WE WOKE up to a clear, hot weekday morning in Albuquerque—as deceptively bright and unthreatening as the morning before in Amarillo—but look at how wrong we’d been about that, huh?
I was exhausted still. Donovan was, of course, more than a little worse for the wear, but he was making a heroic effort to get back to a healthy equilibrium after his whiskey bender.
He scrubbed his face with his palms, ran his fingers through his dark hair and looked at me with concern. “Morning,” he said. Then, after gulping down a few Dixie cups of tap water, “Um, Aurora, last night—”
I used his pause as an excuse to jump in. “Yeah, I know you were pretty sick. How are you feeling? I hope you’re not too headachy today, but we can take it easy if you are. I’m not sure what you feel like eating, but I think simpler and plainer food is better, right?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “And maybe you’ll want to take an aspirin now and a nap later. I know you didn’t get as much sleep as usual.”
He glanced at me warily. “Yeah. Aurora, about that—”
“Oh, and we should really go over some things in the journal,” I babbled. “A few new words or phrases might stand out more for us now.”
He exhaled, walked up to where I was standing by the edge of the bed and put his hands on my shoulders. “We’ll do that today, I promise. But first, I just wanted to apologize for yesterday. All of it. The morning and all the danger I put us in. The afternoon, the evening and especially the middle of the night. I was just…I don’t know…for some stupid reason I thought the alcohol would help take the edge off, but it didn’t really work that way. And then I kept waking up a thousand times and waking you up along with me.”
I put my index finger up to his lips. “Been drinking,” I said, parroting his words from the night of the graduation party. “I understand. I really do. Nothing happened last night.” When he shook his head and opened his mouth to contradict me, though, I added, “Nothing you need to worry about, okay? Please, Donovan. Please don’t.”
He still looked like he wanted to continue debating this point, but I was determined to put an end to any further apologies. Especially since I should be the one apologizing for most of it.
Instead, I pulled out Treak’s notes and reviewed with Donovan what I’d noticed when I reread them last night. Then I opened up Gideon’s journal to the Albuquerque/Santa Fe page and read it aloud:
“So, the date, when run through the month/day equation, is actually August 10, 1976,” I said. “Five days after the explosion in Amarillo.”
“And ‘NevilleB’? What’s that?” he asked.
“Treak listed a ‘Billy Neville’ in his notes, and he was from Albuquerque, so that’s my best guess. As for the numbers following the name, I’m not sure. Zero times two is zero. And zero plus seven is seven. So maybe the number seven has some meaning in connection with this Neville guy.”
But Donovan was staring at the page with an odd expression. “I know you’re better than me at this stuff, but could the zero times two equal a double zero with the seven added onto the end? So it’s actually 007?”
Instantly I saw what he saw and knew he had to be right.
“Wow, yeah,” I said. “That’s it for sure. It’s exactly the kind of thing Gideon would write.” Then I thought about it. “I just don’t know why. Is Billy Neville some kind of spy? Someone who’s British? Or does it refer to something else from the Bond films?”
He shrugged, but I couldn’t help but notice that he looked fleetingly proud of himself for having cracked one of my brother’s little codes.
As for the final line—RIP in Traveling St.—neither of us had any idea what that meant specifically, but I felt justified in fearing that the “RIP” probably had something to do with Jeremy.
Donovan may have been thinking exactly the same thing, but he willed me with his eyes not to verbalize it. So I didn’t. Instead, I confessed something that had been bothering me.
“I hate that we can’t trust the cops we know personally. I hate that we don’t know who the ‘good guys’ are anymore. Until our brothers disappeared, I always thought we could count on the police to uphold the law, but it feels like they’re more often the criminals. At least when it comes to this case.” I knew I sounded bitter, but I couldn’t help it.
Donovan sighed. “Whatever’s happening here feels more like war than crime, Aurora. With an act of war, a soldier’s moral compass isn’t set to true north. Depending on the side you’re fighting on, you’d label one act as ‘justice,’ if it was your troop doing it, and the same act as ‘terrorism,’ if it came from your enemies.”
He had another cup of water and took a few steadying breaths. “I didn’t get sent to ‘Nam, but I had friends who were there and lived to talk about it. And my grandpa fought in World War I, dropping depth chargers on enemy U-boats. These were all good and honest men here at home. Heroes, in my book. But to the other side—to the Viet Cong, to the Germans—they were monsters. In war, no one is totally good. Everyone loses.”
I nodded. What he was saying made sense. Gideon and Jeremy had been doing something patriotic, yet Jeremy ended up dying senselessly. And even though it appeared that Gideon managed to survive, it was only in body. Nothing of my brother’s prior life remained. He’d lost his best friend, his family, his home, the world as he knew it, the future he had planned, however casually… None of this was fair, but we all knew war wasn’t known for its fairness.
“We still don’t know the whole story, though,” I said. “After our brothers fled Crescent Cove, what led them to Texas in hopes of uncovering the truth? Sebastian said they’d been talking with Hal. Stirring up trouble, in Sebastian’s opinion. Were they ignoring what they knew to be the safe thing in hopes of doing the right thing? Were they trying to be heroes?”
He wrinkled his nose and gave his head a shake. “That’s my point. In an act of war—foreign or domestic—there’s no standard or unquestionably ‘right’ side. It all depends. Could Gideon and Jeremy always clearly read their moral compass? If so, would we agree with their choices? I don’t think we can say.” He sort of smiled at me. “I mean, are you always sure of what your moral compass says? Are you positive you’re acting the right way? Doing the right thing all the time?”
I felt my face begin to flush as I remembered our kiss from the night before. Had I been doing the right thing? Had I genuinely been comforting Donovan…or had I been taking advantage of his weakened state?
I mumbled something noncommittal and changed the subject.
“I still think we should head towards home again. Maybe not drive all the way back to Minnesota, but get within striking distance.” I pointed at the journal. “I suppose if we search, we might find somebody in Albuquerque named Billy Neville, but I don’t think there was anyone on Treak’s list who wasn’t a big crook, a nasty killer or both. I don’t want to take a chance on running into somebody else who might start shooting at us.”
But Donovan was already pulling out the phonebook and flipping to the Ns.
“Neville, B.J.” the listing read. “157 Greenleaf Cir.” And there was a phone number, too, that I didn’t even bother to memorize.
“But I don’t want to find him,” I said again, more insistently. “I’m scared of these people, Donovan.” I’m scared of what they might do to me...and especially to you.
Never before had I felt the weight of my mortality so strongly. The consequences my life—or death—would have on other people that I cared about. It wasn’t about giving up the search. I just knew I had to be grown-up enough to take my loved ones into consideration.
“I know,” he said. “Me, too.” He blew out some air. “But we’re not going back home. Not yet. And I can’t spend another day in this motel, so I have an idea. I think we need to take a little field trip today.”
“To where? The grocery store?” I glanced at the bags and boxes of food on the table that we’d both rummaged through all day yesterday and had half eaten. I was, admittedly, pretty
sick of Ritz crackers and beef jerky. “Or maybe the library?”
He laughed. “No. I think we need to go to Santa Fe.”
“I thought you didn’t want to drive anywhere for a few days. That the point of being at this motor lodge was to hide the Trans Am in the garage.”
“It is,” he said, thumbing back to a reference page in an earlier section of the phonebook—one with a timetable of some kind and a bunch of multicolored routes listed on it. “That’s why we’re going to take the bus.”
Santa Fe, New Mexico ~ Monday, June 26
DRESSED IN clothes that were as understated as possible, Donovan and I caught the first bus heading northeast to Santa Fe.
He was wearing a plain white t-shirt, blue jeans and a dark-colored baseball cap. I was in a pale-yellow t-shirt with khaki shorts, but that hadn’t been my first choice.
“Isn’t that shirt, maybe, too…pink?” Donovan asked me when he saw my original outfit.
In spite of everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, I burst out laughing. “Are you kidding me? You’re telling me what I’m wearing is—oh, how should I put it—too conspicuous?”
He shot me a sheepish grin, acknowledging the irony, but he only said, “Just change it. It’s nice and all, but a little, um, bright.”
I snorted, but I put on the pale-yellow one anyway.
The bus ride took just over an hour with stops, but everyone onboard seemed like fairly normal people. A collection of melting-pot Americans. Lots of grandma-looking types with woven handbags, moms with little kids on their laps, working men of various skin tones and ages—reading their newspapers or their paperback novels or catching a light doze before their stop. Though Donovan and I both lacked the deeply tanned skin of many of the passengers, I felt we blended in with the group reasonably well.
When we got to downtown Santa Fe, we nimbly hopped off the bus and embarked on a city exploration adventure that lasted several hours. Gideon’s journal hadn’t given us much to go on. He only mentioned that he’d been in Santa Fe and Albuquerque on the same date—August tenth—which had been a Tuesday two years ago.
I vowed to keep an eye open for any street that might be called “Traveling St.” or, maybe, a roadway that had something to do with travel. Planes? Cars? Buses? Trains? Something that might explain Gideon’s “RIP” clue.
But nothing we encountered rang any bells and, from what I could tell, the only thing I was sure about when it came to Santa Fe was that this was a city of ninety percent artists.
There were sculptures and paintings and pottery and handcrafted jewelry in just about every store. More vibrant reds, oranges and golds than a string of summer sunsets. More splashes of turquoise, indigo and silver than the falling dusk on the night of a full moon.
“Hey, can I see your ring?” Donovan asked suddenly, after we’d walked by probably our twenty-seventh jewelry shop.
I handed him the gold-colored Cracker-Jack-like band he’d given me to wear during motel check-ins and check-outs. We’d been so preoccupied lately, though, that I’d forgotten to take it off for several days. When I pulled it off my left ring finger, it left a greenish residue on my skin. I tried to rub it away.
He saw my finger and said, “Sorry. You shouldn’t be wearing this junk. I didn’t think you’d have to have it on for this long.”
I succeeded in getting some of the green ickiness off, but I could still see a line. I felt almost marked by it. “That’s okay. It’ll go away when I wash my hands next.” I hoped this was true.
He pointed to a Burger King, nestled in a cluster of eateries, farther down the block. “They’ve got bathrooms there,” he said. “Hungry? Wanna grab a couple of burgers?”
“Sure.”
We walked most of the way together, but Donovan wanted to duck into an art shop that specialized in framed posters of classic cars. He told me to go ahead. That he’d meet me there in a few minutes.
“Take your time,” I said. “I’ll get the burgers for us.” And when he moved to pull out his wallet, I took several steps away from him. “No, Donovan. You’ve covered most of our meals on the trip already. Let me buy this one.” I scurried away, not waiting for him to give his consent.
I almost regretted telling him to take as long as he needed because our meal was starting to get cold by the time he got there. I’d already washed my hands twice and ordered Whoppers, French fries and Cokes for both of us (I was starving), and I’d been waiting impatiently for about ten minutes more before he finally walked in the door. But he was smiling, and it was nice to see that for a change.
Sometime after I’d finished my burger but before I’d eaten all of my fries, he pulled a little white box out of his pocket and set it on one of the paper napkins in front of me.
“Take a look,” he said, grinning.
I lifted the lid. There was a gold ring inside with a small but lovely round-cut ruby on top. My birthstone. “What did you…” I stopped speaking. I was at a loss for words.
“Do you like it?”
“Yes. Yes, it—it’s beautiful.”
I lifted it out of the box. It reminded me of Gideon’s graduation ring, but it was tinier, more delicate. I hadn’t ordered a graduation ring myself but, if I had, I probably would have chosen something similar to this. What did it mean that Donovan had gotten this for me?
“Try it on.”
I slipped it on my finger, and it was a perfect fit. “How did you know—”
His smile broadened. He produced the Cracker-Jack prize ring from his pocket and dropped it into the white box. “You’d sized it for me by wearing this old one. You should have a ring that doesn’t turn your finger green,” he said. “This new one’s 14-carat gold.”
“Donovan, you shouldn’t have gotten me this. It’s too expensive, and I don’t need—”
“It wasn’t very expensive,” he insisted, “and, anyway, your birthday’s this weekend, right? Happy eighteenth, Aurora.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I somehow managed to mumble, “Thank you. This is such a surprise. I really didn’t expect...anything.”
“You’re welcome. You deserve something nice. Something that’ll last.” His voice was smooth and confident when he spoke, like that of a family elder. But, when our gazes met, he seemed to get a little boyish and fidgety. He abruptly got up, tossed the used wrappers and table garbage in the trash and excused himself to use the bathroom.
I slowly finished my fries, glancing every other second at the new ring adorning my left hand and wondering if there was anything significant about this gift from his point of view. Anything more to it than simply being an incredibly pretty and very thoughtful birthday present.
EVENTUALLY, WE had to admit that all we were doing in Santa Fe was wandering aimlessly around town, shopping and eating. Nothing we’d seen had jumped out at us as far as being relevant to our brothers, so we hopped on the bus again and headed back to Albuquerque.
It was a pleasant return drive. Donovan and I, though not uneasy with each other, rode back to the motor lodge in silence. He was sitting on the aisle, studying the facial features of our fellow passengers. I, in the window seat, did that for a few minutes, too, before turning my attention to the New Mexico scenery.
We passed a handful of family restaurants, a Chrysler dealership, a church named St. Christopher’s, a bunch of roadside fruit-and-vegetable stands and a sprawling K-mart.
Beyond the evidence of capitalism, commerce and community, however, were the mountains on one side and the stark but stunning desert on the other…the burnt edges of which rose up to meet the horizon. How odd to technically be in my native country and, yet, to feel as though I were traveling in a foreign land. It was at once both unsettling and invigorating.
It wasn’t until we were getting ready for bed late that night that something we’d seen during the day registered on the canvas of my consciousness.
“Remember how Amy Lynn told us that Treak had a medallion of a saint?” I asked
Donovan. “It was the patron saint of travelers, right?”
He nodded. “Yep. St. Christopher. Why?”
“Because Gideon wrote on his Albuquerque/Santa Fe page ‘RIP in Traveling St.’ and I thought it was Traveling Street. But what if it was his abbreviation for Traveling Saint? We passed by a St. Christopher’s Church on the way home. Could Gideon have maybe taken Jeremy’s body there?” Then, as gently as I could, I added, “It had a small cemetery.”
The light in his eyes dimmed visibly at my words, but he took them in and nodded. “Yeah. That’d probably make sense. He would’ve had to have done something with the body.” He glanced vacantly at the window. “I guess we could go back to it tomorrow. Check it out.”
That night, Donovan didn’t get wasted on whiskey, take a shower at two a.m. or cry soundlessly over the death of his kid brother—but neither did he sleep well. He tossed and twisted and breathed unevenly. At one point, he started sweating again, but this time he just gulped a cup of water, took his shirt off, threw it across the room and attempted to quietly get comfortable in bed. He never did manage that.
In the darkness, with him turned away from me, I studied the silhouette of his body—admiring the contours of his muscles, the thickness of his wavy hair, the otherness of his form.
A part of me felt guilty for taking mental energy away from the danger we were in and letting myself daydream about Donovan and me…together. My attraction to him was a luxury I knew I couldn’t afford. Not with a killer still on the loose and a thousand unanswered questions remaining.
But I justified it by telling myself that my fantasy of kissing him again—when we were both completely sober and wide awake—was a harmless stress release, not unlike my fleeting but vivid daydreams about Roger Moore in “The Spy Who Loved Me” or Warren Beatty in just about anything.
The Road to You Page 26
