Meg said you could see the lump of the mouse in the snake’s body, and when she went back a day later, it was still there, although smaller. She was fascinated by the whole thing and returned a few times to see Hendrix eat. I didn’t. Once was enough for me.

x x x

About three weeks after that day together in Seattle, I get a call from Ben.

“You don’t write; you don’t call,” he says in a joking voice. “Don’t you care about the kittens?”

“Are they okay?” I ask, worried he’s calling to tell me they got smashed by a truck or something.

“They’re fine. My housemates are looking after them.”

“Why aren’t you?” In the background, I hear lots of noise, people, clinking glasses. “Where are you?”

“Missoula,” he answers. “Bass player for Fifteen Seconds of Juliet broke her arm so we got asked to be Shug’s opening band on a mini-tour. What are you up to?”

What am I up to? I’ve been cleaning other people’s houses and festering at my own, reading and rereading the posts between Meg and All_BS, trying to figure out where to go from here. After that last set of dispatches, their communication dwindles, so it’s pretty clear they took their conversation off the boards. Only where? I couldn’t find anything on Meg’s computer. I found the new email address All_BS instructed her to set up on the boards, but when I emailed it, the message bounced. I asked Harry to look into it. He said the account was activated and disabled within three days, so Meg probably set it up solely for All_BS to instruct her how to contact him directly. “Sounds like they were being careful,” he wrote. “And so should you.”

Careful. Maybe that explains all the deleted sent emails. Meg covering her tracks, quietly so.

I also can’t stop obsessing about this friend who told her to go on meds. Who was it? Some sort of confidante? If so, did Meg also confide about the Final Solution people?

I checked with Alice to see if she’d mentioned meds to Meg, but Alice said no, nor had she seen any evidence of Meg taking prescription drugs. Alice asked Stoner Richard, who called me and said that he didn’t know anything but that I should try some of Meg’s Seattle friends. I’d already thought of Ben, and when Richard had said that, it made me think again that he might be the confidant Meg referred to. But not enough to call him.

“Same old, same old,” I tell Ben.

“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asks.

“Nothing. I don’t know. How come?”

“You live near Spokane, right?”

“Near is a relative term out here. About a hundred miles.”

“Oh. I thought it was closer.”

“Nope. Why?”

“We’re playing in Spokane tomorrow night. Last show before we truck back home. I thought you might want to come.”

I open the file folder I have, containing printouts of Meg’s posts. I’ve been going over and over them, and I’m no closer to finding out who All_BS is. I suspect he’s a guy and that he’s older. But that’s just a gut feeling. Maybe Ben can connect me with the mystery friend. Maybe he is the mystery friend.

I don’t want to see Ben. Or maybe I don’t want to want to see him. But I need to see him, so I say yes.

x x x

Getting to Spokane is expensive and a pain, because the last bus back is pretty early and I don’t want to get stuck there for the night. I ask Tricia if I can use her car.

“Can’t. Gonna earn me some mad money.” She mimes a slot machine and makes a ca-ching sound. “Wanna come?”

Tricia loves to gamble, maybe because it’s the one area in her life where she actually has decent luck. When I was younger, she dragged me with her to the Indian casino in Wenatchee a few times.

“No, thanks,” I tell her.

I catch a bus to Spokane, figuring I can talk to Ben and skip out on his show if I can’t get a lift back tonight. On the ride out, I alternate between nervous and nauseated, but that’s pretty standard these days. Spending all this time trying to find Meg and All_BS has put me in a perpetual state of anxiety. I’ve had trouble eating and sleeping, and I’ve lost so much weight, Tricia says I look supermodely.

It’s a short walk from the downtown station to the taqueria where Ben told me to meet him. It’s so hot and dry and dusty, winter having jumped right into summer without ever passing spring this year, which seems fitting. All extremes, no time for gentle transitions.

Ben is already at the near-empty restaurant, in a booth in the back. He jumps up when I come in, and he looks both tired—probably from being on the road—and happy—maybe also from being on the road.

When I get to the edge of the booth, we both just stand there for a second, unsure of what to do. After a slightly awkward pause, I say: “Should we sit?”

He nods. “Yeah, sitting’s good.”

There’s a six-pack on the table. “It’s BYO,” Ben explains. “Do you want one?”

I take a beer. The waitress sets down a basket of chips and some salsa, and I scoop some up, and find that I can actually eat it. Ben and I drink our beers and small-talk for a bit. He tells me about the tour, about the floors they’ve slept on, about sharing a toothbrush with the drummer because he lost his. I tell him that’s disgusting. That you can buy toothbrushes at any 7-Eleven. But he says it wouldn’t make as good a story, and I’m reminded that Ben McCallister is all about the artifice.

We talk about the cats, and he has pictures on his phone, a sort of ridiculous amount of kitten pictures for a guy to have. Our food comes out, and we talk about other bullshit stuff, and after a while it starts to become clear that I’m sidestepping my way around the thing I should be talking about. The reason I’m here.

I take a deep breath. “So, I found some stuff.”

Ben looks at me. And those eyes. I have to look away. “What stuff?”

“On Meg’s computer. And then from there.” I start off by telling him about the documents Harry decrypted. I’d planned to show him the posts Meg wrote to All_BS—I’ve brought them with me—but I don’t get the chance, because he’s jumping down my throat.

“I thought you said you were going to tell me if you found anything,” he says.

“I’m telling you now.”

“Yeah, but only because I called you. What if I hadn’t?”

“Sorry. There didn’t seem much point.”