Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  Me alone.

  Otherwise, he would have left it in the middle of the dining room table, the place he’d always tossed his school notes when we were little kids, his car keys as we got older, his wallet and, sometimes, an empty beer can or Twinkie wrapper. It was his spot. Mine was the edge of the kitchen counter, just beneath Granny’s Bavarian cuckoo clock. Nonverbal signals that we were home.

  So, I didn’t tell Mom or Dad.

  Instead, I took the journal to my room—a deceptively cheery place I hadn’t bothered to alter since Gideon’s disappearance. It still held the relics of my life from two years ago. All of my interests frozen at fifteen.

  My poster of David Cassidy was the cheeriest item of all, although I’d finally gotten over my crush on him. I now preferred men who weren’t teen heartthrobs. Who were older, cooler and more serious. Like Harrison Ford.

  I flopped onto my tie-dyed bedspread, took a half-dozen deep breaths and flipped further through the journal. It was all written in Gideon’s distinctive scrawl. Really, no forger could ever replicate those peculiar loops and lines.

  “It’s like a fifth grader’s writing,” I’d told him mockingly once. I, Aurora Gray, the superior younger sister in matters of penmanship.

  He flicked his eyes toward the ceiling. “Maybe I don’t want just anyone to be able to read it,” he retorted. “Maybe content is more important than style. Ever consider that, Miss Straight-A Student?” Then he winked at me and went back to whatever he was doing. Good-natured as always, though secretive. Delighting too much in his cageyness.

  I read through every single page in the book, but my brother’s notes didn’t make much sense to me. Cities, sometimes states, with a handful of names listed, usually an equation or two. More car parts, chemical fluids, a smattering of tools. It was like a crash course in auto mechanics with an extra-credit seminar in geography—all in code.

  Thanks a lot, Gideon. How useful.

  My pulse raced at what this all might mean, though. And, again, my brother’s corner note kept me looking, studying, scrutinizing.

  “Start here.”

  Start here…what? Start reading? Start traveling to these places? Start piecing together a way to find him? If so, why would he have made this so hard for me? Sure, we used to play at codes a lot as kids, but did he really think games would be necessary now?

  I heard a set of heavy footsteps in the far hall, shuffling in a way that signaled a thump of recognition low on my spine. Dad was home. A so-so work day at the post office. I exhaled in relief. There were never good days any more. Gloomy was normal, and tolerable was the new excellent. How long had it been since we’d stopped expecting anything above barely okay?

  Long.

  “Hello, Aurora,” he called to me, his voice tired, slightly hoarse.

  “Hi, Dad,” I called back and then waited, on high alert, until my father had walked past my room without coming in. Mom wasn’t expected home for another half hour from her secretarial job, so I had a little more time. I intended to use it.

  I scanned another page of Gideon’s journal—just as cryptic as the rest, but this time I noticed a reference to “J.” This, too, sent my mind rolling in a prescribed direction.

  The “J,” I knew, stood for “Jeremy,” as in the younger of the two McCafferty brothers. He and Gideon were best friends, and they would both be twenty years old right now if they were, in fact, wandering any part of the planet jointly or separately. They’d disappeared together on that same day.

  My heartbeat picked up the pace as I flipped back to the Start here page and reread it, more carefully this time. Slipped in between the gauges and chemical substances I couldn’t identify was the date: Monday, April 19, 1976. Just a few months before they’d gone missing. And this was followed by the words: J. & I drove to Crescent Cove.

  Where the hell was Crescent Cove?

  I whipped out the dog-eared U.S. atlas from under my bed, brushing the threads of a spider’s web off the cover and coughing as the dust particles swirled around me. Then I studied the state map of Minnesota. Looked in the city index, too, but I couldn’t find any place with that name. There was a La Crescent, a Crescent Beach, a Crescent Bay…

  But, as I was about to toss the book away, I saw it at the edge of the page. It was there in nearly microscopic print, just across the Wisconsin border, near the Saint Croix Chippewa Indian Reservation. About three and a half hours away. If I got in my car and started driving eastward, I’d get there by nine tonight.

  And then…do what?

  I turned back to the journal, inspecting it for hints. Clues. Anything to tell me the correct next step.

  I had no trouble catching vibes off people, and I’d read Gideon’s expressions well enough when he was here. His journal, however, couldn’t gesture frantically or blink in surprise. It couldn’t tell me any of the three thousand things other people said with their fidgety fingers, raised eyebrows and bitten bottom lips. It was just a collection of words on old paper.

  But it was a collection of words that was branded in ink, probably by my brother, as recently as ten days ago. And if it was proof that Gideon was still alive—and if my instincts about him having left our town for a reason had been right all along—then Jeremy might be alive, too. Was that possible?

  I could almost feel the pinball of connectivity rolling between the different centers of knowledge and recognition in my brain, leading inevitably to the one other person who not only had an immediate, strong and highly personal stake in the outcome of this question, but who also had a solid mechanical background. Somebody who might be able to draw secret understandings from words that, to me, resembled a form of hieroglyphic gibberish.

  That would be Jeremy’s older brother, Donovan.

  Oh, crap.

  ***

  I could count on one hand the things I knew were true about Donovan McCafferty:

  He was twenty-three—just over five years older than I was.

  He’d escaped into the army at age eighteen and, except for a few quick but memorable visits, hadn’t returned to Minnesota until this past winter.

  He had an excellent mechanical mind.

  And he made me very nervous.

  Underneath my skin, every nerve fiber was fast twitching. Just thinking about Donovan always did that to me but, this time, it was also about the trip.

  I couldn’t have been more impatient to get on the road to Crescent Cove, and I really didn’t want to make a stop at Donovan’s workplace. But, awkward though it would be, he knew a few things I didn’t. And he just might signal to me (whether he realized it or not) some very useful directions.

  I waited until after dinner, biding my time. Made the three of us broiled chicken, mashed potatoes, broccoli. Boring, yes, but it wasn’t like anyone cared.

  Then I excused myself from the usual watching of TV news and Thursday-night shows—they were repeat episodes anyway—and drove to the only auto-repair shop and gas station in town. The one I avoided like the plague whenever possible, preferring to fill up in places where no one knew me, like Alexandria or St. Cloud. Places where Donovan McCafferty...wasn’t.

  It was 7:05 p.m. by the time I got to the shop, and I parked a fair distance from the entrance. They closed at seven, but the work light in the back was on and two out of the three garage doors were still open. I knew he was in there. Not because I’d caught even one glimpse of Mr. Tall, Dark and Intense yet, but because the only other car in the lot was a crimson Trans Am with the giant Firebird decal in black and gold across the hood. His, of course.

  I pushed open my car door, grabbed my tote bag with Gideon’s journal tucked safely inside and inhaled several lungfuls of the cloying summer air. So early in June and already every breath was wrapped in sticky-sweet bugginess.

  I didn’t make it more than five steps before Donovan came out. A solid, broad-shouldered, six-foot-two mass of frequently impenetrable emotions. Not impenetrable enough this time, though.

  Even at a distance of
half a parking lot, I detected two powerful sensations that crashed, one after the other, into my awareness.

  One, he was hugely curious about why I was here.

  And, two, he very much wished I hadn’t been.

  He walked up to me and cleared his throat. “Car trouble, Aurora?” He glanced at my hand-me-down, smoke-blue, five-year-old Buick Century, which had done nothing but purr contentedly during my drives around town. Donovan was the type to have noticed this, so I could tell he knew it wasn’t the car.

  I shook my head. “I need to show you something,” I told him. “Privately.”

  A small flash of amusement quirked one corner of his mouth upward. I was surprised he allowed me to read this, especially since he knew I could. Surprised he was letting me see that one of his possible explanations for my presence was flirtatious in origin—even as he immediately dismissed the idea.

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that,” I murmured.

  He pressed his lips together, but the amusement still simmered just beneath the surface. “Too bad. ‘We’re both young and inconspicuous,’” he said, parroting the hideously embarrassing words I’d said to him one night when I was a sophomore and had snuck into our brothers’ secret high-school graduation party with my best friend Betsy. The guys had held it forty minutes away in St. Cloud so none of our parents would know.

  I fought a blush. “We’re not that young,” I told him, trying to stand straighter and look older. “And we’re not inconspicuous here.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” He turned and motioned for me to follow him inside, clicking the shop’s cool new garage-door opener so the second of the three garage doors came down behind us, rattling until it touched the concrete.

  He led me into the back office and ushered me in. “You want me to close this door, too? Snap the blinds shut?” He was mocking me, but there was a layer of concern beneath it. He knew something serious was up. In a town of 2,485 people, where you’d run into the majority of the residents a handful of times each week, I’d spoken with Donovan McCafferty in private exactly six times in the past five years.

  Here’s to lucky number seven.

  “Yes to the door,” I said. “No to the blinds.”

  He did as I asked and then leaned against the smudged once-white wall, crossed his arms and studied me. “What’s this all about, Aurora?”

  I nodded and pulled Gideon’s journal out of my bag.

  “I found this,” I told him, explaining the odd circumstances of my discovery, and watched as his dark eyes narrowed. The curiosity of a few minutes before became heavily spiked with suspicion. He flipped through several pages of the journal, silent. He was processing all of this, I knew, but he didn’t quite seem to get it. To be able—or willing—to take the appropriate intuitive leap. To allow himself to follow the fated path of the pinball.

  So, I pointed again to the recently dated page and to Gideon’s words on it, scrutinizing Donovan’s face as he read it a second time. I saw every nuance of his reaction. Couldn’t miss the two major transitions, shifting his expressions in slow motion like tectonic plates made visible. Incredulity hardening into doubt. Hope melding into anger.

  “What makes you think this new date written down is even real?” he growled at me. “Your brother could’ve just scribbled it in the corner two years ago as a note for himself. Or somebody else could have written it. There are a hundred possible explanations. Finding this journal all of a sudden doesn’t prove anything.”

  “I think it does,” I said quickly, but very cautiously.

  Insight into a guy’s emotions was no guarantee I’d correctly predict his behavior. In Donovan’s case, he was a human knot of tension and anger. I had no earthly idea what he’d do next, so I did my best to come across as super calm.

  “I know this is probably difficult to accept,” I said, “but I’m almost positive Gideon wrote in this recently and that he brought it back to Chameleon Lake himself.”

  Still, Donovan didn’t believe me.

  “Your brother is dead, Aurora. And so is Jeremy. You know that. We all know that. Otherwise, they would’ve come back by now.” For a second, his voice broke, giving away the anguish behind the words. He tried to cover it up. “You show this thing to anyone and they’ll think you’re crazy. ‘Oh, look, my brother wrote me notes from the grave,’” he said with full-on sarcasm. “‘And, hey, sometimes he visits me at my house, too.’ Yeah. Have fun convincing anybody of that.”

  “I’m not showing it to anyone else, at least not until I have an idea of what it all means,” I snapped. “But try to imagine I’m right. Just try. You knew your brother best. Is there anything here that jumps out at you a little? Makes sense to you? Especially those technical terms. Can you figure out what they were working on?”

  Donovan wasn’t a person who took orders willingly, at least not from someone he didn’t consider his direct superior, so, of course, he didn’t answer any of my questions.

  “Tell me exactly what you’re planning to do with this.” He held up the journal.

  I shrugged. “I’m just trying to understand it.” This was mostly truthful.

  Donovan stared at me—his face moving closer to mine as he searched for whatever clue he was looking for in my expression. It was precisely this uncomfortable sensation of being so carefully observed that made me keep my distance from the guy. I was used to analyzing the minute movements, body language and facial changes of others. It was not, however, my idea of a good time to be the subject of such scrutiny myself. Thankfully, that rarely happened.

  I knew Donovan didn’t make a habit of reading reactions like I did, but he seemed to enjoy turning the tables on me whenever possible. He was one of the only people I’d ever met who instinctively knew from Day One that I possessed this heightened perceptiveness. A natural gift and, alternately, a curse. I’d been only twelve years old the first time we spoke, but he was guarded with me even then.

  “Just read the page. Please.” I motioned to the journal. “I looked up some of the words in an encyclopedia but, aside from figuring out that they’re chemicals, they don’t mean anything to me.”

  Ethylene glycol

  Propylene glycol

  Sulfuric acid

  Sodium nitrate

  Strontium nitrate

  Atomized spherical aluminum

  Bismuth subcarbonate

  Ammonium nitrate

  Sodium hypochlorite

  Aluminum

  Manganese dioxide

  Sodium silicate

  Zirconium powdery + 2 (+ 0)

  Monday, April 19, 1976

  J. & I drove to Crescent Cove

  Potassium perchlorate

  Sulfur

  Antimony sulfide

  M + 1 (+ 0), D + 10 (+ 0)

  He read each of these hard-to-pronounce compounds aloud, along with the numbers and the mention of Jeremy and Gideon going to Crescent Cove. He shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why they’d need most of it at all. A few of these are used for car engines, like the propylene glycol, so they might have needed that, but the others are common oxidizers.”

  I squinted at him. “In English, please?”

  “Chemicals that blow things up. Potassium perchlorate and sodium nitrate are used as fuels for things like fireworks,” he explained. “They’re not hard to find. If our brothers wanted to get their hands on them, they wouldn’t have had to drive three hours to Wisconsin. They could find them in St. Cloud. So, if they went to Crescent Cove two summers ago, it must have been for a different reason. To meet somebody, maybe.”

  Yes! And that was why I’d come here, risking sheer mortification and that pit-of-my-stomach unease, just to ask Donovan that question. I figured he’d know about stuff like this. And I could work with his conclusion. I could do something now… I only wished we’d had this clue two years ago.

  But in my excitement, I made a stupid tactical mistake. “I can’t wait to talk to that person,” I murmured, r
ealizing my error the instant the words were in midair. I tried to cover it up by smiling and shuffling my feet. Unfortunately, Donovan wasn’t fooled.

  His dark eyebrows rose slowly. “You’re going there? When?”

  I took a step back, regretting having requested the closed office door. We did not, perhaps, need this much privacy after all.

  “Um,” I said, shrugging and reaching for the journal. “It’s not really set…”

  Okay, this was a blatant lie. I had my excursion all planned, right down to my alibi for the weekend. No one would mind or even really notice. Not unless, like my brother, I happened to go missing the summer after my high-school graduation, too.

  This worrisome thought distracted me. It was only for a second, but that was long enough for Donovan to snatch the journal from my grasp and say again, “Aurora, when are you going?”

  Much as I preferred to keep him and everyone else out of it, maybe it would be wise to tell at least one person my real whereabouts. Just in case.

  I sighed. “Tomorrow at noon. After I’m done with my shift at work.”

  “At the Grocery Mart?”

  I nodded, not surprised he remembered that was where I had my part-time job. I’d felt his eyes track me when we were out in public. I knew he’d been aware of me all this time, just as I’d been aware of him. Unfortunately, the foolish crush I had on him only went one way. “I won’t be gone long. Two days, at most.”

  In my mind, I’d already begun formulating the questions I wanted to ask in Crescent Cove. Seemingly innocent things that might draw out the responses I needed. I was sure if I asked just the right question to just the right person, the truth would be spontaneously revealed to me—by their hands, their eyes, their vocal tone, their posture. I didn’t need their words. Soon, I’d know what happened to my brother and his best friend, and then this deadening sense of helplessness would have to stop.

  Donovan was shaking his head again. With his army buzz-cut long gone, his dark hair grazed the back of his black crewneck t-shirt—a faded tribute to The Who.