The Never List

stellar investigative instincts yet, I suppose,” I replied.
    Tracy smiled a little at that.
    We set up in my dining room, each of us spreading out our letters in chronological order on the table. In each instance, the postmarks were only a few days apart. I brought out two empty notebooks and brand-new Uniball Deluxe pens. We sat down and pored over the pages.
    At first I was disoriented by the sea of black ink swirling in my pristine white world, but I forced myself to concentrate. Only thinking can save us, I thought automatically, my mantra from the past.
    I wrote out columns in my notebook, one for each of us, and we began to categorize the references as best we could. Under Tracy’s name I wrote, in the careful block letters Jennifer had always used in those other notebooks, N EW O RLEANS , C OSTUMES , L AKE . She glanced over at the page and quickly jerked her head away. I figured the word lake must have brought back some painful memories.
    I carefully thumbed through Tracy’s letters, terrified at what I might find but eager as well. Finally, I came across what was clearly a reference to Jennifer and me: “A crash and then drowning, fast, in a sea of numbers.” Under my name I carefully set the words C RASH and S EA OF N UMBERS . Of course. The car accident that killed Jennifer’s mother. The journals. He had figured out so much, so easily, while we were his prisoners.
    We studied the letters for nearly an hour, until my columns were two pages for each of us, when Tracy finally leaned back and sighed. She looked me in the eye, but without menace this time.
    “They make no sense whatsoever. I mean, yes, the letters areabout us. Yes, he likes to torment us with how much he knows. It seems like he’s spending a lot of time in the slammer rehashing old memories for the thrill. But in terms of interpretive value, I’m going to have to give this a zero.”
    “It’s a puzzle,” I said. “It’s some sort of word puzzle. I know we can break it, if we just use logic. If we just get these ideas organized. If we just—”
    “— do the math ?” Tracy interrupted with frustration. “Do you think that can really help us? You think all of life can be sorted and arranged and comprehended? That the whole universe is organized in accordance with some inner logic, and with enough statistical analysis, we can solve some sort of philosophical algorithm? Life doesn’t work that way, Sarah. I thought you’d learned that already. If three years in a dungeon didn’t teach you that, then nothing I can say will. Look what he did to us. Our heads are the puzzle, not these letters. He spent years mixing us up, and now you think you can overcome that, and apply the methods you used as a teenager to decode some hidden message? You think there’s invisible ink in there too?” She got up and stormed into my kitchen. I followed.
    She opened my cabinets one by one until she found what she was looking for. I stared at her in disbelief. She had a box of cereal in her hands, and she started ripping it open.
    “What are you doing?” I thought she’d gone completely mad. I backed away from her, quickly calculating the seconds it would take me to run to the door, flip all the locks, and get to the elevator.
    “I’m looking for the decoder ring, Sarah. I’m looking for a secret spy tool that can solve this puzzle for us.”
    She must have seen the alarm in my eyes, because when she looked at me, she put the box on the counter and took three slow, deliberate breaths. Then she put her hands over her face, her fingertips massaging her scalp. When she dropped them, she looked back at me, dry-eyed, and spoke with a new firmness in her voice.
    “We can’t be the ones to go through these letters. Send them all back to McCordy, with your little chart. Let him put his agents on it. They have techniques and methods and strategies. We just have a lot of fucked-up memories that are only going to keep us twisted up inside the more we dwell on them.”
    I stood beside her, staring past her at a small stain on the kitchen floor, the kind you can never get off, the kind you have to renovate your whole kitchen to make go away.
    Tracy sat up and stared at me, dejected. “You got my hopes up a little bit, I admit. But this is a waste of my precious time. I gotta get out of here … I left the journal in the hands of the deputy editor. I’d better get back to my next issue.” She stood up slowly and started gathering her things, looking