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Chapter

Thirty-One

“Does the writing look like it matches to you?”

Twenty-four agonizing hours later Dad and I locked ourselves into the conference room. I had Dr. Pollack’s copy of The Traveler’s Guide and Derrek Sidney’s clipped open side by side.

Select letters from Sidney’s fan mail were spread all over the table.

“Sometimes,” Dad said. “But some of the sevens have hash marks through them. Some don’t.”

“But the angles are similar,” I said, tilting my head sideways.

Sidney’s Traveler’s Guide had writing on almost every page. Some words were crossed out. There were probably hundreds of superscript numbers throughout the book. I started writing them down sequentially to see if I could discern any pattern. But they seemed completely random. Some of the chapter headings were circled; others were crossed out.

We’d isolated all the letters we felt might have been written by one person or one group. The handwritten superscripts only appeared in some of them. But the majority contained those odd footnote references we hadn’t yet been able to match to anything. I ran it through an AI program, but still came up with nothing.

“Mercy,” Dad said. “We don’t even know for sure whether Sidney’s the one who marked up this book.”

I held up one letter. It was one of the earliest of those sent by our mystery writer.

“Here,” I said. “Read this line.”

I handed the letter to my dad. He read aloud. “Your journey is my gift and the meaning. The first and last words are still unwritten.”

“I’ve been going over and over that,” I said. “It seems meaningless.”

“Mercy,” Dad said. “It sounds like some of the prose in this god-awful book. Sherman uses nonsensical phrases all over the place. You said that’s exactly what Pollack and Derby were arguing about.”

“They were,” I said. “Pollack insisted there was a deliberation in everything Sherman wrote. Derby thinks it’s word salad. That it was just stuff Sherman thought sounded profound but wasn’t.”

“Well, a lot of these letters sound the same way. Do you think …?”

“What?”

“This is going to sound so far-fetched. But is there a chance Sherman wrote some of these letters?”

“He died in the mid-‘90s,” I said. “These letters were written almost twenty years later.”

“Hmm,” he said.

“What? You think Sherman somehow faked his own death, then started writing to a serial killer for fun?”

“Atrō te benedico. Opus nōn perfectum,” Dad said. “Both of those lines appear in this book. They’re in that stupid poem the Traveler heard from that acid-trip pixie.”

“Did you read it?” I asked. “The whole book?”

“I forced myself to,” Dad said.

“Don’t tell me you’re a believer now, too?”

“No. I don’t know. It was a slog to get through. You said Kent Derby thinks you need to read it through a second time to fully understand it. A couple of nights ago, I picked it up again. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I sort of get it now.”

I was stunned. E. Thomas Gale was the ultimate skeptic. It had served him well as a defense lawyer for all those years.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the book is so bad, it seems impossible that Sherman wasn’t in on the joke. No one could take themselves that seriously for that long. I think ... I think maybe this is exactly what he wanted the book to accomplish. He wanted to screw with his readers’ heads. If that’s true, then I think he probably was a bit of a genius. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t also a pretentious jerk. But some of the prose is actually quite good. And some of it reads like drivel.”