The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ~A Coming-of-Age/New Adult Romantic Mystery from Bestselling Author Marilyn Brant~

  Sometimes the only road to the truth...is one you’ve never taken.

  Until I found Gideon’s journal in the tool shed—locked in the cedar box where I’d once hidden my old diary—I’d been led to believe my brother was dead. But the contents of his journal changed all that.

  The Road to Discovery...

  Two years ago, Aurora Gray’s world turned upside down when her big brother Gideon and his best friend Jeremy disappeared. Now, during the summer of her 18th birthday, she unexpectedly finds her brother’s journal and sees that it’s been written in again. Recently. By him.

  The Road to Danger...

  There are secret messages coded within the journal’s pages. Aurora, who’s unusually perceptive and a natural puzzle solver, is hell bent on following where they lead, no matter what the cost. She confides in the only person she feels can help her interpret the clues: Donovan McCafferty, Jeremy’s older brother and a guy she’s always been drawn to—even against her better judgment.

  The Road to You...

  Reluctantly, Donovan agrees to go with her and, together, they set out on a road trip of discovery and danger, hoping to find their lost brothers and the answers to questions they’ve never dared to ask aloud.

  In that expectant space between silence and melody, our trip began...

  “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

  ~Martin Buber

  I spent a large portion of my childhood in the 1970s, and I remember that decade with fondness if, perhaps, with a bit too much disco, oddly patterned clothing and kitchen appliances that were painted a disturbing shade of “mustard.”

  But that time period wasn’t really so long ago...although, sometimes, it does seem like a galaxy far, far away. An alternate universe where the people of Earth did not have cell phones. Or GPS devices. Or even wireless Internet access.

  It proved quite a challenge for me to write a story about missing teens set in an age when, if a family member disappeared, he or she couldn’t be tracked by the technological or forensic methods so commonplace today. An era when finding an unoccupied payphone was the only way to contact someone if you were away from home. When folded-paper maps were the main tool you had in figuring out directions on the road. And when, if there was research on a topic to be done, the public library would be your best bet for getting the resources you needed.

  We have so much information available at our fingertips now, but that not-so-distant decade still holds plenty of unique gifts in its treasure box. The music back then could be pretty amazing—if you knew who to listen to on your LP turntable, 8-track player or cassette deck. It was a known fact that there were some really cool cars on the highway. And, well, the Force was with us all...

  Thanks for reading this story. I hope it brings you the joy of romance, the intrigue of mystery and the sheer thrill of adventure.

  “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to the truth;

  not going all the way, and not starting.”

  ~Buddha

  Chameleon Lake, Minnesota ~ Thursday, June 8, 1978

  MY HANDS trembled as I unlocked the cedar box in the tool shed. I listened for the distinctive click, lifted the lid and peered inside, not knowing what I’d find in its shadowy depths.

  I half expected to see my old diary resting at the bottom, even though I knew it was safely back in my room. I used to hide it in here years ago, before the key to the box was lost. A key that mysteriously resurfaced this week.

  But it wasn’t my diary.

  Instead, I found a different book. The small brown-leather journal that had once belonged to my older brother Gideon. My only sibling. The one who’d disappeared two years ago. The one everyone said was dead.

  I bit back the usual sob that always rose up in my throat when I remember him, then stared at the medium-sized box and its contents, almost afraid to touch anything. To my eye, my brother’s book seemed to have been conjured there, as if by magic. I hadn’t seen Gideon’s journal since the day he’d gone missing... What was written in it? And why, all of a sudden, had it reappeared—much like the key to this box—here, now?

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I snatched up the journal and began to examine it.

  Funny, even with the impression of a delicate butterfly stamped on the front cover, the book still managed to be tinged with Gideon’s masculinity. To an outsider, it probably looked like it contained some kid’s observations on nature. Something safe, simple, innocent.

  And the first few pages really were ordinary. So typical of my big brother that I caught myself in a sigh, missing him. I still missed him so damned much—with every breath, every memory.

  Like the way he’d grin at me whenever I saw him scribbling in it. Even if I teased him about the butterfly or keeping secrets or writing notes about his girlfriends, he’d just laugh.

  “Aurora, I love butterflies and secrets...and girls,” he’d tell me, amused and so self-confident.

  But here I was, skimming through a dozen pages, and I hadn’t found any dating exploits yet. Just details about cars and engines cluttering the first third of the journal. I spotted a step-by-step flowchart for performing an oil change. Something about the testing of transmission fluid. A procedure for fixing a leaky head gasket and the supplies needed to do so:

  …and so on.

  Looked kind of like a recipe to me.

  Lists of standard adjustable wrenches (8”/203mm, 10”/254mm, 12”/305mm) and screwdrivers (Torx #15, Phillips #00) followed. I squinted at them all. For a girly, bookish seventeen-year-old like me, this was about as riveting as reading an old J.C. Penney catalog.

  I kept reading anyway, my heart pounding as I traced my brother’s words with my fingertip. The familiar raw ache twisted deeper.

  On the page, Gideon was going on for an eternity and a half, specifying the differences between long nose pliers and nippers but, truth was, I didn’t care. I knew the only reason I continued to flip the jaundiced, grease-stained pages was because this journal had once belonged to him. Just seeing that curious cramped script of his—far less even and so much smaller than my own—made me feel as though he were standing next to me, instructing me on something yet again. And Gideon had liked to teach lessons...when he was alive.

  I shoved back at least fifty memories of my warm, funny, clever big brother, grasping for the emotional anesthesia that I knew cool over-analysis would bring—my default setting ever since he’d been gone. The same questions kept running through my head, but I didn’t have any answers.

  Why was this journal here? Why was I finding it now?

  But then I turned the page once more and read a line that made me stop short.

  The strangeness of what I saw left me struggling to inhale the musty air of the tool shed, and I felt tiny shivers sweep like lightning crackles across my skin.

  The date somewhere in the middle of the page was from April 1976, but notated in the upper right-hand corner was a much more recent date: Monday, May 29, 1978.

  Memorial Day. Less than two weeks ago.

  I checked and double checked the numbers, almost positive my eyesight was playing tricks on me in the dim light. I had to be misreading this. It couldn’t be real.

  A few months after Gideon disappeared, the cops told us he must be dead. Insisted it had to be true. And due to the force of everyone’s conviction, my parents and I had been persuaded to accept the police’s assessment…although, I could never quite squelch the flicker of hope that lurked in my heart and flared up at the oddest moments. I could never really stop believing that everyone might just be wrong.


  And now I had this.

  Underneath the recent date were the words: Start here. G.

  Logical or not, it was as if this were a message written just for me. Oh, God. Could it be?

  My brain swam in a soup of questions and possibilities, a mix of elements and matter. Whos, hows and whens. Origins and endings. My hidden flicker of hope burst into flame.

  There had been a lot of strangers filtering through our town over Memorial Day Weekend—visitors from places nearby, friends and relatives of residents, the occasional herd of curious wildlife—for the annual Chameleon Fest. Three days of hastily assembled carnival rides, taste tests, fireworks in the evening. A weekend of some small excitement in our otherwise sleepy lakeside village.

  And then the key to the cedar box reappeared.

  It had been lost for ages but, out of nowhere, it materialized again. In my room. In my desk. In my plastic paperclip tray.

  Gideon used to tease me about how much I loved personalized stationery and office supplies. All of my neatly stacked notepads. My smooth-writing Bic pens. My colored bulletin-board tacks. For a couple of days, I tried to dismiss my discovery. I tried to convince myself I’d just overlooked the key in my numbness of the past two years.

  But the jab of peculiarity pressed upon my senses and only grew stronger.

  It was too strange to have found the key there, buried beneath a sea of paperclips, since I knew I’d replenished them just a few weeks ago. Even in grief, I wasn’t someone who’d forget something like that. And I couldn’t keep denying my instincts.

  Standing here in the middle of the tool shed and holding Gideon’s journal, I knew for sure that finding this key couldn’t have been accidental. Like the trajectory of a pinball, if you were to hit the metal flapper so it connected with the ball in just the right, sweet spot, it would send the orb rolling with a smack, straight into the diamond center and—bing, bing, bing, bing, bing—you’d get the 10,000-point bonus.

  The person who put the key in my paperclip bin knew I’d eventually find it, recognize it and head to the tool shed to hunt down the cedar box.

  The person who put the key in my paperclip bin knew how organized I was, how much of a puzzle solver I’d always been and that I wouldn’t stop looking until I’d found the box, opened it and discovered the journal resting there.

  And the only someone who would know these things about me was my brother.

  Somehow, Gideon must have come into town on Memorial Day Weekend, snuck into the house while we were away and left the key for me, knowing the path he’d set me on.

  Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

  I felt myself slam into the 10,000-point bonus, my mind reeling. I tried to shake the mental machine hard enough to clear my head. Flash. Bing. Tilt.

  But it was too late. My world had already tilted and, suddenly, I knew I was playing a very different game.

  I WANDERED back to our house, my brain still swirling and Gideon’s voice—loud and insistent—in my mind.

  “You can’t tell,” I could almost hear him say. A line from our childhood that he’d used more than once when he was doing something dangerous.

  “Mom and Dad will freak,” he’d add. Then he’d laugh and try to reassure me.

  “Oh, stop worrying, Sis. They don’t have to know everything all the time.”

  “We’re not kids anymore. We can handle this.”

  “Trust me, it’ll be fine. Really.”

  And it usually was...until it wasn’t. Until, one day, he was gone.

  Any normal person would’ve ignored the pleading voice from the past and run, not walked, to the telephone, to call her still-grieving parents. To give them a surge of hope that their missing son might be alive after all. Because, oh, God—I didn’t want to witness even another minute of my parents’ pain. Not if it was within my power to stop it.

  But I wasn’t a totally normal person. I knew intuitively—with a mysterious certainty I’d come to expect and rely on—that this wasn’t what Gideon wanted. He didn’t want my parents to find the journal. He wanted me to find it.

  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 practically illegible,” 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.