The Road to You (13 page)

Though surprised to see me, Betsy had dedicated herself to a weekend of heavy partying, and nothing was going to deter her from her agenda.

She just thrust a bottle of Old Style at me Saturday night and then loudly introduced me to the gang before returning to the sofa, where she was wedged between a lava lamp and a beefy looking guy named Stan.

The next morning, though, my friend’s curiosity returned.

“Why did it take you so long to get here?” Betsy asked for the third time, attempting to rub away a hangover with the pads of her fingers. She winced. “Were you with a guy?”

I didn’t trust myself to answer this directly, so I shook my head. “I just needed to research something without my parents wondering where I was.”

“Research what?”

“Um…colleges,” I blurted. I didn’t know why I said that, but it seemed to be a reasonable response. A normal teenage girl kind of explanation. Versus the truth, which was not exactly
normal
.

My friend raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You’re back to maybe going to the Twin Cities in the fall?”

Betsy and I had planned to go to college together in our early years of high school. Before the disappearance. Then my plans for the future had stalled. Betsy’s hadn’t.

“I doubt I could get in for the fall,” I told her, trying to be honest whenever I could. “I may have already missed the application deadline. But I’m thinking of maybe trying to register for the second semester.” I forced a smile. “That’d be fun, right?”

Betsy agreed right away, but I wasn’t blind. Hangover or not, there was a flash of guardedness in my friend’s eyes. A sudden crease in the middle of her forehead that she smoothed away—just not fast enough.

It was clear she’d already begun to construct her upcoming college experience without the tragic story of her high-school best friend. Someone whose personal drama would, no doubt, draw attention away from her lightness and add an unwanted shadow to an otherwise fresh, new adventure.

Not that Betsy would ever admit to this. I knew she cared about me and our friendship. Had stood by me through all of my stages of grief. I could even understand why she’d appreciate a little natural distance between us.

Still, the realization that my best friend had been hoping to cut ties…
hurt
. Made me wish I couldn’t so often guess what people were thinking.

“Nothing is for sure,” I said with a shrug. “I figured my parents wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea, so I just wanted to have time to get some info without them suspecting anything. I’ll probably need to wait a year or two to go anywhere anyway.”

“Well, keep me posted,” she said, the urgency in her voice tinged with relief. Then she sort of laughed. “So, there’s really no secret guy?”

“Of course not.” I laughed, too. “If there was one, wouldn’t I tell you?”

“Yeah,” Betsy said, although her tone actually said,
“Probably.”

As I was getting ready to leave and, finally, return home, my friend asked if I wanted to get together on Friday night. “Maybe see the movie that’s coming to town?” she suggested. “I keep hearing about ‘Grease,’ but I don’t know if it’ll be any good.”

“Sure,” I replied, fully intending to cancel in a few days. I’d likely be spending the night getting ready for the trip—with or without Donovan. Either way, I was headed to Chicago no later than Saturday morning. “It looked kind of silly in the previews—all those poodle skirts and Fifties songs—but I bet it’ll be fun.”
For someone else.

“Great!” Betsy said, seeming happy to be on such a neutral, easy subject. “See you then, if not before.”

I waved goodbye and drove home, the sheer commitment of what I’d planned to do the following weekend settling on my shoulders like lead weights.

With my parents both otherwise occupied, I snuck in the backdoor and stole up to my room. Mom would soon notice the Buick back in the driveway again and feel relief at my return. Dad would be glad to have me home but even gladder to see his wife’s jitteriness lessen for a little while. And, later, we’d all just pretend that we were still a normal family. Normal, in spite of everything.

There was something decidedly abnormal about that.

O
N
M
ONDAY
morning, I found myself back at work with Sandy, who was babbling about finally having gone to see “Corvette Summer” in St. Cloud over the weekend
. (Ohhh, Mark Hamill! Love, love, love!)

Sandy was chitchatting about wanting to watch “Grease” soon, too.
(It looks so cute! And you should just see John Travolta dancing! It’s going to be even bigger than “Saturday Night Fever”…)

Yeah, right.

That feeling of being like the older waitress—like Cindy at that Crescent Cove bar—kept coming back to me. That sense of being trapped at the Grocery Mart for the next decade with Sandy, Dale and the occasional shopper looking for Hamburger Helper. It was too depressing a fate to keep imagining.

When I finally got a break, I cornered my boss in the backroom.

“Dale, I’m sorry to ask you this on short notice, but I’m going to need to take off work next week.”

He shot me the withering look of someone convinced of his self importance. “Vacations need to be put in at least a month ahead of time.”

I nodded. I knew this. But he owed me a few favors and I was going to get my way. Period.

“I’m not going on vacation. I’m going on a college scouting trip,” I said, mentally commanding him to hear the determination in my voice. “The admissions offices already have shorter hours and they’ll be closed once the summer-school sessions are over.” Not sure if that was really true but, hey, it sounded good. “So, I really have to go
now
.”

“You couldn’t have decided this last month?”

“No, Dale. I couldn’t have.”

I stood still and faced him. Looked into those beady, bloodshot eyes of his and willed him to remember how my intuitive skills kept his store from being robbed by a couple of grimy thugs in the early spring. I’d warned Dale about them. Said they were big-city hoods who were up to no good. Pointed out how they were casing the place. And, in response, he’d called in Officer Cleary for backup. Major crisis averted.

After a moment of glaring at me, Dale exhaled—a longsuffering stream of hot air and irritation. “You really need
all
of next week off?”

“At least. Maybe we should make it a week and a half.”

His squirminess told me that I was pushing it, but Dale was a coward. He gave in out of fear of confrontation rather than out of any sense of compassion or desire to help.

“One week,” he muttered with a scowl and a dismissive huff, then he headed into the back alley for a smoke.

I smiled grimly to myself. My victory was small but important.

One battle down, two to go.

I
T TOOK
all of seven minutes on Tuesday night for Donovan to start picking a fight with me.

“You need to think about this,” Donovan insisted when I informed him I’d gotten a week off from work for the trip. “Do we really need to rush into it?”

“Rush?”
I stared at him. “Your concept of time is seriously warped. Being two years late is hardly
rushing
.”

I could hear the exasperation in my voice, but I wasn’t backing down. And, besides, in my not very humble opinion, I’d already won this damned argument.

“You were standing right next to me in Crescent Cove, weren’t you?” I said. “We got more leads in twenty-four hours than the cops had managed to track down in a month, and that’s even with their tromping all over our houses and putting out missing persons bulletins.”

I shook my head, remembering Officer James and Officer Cleary tearing apart Gideon’s bedroom, asking if he “always listened to disturbing music” (he owned a few KISS albums) or “looked at a lot of dark art” (he had
one
Van Gogh poster up on his wall) or “frequently read Commie literature” (someone gave him a book by Karl Marx, but I’m pretty sure he never cracked it open).

To some extent, I appreciated what the police were trying to do: Establish his patterns of behavior before the disappearance, determine what was or wasn’t in character, check to see if there were other suspicious activities dotting his past—any juvie criminal records, disabilities that might impair judgment, indications of burgeoning mental illness, drug or gambling habits.

I’d overheard Officer James making some comment about “solvability factors” to his partner as they sifted through Gideon’s old school notebooks, hunting for hints about why someone else might want to abduct him or why he might feel the need to either kill himself or disappear indefinitely.

But they couldn’t find anything obvious.

No missing favorite things from his bedroom. No money trail. No suicide notes tucked inside his LP liners. Apparently, listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite” from KISS’s
Alive!
album over and over again was not quite enough evidence to qualify an eighteen-year-old male as “troubled,” although the cops called into question his musical taste more than once.

Donovan made a face and started digging around in a desk drawer for something. “What did you tell Old Man Geiger you’d be doing anyway?” he asked.

“College scouting,” I replied. “Can’t you tell your boss you’re doing that, too?”

He stopped fiddling around and leveled an odd look at me. “Um,” he said, which I took to mean,
Yes…yes, he could, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to
.

I was aware he’d been in the Army long enough to pay for four years of college, thanks to the GI Bill, but he hadn’t started taking any classes yet—at least not as far as I knew.

Deciding to push my luck, I said, “That’s what we could tell everyone. The explanation for why we’re leaving town together for a week. We’re both just looking at a few colleges. That sounds reasonable enough, right?”

He cleared his throat. “Um,” he said again. “I just…I don’t know.”

I sighed. There were a bunch of things I could do in Chicago by myself, and I would, but Donovan had been more help in Crescent Cove than I’d wanted to admit. It wasn’t like I could force him to come with me, though. (He was a lot stronger than me.) But there was also no way he could force me to stay home. “It’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. “I can take it from here.”

He shot me a look of disbelief and went back to scrounging through the desk drawer until he retrieved a stack of stapled sheets of yellow paper and a pen. He walked over to the Muscle-Car Babe calendar and studied the dates beneath the red Mustang and the too-perky blonde, comparing them to whatever was written on one of the yellow sheets. He exhaled slowly and jotted down a few notes on the calendar and then a few more on the paper.

My excitement began to rise at the sight. He was doing it. He was blocking off the time. He was going to go with me to Chicago.

I smothered a grin, knowing that—in Donovan’s case—the only obstacle to his departure was work-related. Unlike me, he didn’t have to clear anything with his parents. Both his real dad and his stepdad were out of the picture, and his mom, while still very much in his life, had her own house.