The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  She kept us waiting longer than I’d expected but, thankfully, Donovan took my lead and allowed me to watch Amy Lynn’s reactions. He gave me time to carefully adjust my mannerisms until I felt the two of us girls were on a similar vibration. Until I could sense she was sure of us.

  To my eye, Amy Lynn might have given off an air of timidity at first glance, but I could feel a resolute core beneath her fragile appearance. When she smiled carefully and stepped back to allow us to enter, I got the distinct sense that she was, in fact, choreographing every move.

  Her first words to us weren’t greetings. Instead, she said, “You both resemble your brothers.” Then she turned to Donovan and added, “Especially you.”

  I watched him process this. While I didn’t understand him so well as to be able to gauge half of his responses in advance, I knew him well enough to realize an inquisition was coming. Soon.

  “How did you meet him?” Donovan asked almost immediately. He glanced at me for a split second, then back at Amy Lynn. “How did you meet them both—Jeremy and Gideon?”

  The slender woman nodded and motioned for us to sit down. My insides twisted wildly at the thought of her parting words on the phone and the questions that were burning my tongue. I couldn’t wait a second longer to ask, “And when did Gideon tell you we might be coming? How did he contact you?”

  But the other woman shook her head slightly and said, “I promise I’ll get to all of that. This—” She pointed at me then at Donovan then at herself. “This is all a little overwhelming for me, too. Just let me organize my thoughts so I can tell you both the whole story.”

  So, I was forced to bide my time, knowing it was too important a meeting to screw up with impatience. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t itching to hurry her along. And Donovan looked like he was about to jump out of his skin with restless anxiety.

  I forced myself to sit politely at the edge of the sofa, a foot away from Donovan, acutely aware of the tension straining his leg muscles, the rigidity of his torso and the pressure of his fingertips as they dug into the cushion between us, surely leaving angry indentations in the thinning fabric.

  But then, when Amy Lynn started to speak in a curiously measured and melodious voice, I began to lose myself in her story, as cleverly executed as if by a professional narrator.

  “I’ve been waiting to tell someone about this for a long time,” she said and, from my perspective, Amy Lynn did look more relieved than fearful. “In the spring of 1976, I’d just moved in with my new boyfriend, Patrick Bradley—everyone called him Treak—who was a couple of years older than me and a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.”

  She nodded at a copy she had of the newspaper on her coffee table.

  “I was an actress back then, only getting small parts in small theaters, and while I liked to think my big break was on the verge of finally happening, I suspected my life probably wouldn’t play out that way. That I wouldn’t end up being discovered and landing in a Broadway show or in a Hollywood movie. More likely, I was on the fast track to being either a strung-out hostess at an adults-only nightclub or a married mom juggling three kids and a sheepdog.” She laughed but I wasn’t reading a lot of genuine humor in her expression.

  “Anyway, I figured when Treak asked me to move into his south side apartment with him, this would be a better choice than doing lap dances at dive bars on Mannheim Road to pay for groceries, so I did.”

  Amy Lynn shrugged. “Back then, everybody who knew me called me by my stage name, Chelsea Carew. My parents lived in western Ohio, and I hadn’t bothered to get a driver’s license when I moved to Chicago because I didn’t have a car. Since most of my work transactions were done ‘under the table,’ so to speak, I avoided stuff like filing income taxes and, because I was crashing on the floors or the sofas of other actors’ apartments, my name never showed up on a lease. Turns out, the fact that I was pretty much an irresponsible adult probably saved my life.”

  Donovan was listening intently to her, and Amy Lynn, in turn, studied him carefully before continuing, her words something she seemed to weigh like fresh produce at the Grocery Mart.

  “One day, about a month after I moved in, Treak came home all excited because he’d finally gotten a lead on a big story he was working on. Only problem was that he’d need to be gone—out of town somewhere—to work on it. I wasn’t going to get to see him for at least a week. Maybe two.” She looked at us and then away. “The first few nights he was away, he’d call me and we’d chat. Things still seemed normal, but then his digging led him to this little town in Wisconsin. Crescent Cove.”

  I inhaled a sudden rush of air, but it didn’t help. Yet another link between my brother, his best friend and that Wisconsin town—it made me lightheaded.

  Start here, Gideon had written.

  I struggled not to slump back against the sofa cushions and cradle my head in my palms, but Amy Lynn noticed the change in me.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I forced a nod. “Yes, please go on. So, you’re saying your boyfriend followed some clues for a story and they led him to Crescent Cove?”

  “Yes,” Amy Lynn replied. “That’s where he eventually ended up. We were talking less frequently by then. He’d call only once every few days and usually just for five or ten minutes. He was hot on the trail of something, and he was busy with it for hours at a time. Almost all day and well into the night. The last time he called me was on July 1, 1976. It was a Thursday afternoon.”

  Donovan bowed his head, bit his lip and then said, in a very stilted voice, “Do you mean that was the last time Treak called you on that trip? Or the last time you ever heard from him?”

  “Both,” Amy Lynn replied.

  She let this sink in, belatedly asking if either of us wanted something to drink, almost enjoying the dramatic moment, I felt. Definitely a former actress.

  But, much as I hated the skilled performance and the pregnant pauses used to great effect, I also strongly sensed that there was very little exaggeration in Amy Lynn’s retelling. Sure, her delivery bordered on stagey, but the actress formerly known as Chelsea Carew didn’t need to heighten the tension with unnecessary theatrics. The real story provided more than enough natural drama.

  Donovan and I both declined a drink and pressed Amy Lynn to tell us what happened next.

  “Sunday morning, about two a.m. on the Fourth of July, I got a phone call out of nowhere from these guys I didn’t know. They sounded really scared, and just being shaken awake like that made me really scared, too. They told me I was in a lot of danger. That they had some stuff of Treak’s and had to give it to me, but that I needed to get myself somewhere safer first.”

  She slanted an odd smile at us. “Of course, I thought they were wackos, and I almost hung up on them. But one of the guys started listing all kinds of things he knew about me because of their conversations with my boyfriend. And then he listed all kinds of things he knew about Treak. And he said—I’ll never forget this—‘I know you don’t want to believe us, and I know you have to be freaking out getting this kind of a call, but we saw two men get blown up in an explosion tonight, and Treak was one of them. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you that, but I’ll be even sorrier if you get killed, too, when I could’ve helped prevent it. So take what you need. Take anything with your picture or with your name on it. Any important documents. Then get the hell out of there, Chelsea.’ And I listened to him,” Amy Lynn said. “That was how I met your brothers.”

  I tried to digest this. I knew, even without Amy Lynn telling me so, that Gideon was the one who had been listing things during that phone call.

  It was very much like him. I could picture all too well what had happened that night, at least from the point where there was an explosion at Bonner Mill—killing Ben Rainwater and the unknown man, who must have been Treak, I realized—and then Jeremy and Gideon racing out of Crescent Cove, stopping somewhere to call and warn Amy Lynn.

  But I still didn’t know what had set
off that chain of events. Who had caused the explosion and why. Although, thank God, it didn’t seem to be either of our brothers who’d done it—at least not on purpose.

  Donovan seemed to be thinking through this chronologically, too, and he was a few steps ahead of me.

  “If you left Treak’s apartment, how were Jeremy and Gideon able to find you?” he asked. “How long after that did you actually meet them in person?”

  Amy Lynn squinted a bit, remembering. “Well, I still didn’t totally trust them then, but I knew there was only one place in Chicago I could go to that no one in my current life knew about. It was my friend Karen’s place, and she lived on the far north side of the city. Unlike most of the people I hung around with, she wasn’t an aspiring actress, and she wasn’t someone who knew Treak and his small circle of friends either. She was a grad student at Northwestern.”

  “Living alone?” Donovan asked.

  “Yes, she did. So, I told Gideon and Jeremy that I’d meet them on the Evanston campus that afternoon, just outside of the student union. School wasn’t in session, of course, but there were always college kids roaming around, so I figured I could blend in with the crowd pretty well, especially on a national holiday.” She paused. “I knew it was them the second I saw them, though. They looked real jumpy and they were the only two people on the lawn who weren’t smiling.”

  “Did the three of you talk right there? At the student union?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “We didn’t go in, but we found a private area to one side of the building where we could talk without being interrupted and where no one would be able to hear our whispers. Gideon and Jeremy introduced themselves to me and showed me the business card they’d gotten from Treak. That’s how they’d known which phone number to call. They showed me other papers of his, too. Some notes he’d taken on this story he was working on. I was pretty much a mess, though, and I could barely concentrate on what they were saying at first. I hadn’t slept since they’d awakened me, and the fact that a guy I liked a lot, someone I was living with, might really be dead had just begun to sink in.”

  Just remembering that day made Amy Lynn look shaken and pale. I knew how she felt. Even two years later, whenever I thought back on that moment when we first suspected Gideon and Jeremy were missing, not just out having fun somewhere, I felt a dark wave of nausea.

  “The whole day was as bizarre as it was scary,” Amy Lynn admitted. “It didn’t feel real to me at all, even though I’d done what they said. I’d all but erased evidence of myself from Treak’s apartment. I threw my clothes, photo albums, important papers and a few keepsakes—I didn’t have much—into one large suitcase. Then I grabbed my playbills, a few 8-tracks and cassettes, Treak’s address book and a gold chain with a St. Christopher’s medallion that he’d loved because it had once been his grandfather’s. The patron saint of travelers. I wish he would have worn it to Wisconsin,” she said wistfully.

  “Anyway, I stuffed those things in my bag, too, and took my purse, filling it with whatever cash I could find. I also raided Treak’s private dresser drawer, where he kept a couple of emergency one-hundred-dollar bills. My secret worry was that Gideon and Jeremy were lying to me, and that Treak would come home that day and think I’d robbed him and then left him without even a note.” She shuddered. “It was horrible to imagine how betrayed he’d feel, but that was only because I was avoiding trying to accept that your brothers might not be lying. But then, when I saw the two of them—”

  “Yes?” Donovan prompted.

  “Then the horror of it hit me hard. They seemed too frightened, both for themselves and for me, to be making it all up. I’d been around lots of actors. Good ones. Bad ones. Not even the exceptionally gifted ones could’ve pulled off that kind of fear.”

  Amy Lynn suddenly stood and started pacing around the room, her own very composed performance having begun to unravel at last.

  “Turned out, Jeremy and Gideon weren’t just here to tell me about what happened to Treak and this guy named Ben Rainwater,” she said, “but they also wanted me to fill in some gaps for them. The part of the story they didn’t know. Stuff about his reporter’s life before he went to Crescent Cove. And, while I could give them a little more information, there were huge chunks I didn’t know myself.”

  My head began to throb. A low but rising ache that started behind my eyes and pulsed outward. A sob I’d tried to contain threatened to come out if I didn’t get more answers. But I had so many questions…I didn’t know which to ask first.

  “What did they say about Treak and Ben?” I said. “How did your boyfriend even know Ben Rainwater?”

  “Treak didn’t know him. Not until he went up to Crescent Cove,” Amy Lynn replied. “At the time, all I knew about the story Treak was working on was that it involved some shady Chicago union stuff. Something about problems in the city because of the power struggles between the workers’ unions—mostly the Teamsters—and the mob. Reporters were covering all different angles, but the one Treak was working on led him to a trucker from out of state. A guy from Wisconsin.”

  “From Crescent Cove,” Donovan murmured.

  The woman nodded. “Treak went up there to investigate, and he met Ben Rainwater after a few days. Ben was an amateur filmmaker, did you know that?”

  We shook our heads.

  “From what Treak said, Ben was just getting started. He’d bought an 8mm camera a few months before and was filming things for fun, whenever he had time, and trying to learn the best shots. He worked in his cousin’s shop—some little grocery store, I guess—but filming was his passion. Treak liked him right away and said he was a natural behind the camera. Told me Ben was going to show him some film footage that he’d shot in and around the town.” She paused. “That was our last conversation.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Me, too,” Amy Lynn said. She bit her lip and inhaled a few times. “Anyway, I came to the same conclusion that you’re probably coming to now. That the filmmaker caught something on camera he wasn’t supposed to see. Your brothers knew all about it. They’d seen the film, too. They were in Crescent Cove that weekend and they’d actually watched it with Treak and Ben. That film reel was one of the things they brought me, along with a few pages of my boyfriend’s notes.”

  “Where is it? The film?” Donovan said, speaking softly but it came across as a demand nonetheless. “And what’s on it?”

  “It’s in a safe place,” she replied. “I only watched it once, by myself, a few weeks after they gave it to me. And I only half understood what I was seeing.”

  “Can we see it?” he asked, his breath shallower than normal. “Please?”

  “Of course,” Amy Lynn said. “I’d already planned to show you. But I’d need to borrow a projector. I might be able to arrange to do that tomorrow. The landlord is a friend of mine, and I know he has one, but he won’t be home until really late tonight.”

  Donovan, quite clearly, didn’t look like he could be that patient.

  I was feeling my own frustrations rising. If there were answers to be had, I wanted them now. “You must have some idea of what your boyfriend was uncovering in Crescent Cove,” I said to her. “Just from talking to our brothers and reading Treak’s notes. It had to be something really big to put them all in such danger.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So big that Treak didn’t want to talk about it on the phone. So big that I had to pull the details out of your brothers. They were afraid to tell me more than they had to when they saw me because, in their opinion, the less I knew, the safer I was.”

  She peered out the window. “They made me promise on my grandmother’s grave that I wouldn’t contact the police or report Treak missing. That I would go back to using my real name, cut off contact with the people I knew from my actress life and stay away from Treak’s apartment. That if the cops were to ever manage to piece together that Chelsea Carew and Amy Lynn Dreamson were the same person, I should deny knowing anything more about Treak’
s disappearance. I was just supposed to say that he was a jerk who’d left me one day and never came back. That I had no idea why.”

  Her expression turned hard as she stopped pacing and sank into a chair across from us. “I can’t express just how difficult it was to try to absorb all of this that day. I’d taken the train up to my friend’s place, and Karen let me in at six a.m. without any questions. But what your brothers were asking me to do was going to require me to explain at least a few things to her, and I didn’t want to do that if I didn’t have to. Especially if this was all so dangerous.”

  She massaged her forehead for a moment. “The Bicentennial fireworks were set for that night. It was a big deal, so I watched them with Karen and a few of her friends, and then I slept like the dead afterward because I was so exhausted. The next day was a Monday, but it was a holiday because the Fourth of July had been on Sunday. I couldn’t stop thinking about Treak and everything that happened in the past twenty-four hours.”

  I remembered that weekend well. Gideon had been gone on overnight trips before, so my family didn’t panic at first when he hadn’t shown up for the big fireworks celebration. But when, after a whole weekend away, he wasn’t there on Monday either, or on Tuesday…

  Amy Lynn said, “The first time I could slip away was on Monday afternoon. I took the train back down to the old neighborhood—just to see if Treak’s car was there. Maybe peek in the apartment and check for any last things I should bring along. But I didn’t even go in the building. His Chevy was nowhere in sight, but there were three cop cars lined up outside, and I could see a couple of officers milling around inside his second-floor apartment as I looked up from the street into his front window. I hid in the shadow of the doorway of the apartment complex across the street and watched for half an hour as policemen went in empty-handed and came out carting boxes of Treak’s files.”