Tom looked towards the far wall but could see nothing beyond the huddle of people that stood in the muted light. He considered getting up to have a closer look, then decided against it. It would be better to wait until he was buzzed enough to manage the germ-filled congestion of humanity he would have to deal with. He turned to Chip instead. “So all this started a few months ago, huh?” he asked. To his own surprise, Tom realized that he was beginning to relax. The beer was soaking in, the din of the crowd was beginning to fade into the background, and the conversation with the friendly older man named Chip sitting next to him was beginning to get interesting.
“The first letter arrived a little over a month ago,” Chip replied matter-of-factly. “I was actually sitting here when Jeri opened it.”
“And what was your take?” Tom asked.
Chip rubbed his stubbly beard for a moment while his eyes darted quickly around the bar, as if his mind was assembling the answer to a long, complicated mathematical equation.
“Well, I thought it was all very interesting,” he said thoughtfully, his pale eyes flashing at Tom before settling back on his beer. “But then, everything is interesting to me. I mean, come on… why else would I sit here for hours on end if I wasn’t fascinated by the mundane and trivial?” The hint of a smile curled the edges of Chip’s mouth. “Christ, I could sit here all day watching someone eat corn nuts without getting bored.”
Tom smiled at the older man. While he’d never admit it, he could empathize with Chip’s condition. That simple ability to find interest in the smallest of details sat right at the core of his own personality. He took another swallow of beer, enjoying its cold, bitter taste. “And you’re telling me nobody knows anything about this guy? Who he is, what he does, or…” Tom paused as the image of Jeri’s face, almond-shaped and beautiful in the soft light of the bar flashed through his mind. “Or what his intentions are?”
Chip shook his head. “No. And if anyone does, they’re not talking,” he replied laconically. “Of course, every idiot who walks in here and reads the letters seems to have a theory or a hunch. And I’ve heard just about all of them.”
“Care to repeat a few?”
“Oh god, you name it,” Chip muttered, his hands drawing wide arcs in the air. “There’s the obvious ones – he’s a hippie in the Peace Corps, he’s a hungry young reporter on some shitty-gritty assignment, he’s a good-doing doctor selflessly fighting disease in the worst places on earth. Then there’s the creative ones – he’s a location scout for a reality TV show, he’s a recruiter for an off-shore development firm, he’s a buyer of rare antiquities and artifacts.” He paused to take a drink before continuing. “And then there’s the cryptic ones, like the guy tonight who swore if you traced the locations of the letter’s origins in chronological order on a world map, you’d see that it forms the shape of a pentagram. There was even a cute little red-head sitting on that barstool earlier who was convinced the names of the letters’ origins were some form of anagram. She must’ve sat there for two hours trying to patch the letters together…” Chip’s baritone voice trailed off suddenly, leaving a flagrant question lingering in the musty-warm air of the saloon.
“So… did she come up with something?” Tom asked.
“Only if your definition of ‘something’ includes total gibberish,” Chip replied, shaking his head. “I tell you, if the kids I listened to tonight are any indication of the level of intellect we’re producing these days, this country is in serious trouble.” He smiled a quick thanks to the bartender as the portly man dropped off another pint. “So anyway, that’s the story,” he said quietly, taking a long drink as if to punctuate his sentence.
Tom nodded slowly. He could tell that the older man was done with the topic, but his interest was too aroused to let it drop just yet. He figured he had an even chance at asking one more question before Chip gave him a dismissive wave of the hand.
“You seem to be pretty good at reading people, Chip… so what do you think this guy’s up to?”
Chip’s expression softened for a moment as he glanced around the saloon, his gaze scanning over the faces of the patrons and briefly on the wall of letters before settling on Tom. His blue eyes seemed to hold a turbulent wash of ideas, swirling and colliding as they were drawn inward, like leaves drawn into a deep whirlpool. “What I think this guy is up to is a game that could be very innocent or very serious, and we won’t know which until he chooses to show us. Either way, he’s got the advantage. We know nothing about him, and yet he knows something, perhaps a great deal, about Jeri and this place. He could be sitting next to you right now, or sitting on the other side of the world. None of us have a clue.”