The Road to You (10 page)

“Kim and Cindy at the bar,” Donovan said easily, pointing vaguely in the direction of the place we were at last night. “And we got to talking to Mike, too. You know, the bartender?” He fiddled with a stick of beef jerky on the counter. “They said you could, uh…help us out.”

I forced myself not to hold my breath. It would take Ronny only one conversation with any of the people Donovan had just name-dropped to unveil the truth. Donovan had just put a ticking clock on our stay in Crescent Cove.

Ronny’s eyes narrowed. “Where’re you from?”

“St. Paul,” Donovan said, his now-standard response.

A smirk graced the clerk’s face that gave me the most uneasy feeling imaginable. “How much money you people got?” he asked.

“How much stuff is in a bag?” Donovan shot back, still grinning languidly.

“Little bag, ten bucks. Big bag, twenty. Cash only.”

Donovan plucked a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and passed it to Ronny.

The clerk licked his lips, scanned the doors and windows for peeping eyes, snatched the bill and pocketed it. “Hang on,” he said, as he walked into the backroom and emerged in under fifteen seconds with a largish, unmarked, brown-paper sack with the top rolled shut. “Careful with this. You don’t want to shake it too much. And keep it dry.”

Donovan unrolled the top and peered inside. His expression betrayed nothing, but the stillness of his body told me he hadn’t gotten what he’d expected.

“Thanks, man,” he said to Ronny in that same pseudo-relaxed voice. The two guys nodded to each other before Donovan nudged me out the door with an urgency that was surprising.

“What’s in there?” I whispered when we were on the sidewalk, several yards away from the store and near enough to the Trans Am to make a quick escape. “That’s an awfully large bag for drugs.”

“Get in the car,” he said grimly, “and I’ll show you.”

When we were inside, he slowly opened the bag and let me look. It wasn’t drugs. No, it was fireworks. Unlabeled. Not uniform in size or shape. Without any typical commercial packaging. In other words, the illegal kind.

“Oh,” I said. “Do you think that’s all he sells?”

Donovan shook his head. “I wouldn’t put drugs or firearms past him, but this is bad enough. Possession of this kind of stash could land him in almost as much trouble.” He looked warily at the brown-paper sack. “Us, too, if we get caught holding this.”

“Wonderful.”

“Yeah.” He set the bag gently on the backseat and put the car into gear. “I want to take a closer look at these. Somewhere private, though. And I want to check your brother’s journal again, too.”

We drove down one of the long country roads, headed in the direction of the St. Croix Chippewa Tribal Lands.

“We should poke around the Reservation area,” I said. “And check out the site of this Bonner Mill, too.” The more we looked around, the more people I could talk to face to face, the more subtle information I’d be able to pick up.

“First we go through everything in this bag. Then,” he said, “we’ll see.”

After about a mile or so, he pulled the car into the driveway of an abandoned farmhouse, parked in the shade and began rifling through the contents of the sack—very gingerly.

As he studied each of the fireworks, he sniffed them, looked at their wicks and their casings, tested their weight in his palms and gently set them down on the dashboard, until he’d lined most of them up like a ragtag band of soldiers.

“Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath as he held up a pair of red-tube firecrackers, each one not even two inches long, but they had a stiff fuse sticking out of their middles and paper end caps covering their sides like little bonnets.

To me, they looked kind of like those fake bombs you might see on a kids’ cartoon. The ones poor Wile E. Coyote used to try to blow the Roadrunner up with—again and again.

Donovan wasn’t laughing, though. “These are M-80s, Aurora. They might look harmless to you but, if they’re what I think they are, they’ve got about sixty
times
more flash powder in each tube than is legal in the U.S.A. And there are cherry bombs in here and…oh, shit.” He pulled something silvery out of the bag. “Original quarter sticks.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

My brother was the kind of kid who was always building models or experimenting with chemistry sets, taking apart old clocks or connecting electrical circuits—none of which I’d had any personal interest in growing up. I’d only played with sparklers on the Fourth of July and the occasional child-friendly Roman candle our dad had gotten for Gideon and me at the local drugstore.

To my inexperienced eye, the cherry bombs didn’t look all that different from the smoke bombs I saw my brother and some of the neighbor boys fooling around with when we were kids, but Donovan was staring in horror at the silver tube in his hand. It was, maybe, four-inches long but he was looking at it like it was a lethal weapon.

He let out a long, slow breath. “It means if we get caught with this, we’ll get one hell of a fine.”

He shook his head, careful not to jostle the firecracker too much as he scrutinized it from every angle, looking for markings, touching the green fuse with just the tip of his index finger and wincing as if it hurt him to have to hold it.

“Legal quarter sticks can only have fifty milligrams of flash powder,” Donovan explained. “Too many people got injured using originals like these, so they outlawed them. But this particular firecracker was either made a dozen years ago, before the ban, or it was made recently and in secret. From the size and heft to it, it most likely has ten
grams
of flash powder. That’s two hundred times more than the legal limit. Enough to blow off a hand and, possibly, even kill a man.”

Scary.

I leaned as far away from it as I could get in the passenger’s seat. “Do you think Ronny makes them himself?” I asked. “Or, maybe, it’s something they assemble together on the Reservation. Maybe it’s not illegal there.”

“Maybe, maybe not, but I can tell you it’s illegal everywhere else. I spent four years in the U.S. Army, and I did some demolition work for a while. The M in M-80 stands for ‘Military.’ These are low explosives. Not as destructive as dynamite with high-explosive material like nitroglycerine and picric acid, but it’s no plaything either. One spark of static electricity in the wrong place and
boom!”

I flinched.

“Would you open up the journal, Aurora? Go to that ‘start here’ page.”

I flipped to it for him and saw again all the chemicals listed there. He read each one carefully.

“Potassium perchlorate, huh?” he said. “I wonder if our brothers were helping to make these fireworks…”

He grabbed the journal from me and looked more closely at the scrawled chemical list on that page with the dual dates—April 19, 1976 and May 29, 1978. Then he flipped to the next page, dated Monday, May 10, 1976 and, since the car was shadowed by the shade of an unkempt sugar maple tree, he stepped out into the driveway to look at both pages again in the bright sunlight.

“Come out here,” he commanded suddenly. “Take a look at this.”

At first I didn’t understand what he was pointing to—it looked like he was stabbing his finger at the words
potassium perchlorate
over and over again—but then I saw it. “The ink…” I whispered. “It’s different at the bottom.”

Beads of sweat formed on his brow and flew off in little droplets as he nodded. “The difference in shade is slight. I never noticed it until we were out here, with the sun shining directly on the page like that. Maybe it means something.”

Of course it did.

“If that’s the case then—” I began. I could feel the puzzle pieces connecting in my mind and, for a second, I could see a flash of the final image it might make, even though the puzzle remained unfinished.

“Then what?” he asked.

“Then Gideon added the last few lines of each entry at a later date,” I finished. “At least for these first ones. Is every entry like that?”

“Think so.” He flipped through several more pages of the journal and pointed to the spot on each one where the ink subtly changed color. It was always just the last three or four lines and, in almost every case, the newer part contained some kind of addition or subtraction equation using the variables D and M.

What were you and Jeremy doing, Gideon? What were you trying to tell me?

I took hold of the journal myself and studied the pages preceding the ‘start here’ part. There was only one kind of ink there. “I think this is actually a parallel record. Sort of like a secretive journal, though hidden in plain sight.”

“What makes you say that?”

“What we’re piecing together can’t be pure coincidence.” I began ticking items off on my fingers. “One, the journal has chemicals listed in it that are used to make fireworks and explosives. Two, the man they came to see here in Crescent Cove died in an explosion two years ago—the same weekend our brothers disappeared. Three, the cousin of the guy that died sells illegal fireworks out of his store.” I held up my palms. “There’s no way these things aren’t connected somehow.”

And, though I didn’t mention this to Donovan, I suspected that what linked these three facts was probably a really obvious thread, or it
would be
obvious once we had more information. More contact with the people Gideon and Jeremy had interacted with two years ago. More nonverbal communication.

I felt an odd mix of feelings that kept alternating: A burgeoning sense of hopefulness that, after all this time, closure might be possible. Answers might be found. And our brothers—wherever the hell they were—might be alive with a logical explanation for having disappeared.

But there was also the other side—the dread and the fear that whatever explanation we discovered might cast our brothers in a less than a moral and righteous light.

Donovan was looking at me strangely.

“What?” I asked him. “Don’t you think I’m right?”

“I’m not sure what to think,” he admitted. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but aren’t you overreaching here? Moving a little too fast. We can’t just take leaps of logic like that.” And Donovan, giving voice to my fears, added, “We know Jeremy and Gideon had knowledge of pyrotechnics. Without much effort those two could’ve easily built a box of bootleg fireworks. Or homemade bombs.”

He gulped a few breaths before continuing. “A man our brothers knew died, and it happened the same weekend as our brothers’ disappearance two years ago. Those are the facts. The only thing I’d for sure agree with you about is that this has to be bigger than it seems. Too big for us. I think we’re in over our heads.”

Who were our brothers? Were they good guys…or not?

I didn’t like the questions suddenly bubbling on the edges of my awareness. I also didn’t like having to justify my ability to reach conclusions about our discoveries.

“Do the lines at the bottom of each page add up to anything that you can tell?” I asked him, trying to direct the conversation away from this ridiculous notion that we couldn’t handle what we were learning. “Is there a pattern?”

He reread the lines listed after the ink change on the
Start here
page. “Potassium perchlorate, sulfur and antimony sulfide are the last three listed, and they’re the same three ingredients used in making a cherry bomb. But, how powerful a firecracker like that is depends entirely on the amounts used. Then there’s that equation-like thing at the bottom: M + 1 (+ 0), D + 10 (+ 0). Don’t know what that means.”

“Could it be the proportion of the substance?” I wondered aloud. “Maybe the ‘M’ stands for milligram?”

“Possible. And maybe the ‘D’ is for the diameter of the shell casing.” He looked at the list for moment longer. “Not sure in what unit, though. Millimeters? Inches or centimeters would be too long.”

“Maybe ‘D’ is for density,” I suggested. “Or it could be something totally different, like a tally of who owes them
money,
the ‘M.’ Or who they’ve made
deliveries
to, the ‘D.’ Something we’re not even thinking about yet. That’s why we need to get more information than we have now.”

I’d worry later about how and where to get it. And what, exactly, I’d tell Donovan about how I found it. Because I sensed there would be a lot that I’d have to do on my own if I wanted to get any real answers.

I glanced inside the car where all the fireworks were still resting on the dashboard. “Is there any way we could get rid of these?” I asked. “Aside from being illegal, they’re…kind of dangerous.”

He agreed. “I just don’t know where to put them yet. To take them with us is asking for trouble, but to leave them anywhere would be like planting a bunch of landmines on some civilian’s lawn.”

I considered this. “What if we went somewhere—somewhere isolated—and just exploded them? Then we’d know how powerful they are, but we wouldn’t have to keep them.”

“Maybe.” He squinted at me, a smile twisting the corners of his lips upward. “This is a weird conversation. Never would’ve imagined talking about stuff like this with
you
.”