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drowning feelings of failure and futility at the bottom of a glass. Also, there’s something about traveling that always makes me want to drink, even if I am not on vacation.
    Drunk, I decided to revisit my latest failure. I brought up a map webpage and put in those meaningless coordinates, N44 47 W072 32. The page brought me the stunning view of green nowhere that I had discovered earlier in the day. I toasted that nothingness and took another sip of my drink. I zoomed in again, seeing nothing, not even a road. I laughed at my foolishness in thinking I had solved it. I laughed that I thought a dream would give me a break in a case I knew nothing about. This wasn’t a lost watch, this was a half a million dollar missing girl. I spun the wheel on my USB mouse, zooming myself back out to the default view. I zoomed it a bit farther than that, but didn’t care.
    I looked back to see the apes and humans trying to work together as the credits rolled, giving hope that the future could be changed. It never was my favorite in the series, but at least it wasn’t Escape from the Planet of the Apes. I took another drink and looked back at the laptop, ready to go to another page, maybe news, maybe porn. I barely held onto my drink as I stared wide-eyed at the page.
    I put the drink down and started dragging my mouse around the map, looking at all the towns in that area of Vermont. Lowell, Belvidere, Troy, Eden. Each of them were in almost a circle around the dead space my coordinates pointed to. I quickly flipped to my notebook where I had written down the text of the conversation in my dream. In almost a frenzy, I scanned the words, confirming they matched what I saw. My heart was racing as I read each line. “Lowell, between her and reruns of Mr. Belvedere”, “It’s not even the Garden of Eden”, “She’s no Helen of Troy.” They were all there on the map! The conversation pointed to all the local towns in that area of Vermont. I had a circle of towns around a location, and as the final touch, I had coordinates that pointed directly in the center of them.
    I laughed loudly and cheered, no doubt disturbing anyone in rooms adjacent to me. I jumped up and down, simply elated that I had something. I fucking had something! Something that none of the others had. The bizarreness, the unreality of it, the unlikeliness had not hit me in my drunken stupor. All I knew was I had a chance. I never doubted that a simple dream would lead me to her, I never questioned how impossible it was that a dream would bring me to that place.
    In retrospect, maybe I should have.
    I booked a flight that left in the morning for Vermont.

Three
     
    I’m not sure what exactly I expected to find when I went to that spot in the woods in Vermont. Maybe Katie Vanders in a shallow grave among weeping pines. Maybe a cabin in the woods where she was held captive. Those things would have been easier, better. Instead I found secrets and danger in the little town of Sommersfield.
    I flew into the Newport Airport and rented a car. I drove west, traveling through Troy and then south to Lowell.  Along the way, my phone rang. I answered and heard a familiar voice: “O, for a draught of vintage that hath been / Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, / Tasting for Flora and the country green, / Dance and Provencal son, and suburnt mirth!”
    I sighed. “Hello Morty.” This was just one of many of Morty’s quirks. Since taking me under his wing, he now jokingly refers to himself as “a patron of the arts.” If you weren’t aware, I share a name with a famous poet of old, John Keats. And since he is my partner, Morty considers himself my “patron.” He also finds it amusing to quote me bits of Keats poems whenever he calls me. I’m sure he has a volume of Keats he keeps by the phone just for this purpose. Over the past few years, I’ve heard more Keats than even my high school English teachers subjected me to. I wonder what he’ll do when he runs out