John didn’t wait for me this morning to ring his door bell. He strode right up to my car.

“Did you hear the helicopter? It flew over these fields this morning for almost two hours. They started at Pete’s house and covered he same territory we did. I thought you had something to do with it.”

“Didn’t hear a thing. I ate breakfast at 6 and went back to bed.”

“We won’t find out till next week why they were here. I don’t know if you know but our paper comes out only twice a week. I saw the pilot and two guys swooping back and forth above the telephone lines, right where we walked. They had to be looking for someone.”

“I wish they’d done that yesterday. I’m still pulling thorns out of my socks and clearing my throat of dust. So now what do we do? I was going to suggest we follow up on yesterday and walk the fields again.”

“If there was someone down there they would have seen him.”

And that’s how, heat and clockwork be damned, we ended up back at the water tower. I called Ken to check again on Pete’s last journal entry and it hadn’t changed. “He wrote he’s gonna test himself by walking to the water tower.” This time I parked not at the tower but below it and spied a distinct cairn trail. We followed the cairns back towards the mountains alternately talking ourselves in and out of believing they were Pete’s.

And, to repeat myself, that’s why this hunt is so aggravating. There are no declarative clues. Not a one. There is no right direction to go. Only theories, only sentences with question marks. Not to be too graphic but four months later we’re limited to nothing but guess work. No black spiral of birds, and nothing to smell. We have sight and that is it. I can’t even, in good faith, raise money to send Goose and his friend, John, down here. What would I tell them? Don’t look where I’ve looked even though he could have been five feet to my left or right. Go to the water tower because of a journal entry but disregard Sam’s advice about the scorching heat that week. Look for cairns in the desert because Pete has them in his yard, but ignore those in the nearby trailer park? Go north to the Test Site because a psychic told me to?

I didn’t expect to find Ken’s father when I decided to come here, but I’m very disappointed. As I said to Sam, “Other than happiness, I’ve never looked so hard for anything.”