The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  But I strongly disagreed and he knew I’d argue with him. And, also, there were his growing questions about Jeremy.

  He didn’t openly say anything about it, of course, but I recognized it in the way he dealt with any new detail we’d gleaned in some way from Gideon. The postcards, in particular, bothered Donovan. Especially the one sent earlier this month.

  My brother was being his typical cryptic self when it came to communication, but the fact that Gideon knew we’d be heading toward Chicago meant he was confident in both his ability to orchestrate our direction and, also, in our ability to correctly follow along. I got the sense he’d almost been monitoring us. The natural question that arose was where were Jeremy’s hints and clues? Had Donovan missed them, or had Jeremy just never sent any?

  After a day and a half spent scouring old newspaper clippings and ambling down the streets of St. Louis in hopes of making some new connections, I asked Donovan to just get us to the next city mentioned in Gideon’s journal—Joplin, Missouri—find us a place to stay and give me some space there to lay out all of my collected papers and notes. I had a few questions I wanted to get down on paper.

  To his credit, he did this and without even too much grumbling.

  While Donovan left for a half hour to scrounge up something that might resemble a dinner, I used the bed in our motel room to spread out every map, scribble of notes and sheet of paper we had in our possession—anything that had anything to do with our brothers—and I flipped over the largish construction-paper calendar on the wall to use the blank back side as my personal writing board.

  When Donovan returned bearing Cokes, sliced turkey sandwiches and a bag of Oreos—“Dinner of champions,” he informed me—I went through each item with him, one at a time.

  “Okay, we’ve got the placemat that shows the Route 66 cities and famous attractions,” I said. “Our road atlas, which shows the Interstates as well. We’ve got Gideon’s postcards, Treak’s notes and the journal.”

  I tapped the Joplin page with my index finger. “This entry is more promising than the St. Louis one because that only had some car parts at the top and, then, ‘Cardinal Town,’ the fake date and the equation on the bottom. Here we have at least a few more things written down, especially beneath the ink change.”

  The more I looked at my brother’s journal, the more I was convinced my earliest hunch about it was right—that it was a parallel record. That Gideon had the original entries already in the book and, in adding notes beneath them, had found a safe and convenient place to record his journey with Jeremy. On this point, at least, Donovan didn’t seem to question my instincts too much.

  He picked up the journal and read the first part of the entry aloud:

  He didn’t bother to hide his exasperation when he glanced my way. “Are you kidding? He wrote down nine steps for this—a job that’s even easier to do than draining coolant. Maybe your brother was planning to teach a car-maintenance class to a group of kindergarteners someday.”

  I glared at him.

  He ignored me, split open the bag of Oreos and continued reading from the point where the ink changed.

  He looked at me blankly. “So, you think this is useful?”

  I nodded. “We know the real date they were here was July twenty-fifth. May plus two months is July. Twenty-three plus two days is twenty-five. And then he makes three references to the movie ‘The Sting,’ so that has to mean something important.” I knew I didn’t have to explain to Donovan that “The Entertainer” was used as the musical theme for the film. It was so famous, even people who hadn’t watched the Redford-Newman picture knew that.

  He reached for a cookie, twisted it and ate half. “It was a good flick,” he said, chewing. “Been a few years since it was out. You see it in the theater?”

  I told him I had. “But I mostly just remember that Robert Redford and Paul Newman were con artists. It was a complicated plot. I don’t remember who Lonnegan and Snyder were.” Leave it to my brother to give us a clue like this. He’d loved that movie.

  Donovan handed me the bag of Oreos and paced to the window and back. “One was a Chicago mob boss and the other was a corrupt police lieutenant. And there was a woman, too. Loretta. She was dangerous.”

  “Sounds like you remember it well.”

  He shrugged. “I saw it a couple of times. Once with a few Army buds. And I took Jeremy to it when I was home on leave. It came out around Christmas.” He paused. “Jeremy laughed like crazy when Newman and Redford’s characters pulled off their sting operation. Pretty sure he and your brother went to see it again.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure they did, too.”

  We didn’t say anything for a few minutes after that.

  “So what do you think he’s saying?” Donovan asked. “That he and Jeremy were trying to con a bad cop and a crime boss?” He snatched the bag of cookies again and twisted another one open. “I wasn’t getting that from what Amy Lynn told us.”

  “No, I didn’t get that either,” I said, “but it may have something to do with the story Treak was working on. He was from Chicago and, based on what we learned at Amy Lynn’s, I really don’t think Treak was one of the bad guys. She said he was investigating some mob-related stuff, so, maybe, he accidentally stumbled upon something like this.”

  Donovan made a weird face but he didn’t tell me it was a completely stupid idea.

  I reread the line my brother had written about the mob boss and the cop:

  And bad guys = Lonnegan and Snyder, just like real life

  “It’s the ‘just like real life’ part that’s making me think that,” I said. “But he’s also careful to say that Joplin wasn’t quite ‘The Entertainer.’ Maybe it was a play on words to confuse people. We know he was following Route 66 and went through Joplin, Missouri. Maybe someone else reading it would think he was talking about Scott Joplin, though, the composer of the song.”

  Donovan ate another Oreo then rummaged through the bag of food for his sandwich and bottle of Coke. “Thirsty? Want me to open yours?” He had a bottle cap opener on his keychain and deftly popped the top off of his drink.

  “In a few minutes,” I said. “I want to show you the rest of this stuff.”

  He sighed. “Okay.” He took a swig of Coke and plopped down beside me on the bed, scrunching the corners of my copied shorthand pages from Treak’s notes.

  “Careful,” I said, rescuing them from under his leg. “We need to decode these. Like tomorrow. There’s got to be a library in town that has books on how to read and write shorthand. Maybe we can puzzle it out while we’re there.”

  “I’m always going to libraries with you…” he murmured.

  “Yeah, well, that’s because they’re wonderful.”

  “Sure.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  My temper ignited. “Donovan, you were willing to defend our country’s freedoms when you joined the Army. But what’s the use of having freedom of speech and freedom of the press if people don’t have a place where they can read what others have written? If they don’t have free public access to information? Libraries give that access to everybody.”

  He started humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “Only if you get off your soapbox, Aurora.” He shot me an annoyed look. “I don’t know how you’re jumping to half of these conclusions, but fine. We’ll go to the library—your little utopia—and you can look things up.”

  “Good. And while we’re there, we need to check out what was happening in Joplin and along the westward course of Route 66 two years ago. Any news stories that might be connected with Chicago, Crescent Cove or our brothers.”

  He pointed to the construction paper calendar I’d flipped over. “What’s that?”

  “This is my list of questions—or, at least, the start of it. Things we need to know but don’t yet.” I read him what I’d written so far:

  1. Who was the bad guy/cop at Bonner Mill—the one who killed Ben and Treak and who
threw the pipe bombs at Gideon and Jeremy?

  2. What did Treak find out that led him up to Crescent Cove initially and what information is in his notes?

  3. Why did the Chicago police want Treak’s files and who wrote the report that said his car was destroyed in an accident?

  4. Who got rid of our brothers’ possessions at the hotel and confiscated Gideon’s car?

  5. What kept Gideon and Jeremy from ever feeling they were safe enough to call home or send a letter to us to let us know they were okay?

  “Can you think of a number six?” I asked Donovan.

  “Not right now.” He abruptly got off the bed and drank more of his Coke.

  “If either of us thinks of anything else, we can add it later. There are lots and lots of little questions, but I think these are the biggest ones,” I said. Which was a lie. I knew there was at least one huge question neither of us was willing to say aloud: If we ever saw our brothers again, would they be the same as we remembered?

  Donovan said he’d “had enough detective crap” for one day, so we spent the rest of the evening unwinding and watching “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley,” just because it was Tuesday night.

  The shows reminded me of Betsy and her love of the Fifties. I didn’t feel that same sentimentality for any prior decade, but I wondered if—someday, in the distant future—I’d get all nostalgic about the Seventies. Look at it through rose-colored glasses. Think of it as an easier, simpler, more fun time.

  Maybe, but that was hard to imagine.

  THE NEXT day we arrived at the Joplin Carnegie Library with our mission laid out before us and I, for one, had no intention of leaving until we’d accomplished it.

  “Impressive,” even Donovan had to admit, taking in the three-story, four-columned entrance of the white edifice on the corner of Wall and Ninth Streets.

  I couldn’t guess at the style of architecture, but it looked like one of those ancient Roman buildings.

  “And it’s old,” he added, pointing to a stone inscription that read: “The Gift of Andrew Carnegie. To the City of Joplin. 1902.”

  “Carnegie was a great supporter of libraries,” I said. “He’d financed a lot of them. Unlike you, he was someone who believed in their importance, both to the individual and to the community.”

  Donovan cocked his head. “Oh, what a dreamboat,” he said in full mockery. “Too bad you didn’t know him personally. He would’ve been the perfect boyfriend for you.”

  I couldn’t think of a snappy answer to that, so I just huffed and pushed past him on my way into the library and onto my quest to find the card catalog.

  After a quick search of their nonfiction collection, I located several possible books on shorthand, needing only to narrow down which form Treak used in his notes—either the Pitman or the Gregg style—since both were widely used. In the stacks, I pulled out a representative copy of each and compared them to the notes I’d brought along.

  “These two shorthand forms are similar,” I told Donovan, “but if you look at the width of the Gregg characters, it doesn’t vary. With the Pitman style, there are different thicknesses in some places.” I pointed to Treak’s notes. “I don’t see any variation here, so I think he learned the Gregg version.”

  “Yeah, all right,” he said, looking impatient. “Now what?”

  “Now, we try to decode what Treak wrote. I’m going to sit over there.” I indicated a small table toward the back. “Help me if you want. If you don’t, that’s fine. Go look at old newspapers or try to dig up any regional news from two summers ago or something. I’m going to need at least an hour for this. Maybe longer.”

  Donovan, no doubt realizing that decoding shorthand was a one-person job and he wasn’t that person, meandered to another section of the library and left me in peace.

  I spread out the pages I’d copied from Treak’s notes and opened the Gregg shorthand book to the quick reference chart. Squiggle by tedious squiggle, I matched the lines on the notes with the corresponding sounds from the chart. I knew it wouldn’t be exact, but I hoped I’d get close enough to figure out most of the words.

  Eventually, Donovan strode back in to check on my progress. He squinted over my shoulder at the sheet of notebook paper where I’d been writing the words down as I decoded them. “What’s a ‘halchaney’?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “At this point, I’m just trying to get all the major sounds written down so I can look at Treak’s notes as a whole. Then I’ll scan for patterns, sentence breaks and anything that might be meaningful.”

  He ran his fingers along his hairline and, then, down his sideburns. Pausing. Thinking. Evaluating. “You like this kind of thing, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean? I don’t know anything about shorthand,” I said. “I know I probably should’ve taken it in high school, but it was an elective and I was pretty distracted my last couple of years, so I wasn’t—”

  “Not what I’m saying, Aurora.” He crossed his arms and tapped his fingertips near each elbow, slapping the skin. “I meant the code part. The solving of the mystery. Your brother’s journal with all its weird little clues. The big puzzle behind it. You like that sort of stuff.”

  He didn’t say it like an accusation—not exactly—but it was clear he didn’t share my interest in problem solving as a form of entertainment. I wasn’t about to tell him how I used to love reading mysteries or the thousand times Gideon and I wrote in code to each other when we were kids. He already thought I was strange enough.

  “Swear to God, Donovan, if you start in again on the Nancy Drew name calling—”

  “Did I say anything about that?” He shot me an irritated look. “Listen, it was just an observation. Seems to me it’s the kind of thing someone who should go to college would like. You know, it fits you. Shows you’re bright. That’s all.” Then, before I could manage any kind of reply, he spun on his sneaker sole and said, “I’ll be back in another half hour.”

  By the time he returned, I had most of Treak’s shorthand symbols decoded into sounds, and what I saw on the page was starting to take shape into something almost recognizable.

  “It seems like a list of names,” I told Donovan. “See this first one?” I pointed to the word halchaney, which he’d seen before. “It looks like there’s a space between the ‘l’ and the ‘c.’ So, maybe, it’s actually Hal Chaney. The reason I think so is, also, because of what comes after it. There’s the phrase Americana Trucking, like it’s a company he owns or works for. And, after that, it’s Cres Cove, Chic, MO, TX, NM, which I’m betting is ‘Crescent Cove, Chicago, Missouri, Texas and New Mexico.’ Does that make sense to you?”

  Donovan nodded. “But Hal Chaney?” he said. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “I don’t know. Below it are some other names and places that follow.” I whispered the full list to him aloud:

  Hal Chaney - Americana Trucking - Cres Cove, Chic, MO, TX, NM

  Vincent Leto - Chic

  Rick Brice - Chic

  Sebastian James - Chic

  Timothy Wick - Americana Trucking, Jop, Amar

  Billy Neville - Albuq

  Julian Carello - Chic

  “I’ve never heard of any of these people,” he said. “They can’t be famous. At least not to an average American.”

  “Maybe not. But for some reason they were important to Treak. We should check every reference source we can lay our hands on to try to figure out who at least a few of them are and what they do,” I said. “Microfilm. Phonebooks. Newspapers. Periodical indexes. Anything at our disposal.”

  “Is this everything Treak had listed?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “There was one more section.” I showed him the last page. “It’s mostly numbers, as you can see in this left-hand column. The shorthand words to the right vary, but each of them is a city. There were several mentions of Chicago and St. Louis, a few of Joplin and Amarillo, an Oklahoma City and an Albuquerque.”

  “All pl
aces along Route 66.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But no idea what the numbers mean?”

  “Not yet,” I said. They had to mean something, though, and the quicker I could figure out little details like these, the quicker we might be able to track down Gideon.

  Donovan was staring at the list of names again. “I’m thinking the thing to start with is the trucking company because that, at least, gives us a jumping off point. We can look them up. See where they’re based. Try to find something on Hal Chaney and Timothy Wick through them, since Americana Trucking was listed after both of their names.”

  Something tugged at my memory. I looked at Hal’s name again and the places Treak had written after it:

  Cres Cove, Chic, MO, TX, NM.

  “Didn’t somebody in Crescent Cove know a guy named Hal?” I asked.

  Donovan remembered an instant before I did. “Kim.”

  “That’s right. Our waitress at the bar. The desperate Cher-lookalike chick who was drooling all over you.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Didn’t she say her old boyfriend was a trucker? A guy named Hal. The one she’d moved to Crescent Cove to be with…”

  “But then he left her.”

  “Or, maybe, he just left.”

  “Kim didn’t say a last name, though. She might’ve been talking about another Hal,” he said.

  “Right. Because there would be so many truckers named ‘Hal’ in a town with a population of 949.” I sighed. Donovan was so damn unwilling to let his mind take any leaps at all.

  He jabbed my shoulder with his index finger. “Stop it with the snottiness. I’m just trying to make sure we don’t overlook anything.”

  I shrugged. “Fine. Let’s just go to the reference room and get started.”

  He followed me, though several paces behind, as I collected my papers and speed-walked through the first floor and the general reading room so we could enter the connected reference area. Just as I’d done at the public library in Ashburn Falls, I took a quick scan of the available staff members to gather impressions about them and to see which one might be the best to approach. Who looked both knowledgeable and trustworthy?