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

by Brant, Marilyn

  Donovan wasn’t asking her about that, though. Either he’d failed to see her signals or he was ignoring them. Neither reason would have surprised me. He did, however, bring up something I should have asked sooner.

  “Aren’t Ben Rainwater’s mom and his sister here in Chicago?” Donovan said. “We were told by a few different people that they’d moved here.”

  Amy Lynn shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve never met them or heard from them. Chicago is a big city, which is why I can still live here. It’s easier to hide out in a cast of millions than it would be to try to blend into a small town. I’ve never run into anyone yet who knew me as Chelsea Carew.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Not that I was famous or anything. And I work behind a desk now, mostly stuffing envelopes and filing papers, so I don’t meet a lot of new people.”

  I thought about this. Considering how Ben’s cousin was the one storing the pipe bombs, even if Ronny didn’t actually detonate them, maybe there was some fear on Jeremy and Gideon’s part about ever contacting Ben’s family and explaining to them the details of his death. Whoever was responsible for killing Ben may have been keeping a close eye on the movements of his immediate relatives.

  Donovan looked like he had the headache from hell, but I watched him working to keep an open mind about everything he was hearing. What I’d intuitively accepted from the moment I found my brother’s journal—that we’d been lied to by the police, that our brothers were still alive, that there was much, much more to this story than we’d ever imagined—was not as natural for Donovan to wrap his brain around.

  So, I admired him for his efforts. For being willing to rethink something so fundamental about what he’d believed. For taking a pure leap of faith, however atypical of him. And for saying to me, “Well, Aurora, I suppose you want to go to St. Louis now, huh?”

  ***

  After we’d said goodbye to Amy Lynn, thanking her for all she’d done for us—not to mention the kindness and trust she’d shown our brothers—and swapping contact information, we emerged into the dazzling sunlight of a hot summer Sunday and got settled in Donovan’s car.

  He pulled out his road atlas and plopped it into my lap. “You get to navigate on this one.”

  I flipped it open in surprise. Considering his ingrained aversion to asking anyone for directions, this was a sign of great progress.

  He started the engine. “If we get lost, it’s on your head, Nancy Drew.”

  I glared at him. “Stop calling me that.”

  “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy,” he mocked.

  “Oh, you’re real mature,” I said, but he continued with his mockery. I knew he needed an outlet, a little levity, something—especially after all the grave, life-changing information we’d just gotten. I was beginning to learn his patterns. He would need to munch on something, and he wouldn’t be able to discuss anything seriously for a couple of hours at least. Good thing we had snacks in the car and a five-hour drive ahead of us.

  “Fine. Be that way.” I told him the first few turns, taking us past the big Sears on Irving Park Road and following the signs so we could merge onto Interstate 90/94. Eventually, since I wasn’t afraid to read a map—unlike some people—I knew we’d meet up with 55 South, which would take us all the way to Missouri.

  But, as soon as Donovan looked comfortable with the roads, I dug through my purse for the cassette I’d been saving for just such an occasion, and I popped it in. As the opening strains of the Bee Gees’s hit “Stayin’ Alive” came on, I had the satisfaction of seeing Donovan make a disgusted face and reach to turn it off.

  I batted his hand away from the cassette deck. “Do you really think disco is a fad?” I said, mimicking Vicky from St. Cloud. Then I started singing along with the song’s chorus. I’d heard the lyrics about, oh, sixty thousand times since the movie came out last year. I knew every word.

  “Uh! God, stop that!” he said, half laughing.

  “What’s my name?” I asked him sweetly during an instrumental moment.

  He shot me a dirty look. “Just cut it out.”

  I sang along with the entire second verse. Loudly.

  “Hell, Aurora. Stop.”

  “What did you just say my name was?” I asked. Then, more threateningly, “You do realize that ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ is coming up next, right?”

  He made a gagging sound that I took as a precursor to his inevitable surrender. I was right.

  “Your name is Aurora, but I will strangle you with the long threads of tape that I’m going to yank out of my deck in about ten seconds if you don’t do it first.”

  I snapped the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack out of the player.

  “If you call me Nancy Drew again, you can expect a full hour of disco hits. I can sing ‘If I Can’t Have You’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing’ and more. All of them a cappella. And, yeah, that’s a warning. Be scared.”

  The look he gave me was nothing short of scathing but, a few minutes later, when I was studying the Illinois map in the middle of the atlas, I caught him glancing at me and smothering a laugh.

  “Who knew you’d grow up to be such a weirdo…Aurora,” he said, emphasizing my name, of course.

  “Oh, you’re funny.”

  “I am, actually. But I guess it’s been a while since I felt much like laughing.”

  I was surprised to hear him say that. Not because I didn’t believe him—just because I didn’t think he’d be quick to disclose something personal if he didn’t have to. Something that might invite follow-up questions.

  “It’s been a rough two years,” I said, stating the obvious. Making it easy for him.

  “Yep.”

  For a while we rode along in silence. I wanted to ask him what theories he had about our brothers. If he finally believed me that Gideon was alive. What he thought it meant that we hadn’t gotten any recent news at all about Jeremy. But Donovan still wasn’t ready for that. I decided to look more closely at the atlas.

  At one point, he peered over at me and leaned in close to read the map I was studying.

  “Shouldn’t your eyes be on the road?” I asked him.

  “Well, you keep staring at that thing like it’s the Holy Grail. Is there something coming up I should know about?”

  In fact, yes, there was. I just wasn’t ready to tell him about it yet because, to be honest, I hadn’t entirely figured it out.

  I was hoping reading the names of the upcoming cities in the atlas would help. I knew I knew something important. I knew I’d been given some solid clues at Amy Lynn’s apartment to figure out a few new puzzle pieces. I just wasn’t sure which pieces. So, I was sifting through my memories of what she’d said and what I’d learned—names, details, places and dates—trying to let my conscious mind catch up with my intuition.

  “There’s something here that I’m looking at but not seeing,” I told him. “It’ll help us if I can figure it out. And I know it’s somewhere on these pages.”

  I tapped the Illinois map with my index finger and then waved my hand at Treak’s notes and Gideon’s journal, which I’d set on the dash. Before we’d left, Amy Lynn had given me the two postcards my brother had sent her, and they were sticking out of the small leather book, taunting me even more than Donovan had been.

  What was I missing?

  “What’s on the next page of the journal?” Donovan asked. “You usually get some kind of weird clue from that. Why don’t you read it aloud?”

  I exhaled on a sigh. I’d scanned it back at Amy Lynn’s and there hadn’t been anything that’d jumped out at me there. But Donovan was looking at me expectantly and, if he was finally willing to discuss our search, I didn’t want to discourage him.

  Besides, staring at the atlas for fifteen minutes straight hadn’t done me any good.

  So, I opened the journal and shuffled through the pages until I got to the one right after “J & I in Chicago” but just before “Cardinal Town.”

  As usual, Gideon had his list of car thingies, chemical substances and direction
s for some automotive procedure—about half a page’s worth—which I read to Donovan, even when it got a little embarrassing.

  Draining the Cooling System:

  1. Make sure engine is cold then open radiator cap

  2. Find the radiator drain cock under the front of the car & place a large pan underneath

  3. Drain radiator fluid into the pan then close drain cock

  Donovan snickered next to me. “Do you have any idea what a drain cock is?”

  I shrugged and tried not to look as awkward as I felt. “I don’t care what it is. You told me you wanted me to read this out loud, so I’m reading.”

  He laughed openly. “Yeah, but I remember seeing this page when you first showed me the journal and I wondered then why your brother would’ve written down the steps for this. It isn’t a tough procedure. Hell, the way Gideon loved cars, he probably learned how to drain coolant when he was ten.”

  “Well, I don’t know why he did half the things he did,” I said stiffly. “I’m sure he had a reason.”

  “If you say so,” he said.

  I returned to the page and kept reading.

  4. Refill radiator with water, replace cap & run engine to circulate the water

  5. Repeat

  6. Add 1/2 water & 1/2 antifreeze to both radiator & overflow reservoir—fill to top

  7. Leave off radiator cap, let engine run until radiator burps

  Donovan found that line to be pretty darned hilarious, too, but I just ignored him.

  8. Coolant level will drop—keep watch on temperature gauge

  9. Refill radiator and reservoir so fluid is back to the top again, put cap back on

  10. Put old coolant/water in a container & dispose at a service station

  I paused. That was the end of the latest lesson in car mechanics and, just below it, the ink changed. It was really subtle—I had to strain my eyes to see it—but I knew as soon as I read the words underneath that I’d been wrong in thinking Gideon hadn’t given us a place name on this page. He had.

  “Listen to this,” I told Donovan, and then I read him the last three lines.

  Tuesday, May 18, 1976

  Nothing’s Normal

  M + 2, D - 12

  “So?” he said.

  “So Gideon wrote ‘Nothing’s Normal’ in the new ink section.” I snagged the atlas, still open to the Illinois page, and pointed excitedly to a city in the middle of the state. “Interstate 55 runs right through Normal, Illinois. It’s right here.” I held up the map so he could see the black dot. “It’s next to Bloomington. Then, further south on 55 is Springfield and, finally, St. Louis, just across the Missouri state line.”

  “And that proves…what? That they’d stopped in a place called Normal on their way to St. Louis?”

  “Yes!” And, for a moment, I was relieved. I knew all along we were headed on the right path, but I still appreciated having these little acknowledgments of our progress along the way. Like getting to check the answer key in the back of my high-school algebra book. Even when I’d solved the equations completely on my own, I liked knowing I could double check just to be sure I got them right.

  Then Donovan added, “In May?”

  “What?”

  “The date,” he said. “It was May eighteenth. You told me on the way to Chicago that you thought either the dates or the places were wrong.”

  And my uncomfortable feeling of “knowing without knowing” returned full force. There was definitely another clue to find, and I was so close to it I could almost hear it whispering in my ear.

  “No, it has to be July. If they met up with Amy Lynn in Chicago on July fourth, they had to be in Normal and St. Louis after that.” I flipped back a page in the journal. “We know for sure they were in Chicago on Independence Day, but the date written down on the page for their Chicago visit is May thirteenth—a Thursday in the middle of a school week. They couldn’t have been in Illinois then. We know Gideon sent Amy Lynn a postcard from Flagstaff that was dated September eighth.”

  I pulled it out and reread the postmark on the back. “But, in his journal, the only reference I can find to Flagstaff is here.” I skipped through several pages to get to the one where the city in Arizona was mentioned briefly. “It’s on a page that Gideon dated June 22, 1976.”

  I returned to the Normal page and reread those last three lines to myself.

  Tuesday, May 18, 1976

  Nothing’s Normal

  M + 2, D - 12

  It was wrong no matter how I looked at it. They were not there in May, but in July. And not there on the eighteenth, but on the fourth or later.

  Then, in a flash of recognition, I saw it. The pattern I’d been missing.

  It was so simple, so obvious…once I had the key. And, just as I’d suspected, it had been right in front of my eyes the whole time.

  “Oh, my God, Donovan,” I whispered. “We just needed to read the equation.”

  He sent me a quizzical look. “Where?”

  “At the bottom of every page.”

  I grabbed a pen from my purse and a piece of scratch paper from Donovan's glove compartment. On it, I wrote:

  Normal, Illinois = 5/18/76 (date written in journal)

  M + 2, D - 12

  M = month, D = day

  M = 5 + 2 = 7 (month = July)

  D = 18 - 12 = 6 (day = 6th)

  7/6/76 (real date of visit)

  I read this to Donovan. “See? The M and D stand for Month and Day. We just need to make adjustments for that and we’ll have the correct date that they were in each city!” I was kind of shouting, but I was excited. I showed him how it worked on the Chicago page.

  Chicago = 5/13/76 (date written)

  M + 2, D - 9

  5 + 2 = 7 (month = July)

  13 - 9 = 4 (day = 4th)

  7/4/76 (real date)

  And then, for good measure, I decoded the Flagstaff date.

  Flagstaff = 6/22/76

  M + 3, D - 14

  6 + 3 = 9 (month = September)

  22 - 14 = 8 (day = 8th)

  9/8/76 (real date)

  “Wow,” he murmured. “That’s really…clever. Good, um, code breaking. It’ll be easy for you to figure all the dates out now.” He looked impressed with my detective skills but, thankfully, he knew better than to call me Nancy Drew again.

  I nodded happily and set to work on decoding each date in the journal. That unsettling feeling was gone, thank God. At least for the time being. And I was able to finally concentrate again on the still-unsolved mysteries within the journal—as well as those outside of it. Not the least of which was why my brother had gone to so much trouble to disguise where he went and when.

  However, even as I was wondering this, my mind was spinning with possible reasons. Let’s say someone else were to have found the journal before I did—or if, by chance, it was either lost or stolen later—all of the listed dates would be from before the “disappearance.” It would be an odd object of Gideon’s to find…but, if by chance he wanted people to think he was dead, the dates in the journal kept that possibility intact.

  In fact, there was only one page where the current year, 1978, was written at all, just in the corner, and—to almost anyone else but me—it would be far too insignificant to dwell on:

  Monday, May 29, 1978

  Start here. G.

  I turned back to that section, rereading the entire page for the nine-hundredth time in the past two weeks, my mind focusing on all of the lines with numbers in them.

  Zirconium powdery + 2 (+ 0)

  Monday, April 19, 1976

  M + 1 (+ 0), D + 10 (+ 0)

  I used the equation at the bottom of the sheet and applied it to the date.

  Crescent Cove = 4/19/76

  M + 1 + 0, D + 10 + 0

  4 + 1 +0 = 5 (month = May)

  19 + 10 + 0 = 29 (day = 29th)

  5/29/76 (real date)

  Only, this time the month/day pattern didn’t work.

  May 29, 1976 had been a
Saturday. Specifically, the Saturday before Gideon and Jeremy’s high-school graduation. It was the first day of a crazy week-long set of activities, both at the school and around town, thanks to the Chameleon Fest. I’d run through that social obstacle course myself just a few weeks ago. No way were they goofing off in Wisconsin then.

  Plus, I remembered seeing them every single day of that Memorial Day weekend and each weekday leading up to their big graduation bash in St. Cloud on June fifth of that year.

  So, no.

  Donovan and I had always thought April nineteenth made sense as the real date our brothers went to Crescent Cove for the first time. On the next page, May tenth, it said they went there again, which also fit with what Jeremy had told Donovan in June 1976. I reread the lines with numbers on that page.

  Zirconium powdery + 0

  Monday, May 10, 1976

  M + 0, D + 0

  The month and day lines in the equation were both + 0, so there was nothing to add to the date, and the only other number on the page involved that chemical—whatever “Zirconium powdery” was—but that, too, was + 0.

  I’d seen that chemical on the Start here page as well, but the number added was different. I flipped back and read it again.

  Zirconium powdery + 2 (+ 0)

  Monday, April 19, 1976

  J. & I drove to Crescent Cove

  Ah. Now I saw the tricky thing Gideon had done. The ink change started just above the date. It wasn’t “powdery + 2 (+ 0),” like I’d thought for so long. It was “powder y + 2 (+ 0).” With the y + 2 (+ 0) part written in that subtly different shade of ink.