“Then you better come up with an alternative. I’m giving you fair warning. That’s the best I can do.”

Chapter 30 - Wednesday evening, April 20, 1988

30

Wednesday evening, April 20, 1988

When I got home from work, I tossed the mail on the kitchen counter, turned on the lights, and sat down at my desk. I needed to organize my thoughts. With the investigation in tatters, it seemed imperative to catalog what I knew, consigning the details to index cards. There had to be a pattern, an overview into which all the little pieces would fit. Like an optical illusion, I was waiting for the shift, one image flipping over to its counterpart.

In both junior high and high school, I had trouble staying focused in classes where I was doing poorly, math being my weakest subject. Faced with a “thought” problem, my mind inevitably wandered to other matters. The math whizzes grasped the setup on sight. Not only could they divine the crux of the matter, but they’d start licking their pencil points and scribble the solution while I was still squirming in my seat. I wasn’t stupid by any stretch. I was easily distracted and my attention would shift to details that turned out to be irrelevant.

A train leaves Chicago for Boston traveling sixty miles an hour, while a second train leaves Boston, speeding toward Chicago at eighty miles an hour. A bird flies back and forth between the two . . .

And that’s as far as I’d get. I’d start wondering why the bird was behaving so erratically, positing a virus affecting the bird’s internal gyroscope. I’d daydream about who was on the train and why they were going from Chicago to Boston. Then I’d fret about what was happening in Boston that residents had crowded into the fastest train out. I’d never been to Boston and now I was forced to scratch it off my list.