The Road to You (20 page)

There was a long pause on the line. “Have you learned anything…new?” he asked carefully.

“Yes,” I whispered. “It’s…mostly helpful news, but I’ll, um, find out more tomorrow. And we’ll talk again then.”

He asked how Donovan was treating me—if he was being “a gentleman”—and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, yeah. He’s been fine, Dad. Don’t worry about that. He just went out to get us some more food.”
And to walk off some of his edginess and fear.
Then I changed the subject and told him to give my love to Mom, who was in the bath. I said that, really and truly, everything was okay. “Better than okay,” I insisted.

It took another minute of assurances, but I was finally able to hang up. It was going to get harder, I knew, to pile on the falsehoods if our trip lasted for more than a week. Much more challenging to tell fractional truths as the chasm between what we were
really
doing and what we
said
we were doing continued to expand.

Even if my father knew enough to understand that a search for Gideon and Jeremy played a part in this road trip, he didn’t know about the journal. He didn’t know anything about Crescent Cove, Ben Rainwater, Treak Bradley or the Bonner Mill explosion. And I couldn’t explain any of it over the phone, even if I’d wanted to.

Not only was it too chancy—he might tell someone he shouldn’t—but I was also worried he’d react too strongly to the news that his son was most likely still alive. He was like Donovan that way. He’d slammed the door on any hope that my brother and his friend had survived.

When Dad had given his permission for this trip, all he’d really wanted was for our family to finally get closure on Gideon’s death. To find out for sure what had happened. Why Gideon and Jeremy had left town. I knew my father had no idea I was tracking Gideon himself. Veering right onto the path where my brother had last tread and all but walking in his footsteps.

Dad would not like the potential danger of that—not one little bit.

Amy Lynn returned to the room. “I brought the notes,” she said, setting a thin manila folder down on her small glass coffee table. She glanced at the telephone. “Everything okay?”

I nodded. “Yes, thanks. Just overprotective parents.”

“I’d be overprotective, too, in their shoes,” she admitted.

Donovan knocked on the door and, when Amy Lynn opened it for him, he strode into the room with a bag filled with warm hot dogs and fries. They smelled so good, I actually felt a pang of hunger.

He pulled out one Chicago dog for Amy Lynn, one for me and two for himself.

“Only two for you?” I teased.

“Only two left,” he retorted. “I had my first one on the walk back. Good stuff.”

I grinned at him and Amy Lynn, who’d been watching our exchange with interest, laughed a little.
She likes us
.
More than she thought she would.

This feeling was confirmed a few minutes later when Amy Lynn said, around a mouthful of hot dog, “I know we’re going to be up late tonight, talking and looking through these papers.” She waved her hand in the direction of the manila folder. “And then there’s the film reel we need to see in the morning. It’s silly for you two to leave here and stay at some motel. I don’t have a lot of space—” She glanced around her one-bedroom apartment. “But I do have the sofa, a sleeping bag and extra pillows and blankets. You could crash here tonight, if you’d like.”

A few conflicting emotions flashed across Donovan’s face. I wasn’t sure what they all meant, but one of them was appreciation. And rightly so. Amy Lynn was being very generous to us.

But a tight feeling of jealousy strangled me a bit when I suspected that another of Donovan’s emotions might be attraction. The pixie blonde was closer to his age than I was. And pretty, in a very delicate way. More worldly than the kind of women he ran into in Chameleon Lake. A woman who’d
lived
with a man before. Not an inexperienced teenager, like me.

If that was the case, though, Donovan didn’t seem to dwell on it. Instead, he said to her, “Are you sure?”

I, however, knew our hostess’s answer before she verbalized it. Amy Lynn had been watching the way Donovan and I had been interacting all evening and, to some degree, envying it. Her obvious relief at having unburdened herself of a dark, two-year secret must have buoyed her and made her want to continue our private party for longer.

So Donovan made one more trip downstairs—this time to check our parking space to make sure we could stay there until morning and, also, to retrieve our bags from the trunk of his Trans Am. Then the three of us got settled in for the night.

Amy Lynn was right about Treak’s notes—they
did
look like gobbledygook. I recognized some of the squiggly lines as shorthand symbols, but I couldn’t read them. I didn’t have the kind of knowledge about the dead reporter that I had about my brother either, which was the only way I’d managed to decipher anything at all in Gideon’s journal—and that had been written in standard English.

Still, I laboriously traced the three half-sheets of paper that had belonged to Treak and were his only remaining clues to us. Amy Lynn gave me some thin typing paper for the task, encouraging us to keep a copy but to be careful with it. And finally, when I was finished, I asked again the question that had been haunting me since I first made the phone call to Amy Lynn that afternoon. God, was it only five hours ago?

“How did you know we were coming?” I murmured, unable to tolerate the suspense of this even a second longer. “On the phone you said Gideon had told you to expect us. H-How did he communicate with you? Has he called? Stopped by in person?”

It was at that moment, when Amy Lynn tilted her fair-haired head in confusion again, that I began to realize that, no matter how many questions Donovan and I had already asked, there were a billion more still unanswered.

Amy Lynn must have realized it, too, because she didn’t immediately reply. Instead, she went to a desk drawer and pulled out a couple pieces of mail.

She crossed back to me and held out two postcards that had been sent in envelopes. The first one had a picture of some weird cactus-like sculpture thing on the front and a Northern Arizona University “School of Art” logo. The smudged white envelope was sent to Amy Lynn at her friend Karen’s place and postmarked
September 8, 1976, Flagstaff, Arizona
. More than two months after the guys had disappeared. There was no return address.

On the back of the card, in Gideon’s distinctive script, were the words:

Much worse than I thought. Be careful. Will write again if it’s ever safe to share anything. G.

I pressed my lips together tight, remembering the “funeral” services we’d had for the guys just a few months after this postcard had been sent. Hard to believe we may have all suffered through that day unnecessarily and, yet, I couldn’t help but hope that was the case.

Mutely, I handed the card to Donovan and I looked at the second one. The image on the front was of a row of painted Cadillacs, each stuck in the ground at about a forty-five degree angle. My brother was definitely going for “bizarre local attractions” as his correspondence theme.

This envelope was light beige, and the postmark stamped it as being from
Amarillo, Texas, June 12, 1978
. Dated less than a week ago! Again, no return address, but he’d sent it to Amy Lynn’s Chicago apartment. How had he known where she lived now? The phonebook?

I held my breath as I read the words on the card:

My sister will probably be passing through Chicago soon. Why not show her a movie? G.

It, too, was in his handwriting, and it showcased both his sly sense of humor and his proclivity for enigmatic wording. Real proof that he was alive.
(Hallelujah!)
But, also, that he’d both planned this wild goose chase we were on and made sure it was being orchestrated in the way he’d expected.

Oh, Gideon, don’t you understand? This hurts. Where are you leading us, and why this crazy game? You seem so close, like we might run into you around any corner, but yet…

It was all getting to be too much for me. The hope mixed with the confusion. The ambiguities I had to hold in my head and in my heart.

Ever since I’d found my brother’s journal, I could feel my wall of pseudo-strength cracking. Piece by piece. The pain of him being gone had been so strong, so powerful, I’d forced it back...but I couldn’t keep doing that. Not if he might really be out there.

A sob that had been lodged deep in my windpipe rose up and pushed its way to my lips, gashing through my defenses and shattering the silence in the room. I heard the pain in my own cry and it made me sink to the floor.

Donovan knelt beside me. He gently put his hand on my shoulder, comforting me, and then slowly wedged the second postcard from my grip, scanning the words once. Then scanning them again.

If I was having a hard time dealing with the vagaries of our brothers’ behavior and the mysterious, hazardous situation they’d somehow found themselves in, I could only imagine what Donovan’s reaction to the second card would be.

I found out soon enough.

He shook his head. “It’s a lie,” he stated. “This can’t be real. And I’m gonna fucking
kill
whoever’s faking it.” Then he jumped up and stormed out of the room while I buried my face in my hands and wept for all of us.

I
T WASN’T
until over an hour later that Donovan returned for the night. He mumbled an apology, first to Amy Lynn and then to me, but he didn’t offer any explanation of his whereabouts, nor did he want to discuss our brothers any more that evening. I could tell he’d reached his saturation point. Truth was, so had I.

All of us were exhausted anyway. During his absence, Amy Lynn and I had put together two makeshift beds—one for Donovan in a sleeping bag on the carpet, and one for me on the sofa. Tired as I was, though, I knew I wouldn’t be getting much sleep.

It was destined to be a restless night for Donovan, too. I closed my eyes, willing myself to relax, but he was only a few feet away, and I could see him flipping, shifting, attempting to get comfortable on the floor. When, finally, he did drift off, he was still in an uneasy state—wrestling, no doubt, with the demons that were Jeremy’s memory and his own latent guilt, and mumbling angry words directed, I sensed, at my brother. Something about Amarillo and that Cadillac Ranch.

In my case, my mind kept replaying the memorial service we’d had for our brothers when they still hadn’t returned after several months and everyone—particularly the police—had presumed them dead. There had been the loud sobbing of some family and friends. The utter silence of others. Like me…and like Donovan. Our mutual grief stabbing invisible holes in the serene air of the church.

I remembered my parents holding hands, bracing each other for support. And I remembered Donovan’s mom and stepfather, with a palm’s span of light between them, the first noticeable fissure of what would eventually lead to their separation some months afterward.

I always knew I wouldn’t have stayed in Chameleon Lake had it not been for Gideon and Jeremy’s disappearance. But it occurred to me that I didn’t know what Donovan would have done differently if this tragedy hadn’t befallen our families. He’d left our hometown when he was eighteen. I seriously doubted he would have ever returned for more than a long weekend, even after he finished his stint in the service.

The chain of events sparked by our brothers’ disappearance led to both of us being in Chameleon Lake almost against our will. My future plans had been murky, but they’d involved going away to college and moving somewhere larger, more cosmopolitan.

For the first time, I wondered what Donovan’s dreams had been.