The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  “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 any 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?

  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 directions for some automotive procedure—about half a page’s worth—which I read to Donovan, even when it got a little embarrassing:

  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:

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

  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:

  “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:

  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 late
r.

  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.