The Road to You (27 page)

I looked at the Route 66 placemat we’d snitched from that diner in Litchfield and scanned for any lodging recommendations that were listed in the St. Louis area. The only place mentioned was a motel called Coral Court.

“That’s an infamous motel,” Donovan said when I pointed it out to him. “It’s a motor court but also known as a ‘No Tell Motel.’ I knew a few guys from the Army that stayed there once. Had special rates so you could rent a room for as little as four hours.” He raised a brow. “And there was a well-known kidnapping case back in the Fifties where one of the murderers hid out there anonymously for a couple of days.”

I opened my mouth to suggest staying there for a night so we could check it out, but Donovan anticipated me.

“No.”

“Oh, c’mon. Gideon doesn’t give us any clues that I can figure out about where they stayed when they were here. This sounds just like the kind of place that—”

“That your dad would kill me if I took you to,” he interrupted. “Absolutely not, Aurora.” He shook his head for added emphasis and pitched his empty custard cup in the trash.

I snickered. “Don’t be such an old fogy. It’s not like we’re going to
do
anything there.”

Seriously, it was all I could do not to shake him. He hadn’t so much as given me a little side hug since we’d been away from Chameleon Lake, even when he was pretending to be my “husband.” He probably thought if he held my hand or something I’d combust from his act of grand passion.

Considering my mockery, I expected him to say “no” again right away, but he didn’t. He just looked at me for a very long, very uncomfortable moment with an expression that was odd and unsmiling. Too inscrutable for me to read. God, I hated that.

“Get in the car,” he said finally.

“Why? Where are we going?”

“To Coral Court.”

“We’re going to stay there?” I asked, delighted but surprised.

“No,” he said, swiftly crushing that idea. “But if you really think it would help to see it, we should take a quick look at it.”

The motel was located about a mile west of the city limits and, to my eye, it looked respectable enough.

“The only really weird thing about it,” I told Donovan, “is that just the
sign
is coral in color. All of the units are gold. And they are very Art Deco.”

It was set up kind of like duplex groupings. There were the rounded gold brick units with brown highlights, thick glass block window squares and private one-car garages where the guests could safely keep their vehicles. And, I supposed, their secrets.

I knew it would have been the perfect place for Gideon and Jeremy to disappear from the world for a couple of weeks. How they paid for it, I wasn’t sure, but the rates had to be moderate and the anonymity offered was worth any extra charges.

“Maybe they were working while they were here, too. Getting extra cash for a few days’ labor,” I suggested. “Somewhere within walking distance. Something easy, like washing dishes at a café or cleaning windows.”

Donovan said, “It’s possible,” but I could tell he didn’t want to hazard any guesses.

After I’d had a half hour to wander around, he made me get into his car again and he took us back into the city, where he checked us into the same kind of mom-and-pop motel we’d stayed at in Crescent Cove and in Litchfield.

“At least one time on this trip we need to stay at a motor court,” I told him. “So we can park your
obvious
Firebird Trans Am in a garage for a change.”

He laughed and said with heavy sarcasm, “Yeah. When we need to hide from bad guys, we’ll do that. Until then, the lodging is
my
choice.”

About an hour later, we were in the downtown area, meandering past the shops and finding ourselves walking along the section of the Mississippi River that flowed through the city.

“The part that keeps tripping me up are Treak’s notes,” I told Donovan as we sat on a park bench near the famous Gateway Arch, our view of the St. Louis skyline obscured by the large trees and the taller city buildings near us. “Even if we can somehow translate the shorthand in those few pages, there has to be tons of stuff we’re missing. Stacks of folders that got burned up in his car at Bonner Mill. Boxes that got carted away from his apartment in Chicago. I don’t know how we’re ever going to figure out a fraction of what Treak had uncovered, even if we somehow find our brothers and they’re able to explain what they know to us.”

Donovan shrugged. “Probably safer that way.”

“Yeah, but what’s the point of us being here then?” I snapped. “We’d be
safer
at home. Not asking questions. Not traveling anywhere. And then we’d have exactly what we had before—nothing.”

I shook my head. “We need to keep searching for anything that might lead us to our brothers or tell us why they can’t come back home. There has to be a new clue in the journal, in the decoded dates. Things that we’ll be able to see now because of the extra information Amy Lynn gave us. I just wish Gideon would’ve given us a little more to go on in the first place.”

He exhaled slowly but didn’t speak. It was clear he didn’t want to deal yet again with my familiar rant about how we needed to keep pressing forward. Going further westward.

On some level, despite being shaken up by the film our brothers made and despite all the proof we had challenging the presumption that our brothers were dead, I knew Donovan still believed we were better off turning all of this evidence over to the Chameleon Lake Police Department and having them lead the investigation.

But I strongly disagreed and he knew I’d argue with him. And, also, there were his growing questions about Jeremy.

He didn’t openly say anything about it, of course, but I recognized it in the way he dealt with any new detail we’d gleaned in some way from Gideon. The postcards, in particular, bothered Donovan. Especially the one sent earlier this month.

My brother was being his typical cryptic self when it came to communication, but the fact that Gideon knew we’d be heading toward Chicago meant he was confident in both his ability to orchestrate our direction and, also, in our ability to correctly follow along. I got the sense he’d almost been monitoring us. The natural question that arose was where were
Jeremy’s
hints and clues? Had Donovan missed them, or had Jeremy just never sent any?

After a day and a half spent scouring old newspaper clippings and ambling down the streets of St. Louis in hopes of making some new connections, I asked Donovan to just get us to the next city mentioned in Gideon’s journal—Joplin, Missouri—find us a place to stay and give me some space there to lay out all of my collected papers and notes. I had a few questions I wanted to get down on paper.

To his credit, he did this and without even too much grumbling.

While Donovan left for a half hour to scrounge up something that might resemble a dinner, I used the bed in our motel room to spread out every map, scribble of notes and sheet of paper we had in our possession—anything that had anything to do with our brothers—and I flipped over the largish construction-paper calendar on the wall to use the blank back side as my personal writing board.

When Donovan returned bearing Cokes, sliced turkey sandwiches and a bag of Oreos—“Dinner of champions,” he informed me—I went through each item with him, one at a time.

“Okay, we’ve got the placemat that shows the Route 66 cities and famous attractions,” I said. “Our road atlas, which shows the Interstates as well. We’ve got Gideon’s postcards, Treak’s notes and the journal.”

I tapped the
Joplin
page with my index finger. “This entry is more promising than the St. Louis one because that only had some car parts at the top and, then, ‘Cardinal Town,’ the fake date and the equation on the bottom. Here we have at least a few more things written down, especially beneath the ink change.”

The more I looked at my brother’s journal, the more I was convinced my earliest hunch about it was right—that it was a parallel record. That Gideon had the original entries already in the book and, in adding notes beneath them, had found a safe and convenient place to record his journey with Jeremy. On this point, at least, Donovan didn’t seem to question my instincts too much.

He picked up the journal and read the first part of the entry aloud:

He didn’t bother to hide his exasperation when he glanced my way. “Are you kidding? He wrote down
nine
steps for this—a job that’s even easier to do than draining coolant. Maybe your brother was planning to teach a car-maintenance class to a group of kindergarteners someday.”

I glared at him.

He ignored me, split open the bag of Oreos and continued reading from the point where the ink changed.

He looked at me blankly. “So, you think this is useful?”

I nodded. “We know the real date they were here was July twenty-fifth. May plus two months is July. Twenty-three plus two days is twenty-five. And then he makes three references to the movie ‘The Sting,’ so that has to mean something important.” I knew I didn’t have to explain to Donovan that “The Entertainer” was used as the musical theme for the film. It was so famous, even people who hadn’t watched the Redford-Newman picture knew that.

He reached for a cookie, twisted it and ate half. “It was a good flick,” he said, chewing. “Been a few years since it was out. You see it in the theater?”

I told him I had. “But I mostly just remember that Robert Redford and Paul Newman were con artists. It was a complicated plot. I don’t remember who Lonnegan and Snyder were.” Leave it to my brother to give us a clue like this. He’d loved that movie.

Donovan handed me the bag of Oreos and paced to the window and back. “One was a Chicago mob boss and the other was a corrupt police lieutenant. And there was a woman, too. Loretta. She was dangerous.”

“Sounds like you remember it well.”

He shrugged. “I saw it a couple of times. Once with a few Army buds. And I took Jeremy to it when I was home on leave. It came out around Christmas.” He paused. “Jeremy laughed like crazy when Newman and Redford’s characters pulled off their sting operation. Pretty sure he and your brother went to see it again.”

“Yeah. I’m sure they did, too.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes after that.

“So what do you think he’s saying?” Donovan asked. “That he and Jeremy were trying to con a bad cop and a crime boss?” He snatched the bag of cookies again and twisted another one open. “I wasn’t getting that from what Amy Lynn told us.”

“No, I didn’t get that either,” I said, “but it may have something to do with the story Treak was working on. He was from Chicago and, based on what we learned at Amy Lynn’s, I really don’t think Treak was one of the bad guys. She said he was investigating some mob-related stuff, so, maybe, he accidentally stumbled upon something like this.”

Donovan made a weird face but he didn’t tell me it was a completely stupid idea.

I reread the line my brother had written about the mob boss and the cop:

And bad guys = Lonnegan and Snyder, just like real life

“It’s the ‘just like real life’ part that’s making me think that,” I said. “But he’s also careful to say that Joplin wasn’t quite ‘The Entertainer.’ Maybe it was a play on words to confuse people. We know he was following Route 66 and went through Joplin, Missouri. Maybe someone else reading it would think he was talking about Scott Joplin, though, the composer of the song.”