stopped, he fell out of the backseat and kissed the ground.
Inside, they lumped their packs on one side of the room, removed the books they thought they would need. Of course there were the two Fallows titles, The Coil and The Golden Silence, but there was also an Iowa tourist guide. She had even brought along a book she’d found in the Fisk Library that morning: Richard Aldiss’s Ghost. Alex turned it over and saw the author photo—the man in prison, his face haggard and his eyes cold and wan. Inside the front cover of one of her volumes she saw a jagged strip of paper, and Alex pulled it out and read.
The two mysteries are one. Best of luck to you on your journey, young Alex. What you are involved in is of the greatest importance, and you are almost to the end. Almost there now.
Stanley Fisk
She smiled and slipped the note in her coat pocket before Keller could see.
After they had unpacked, Keller lay down. Looking up at where she stood tentatively beside the bed, he said, “It’s okay. I don’t bite.” She lay beside him. Normal, she thought. It’s like this is all normal.
For a while neither of them spoke. Finally she said, “So. We made it to Iowa.”
“We did,” he echoed. “Now what?”
Alex stared up at the ceiling. She’d always wanted to get away from Jasper, to assume a new identity somewhere. A new life. Her acceptance letter from Harvard had been a kind of promise: that she would soon be away from there, untethered and fending for herself. But now she couldn’t shake the certainty that everything was wrong. That they were walking into one of Aldiss’s traps.
“Alex?”
She turned. The last sunlight gashed through the curtains and fell on his face, and she wanted to hold him. To grab on to him and let his strength pull her from the depths of her fear. But there would be time for that later. Now she was weary from the flight and they had work to do.
“Now,” she said, “we have two days. Two days until our return flight and the class ends. Two days to find Fallows.”