Chapter 2

I could see Jack through the kitchen window as I walked up the driveway the following afternoon. He was making a sandwich, and I could also see he was eying something with interest, which was just out of my view as I set my key to the door.
'Hi Jack,' I called from the front door.
'Hey Martha, how was your day?' came the cheerful reply from the kitchen. 'There's something here for you,' he continued, not waiting for an answer to his question.
On top of the kitchen counter, a large archive box was waiting for me, sealed along the top and sides with tape, and with a printed address label stuck on the top.
'It's for you,' he said, nodding towards the box. 'It came this morning'
'Thanks,' I said lifting the box. 'And college was fine.'
I looked at the pre-printed address label and noted the college postmark. I knew what it must be, so I took it upstairs to my room.
Inside, there was a note from the Dean of Dad's faculty, sending his condolences and enclosing the contents of Dad's desk and personal items from his office. He said there were too many books to send, but if I wanted them I was welcome to come and collect them.
I pulled out a framed photograph of me, taken a few years ago at a birthday meal, which Dad kept on his desk. There were various pens, calculators and other items of stationery that I would rather had just been thrown out. I would only feel obliged to keep them, worrying I might regret it if I threw them away, as though my entire memory of Dad relied upon my possession of them. I put them back in the box.
The only other item of interest was his compass. I hadn't seen it for years, but I remembered him using it when he took me camping as a child on stargazing expeditions. I held it in my palm and closed my fingers round it. It felt familiar and reassuring.
There were various papers of different sorts, which I doubted were of any importance now, but I scanned through them all the same. Amongst them, I came across an envelope with my name written on the front in Dad's handwriting. I opened it, expecting to find a letter or some other document. Instead, I tipped out a small scrap of paper which had been cut into a spiral.
I held it up and let the end twirl down. It reminded me of something made in art classes long ago, when I would have trotted out of school and proudly shown Dad what I had produced, and he would dutifully pin it to the cork board in his study.
As it spun gently, jerked by the barely perceptible movement of my hand, I noticed there was something written on the paper. It looked like a series of numbers. I coiled the spiral back in on itself, in order to read what Dad had to say. 44° 06™ N, 71° 24™ W was written in his solid, even script.
This was typical of my dad. He was a thinker and always encouraged me to think for myself too. It was never acceptable just to give an answer to any question asked of him. Even as a very young child, he would pull out an ancient looking children's encyclopaedia, and we would look up the subject of my query together.
He loved codes, anagrams and any other method of communication where the recipient of the message had to work at deciphering it. He had told me many times that if something was worth knowing, it was worth the bother of working out first. That is how I knew this was important, or at least something he had wanted me to know.
These numbers weren't at all ambiguous though; they were quite clearly a set of coordinates. Dad had taught me to use a map and compass the very first time he took me camping. I leant across from my bed to my laptop on the desk and entered the coordinates into the search engine. The results pointed to a small patch of land, a hill it seemed, in the White Mountains National Forest.
Dad loved the forest; it reminded him of the landscape of his native country. He and Mum had taken me walking there many times when I was younger. I wondered what it was that he wanted, or had wanted, me to visit there.
I noted that he must have cut the paper spiral after writing the coordinates. I puzzled over why he had done this and what it might mean. But somehow, engaging with Dad's riddle felt like a means of communicating with him, and I felt comforted by that.
I looked at the envelope again and wondered why it had been left in the drawer of his office desk. Or was it there for safekeeping? Had he meant to give it to me before but then changed his mind? Had he forgotten about it? There was no answer to those questions, so I resolved to visit the place on the map that Saturday and try to make sense of what I could. It would also force me to get back into my car, a part of my rehabilitation that I had so far successfully put off.
For the rest of the week, my thoughts were occupied with the place the coordinates would take me to. I didn't dwell too much on the spiral the paper had been cut into. I assumed there was a reason for it, and all would be revealed once I got to the mystery destination.
I had almost forgotten entirely about the man at the bus stop by Friday, as I made my way home. It was raining and my head was bowed beneath my umbrella. I stopped at the convenience store and shook it out as I stepped inside, grateful to no longer be at the mercy of the elements, at least for a few minutes.
As I approached the counter with my basket of groceries, an uneasy feeling prickled along my spine. The bell above the door tingled as it opened, and the man from the bus stop stepped inside.
My face must have given me away because the assistant asked if I was alright. I mumbled something about having forgotten my wallet and made a dash for the door. I didn't turn round to see if the man had registered me or moved to follow me outside. I didn't turn round at all until I reached my front door.
Inside, I double locked it and ran upstairs to my room. It was on the front of the house with a view of the street. I pulled the curtains shut then peeped out from behind the edge of one curtain. The street below was empty. There was no sign of the man. I lay on my bed with my hand to my chest. My heart was pumping. I felt sick with fear and panic, and my head was spinning.
I closed my eyes and took a few slow, deep breaths. I lay there for several minutes, repeating the exercise until I felt my pulse return to normal. As my head cleared a little, I stood up slowly and opened the curtains again. The street below was still empty. A woman riding a bicycle went past. Everything was quiet and ordinary.
'You're an idiot getting yourself worked up like that,' I chastised myself.
I had actually started to feel a little stupid. So what if it was the same man? There was nothing to say he had followed me into the store, and if he was a college student, which it was reasonable to assume, since he had been at the campus bus stop, there was nothing unusual in him using that particular convenience store; it was half a kilometre from the campus and plenty of students lived nearby.
Even so, I regretted not having been more aware while walking back from the bus stop. I tried to remember all the faces on the bus, but it had been busy and I had taken the only available seat I could see, close to the front. I hadn't been looking at the people around me, but I decided I would have noticed him if he had been on the bus. That, coupled with the fact I didn't remember anyone getting off at the stop with me, reassured me that he hadn't actually followed me.
In spite of my reasoning, I still felt dissatisfied with my rational conclusion, and the uneasiness hadn't disappeared altogether. Instead, it seemed to increase silently throughout the evening, niggling in the back of my mind and creeping further into my consciousness.
I decided to get an early night. I felt strangely expectant about tomorrow, and I had a long drive ahead of me, not to mention it being my first in nearly eight weeks. I found Patch curled up under my bed. I dragged him out and settled down with him to watch TV in bed.


Author's Note

Please excuse the coordinates if they are wrong; I got them from trusty old Google Maps. So if they are wrong, please suspend your disbelief! Or, if you can give me correct coordinates that would be even better.

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