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

by Brant, Marilyn

  All valid steps that I hadn’t yet taken.

  If those turned out to be dead ends, though, and if Charlie still hadn’t called one of us, then I’d have no choice but to bring the cops into it before evening. I couldn’t handle another sleepless night like the last one. I thought I’d been in pain when my brother went missing. I thought I’d been empathetic to my mother’s infinite sadness. But I knew better now. I had no idea how my mother survived Gideon’s disappearance. Just one day of this torture was devastating. Much longer, and it might literally kill me.

  I turned on the radio to catch the latest news report, listening for anything out of the ordinary. I checked the biggest local and regional news stories online to see if I’d missed any major incidents that had occurred on Thursday night or Friday morning. I watched several news clips of traffic accidents and burglaries. Then I called Jay again to ask if he’d heard from his brother yet.

  He said, “No,” and, once more, urged me not to worry.

  But he wasn’t nearly as flippant in his responses this time. I could hear the notes of concern creeping into his voice. Feel his unexpressed apprehension pulsing between us on the line.

  Charlie lived in nearby Glendale. So, I called the largest hospitals in our area, including a few in Los Angeles, checking to see if he’d been admitted. There was no one by his name at any of them. There was a John Doe or two, of course, who’d come in between five-thirty Thursday night and ten-thirty Friday morning, but none who matched Charlie’s description.

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved by that or not. At this point, I had no leads. The only thing I had was an absence of information. Was “no news” really “good news” in a situation like this one? For me, it was just an agonizing void that bored a deep hole in my gut while squeezing the lifeblood from my heart.

  A wave of dizziness washed over me. The exhaustion plus the worry plus the lack of food was taking its toll on my body. If I was going to be able to do anything worthwhile that afternoon—anything that might help locate my son—I needed to calm down, rest for ten minutes at least and eat something.

  I tried to distract myself with pretzels and a hot cup of coffee. I tried listening to music while practicing a meditative breathing exercise. And I tried watching a few minutes of a heartwarming Lifetime movie. None of it worked, of course.

  The memories that haunted my past were far, far too strong.

  “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

  ~William Blake

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Chicago, Illinois ~ Sunday, June 18, 1978

  It was the film that began to change Donovan’s mind about the trip.

  I didn’t know if the Bicentennial tribute played the bigger role or if it was the realization that Ronny dealt in pipe bombs as well as fireworks that sealed the deal…but, suddenly, Donovan stopped challenging my certainty that Gideon’s journal was leading us to more information than the cops ever had or were willing to share.

  I saw in his expression a slew of questions that had been raised in the past twenty-four hours, not the least of which was—if Gideon had really been in Amarillo, Texas just a couple of weeks before and if, in fact, no one had been forging his handwriting on those postcards—where the hell was Jeremy?

  We asked, but Amy Lynn didn’t know the answer. With her help, though, we were able to piece together a few additional tidbits about that Fourth of July weekend two years ago.

  Our brothers had said to her that Ben Rainwater’s cousin was involved, but she didn’t know his name was Ronny until we told her. Our brothers also explained to her that there’d been more than one explosion at Bonner Mill, which, of course, Donovan and I already knew, thanks to the microfilm we’d read at the Ashburn Falls Public Library.

  From Ben’s film footage around the mill, Donovan and I concluded that the first explosion was caused by Ronny’s stash of pipe bombs, which Ben had somehow caught on camera and spliced onto Gideon and Jeremy’s tribute reel.

  Amy Lynn explained that Ben wasn’t done with his Super 8 project. He’d been doing a lot of filming in and around town and gathering more evidence against his cousin (related by marriage, not by blood) who, in Ben’s opinion, had always played fast and loose with the law.

  But, one of the most surprisingly things I’d heard was that, however shady Ronny Lee Wolf appeared to all of us to be, he wasn’t the one actually setting off the bombs.

  “Then who was?” Donovan asked.

  Amy Lynn sighed. “Your brothers didn’t know that.”

  “Then how did they know he wasn’t doing it?” Donovan said back.

  “Because of what happened next,” she said. “Because of what they witnessed during the second explosion.”

  “Wait—did they know if the same pipe bombs caused both explosions? The first one that Ben filmed and also the one that killed Ben and Treak?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “That’s what they believed, but they’d just seen Ben’s cousin in downtown Crescent Cove before they drove to the mill. He was strolling down the street. So, although the guy—Ronny, you said his name was—seemed to be involved in the storing and maybe even the manufacturing of these bombs, your brothers were convinced he wasn’t lighting them personally.”

  Donovan was struggling to assemble all of these details. “How is it that our brothers even knew Ben Rainwater? What made them go up to Crescent Cove in the first place? I just don’t understand.” He scored his fingers through his hair. “What exactly did Jeremy and Gideon say about that?”

  Amy Lynn rubbed the center of her forehead, as if trying to bring the memories back to the surface. “They told me they’d first met Ben Rainwater at a party in St. Cloud—I don’t know how long ago—but that Ben invited them up to visit him and to make a film. Your brothers had gone to Crescent Cove once or twice before the Bicentennial, mostly to buy fireworks to bring home, they said, to keep for the upcoming holiday parties. But they also got together with Ben for drinks and shot some of the film footage. The guys went up on the Friday night before the Fourth, and Ben said he’d just picked up the developed reel with everything he’d filmed recently on it. On Saturday afternoon, they all met Treak at his motel in the next town over—”

  “Ashburn Falls?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “I remember Treak telling me how there weren’t motels in Crescent Cove, so he had to stay somewhere else. Gideon and Jeremy were at a different motel, but not that far away. And Ben brought his film projector with him to Treak’s place so the four of them could watch what he’d shot in the past week or two. Gideon and Jeremy were going to take their portion home with them—first to show Gideon’s dad and, then, to mail to you, Donovan.”

  He nodded at this, but then glanced away in silence, either not willing or not able to speak.

  Amy Lynn continued, “I guess Ben had his suspicions about his cousin’s ‘fireworks’ supply already—he’d discovered the storage unit not long before Treak came into town and had snuck in there a few times to check it out—but Gideon and Jeremy recognized how powerful the pipe bombs really were and explained it to them. As for Treak, at least according to what your brothers said, he’d been digging up information all over the place. Ben’s film confirmed a few details that he’d been investigating—it was all somehow connected to his big story—and he was desperate to go back to Bonner Mill with Ben. To shoot some more footage and to document whatever evidence of a bombing cover-up they could find.”

  Donovan massaged his temples. “So, Jeremy and Gideon went with them then?”

  “No,” Amy Lynn said. “Aurora’s brother had some kind of car trouble. He knew they were headed into a holiday weekend, so he wanted to try to get the problem fixed as soon as possible. I guess he and Jeremy fiddled around with it for a while and knew they needed to get a car part from an auto shop, but Ben and Treak were impatient to drive to the mill. Ben didn’t want to leave them stranded, so he loaned them his car—
a white Oldsmobile Cutlass—so they could get the part they needed, while Ben and Treak went to the mill in Treak’s Chevy. Your brothers planned to meet them there as soon as the car got fixed.”

  She started packing up her landlord’s projector. “But they weren’t able to fix the car. The part they needed wasn’t in stock and, with the Bicentennial, they weren’t going to be able to buy it until Tuesday at the earliest. So, they left Gideon’s car at the motel and took Ben’s Oldsmobile into Crescent Cove, driving through the center of town and, finally, getting to Bonner Mill.”

  She fiddled with the white leader tape on the Super 8 reel then stared at us both for a long moment. “Look, I got all of this secondhand on a day that was the most awful one of my entire life…but I remember it. I remember exactly what your brothers said. That’s what you asked for, right?” She met Donovan’s eye.

  He nodded.

  And I said, “I know it’s hard to remember all of this stuff, but it’s helping us to understand. Just tell us what you know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So, when they finally got to the mill, it was getting dark and it was a woodsy area without much light. But they could make out Treak’s car, so they parked behind it, and they noticed there was another vehicle in the lot. They could hear voices coming from inside the mill. At first, they thought it was just Ben and Treak talking really loudly to each other, but they soon realized there was a third man and that he was shouting at the other guys. Gideon and Jeremy hunted for a flashlight so they could see better outside, and tried to decide how serious the argument was. Bad enough for a fist fight to break out? Or bad enough that their friends might needed the help of the authorities?”

  She paused. “They finally found a flashlight in Ben’s glove compartment and got out of the car. When they did, they saw that the other vehicle had markings on the sides. It was a police car. They were worried about Ben and Treak getting in trouble for trespassing. Or, maybe, that it was illegal to film home movies in a privately owned building or something. But as they got closer, they heard Ben yelling at someone. And Gideon told me that Treak shouted that he had notes on the guy, and that the truth would come out.”

  She took several deep and steadying breaths. “The next thing they heard was a series of blasts. And, suddenly, Jeremy said they could see more than they’d wanted to because parts of the mill were on fire, and there were more explosions still happening.”

  Donovan put his head against his fist and closed his eyes. “Then what?” he whispered.

  “Then they ran back to Ben’s car just as the cop came racing out of the building—setting more bombs off behind him and carrying Ben’s movie camera. Your brothers didn’t get a clear look at the man’s face, and they didn’t think he got much of a look at theirs either. They said everything was in shadows. But he must have recognized immediately that Gideon and Jeremy were live witnesses to his crime. So, he lit a pipe bomb filled with gun powder and flung it at them. It landed just a few feet in front of them, on Treak’s Chevy, and pretty much torched half the car.”

  My bottom lip was raw and bleeding from biting it. More dirty cops. I hated them all. “But, obviously, our brothers got away from that crazy policeman and made it here,” I said. “He didn’t try to follow them after that, did he?”

  “Actually, he did,” Amy Lynn said. “But they’d had a tiny lead on him and, eventually, were able to lose him. They didn’t dare go back toward Crescent Cove, or even Ashburn Falls, though, because the cop probably got a good enough look at the car’s make and model and very likely caught the numbers on the plates.”

  Donovan’s jaw was clenched, but he was nodding. “The cop would run the plates with dispatch and Ben Rainwater’s name and address would turn up. He’d figure out in no time, since he’d just killed Ben, that someone else had to be behind the wheel. Our brothers were so sociable. So open and friendly.” He said it almost like it was an indictment. “In a small town like Crescent Cove, it would take less than ten minutes of talking to people at the bar to figure out that Gideon and Jeremy had been with Ben…to find out their names, what type of car they drove, where they were from.”

  “Right,” Amy Lynn said. “So, of course, they were too afraid to go back to get their car or to even think about driving home to Minnesota. With Ben and Treak dead, they didn’t have anyone they could trust in the area. They thought a cop as dirty as that one might keep trying to kill them or, if that didn’t work, he might try to frame them for the Bonner Mill explosion. As it was, that cop somehow managed to get police records to show that Treak’s car had been eviscerated in a ‘crash’ that I don’t think ever happened…at least not if your brothers were telling me the truth, and I believe they were.”

  She shook her head angrily. “I really think your brothers were right to run. They didn’t stop until they got to Milwaukee. That’s when they called me from a payphone downtown. And where, I later learned, they stole the Illinois plates off a parked car at a motel before they left the city. To make themselves harder to trace that night.”

  I let out a long breath I’d been holding. Yeah. My brother and his best friend were clever that way. No one asleep at a motel would notice a missing license plate, at least not until the next morning. It would buy the guys a few hours of driving without worry and, since they were heading into Illinois, it would make Ben’s car as inconspicuous as possible there. How many white Oldsmobiles with Illinois plates were traveling on those very same roads that night? Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

  “So, the reason you have the film was because it was in Ben’s car, right?” I said, already visualizing the events as they happened to my brother and Donovan’s and how, with every mile they drove, Gideon and Jeremy must have discovered something new about their circumstances. Their many losses…and, yet, their few unexpected resources.

  “Exactly,” she replied. “It was in the trunk, along with one of Treak’s folders. I guess he’d left it there when they were transferring Ben’s film equipment to his car to take to the mill. From what Jeremy told me, Treak had a stack of folders in his trunk, too, which were blown up that night, as well as a bunch of notes that were still in his motel room. And I, of course, knew how many papers he’d kept in files in our Chicago apartment. The police carted out all of them before the holiday weekend was over, so I’d guess that anything Treak may have left at that motel in Ashburn Falls would have been confiscated almost immediately.”

  “Along with Gideon’s car,” Donovan added.

  Amy Lynn nodded. “Probably, yeah.”

  Nothing just “probably” about it.

  I’d always wondered why there had never been any reports about my brother’s Ford Galaxie being spotted or recovered anywhere. I could only imagine how quickly his car could have been found and, then, made to “disappear.” How much easier and without raising questions it would have been to simply complete Gideon, Jeremy and Treak’s transactions in Ashburn Falls. To clean out their motel rooms, which most likely had already been paid for in cash. To have a duplicate set of keys made and to turn those in instead, dropping them in the outside box before check-out time the next day.

  No one would think anything of it.

  And if the names or descriptions of three out-of-towners were to come up later, well, sure, these men might have visited, but then they’d left. After all, who stayed around those parts for long if they didn’t have to?

  “What did they say they were going to do next, after they left Chicago?” Donovan asked. “Did they tell you?”

  “Not in any detail,” she admitted. “They both agreed that they’d wanted to warn me, given what they saw happen to Treak and Ben, and they wanted to get the hell out of Crescent Cove that night. But they were still feeling their way through the next steps. Gideon said they would’ve liked to go straight home, or at least call their parents. But they needed to figure out who was behind the bombings so that they didn’t walk into a trap and get arrested for a crime they didn’t commit, especially since they didn’t have a
ny alibis who were alive. They were afraid it wouldn’t be safe yet—either for them or for their families—to head back to Minnesota. But they said what Treak was investigating had a Missouri connection as well as a Wisconsin one, and I could tell Gideon was curious about that.”

  “So they were going to drive there?” I flipped through my brother’s journal. After Chicago, the next page didn’t list a place that I recognized, but on the page after that were the words “Cardinal Town.”

  Ah, yes. St. Louis.

  I showed the entry to Amy Lynn and Donovan.

  “That may have been their next stop,” she said.

  Donovan made no comment about that. Instead, he asked, “Did they tell you anything more? Call you later?”

  “Nope. They left the film reel and the notes folder with me that afternoon. Said not to share them with anyone else unless they gave the okay or said it was safe. But I didn’t hear from them again until I got that first postcard from Gideon. And that was months later. In September.” She shot Donovan an apologetic looked laced with something else. Longing? Regret? “I never got any notes at all from Jeremy.”

  But she desperately wished she had.

  I knew this now, finally understanding something important about Amy Lynn. About why she kept looking so searchingly at Donovan’s face. About why she’d commented immediately on his resemblance to his brother.

  Yes, when Gideon and Jeremy met with her two summers ago, she’d still been in shock by the news of Treak’s death and wasn’t immediately ready to move on. But, in spite of it all, and in the months then years that followed, she’d thought about our brothers often. About Jeremy specifically. She’d been attracted to him. And—it was so clearly written on her face that I marveled at how I’d missed it before—she’d hoped he’d write to her again. Call her. Visit.

  But he hadn’t.

  Why hadn’t he?