The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  She shivered in the summer heat. “It was awfully strange that they’d shown up there so fast, taking his papers with them. And I knew then that your brothers had been right to warn me. To be scared. There was something really off about the cops raiding his place. Treak wasn’t, perhaps, the one true love of my life, but he was an honest man. A dedicated reporter. And a seeker of the truth. Whatever the police were looking for, I didn’t get the sense that it was to protect him.”

  Her expression pleaded with us to understand. She’d cared about Treak Bradley—as a friend and fellow human, if not as a lover. And I could tell he’d been kind to her when few others had. She was helping us because, even two years after he was dead, she still wanted to help him.

  “Something about the intensity of the cops made me think that whatever the police were looking for wasn’t just about him,” Amy Lynn said. “I doubted he would’ve been important enough for that kind of attention and focus. I think they were looking for something else. Some dirt on someone or, maybe, a way to protect somebody or some group. I felt like I’d dodged a heck of a lot of trouble, thanks to your brothers, and I hoped that Treak’s work wouldn’t be in vain. Especially after I saw his obituary in the Chicago Tribune a week later.”

  She grimaced. “It read to me like a monstrous lie, and I don’t know if that was the fault of the press or the cops. All I know is that the paper wrote he’d been killed in ‘a car accident in rural Wisconsin’ on Independence Day. That there were no witnesses but ‘evidence at the scene’ showed he’d been driving too fast and had collided with a cement divider. That there was an explosion and his body was badly burned, so much so that his grieving parents in Indiana were sent only his ashes. Now wasn’t that convenient?” Amy Lynn’s bitterness at this was impossible to hide. “I knew then that my old life had ended.”

  Yours wasn’t the only one.

  “Could we, maybe, take a look at his notes in a bit?” I asked. “I don’t know if anything written in them will stand out as a clue, but it’s possible Donovan or I might recognize something.”

  Amy Lynn nodded. “You can try. I’ll pull them out for you later and you guys can see if you’re able to make anything of them. To me, it was gobbledygook.”

  I glanced at Donovan. He looked beat. Like he’d gone twelve rounds against Muhammad Ali and was lucky to still be upright. Processing all of this new information was exhausting, I knew, but I still had a lot of questions. There were tons of things Donovan and I would need to know just to fill in a small portion of our brothers’ story. I was about to ask my most pressing question—the one that made my heart rise into my throat just thinking about it—when Donovan abruptly jumped up.

  “Anyone hungry?” he asked.

  I stared at him.

  Amy Lynn tilted her head to one side as if not quite comprehending the question.

  He tried again. “I’m starving. Is there somewhere close to here where I could pick up a snack for us? Burgers, pizza, anything like that?”

  “There’s a Roma’s on Cicero,” Amy Lynn said, pointing out her window. “They’ve got Chicago-style hot dogs, sausage and Italian beef sandwiches.”

  “Okay,” Donovan said quickly.

  “Or—” She wandered into her kitchenette and peered into a couple of cupboards. “I have noodles. I could cook those up instead with a little tomato sauce and—”

  “No,” he blurted. “No, thank you. That’s very generous of you, but I don’t want you to go to any trouble.” He paced the room like a caged baby Bengal. “How do I get to this hot dog joint?”

  “It’s a green-topped building—you can’t miss it. It’s just north of the Six Corners shopping area, where Cicero, Milwaukee and Irving Park Road all meet. A three-minute drive. Maybe a fifteen-minute walk.”

  “I’m just going to walk down there and grab a few to go. It sounds perfect.”

  I offered to go along but he immediately shot down that idea.

  “What would you ladies like?” he asked. “You each want one? Two?”

  Amy Lynn smiled kindly back at him. “One is plenty for me, thank you.”

  I didn’t feel the need to eat anything, but it was obvious he was desperate to get out of the apartment and be alone. So I held up an index finger to signal “one” and said, “Thanks, Donovan.” He sent me one of the most grateful looks I’d ever seen.

  “Yeah, no problem. I’ll be back in about a half hour or so.” He was in the hallway before I could even say, “Okay.”

  “It’s a lot to take in,” Amy Lynn said to me, her voice gentle. “Why don’t we take a break, too. You must be tired. Would you like some coffee? Wine?” Then she regarded me more intently for a moment. “How old are you, Aurora?”

  “Almost eighteen,” I said. “And thanks, but I’m fine. Maybe I’ll have some water or something in a bit. I probably need to splash my face with it more than drink it, though.” I laughed. “I want to be able to stay awake a lot longer, but I’m wearing out. It’s been an action-packed day.”

  “Where are you and Donovan staying tonight?”

  “Not sure yet,” I admitted. “Honestly, we didn’t get that far in our planning. We were just trying to figure out any information we could from my brother’s journal.” I explained how I’d guessed at what Amy Lynn’s real last name was from the description Gideon had written next to her first name.

  “Clever guy,” Amy Lynn said.

  “He was. I mean, he is.” My hopefulness surged every time I thought about that, although there was a big “but” attached to it. But, if he was alive out there like I wanted to believe, even if he’d seen or heard something horrible, was it still impossible…still too dangerous…for him to come forward?

  “You’re clever, too, Aurora.”

  I mumbled, “Thanks,” but I didn’t feel as smart as I would have if I’d have just ignored the cops’ dismissal of me and worked harder at figuring out what had happened two summers ago. I should’ve trusted my intuition from the start and not wasted all of this time. Time when Gideon must have urgently needed my help. A glance at the clock told me it was after eight p.m. already, and I realized I owed my parents a phone call.

  “May I use your telephone?” I asked. “My mom and dad in Minnesota are expecting a call from me, but I’ll reverse the charges.”

  “Go right ahead.” The other woman pointed to the phone and left the room to give me a few minutes of privacy. The operator dialed my parents’ number, asking my father if he’d accept a collect call from me, which, of course, he did.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said, filling him in briefly on our long driving day and our arrival in the Chicago area. “I’ve only got a couple of minutes, but I wanted to let you know that everything’s going really well so far. We were just talking with someone who’s familiar with the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, and we’ll check it out tomorrow,” I told him, which was kind of true. At least the first half of the sentence.

  There was a long pause on the line. “Have you learned anything…new?” he asked carefully.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “It’s…mostly helpful news, but I’ll, um, find out more tomorrow. And we’ll talk again then.”

  He asked how Donovan was treating me—if he was being “a gentleman”—and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, yeah. He’s been fine, Dad. Don’t worry about that. He just went out to get us some more food.” And to walk off some of his edginess and fear. Then I changed the subject and told him to give my love to Mom, who was in the bath. I said that, really and truly, everything was okay. “Better than okay,” I insisted.

  It took another minute of assurances, but I was finally able to hang up. It was going to get harder, I knew, to pile on the falsehoods if our trip lasted for more than a week. Much more challenging to tell fractional truths as the chasm between what we were really doing and what we said we were doing continued to expand.

  Even if my father knew enough to understand that a search for Gideon and Jeremy played a part in this road trip, he d
idn’t know about the journal. He didn’t know anything about Crescent Cove, Ben Rainwater, Treak Bradley or the Bonner Mill explosion. And I couldn’t explain any of it over the phone, even if I’d wanted to.

  Not only was it too chancy—he might tell someone he shouldn’t—but I was also worried he’d react too strongly to the news that his son was most likely still alive. He was like Donovan that way. He’d slammed the door on any hope that my brother and his friend had survived.

  When Dad had given his permission for this trip, all he’d really wanted was for our family to finally get closure on Gideon’s death. To find out for sure what had happened. Why Gideon and Jeremy had left town. I knew my father had no idea I was tracking Gideon himself. Veering right onto the path where my brother had last tread and all but walking in his footsteps.

  Dad would not like the potential danger of that—not one little bit.

  Amy Lynn returned to the room. “I brought the notes,” she said, setting a thin manila folder down on her small glass coffee table. She glanced at the telephone. “Everything okay?”

  I nodded. “Yes, thanks. Just overprotective parents.”

  “I’d be overprotective, too, in their shoes,” she admitted.

  Donovan knocked on the door and, when Amy Lynn opened it for him, he strode into the room with a bag filled with warm hot dogs and fries. They smelled so good, I actually felt a pang of hunger.

  He pulled out one Chicago dog for Amy Lynn, one for me and two for himself.

  “Only two for you?” I teased.

  “Only two left,” he retorted. “I had my first one on the walk back. Good stuff.”

  I grinned at him and Amy Lynn, who’d been watching our exchange with interest, laughed a little. She likes us. More than she thought she would.

  This feeling was confirmed a few minutes later when Amy Lynn said, around a mouthful of hot dog, “I know we’re going to be up late tonight, talking and looking through these papers.” She waved her hand in the direction of the manila folder. “And then there’s the film reel we need to see in the morning. It’s silly for you two to leave here and stay at some motel. I don’t have a lot of space—” She glanced around her one-bedroom apartment. “But I do have the sofa, a sleeping bag and extra pillows and blankets. You could crash here tonight, if you’d like.”

  A few conflicting emotions flashed across Donovan’s face. I wasn’t sure what they all meant, but one of them was appreciation. And rightly so. Amy Lynn was being very generous to us.

  But a tight feeling of jealousy strangled me a bit when I suspected that another of Donovan’s emotions might be attraction. The pixie blonde was closer to his age than I was. And pretty, in a very delicate way. More worldly than the kind of women he ran into in Chameleon Lake. A woman who’d lived with a man before. Not an inexperienced teenager, like me.

  If that was the case, though, Donovan didn’t seem to dwell on it. Instead, he said to her, “Are you sure?”

  I, however, knew our hostess’s answer before she verbalized it. Amy Lynn had been watching the way Donovan and I had been interacting all evening and, to some degree, envying it. Her obvious relief at having unburdened herself of a dark, two-year secret must have buoyed her and made her want to continue our private party for longer.

  So Donovan made one more trip downstairs—this time to check our parking space to make sure we could stay there until morning and, also, to retrieve our bags from the trunk of his Trans Am. Then the three of us got settled in for the night.

  Amy Lynn was right about Treak’s notes—they did look like gobbledygook. I recognized some of the squiggly lines as shorthand symbols, but I couldn’t read them. I didn’t have the kind of knowledge about the dead reporter that I had about my brother either, which was the only way I’d managed to decipher anything at all in Gideon’s journal—and that had been written in standard English.

  Still, I laboriously traced the three half-sheets of paper that had belonged to Treak and were his only remaining clues to us. Amy Lynn gave me some thin typing paper for the task, encouraging us to keep a copy but to be careful with it. And finally, when I was finished, I asked again the question that had been haunting me since I first made the phone call to Amy Lynn that afternoon. God, was it only five hours ago?

  “How did you know we were coming?” I murmured, unable to tolerate the suspense of this even a second longer. “On the phone you said Gideon had told you to expect us. H-How did he communicate with you? Has he called? Stopped by in person?”

  It was at that moment, when Amy Lynn tilted her fair-haired head in confusion again, that I began to realize that, no matter how many questions Donovan and I had already asked, there were a billion more still unanswered.

  Amy Lynn must have realized it, too, because she didn’t immediately reply. Instead, she went to a desk drawer and pulled out a couple pieces of mail.

  She crossed back to me and held out two postcards that had been sent in envelopes. The first one had a picture of some weird cactus-like sculpture thing on the front and a Northern Arizona University “School of Art” logo. The smudged white envelope was sent to Amy Lynn at her friend Karen’s place and postmarked September 8, 1976, Flagstaff, Arizona. More than two months after the guys had disappeared. There was no return address.

  On the back of the card, in Gideon’s distinctive script, were the words:

  Much worse than I thought. Be careful. Will write again if it’s ever safe to share anything. G.

  I pressed my lips together tight, remembering the “funeral” services we’d had for the guys just a few months after this postcard had been sent. Hard to believe we may have all suffered through that day unnecessarily and, yet, I couldn’t help but hope that was the case.

  Mutely, I handed the card to Donovan and I looked at the second one. The image on the front was of a row of painted Cadillacs, each stuck in the ground at about a forty-five degree angle. My brother was definitely going for “bizarre local attractions” as his correspondence theme.

  This envelope was light beige, and the postmark stamped it as being from Amarillo, Texas, June 12, 1978. Dated less than a week ago! Again, no return address, but he’d sent it to Amy Lynn’s Chicago apartment. How had he known where she lived now? The phonebook?

  I held my breath as I read the words on the card:

  My sister will probably be passing through Chicago soon. Why not show her a movie? G.

  It, too, was in his handwriting, and it showcased both his sly sense of humor and his proclivity for enigmatic wording. Real proof that he was alive. (Hallelujah!) But, also, that he’d both planned this wild goose chase we were on and made sure it was being orchestrated in the way he’d expected.

  Oh, Gideon, don’t you understand? This hurts. Where are you leading us, and why this crazy game? You seem so close, like we might run into you around any corner, but yet…

  It was all getting to be too much for me. The hope mixed with the confusion. The ambiguities I had to hold in my head and in my heart.

  Ever since I’d found my brother’s journal, I could feel my wall of pseudo-strength cracking. Piece by piece. The pain of him being gone had been so strong, so powerful, I’d forced it back...but I couldn’t keep doing that. Not if he might really be out there.

  A sob that had been lodged deep in my windpipe rose up and pushed its way to my lips, gashing through my defenses and shattering the silence in the room. I heard the pain in my own cry and it made me sink to the floor.

  Donovan knelt beside me. He gently put his hand on my shoulder, comforting me, and then slowly wedged the second postcard from my grip, scanning the words once. Then scanning them again.

  If I was having a hard time dealing with the vagaries of our brothers’ behavior and the mysterious, hazardous situation they’d somehow found themselves in, I could only imagine what Donovan’s reaction to the second card would be.

  I found out soon enough.

  He shook his head. “It’s a lie,” he stated. “This can’t be real. And I’m
gonna fucking kill whoever’s faking it.” Then he jumped up and stormed out of the room while I buried my face in my hands and wept for all of us.

  IT WASN’T until over an hour later that Donovan returned for the night. He mumbled an apology, first to Amy Lynn and then to me, but he didn’t offer any explanation of his whereabouts, nor did he want to discuss our brothers any more that evening. I could tell he’d reached his saturation point. Truth was, so had I.

  All of us were exhausted anyway. During his absence, Amy Lynn and I had put together two makeshift beds—one for Donovan in a sleeping bag on the carpet, and one for me on the sofa. Tired as I was, though, I knew I wouldn’t be getting much sleep.

  It was destined to be a restless night for Donovan, too. I closed my eyes, willing myself to relax, but he was only a few feet away, and I could see him flipping, shifting, attempting to get comfortable on the floor. When, finally, he did drift off, he was still in an uneasy state—wrestling, no doubt, with the demons that were Jeremy’s memory and his own latent guilt, and mumbling angry words directed, I sensed, at my brother. Something about Amarillo and that Cadillac Ranch.

  In my case, my mind kept replaying the memorial service we’d had for our brothers when they still hadn’t returned after several months and everyone—particularly the police—had presumed them dead. There had been the loud sobbing of some family and friends. The utter silence of others. Like me…and like Donovan. Our mutual grief stabbing invisible holes in the serene air of the church.

  I remembered my parents holding hands, bracing each other for support. And I remembered Donovan’s mom and stepfather, with a palm’s span of light between them, the first noticeable fissure of what would eventually lead to their separation some months afterward.

  I always knew I wouldn’t have stayed in Chameleon Lake had it not been for Gideon and Jeremy’s disappearance. But it occurred to me that I didn’t know what Donovan would have done differently if this tragedy hadn’t befallen our families. He’d left our hometown when he was eighteen. I seriously doubted he would have ever returned for more than a long weekend, even after he finished his stint in the service.