The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  “They were out of Kit Kats,” he informed me.

  “Ah.”

  We passed the hours eating, watching snippets of various Saturday morning cartoons, playing a couple of rounds of gin rummy with a deck of cards Donovan found in the desk drawer and holding our collective breaths.

  At 2:08 our patience was rewarded.

  Donovan snatched the phone before the end of the first ring. “Hello?”

  Through the tinny receiver and the stuffy airwaves separating Donovan from me, I could hear the strains of a distinctive Texan accent coming through the line. I heard Andy Reggio ask for me by name.

  “She’s here,” Donovan said coldly. “But I want to talk to you first. I’m Jeremy’s brother, Donovan McCafferty.” There was a pause and, from what I could gather, a jovial greeting—enough so that when Donovan spoke again, his voice had warmed up about ten degrees. “Thank you,” he said. Then, “Yeah, Jeremy was…” Another pause. “Yes, I always thought highly of them both.”

  I moved closer to where Donovan was standing so I might be able to better hear Andy’s comments. It was much harder to read reactions when I only had a voice to go by, but I was going to try. Andy said something about how the three men had all met at the bike shop two years ago, just as I’d guessed.

  “You said you saw Gideon when he gave you the papers,” Donovan said. “Was it recently?”

  “Oh, yeah, ‘bout a month ago.”

  “Really? What about Jeremy? Was he there, too?”

  “Nope, not this time,” I could hear Andy say clearly. “Gideon was alone. He just stopped by the shop for a bit—first time we’d crossed paths since ’76. When I asked about Jeremy, though, he said he expected to see him soon, but he didn’t give out any specifics.”

  A look of pure hope bathed Donovan’s face in a flash of light, effusing it in joy and amazement. It was an expression unlike any I’d seen him wear, at least for the split second that he allowed it to be shown. He covered his eyes with his palm, almost immediately muting the effect, or, perhaps, it was to prevent any tears from leaking out. He cleared his throat several times.

  In almost a whisper, Donovan said, “We haven’t seen our brothers in a long time. What do you know about the incident in Amarillo?”

  I strained to hear Andy’s response, and Donovan, finally seeing how hard I was trying to follow both sides of the conversation, yanked me close to him and shared the phone with me—putting the receiver between our ears, holding it tight.

  “Not much more than what was in the papers,” Andy confessed. “Though Gideon did hint he knew the rumor was true about the trucker being some Yankee named Chaney.”

  I glanced at Donovan and tugged the receiver just a fraction of an inch closer to my mouth before speaking. “Hello, Mr. Reggio. This is Aurora.”

  “Why, hello, Miz Aurora,” the friendly voice on the line said with one of the thickest accents I’d ever heard. You know the kind—so strong you almost think it’s fake. As a Minnesota native, it was hard to believe anyone could draw out their syllables for that long. “With you and Donovan, y’all can call me Andy.”

  “Andy,” I breathed, “thank you for calling us back and for delivering these papers to us last night. Do you have any idea how my brother might have gotten ahold of the police reports? They seemed pretty…um, confidential and official, so I wondered.”

  “Don’t rightly know,” the Texan replied. “But your brother told me to hang onto them for ya, so that’s what I did. He had a law enforcement friend, though, so maybe that was how he got ‘em.”

  Donovan pulled the phone back toward his mouth and repeated, “A law enforcement friend?” He sent me a perplexed glance. “Do you know who, Andy? Or even which city this friend of his lived in?”

  “Sure do,” Andy’s cheery voice boomed back. “Gideon told me about a cop from your hometown. Guy by the name of James—William James. I remember ‘cuz Gideon mentioned him a bunch of times. Fact is, he told me if his sister were ever to be in Oklahoma and askin’ for advice on what to do that I should tell her it was all right to call this police officer. Share the information in the envelope with him…but only him. Say there were details about the Amarillo explosion that Gideon had given to a friend to give to her and that she could bring those papers home to show him.”

  No way!

  I couldn’t believe this. It couldn’t be right. I felt the blood rushing from my face at Andy’s suggestion, but Donovan shot me a triumphant look. He said into the receiver, “So, Gideon specifically told you we could trust Officer James?” I knew he was saying this far more for my benefit than to clarify anything with Andy.

  “Yep,” the Texan said. “But, again, just him. You don’t wanna be tellin’ the whole entire police force about what you know just yet. Probably best to call him personally, at home on the weekend, maybe, rather than go in to see him. There’d be more questions and such if you were at the station.”

  I exhaled slowly, trying to control my desire to contradict everything Andy Reggio was saying. I snatched the phone from Donovan.

  “Do you know how to reach my brother?” I asked Andy.

  How was I supposed to believe we could trust any cop after everything that’d happened? Maybe if the words came directly from Gideon’s mouth…but still. It just felt wrong to me. In opposition to every one of my heightened perceptions.

  “‘Fraid not,” Andy replied, a hint of sadness in his voice. “Would like to see him more often myself. Seems he moves around a lot. But,” his tone brightened, “he told me if you needed proof that what I was sayin’ was the truth, that I should tell you something only you would know, Miz Aurora.”

  I held my breath for a full fifteen seconds before I managed to ask, “What’s that?”

  There was a low chuckle on the line. “In your diary, when you and your brother were kids, he read about your first kiss.”

  “He never read my diary,” I replied. “At least, he said he didn’t.”

  “Ah, brothers do things like that,” Andy said with gentle humor. “Sometimes they lie to their sisters when they’re trying to protect them.”

  My distrust of Andy’s opinion was growing by the minute. “Oh, really? What did he tell you?”

  “Said the boy’s name was Mike somethin’. Klausen, I think. You were fourteen. And you told your friends you liked his kiss, but in your diary you said he was as ‘slobbery as a sheepdog.’ Did I remember that rightly?”

  My mind reeled. Truly, no one in the universe but Gideon could have known that. It was the exact phrase I’d used…and only in my diary. I hadn’t even told Betsy my real reaction.

  “One day, I hope I’ll see my brother again,” I told the chuckling Texan with a sigh, “so I can get even with him for that.” I tried to joke about it, but it was just a flimsy cover for my shock. I was trembling from the inside out.

  “Well, I wish you luck finding him,” Andy said kindly before he hung up.

  Donovan slanted me an odd look. “Mike Klausen was your first kiss? That bonehead—really?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  He laughed. “So, okay. We’ll talk about something else, like how we now can tell all of this stuff we’ve found out on the road to Officer James.”

  “We don’t know that for sure. I just—I don’t think we should reveal everything, Donovan. I mean, Andy told us that Gideon said we could share the clippings and the reports from the envelope with Officer James, but what about the names in Treak’s notes? Or Ben’s film? What about Crescent Cove and the pipe bombs that Ronny Lee Wolf had stashed up there? What about Amy Lynn? We might be willing to take a risk and trust what Andy said, but I don’t feel comfortable forcing that risk on Amy Lynn, especially not without her knowledge or permission.”

  I implored him with my eyes to understand. “Do you see the difference? It’s one thing to tell the officer about information we got from Gideon. It’s another to connect the dots for him and involve someone innocent.”

  I may as well have bee
n talking to the chipped imitation-marble nightstand for all Donovan was listening to me. He was too busy, I could tell, striding around the room and feeling vindicated.

  And stunned by the thought that Jeremy might just be fine.

  And elated that my brother was on his side when it came to trusting the police.

  And pleased that we’d be heading back home in less than an hour because, let’s face it, I’d already pleaded with him to let us keep searching for Gideon, and this dead end—contacting the police at home, for God’s sake!—was where it had led. I could no longer dream up reasons to keep us on the road.

  “Let’s just call Officer James right now,” Donovan urged, “and give him the Cliff’s Notes version. We don’t need to tell him about Amy Lynn yet, but I don’t see any reason to protect that slimeball Ronny. We can just explain that we found out about the pipe bombs in Crescent Cove when we went up there to get more fireworks. He’ll believe that, since he caught us launching some this month. And then we can say we figured out from there that, somehow, Hal was hired to take a bunch of pipe bombs by truck to Albuquerque. Hell, maybe the officer even knows some of this already and—”

  “But, see, that bothers me. Why, if Gideon felt that cop was so trustworthy, didn’t my brother work out all of this himself with Officer James? If Gideon got the police reports from the officer and he shared what he knew about what happened in Crescent Cove, why didn’t the police follow through? Why wasn’t this case solved by August or September 1976 when these newspaper clippings first came out so our brothers could’ve felt safe coming home long ago?”

  Donovan shrugged. “Aurora, I say this respectfully, okay? I don’t want you to get mad at me, but think about it from my side. I know you love your brother, but he’s a big game player. All these codes and hidden messages and crap… I realize he’s a brilliant guy, and I always liked him, but I didn’t have to deal with this side of him before. Maybe he’s got a real good reason for doing every one of the things he did, but I don’t think he needed to act like James Bond about it. He likes creating puzzles for you to solve as much as you like solving them.”

  He paused for a long moment, stroking his sideburns and looking mystified. “That’s something your family is into, I guess, but mine isn’t. This whole game has been wearing me out. I’m ready to be straight with the police about it all. To say what we need to say and then go home.”

  I acknowledged his words. He’d spoken them without a hint of harshness, but he was both firm and honest about his feelings. There was no way I’d get him to back down from that decision and, in trying to see things from his viewpoint, I could understand his frustration. He’d played along with Gideon’s road-trip scavenger hunt for a long time already—a game that even I didn’t know the rules to. A game we’d been struggling to learn as we went along.

  Donovan had trusted me enough to decipher the codes in the journal and he’d cared about me enough to stay by my side no matter where those clues led, but I could see he’d reached the end of this particular highway, especially at a point where he felt we had a good reason to stop.

  “All right,” I said on a sigh, trying to exhale my paranoia along with all the air in my lungs. “Call him now. The sooner we can give him the info, the sooner he can start catching the bad guys, right?”

  My instincts had always been excellent, but I knew I wasn’t infallible. Maybe I’d misread some signals back home. Maybe I’d let my fear and anger over my brother’s disappearance color my perceptions too much. Maybe, just maybe, we could trust Officer James after all.

  Donovan’s hand was already on the phone. “Thanks,” he said to me a second before connecting with the operator and, in moments, getting the home phone number of Officer William James of the Chameleon Lake Police Department.

  The phone rang three or four times before our hometown cop with the quick grin and the auburn hair picked up.

  “Officer James,” Donovan began, identifying himself immediately and, then, launching into a surprisingly eloquent explanation of where we were and much of what we’d discovered. I could tell that, though he was nervous, he’d also been rehearsing some version of this conversation since the first night I showed him the journal. He knew what he wanted to say.

  Also, even though I wasn’t sharing the phone with Donovan this time, I could hear the stunned silence through the line as the Minnesota cop tried to process what Donovan had just told him.

  “You and Aurora Gray are all the way down in Oklahoma City, right this very second?” he asked, incredulous. “With documents that her brother—a guy we’d all thought was dead—gave to a friend of his to give to you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Donovan answered.

  “And you think what you found shows a connection between the manufacturing of pipe bombs in a little Wisconsin town, some possible Chicago mob-related activity and a truck explosion in Amarillo, Texas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do your parents know your whereabouts?” the cop asked. “Does anybody up here?”

  “No, sir,” Donovan said. “We didn’t think it was safe to tell anyone about this except you. But we’re planning to start driving back tonight. It’ll probably take us about sixteen hours but we—”

  “No, son, don’t do that,” Officer James interrupted. “Don’t drive back yet. Carrying around information like that is too dangerous. I think we can come up with a safer alternative.”

  There was a long pause while the cop thought about this and asked Donovan a series of new questions—lines from the police reports that the officer wanted him to read over the phone and details he wanted Donovan to share about what we’d seen in Crescent Cove.

  Donovan was very forthcoming with the information we’d uncovered ourselves, but I was thankful he did as he’d promised and left out our visit to Amy Lynn’s apartment. He also minimized any hints that Gideon had, in some way, been orchestrating our discoveries. Probably because the officer wouldn’t have believed us anyway.

  I heard the cop ask for the second time, “You didn’t actually see Gideon Gray, did you? Or your own brother Jeremy?”

  “Unfortunately, no, sir,” Donovan replied.

  Though I couldn’t see his expression, I could almost feel the officer’s relief that we weren’t admitting to consorting with ghosts in Oklahoma. But I would’ve given a lot at that moment for just one five-second glance at the cop’s face and hands. Being sightless like this, there was so much information about the conversation that was unknown to me.

  “Well, now, if this is all what you say it is, and if we can locate those explosives in Crescent Cove, we might just have a major bust on our hands,” the cop said. “You and Aurora will be heroes when you return, but I don’t want you to leave there just yet. And I don’t want you to talk to anybody else about this until we’re sure we can nail the bad guys.”

  We heard the sounds of shuffling pages in the background, as if Officer James was flipping through something thick, like a phonebook. It must have been a road atlas, though, because he added, “Looks like you’re only about two hundred and fifty miles from Amarillo, Texas, and I have a trusted fellow officer who lives out that way. I won’t tell him anything yet, but it’ll be helpful to have a good man on our side. I want you to drive to Amarillo and stay at the Cactus Flower Inn on the outskirts of town. Should take you about four and a half hours. You’re in your red Trans Am, Donovan, right?”

  “Yes. We took my car.”

  “Good. It’s a fast one. But drive the speed limit.” He laughed. To me, it sounded a little forced, but I appreciated that he was trying to keep things light.

  “Here’s what I’ll do,” he added. “I’m going to go to Wisconsin right now, check out the situation in Crescent Cove and then I’ll give you a call late tonight or sometime tomorrow morning. When we’ve got the evidence in hand, we’ll take the next step. I can set up a meeting for you with my friend. Someone who will not only be able to protect you while you’re there but who has access to all the records on
file and can reexamine the crime scene, if needed, until I can get down to Texas myself.”

  “What about our families?” Donovan asked. “They’re expecting us home this weekend.”

  “Well, if town gossip is correct, everyone in Chameleon Lake thinks you two are out scouting colleges in Illinois and Iowa—” the officer said.

  Donovan winked at me. Did we know how to start an effective rumor, or what?

  “—which was what I thought, too, until this afternoon.” Officer James let out a long breath. “So, why don’t you just give your folks a quick call and say you need a few extra days. That the admissions department of a campus you’re visiting won’t be open until Monday, and that’s why you have to stay a little longer than you’d expected. Okay?”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “And, remember, this is very sensitive information you two have. You need to be very careful and not discuss this with anybody else. Not even family yet.”

  “We won’t,” Donovan promised. Then, when he hung up, he said to me, “So...it looks like we’re gonna get to go a little farther on Route 66 than I thought.”

  Amarillo, Texas ~ Saturday, June 24

  WE MADE the calls home to our parents and, also, to our bosses about our delay, and we assured everyone that all was well.

  Dale was furious with me, of course, but he was at the store with customers when I called him, so he was limited by how much of a jackass he was willing to be in public. Through gritted teeth, he threatened me with “a talk” when I got back and no more vacation time for the rest of the year.

  I just sighed and said, “Sure.” It wasn’t worth the high long-distance rates to argue with him.

  The conversation with my parents was trickier, though. Mom and Dad were genuinely concerned about us, but I’d gotten so good at lying to them about how “fine” and “safe” we were that I’d begun to believe my own fabrications. Never a good idea.