Scary.
I leaned as far away from it as I could get in the passenger’s seat. “Do you think Ronny makes them himself?” I asked. “Or, maybe, it’s something they assemble together on the reservation. Maybe it’s not illegal there.”
“Maybe, maybe not, but I can tell you it’s illegal everywhere else. I spent four years in the U.S. Army, and I did some demolition work for a while. The M in M-80 stands for ‘Military.’ These are low explosives. Not as destructive as dynamite with high-explosive material like nitroglycerine and picric acid, but it’s no plaything either. One spark of static electricity in the wrong place and boom!”
I flinched.
“Would you open up the journal, Aurora? Go to that ‘start here’ page.”
I flipped to it for him and saw again all the chemicals listed there. He read each one carefully.
“Potassium perchlorate, huh?” he said. “I wonder if our brothers were helping to make these fireworks…”
He grabbed the journal from me and looked more closely at the scrawled chemical list on that page with the dual dates—April 19, 1976 and May 29, 1978. Then he flipped to the next page, dated Monday, May 10, 1976 and, since the car was shadowed by the shade of an unkempt sugar maple tree, he stepped out into the driveway to look at both pages again in the bright sunlight.
“Come out here,” he commanded suddenly. “Take a look at this.”
At first I didn’t understand what he was pointing to—it looked like he was stabbing his finger at the words potassium perchlorate over and over again—but then I saw it. “The ink…” I whispered. “It’s different at the bottom.”
Beads of sweat formed on his brow and flew off in little droplets as he nodded. “The difference in shade is slight. I never noticed it until we were out here, with the sun shining directly on the page like that. Maybe it means something.”
Of course it did.
“If that’s the case then—” I began. I could feel the puzzle pieces connecting in my mind and, for a second, I could see a flash of the final image it might make, even though the puzzle remained unfinished.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Then Gideon added the last few lines of each entry at a later date,” I finished. “At least for these first ones. Is every entry like that?”
“Think so.” He flipped through several more pages of the journal and pointed to the spot on each one where the ink subtly changed color. It was always just the last three or four lines and, in almost every case, the newer part contained some kind of addition or subtraction equation using the variables D and M.
What were you and Jeremy doing, Gideon? What were you trying to tell me?
I took hold of the journal myself and studied the pages preceding the ‘start here’ part. There was only one kind of ink there. “I think this is actually a parallel record. Sort of like a secretive journal, though hidden in plain sight.”
“What makes you say that?”
“What we’re piecing together can’t be pure coincidence.” I began ticking items off on my fingers. “One, the journal has chemicals listed in it that are used to make fireworks and explosives. Two, the man they came to see here in Crescent Cove died in an explosion two years ago—the same weekend our brothers disappeared. Three, the cousin of the guy that died sells illegal fireworks out of his store.” I held up my palms. “There’s no way these things aren’t connected somehow.”
And, though I didn’t mention this to Donovan, I suspected that what linked these three facts was probably a really obvious thread, or it would be obvious once we had more information. More contact with the people Gideon and Jeremy had interacted with two years ago. More nonverbal communication.
I felt an odd mix of feelings that kept alternating. A burgeoning sense of hopefulness that, after all this time, closure might be possible. Answers might be found. And our brothers—wherever the hell they were—might be alive with a logical explanation for having disappeared.
But there was also the other side—the dread and the fear that whatever explanation we discovered might cast our brothers in a less than a moral and righteous light.
Donovan was looking at me strangely.
“What?” I asked him. “Don’t you think I’m right?”
“I’m not sure what to think,” he admitted. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but aren’t you overreaching here? Moving a little too fast. We can’t just take leaps of logic like that.” And Donovan, giving voice to my fears, added, “We know Jeremy and Gideon had knowledge of pyrotechnics. Without much effort those two could’ve easily built a box of bootleg fireworks. Or homemade bombs.”
He gulped a few breaths before continuing. “A man our brothers knew died, and it happened the same weekend as our brothers’ disappearance two years ago. Those are the facts. The only thing I’d for sure agree with you about is that this has to be bigger than it seems. Too big for us. I think we’re in over our heads.”
Who were our brothers? Were they good guys…or not?
I didn’t like the questions suddenly bubbling on the edges of my awareness. I also didn’t like having to justify my ability to reach conclusions about our discoveries.
“Do the lines at the bottom of each page add up to anything that you can tell?” I asked him, trying to direct the conversation away from this ridiculous notion that we couldn’t handle what we were learning. “Is there a pattern?”
He reread the lines listed after the ink change on the Start here page. “Potassium perchlorate, sulfur and antimony sulfide are the last three listed, and they’re the same three ingredients used in making a cherry bomb. But, how powerful a firecracker like that is depends entirely on the amounts used. Then there’s that equation-like thing at the bottom: M + 1 (+ 0), D + 10 (+ 0). Don’t know what that means.”
“Could it be the proportion of the substance?” I wondered aloud. “Maybe the ‘M’ stands for milligram?”
“Possible. And maybe the ‘D’ is for the diameter of the shell casing.” He looked at the list for moment longer. “Not sure in what unit, though. Millimeters? Inches or centimeters would be too long.”
“Maybe ‘D’ is for density,” I suggested. “Or it could be something totally different, like a tally of who owes them money, the ‘M.’ Or who they’ve made deliveries to, the ‘D.’ Something we’re not even thinking about yet. That’s why we need to get more information than we have now.”
I’d worry later about how and where to get it. And what, exactly, I’d tell Donovan about how I found it. Because I sensed there would be a lot that I’d have to do on my own if I wanted to get any real answers.
I glanced inside the car where all the fireworks were still resting on the dashboard. “Is there any way we could get rid of these?” I asked. “Aside from being illegal, they’re…kind of dangerous.”
He agreed. “I just don’t know where to put them yet. To take them with us is asking for trouble, but to leave them anywhere would be like planting a bunch of landmines on some civilian’s lawn.”
I considered this. “What if we went somewhere—somewhere isolated—and just exploded them? Then we’d know how powerful they are, but we wouldn’t have to keep them.”
“Maybe.” He squinted at me, a smile twisting the corners of his lips upward. “This is a weird conversation. Never would’ve imagined talking about stuff like this with you.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he turned away, slipped back into the car and began carefully putting every one of the fireworks back into the paper bag, wrapping many of them up in dry plastic first, torn from an old garbage bag he’d had stashed in his backseat. Then he put the whole thing in the trunk, containing it in a small cardboard box.
“Should be pretty safe stored like that,” he said. “And it’s better than having them right inside the car with us.”
I noticed that when he started up the Trans Am again, though, he drove slower than he had in the past twenty-four hours.
***
We headed in t
he direction of the nearest area of land set aside for the St. Croix Chippewa tribe. When we got to the entrance, we expected to be able to just drive right through.
Turned out, we expected wrong.
An older, weathered man, who’d been sitting on a bench at the entrance, took one look at Donovan’s car and stopped us. “Who are you here to see?”
Donovan cleared his throat. “Ben Rainwater’s family. To pay our respects. We just found out last night that he’d died.”
An odd expression crossed the man’s face. “You people knew Ben?”
Donovan nodded slowly, then said, “Well, he was a friend of a friend. We hadn’t seen him in a couple of years.” He smiled that charming, laidback grin he liked to fake, trying to win over the old man. The old man was having none of it.
“It was a tragedy that Ben died. Went to live with the Great Spirit too soon. Only twenty-five years old.” The elder tapped the hood of Donovan’s car in a gesture of dismissal. “I’ll pass your respects along to his cousin when he returns home. Thank you for visiting.”
I thought I might be able to help. “We just spoke with Ronny at the store. Isn’t there any other family in the area?”
If Donovan’s tactics had fallen flat, my attempt at charm was even worse. The old man looked at us more guardedly than before and replied, “Family is gone. Moved away to Chicago, and there is no easy hunting of anyone there in the big city. Again, your thoughtfulness is appreciated.”
Then, to make sure there was no mistaking his intention, he added, “You can turn your car around in this spot here.” He pointed to a short, dead-end dirt road just to our right. “Goodbye.”
We had little choice but to obey.
I blew out the breath I’d been holding as soon as we were a half mile down the pavement again. “It wasn’t exactly the wellspring of information I’d hoped for, but we did learn a few things at least,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Ben’s age and that the place his family moved was Chicago…one of the places mentioned in the journal. And, also, how even someone in Ronny’s own tribe dislikes him.”
“How do you figure?”
“Didn’t you see the man’s face when I mentioned we’d talked to Ronny?” I asked. “The way his eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed? The way his grip on your window tightened? The way he looked at us like we were the enemy? Ben’s cousin is not Mr. Popularity. At least not with that tribe elder.”
“So what? Everybody’s entitled to dislike somebody. There were a few men I wasn’t all that fond of back in my unit in Virginia, and I couldn’t stand half the guys in our high school. I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual. So, I don’t think that means anything.”
Though the subject of school popularity had never been discussed between us before, I knew this was true. Donovan, unlike his brother Jeremy, was not a laidback, fun-loving joiner, even if he was fairly skilled at mimicking someone like that. He had a presence other guys tended to respect—sometimes grudgingly—and girls were often drawn to him, but I’d never gotten the sense that he was “popular” in the traditional way of his brother or mine.
Then again, neither was I.
We hadn’t been driving for long when Donovan spotted a bent sign for Bonner Mill, just a half mile away, and he followed an even smaller country road directly to the site.
When we got there, though, it was more than an abandoned old mill—it was a burned out one. It captured my attention more for what it wasn’t than for what it was. It wasn’t actually much of a mill anymore, not of scrap metal (which was what the old sign claimed it to be) or of anything, really. It was in an even greater state of ruin than that old farmhouse we’d stopped at earlier or that dilapidated bar on the main street in town.
“Must have been some explosion,” I murmured.
Donovan studied the broken-down wooden slats and gnarly old railings, the rusted window ledges with the glass blown out and the fire-tinged edges of what had once been the building’s frame.
“No matter how many grams of flash powder over the legal limit were in Ronny’s bootleg fireworks, it would’ve taken even more than that to blow up a place this bad. Dynamite, maybe.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure what kind of trouble our brothers were in or what they were up to with Ben Rainwater, but there had to be more going on here to cause this than just a little mishap with too many hot fireworks.”
Even knowing far less about the world of explosives than Donovan did, I had to agree. “I have an idea about how we might learn more,” I said. “Although, you might not like it.”
He regarded me with his usual half-suspicious, half-amused gaze, which never failed to make my breath hitch and my heart rate speed up. “What is it?”
“Well, first, we need to go back to Ashburn Falls. And, um, second, we need to find that library.”
He rolled his eyes but, given that he didn’t seem to have any bright new ideas of his own, he agreed to go there.
By the time we got to the Ashburn Falls Public Library, we had only an hour left before closing—the library shut its doors at three p.m. on Saturdays—but if we played our cards right, that would be just enough time to dig up a little background on Bonner Mill and Ben Rainwater.
“Stay over here by the magazines. Let me handle this,” I told Donovan before grabbing a few pieces of scratch paper and a pencil from on top of the card catalog and approaching the reference librarian.
I could tell at least a dozen things about the woman from her posture (not overly confident), her facial expression (not easily humored), her direct gaze (not one to suffer fools willingly) and more. I would be respectful, serious and intellectual. That should put her at ease.
“May I help you?” the librarian lady asked.
“Yes, thank you. I have a research paper I need to complete on regional industries, and I want to do a really good job,” I said, trying to sound like a grade-conscious teen. “Do you have any information on Bonner Mill? Newspapers or microfilm, maybe? I know it’s no longer in operation, but I was hoping to learn a little more about what it used to produce and why it was closed a couple of years ago.”
The librarian jotted down a few notes on the slim pad in front of her. “You’re not from around here then, are you?”
I shook my head. “My family’s from, um, St. Paul.”
The librarian nodded. “School is still in session there?”
The woman was nosy and sharp but, after hearing her speak, I didn’t sense that she was at all mean. Just very curious. I sent her a sheepish smile. “It’s for a summer school project I have to finish and turn in. I got this one really bad grade in social studies, so…” I feigned an embarrassed shrug and waited.
It worked.
“I see,” the librarian said kindly. She pulled off the top sheet from her notepad. “I’ll gather a few documents together for you. I think the newspapers from before last year have already been archived on microfilm, and the mill, as you already know, was closed before then.”
“Yes,” I said, pretending to consult my scratch-paper notes. “I was told there was a big fire or something there two summers ago. Around the Fourth of July, right?”
“You could say that,” the older woman said. “The first firefighter who arrived at the scene speculated it was a series of bombs, but…” She let that thought trail off.
I wanted her to keep talking. “But…what?”
The librarian cleared her throat. “It seemed to get cleared up by the police awfully quickly, is all. The state was never called in to investigate, and I don’t know any more than that.” She adjusted her eyeglasses and strode away with the air of someone who didn’t trust herself with a secret.
She returned about three minutes later with a spool of microfilm and a couple of sections of newspaper. “You can return these to the cart by the wall when you’re done.” She pointed to a half-filled rolling cart near the reference desk. “And the microfilm readers are just over there.” She pointed again, this time to a cou
ple of sectioned-off desks near the back of the room.
“Great,” I said. “Thanks so much.”
The librarian took a few strides away, then paused and looked at me again, more closely this time. “Hope you get a good grade on your paper.”
I forced a smile. “Me, too.” Then I all but sprinted to a booth with an open reader.
As soon as I’d threaded the microfilm into the reader and turned it on, I motioned Donovan over. The two of us huddled together and studied the magnified type on the screen. He quickly took over the task of forwarding through the articles, racing past January, February, March and April of 1976 to get to May, June and July. Then he slowed and we scanned each page for any headlines about Bonner Mill.
Not only did we find a few, but what was most interesting of all was when the articles were written.
Donovan tapped the screen near one date, Wednesday, June 16, 1976. A couple of weeks before our brothers disappeared. He pointed to the headline “Mill Mishap.” A grainy picture showing a burnt-out hole in the wall with the caption “Safety of Bonner Mill called into question by authorities” was front and center. There were a few lines about a faulty heating and exhaust system and how that likely played a part in the small blast.
“So, the explosion over the Fourth of July weekend wasn’t the first one,” Donovan murmured. “There’d been problems already, just not quite as large or as massively destructive.”
This was confirmed by other articles we read in the paper on the days following—inspectors checking the facility for any other safety violations, the Bonner family dealing with legal issues and dissent from the various unions, interviews with people in the local white population and on the rez—both communities expressing concerns about continuing mill operations.
Then, when there was the second, larger blast the night before Independence Day—attributed this time to a furnace explosion—it seemed so obvious, so cut and dried that of course the mill would cease to run its scrap-metal operation until these safety issues were cleared up. But the Bonners were in hot water legally and quickly came to be in debt, so the family didn’t bother to make repairs. They just closed up shop.
Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You Page 8
