The Road to You (28 page)

Donovan ate another Oreo then rummaged through the bag of food for his sandwich and bottle of Coke. “Thirsty? Want me to open yours?” He had a bottle cap opener on his keychain and deftly popped the top off of his drink.

“In a few minutes,” I said. “I want to show you the rest of this stuff.”

He sighed. “Okay.” He took a swig of Coke and plopped down beside me on the bed, scrunching the corners of my copied shorthand pages from Treak’s notes.

“Careful,” I said, rescuing them from under his leg. “We need to decode these. Like tomorrow. There’s got to be a library in town that has books on how to read and write shorthand. Maybe we can puzzle it out while we’re there.”

“I’m always going to libraries with you…” he murmured.

“Yeah, well, that’s because they’re wonderful.”

“Sure.” He didn’t sound convinced.

My temper ignited. “Donovan, you were willing to defend our country’s
freedoms
when you joined the Army. But what’s the use of having freedom of speech and freedom of the press if people don’t have a place where they can read what others have written? If they don’t have free public access to information? Libraries give that access to everybody.”

He started humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Only if you get off your soapbox, Aurora.” He shot me an annoyed look. “I don’t know how you’re jumping to half of these conclusions, but fine. We’ll go to the library—your little
utopia
—and you can look things up.”

“Good. And while we’re there, we need to check out what was happening in Joplin and along the westward course of Route 66 two years ago. Any news stories that might be connected with Chicago, Crescent Cove or our brothers.”

He pointed to the construction paper calendar I’d flipped over. “What’s that?”

“This is my list of questions—or, at least, the start of it. Things we need to know but don’t yet.” I read him what I’d written so far:

1. Who was the bad guy/cop at Bonner Mill—the one who killed Ben and Treak and who threw the pipe bombs at Gideon and Jeremy?

2. What did Treak find out that led him up to Crescent Cove initially and what information is in his notes?

3. Why did the Chicago police want Treak’s files and who wrote the report that said his car was destroyed in an accident?

4. Who got rid of our brothers’ possessions at the hotel and confiscated Gideon’s car?

5. What kept Gideon and Jeremy from ever feeling they were safe enough to call home or send a letter to us to let us know they were okay?

“Can you think of a number six?” I asked Donovan.

“Not right now.” He abruptly got off the bed and drank more of his Coke.

“If either of us thinks of anything else, we can add it later. There are lots and lots of little questions, but I think these are the biggest ones,” I said. Which was a lie. I knew there was at least one huge question neither of us was willing to say aloud:
If we ever saw our brothers again, would they be the same as we remembered?

Donovan said he’d “had enough detective crap” for one day, so we spent the rest of the evening unwinding and watching “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley,” just because it was Tuesday night.

The shows reminded me of Betsy and her love of the Fifties. I didn’t feel that same sentimentality for any prior decade, but I wondered if—someday, in the distant future—I’d get all nostalgic about the Seventies. Look at it through rose-colored glasses. Think of it as an easier, simpler, more fun time.

Maybe, but that was hard to imagine.

T
HE NEXT
day we arrived at the Joplin Carnegie Library with our mission laid out before us and I, for one, had no intention of leaving until we’d accomplished it.

“Impressive,” even Donovan had to admit, taking in the three-story, four-columned entrance of the white edifice on the corner of Wall and Ninth Streets.

I couldn’t guess at the style of architecture, but it looked like one of those ancient Roman buildings.

“And it’s old,” he added, pointing to a stone inscription that read: “The Gift of Andrew Carnegie. To the City of Joplin. 1902.”

“Carnegie was a great supporter of libraries,” I said. “He’d financed a lot of them. Unlike
you
, he was someone who believed in their importance, both to the individual and to the community.”

Donovan cocked his head. “Oh, what a dreamboat,” he said in full mockery. “Too bad you didn’t know him personally. He would’ve been the perfect boyfriend for you.”

I couldn’t think of a snappy answer to that, so I just huffed and pushed past him on my way into the library and onto my quest to find the card catalog.

After a quick search of their nonfiction collection, I located several possible books on shorthand, needing only to narrow down which form Treak used in his notes—either the Pitman or the Gregg style—since both were widely used. In the stacks, I pulled out a representative copy of each and compared them to the notes I’d brought along.

“These two shorthand forms are similar,” I told Donovan, “but if you look at the width of the Gregg characters, it doesn’t vary. With the Pitman style, there are different thicknesses in some places.” I pointed to Treak’s notes. “I don’t see any variation here, so I think he learned the Gregg version.”

“Yeah, all right,” he said, looking impatient. “Now what?”

“Now, we try to decode what Treak wrote. I’m going to sit over there.” I indicated a small table toward the back. “Help me if you want. If you don’t, that’s fine. Go look at old newspapers or try to dig up any regional news from two summers ago or something. I’m going to need at least an hour for this. Maybe longer.”

Donovan, no doubt realizing that decoding shorthand was a one-person job and he wasn’t that person, meandered to another section of the library and left me in peace.

I spread out the pages I’d copied from Treak’s notes and opened the Gregg shorthand book to the quick reference chart. Squiggle by tedious squiggle, I matched the lines on the notes with the corresponding sounds from the chart. I knew it wouldn’t be exact, but I hoped I’d get close enough to figure out most of the words.

Eventually, Donovan strode back in to check on my progress. He squinted over my shoulder at the sheet of notebook paper where I’d been writing the words down as I decoded them. “What’s a ‘halchaney’?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “At this point, I’m just trying to get all the major sounds written down so I can look at Treak’s notes as a whole. Then I’ll scan for patterns, sentence breaks and anything that might be meaningful.”

He ran his fingers along his hairline and, then, down his sideburns. Pausing. Thinking. Evaluating. “You like this kind of thing, don’t you?”

“What do you mean? I don’t know anything about shorthand,” I said. “I know I probably should’ve taken it in high school, but it was an elective and I was pretty distracted my last couple of years, so I wasn’t—”

“Not what I’m saying, Aurora.” He crossed his arms and tapped his fingertips near each elbow, slapping the skin. “I meant the code part. The solving of the mystery. Your brother’s journal with all its weird little clues. The big puzzle behind it. You like that sort of stuff.”

He didn’t say it like an accusation—not exactly—but it was clear he didn’t share my interest in problem solving as a form of entertainment. I wasn’t about to tell him how I used to love reading mysteries or the thousand times Gideon and I wrote in code to each other when we were kids. He already thought I was strange enough.

“Swear to God, Donovan, if you start in again on the Nancy Drew name calling—”

“Did I say anything about that?” He shot me an irritated look. “Listen, it was just an observation. Seems to me it’s the kind of thing someone who should go to college would like. You know, it fits you. Shows you’re bright. That’s all.” Then, before I could manage any kind of reply, he spun on his sneaker sole and said, “I’ll be back in another half hour.”

By the time he returned, I had most of Treak’s shorthand symbols decoded into sounds, and what I saw on the page was starting to take shape into something almost recognizable.

“It seems like a list of names,” I told Donovan. “See this first one?” I pointed to the word
halchaney
, which he’d seen before. “It looks like there’s a space between the ‘l’ and the ‘c.’ So, maybe, it’s actually
Hal Chaney
. The reason I think so is, also, because of what comes after it. There’s the phrase
Americana Trucking
, like it’s a company he owns or works for. And, after that, it’s
Cres Cove, Chic, MO, TX, NM
, which I’m betting is ‘Crescent Cove, Chicago, Missouri, Texas and New Mexico.’ Does that make sense to you?”

Donovan nodded. “But Hal Chaney?” he said. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“I don’t know. Below it are some other names and places that follow.” I whispered the full list to him aloud:

Hal Chaney - Americana Trucking - Cres Cove, Chic, MO, TX, NM

Vincent Leto - Chic

Rick Brice - Chic

Sebastian James - Chic

Timothy Wick - Americana Trucking, Jop, Amar

Billy Neville - Albuq

Julian Carello - Chic

“I’ve never heard of any of these people,” he said. “They can’t be famous. At least not to an average American.”

“Maybe not. But for some reason they were important to Treak. We should check every reference source we can lay our hands on to try to figure out who at least a few of them are and what they do,” I said. “Microfilm. Phonebooks. Newspapers. Periodical indexes. Anything at our disposal.”

“Is this everything Treak had listed?” he asked.

I shook my head. “There was one more section.” I showed him the last page. “It’s mostly numbers, as you can see in this left-hand column. The shorthand words to the right vary, but each of them is a city. There were several mentions of Chicago and St. Louis, a few of Joplin and Amarillo, an Oklahoma City and an Albuquerque.”

“All places along Route 66.”

“Yeah.”

“But no idea what the numbers mean?”

“Not yet,” I said. They had to mean something, though, and the quicker I could figure out little details like these, the quicker we might be able to track down Gideon.

Donovan was staring at the list of names again. “I’m thinking the thing to start with is the trucking company because that, at least, gives us a jumping off point. We can look them up. See where they’re based. Try to find something on Hal Chaney and Timothy Wick through them, since Americana Trucking was listed after both of their names.”

Something tugged at my memory. I looked at Hal’s name again and the places Treak had written after it:

Cres Cove, Chic, MO, TX, NM.

“Didn’t somebody in Crescent Cove know a guy named Hal?” I asked.

Donovan remembered an instant before I did. “Kim.”

“That’s right. Our waitress at the bar. The desperate Cher-lookalike chick who was drooling all over you.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Didn’t she say her old boyfriend was a trucker? A guy named Hal. The one she’d moved to Crescent Cove to be with…”

“But then he left her.”

“Or, maybe, he just
left
.”

“Kim didn’t say a last name, though. She might’ve been talking about another Hal,” he said.

“Right. Because there would be
so many
truckers named ‘Hal’ in a town with a population of 949.” I sighed. Donovan was so damn unwilling to let his mind take any leaps at all.