The Road to You (33 page)

“Officer James,” Donovan began, identifying himself immediately and, then, launching into a surprisingly eloquent explanation of where we were and much of what we’d discovered. I could tell that, though he was nervous, he’d also been rehearsing some version of this conversation since the first night I showed him the journal. He knew what he wanted to say.

Also, even though I wasn’t sharing the phone with Donovan this time, I could hear the stunned silence through the line as the Minnesota cop tried to process what Donovan had just told him.

“You and Aurora Gray are all the way down in Oklahoma City,
right this very second
?” he asked, incredulous. “With documents that her brother—a guy we’d all thought was
dead
—gave to a friend of his to give to you?”

“Yes, sir,” Donovan answered.

“And you think what you found shows a connection between the manufacturing of pipe bombs in a little Wisconsin town, some possible Chicago mob-related activity and a truck explosion in Amarillo, Texas?”

“Yes.”

“Do your parents know your whereabouts?” the cop asked. “Does anybody up here?”

“No, sir,” Donovan said. “We didn’t think it was safe to tell anyone about this except you. But we’re planning to start driving back tonight. It’ll probably take us about sixteen hours but we—”

“No, son, don’t do that,” Officer James interrupted. “Don’t drive back yet. Carrying around information like that is too dangerous. I think we can come up with a safer alternative.”

There was a long pause while the cop thought about this and asked Donovan a series of new questions—lines from the police reports that the officer wanted him to read over the phone and details he wanted Donovan to share about what we’d seen in Crescent Cove.

Donovan was very forthcoming with the information we’d uncovered ourselves, but I was thankful he did as he’d promised and left out our visit to Amy Lynn’s apartment. He also minimized any hints that Gideon had, in some way, been orchestrating our discoveries. Probably because the officer wouldn’t have believed us anyway.

I heard the cop ask for the second time, “You didn’t actually
see
Gideon Gray, did you? Or your own brother Jeremy?”

“Unfortunately, no, sir,” Donovan replied.

Though I couldn’t see his expression, I could almost feel the officer’s relief that we weren’t admitting to consorting with ghosts in Oklahoma. But I would’ve given a lot at that moment for just one five-second glance at the cop’s face and hands. Being sightless like this, there was so much information about the conversation that was unknown to me.

“Well, now, if this is all what you say it is, and if we can locate those explosives in Crescent Cove, we might just have a major bust on our hands,” the cop said. “You and Aurora will be heroes when you return, but I don’t want you to leave there just yet. And I don’t want you to talk to anybody else about this until we’re sure we can nail the bad guys.”

We heard the sounds of shuffling pages in the background, as if Officer James was flipping through something thick, like a phonebook. It must have been a road atlas, though, because he added, “Looks like you’re only about two hundred and fifty miles from Amarillo, Texas, and I have a trusted fellow officer who lives out that way. I won’t tell him anything yet, but it’ll be helpful to have a good man on our side. I want you to drive to Amarillo and stay at the Cactus Flower Inn on the outskirts of town. Should take you about four and a half hours. You’re in your red Trans Am, Donovan, right?”

“Yes. We took my car.”

“Good. It’s a fast one. But drive the speed limit.” He laughed. To me, it sounded a little forced, but I appreciated that he was trying to keep things light.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” he added. “I’m going to go to Wisconsin right now, check out the situation in Crescent Cove and then I’ll give you a call late tonight or sometime tomorrow morning. When we’ve got the evidence in hand, we’ll take the next step. I can set up a meeting for you with my friend. Someone who will not only be able to protect you while you’re there but who has access to all the records on file and can reexamine the crime scene, if needed, until I can get down to Texas myself.”

“What about our families?” Donovan asked. “They’re expecting us home this weekend.”

“Well, if town gossip is correct, everyone in Chameleon Lake thinks you two are out scouting colleges in Illinois and Iowa—” the officer said.

Donovan winked at me.
Did we know how to start an effective rumor, or what?

“—which was what I thought, too, until this afternoon.” Officer James let out a long breath. “So, why don’t you just give your folks a quick call and say you need a few extra days. That the admissions department of a campus you’re visiting won’t be open until Monday, and that’s why you have to stay a little longer than you’d expected. Okay?”

“Okay, sir.”

“And, remember, this is very sensitive information you two have. You need to be very careful and not discuss this with anybody else. Not even family yet.”

“We won’t,” Donovan promised. Then, when he hung up, he said to me, “So...it looks like we’re gonna get to go a little farther on Route 66 than I thought.”

Amarillo, Texas ~ Saturday, June 24

W
E MADE
the calls home to our parents and, also, to our bosses about our delay, and we assured everyone that all was well.

Dale was furious with me, of course, but he was at the store with customers when I called him, so he was limited by how much of a jackass he was willing to be in public. Through gritted teeth, he threatened me with “a talk” when I got back and no more vacation time for the rest of the year.

I just sighed and said, “Sure.” It wasn’t worth the high long-distance rates to argue with him.

The conversation with my parents was trickier, though. Mom and Dad were genuinely concerned about us, but I’d gotten so good at lying to them about how “fine” and “safe” we were that I’d begun to believe my own fabrications. Never a good idea.

It was 8:40 p.m. when we spotted the Cactus Flower Inn. There were exactly two other cars in the parking lot and the “us” in “Cactus” kept flickering in neon green. I’d expected someplace louder, bigger, flashier—or at least more centrally located. But it was a very quiet Saturday night at the edge of Amarillo and the silence taunted me with its artificiality. It was almost defiant.

Donovan shrugged when he got out of the car. “Well, we’re here.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t we check in and then…I don’t know, go for a drive or something? Maybe see the town. I think most of it is over there.” He pointed westward, where a hint of the setting sun still colored the horizon with a thin streak of orange. “Officer James said he wouldn’t call us until late tonight or tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said again, agreeing to the drive.

Not sure what I thought yet about the cop’s plan to talk to us again by phone, though. He still had to get himself to Crescent Cove and find Ronny Lee Wolf’s storage facility. We didn’t tell him how we knew to look for it—just that he should—but Donovan and I were both aware that it’d been two years since Ben Rainwater filmed the insides of the place. Maybe it was on tribal lands and not accessible. Maybe the contents changed. It might even all be gone by now. We’d have to wait and see.

As for our evening, it turned out Amarillo was, in fact, bigger and more active than we’d been led to believe by our sleepy introduction to it. The lady at the front desk handed us a stack of “attractions” brochures along with our room key when we checked in.

“Y’all might wanna catch a bite at The Big Texan Steak Ranch, if you’re hungry and you like meat,” she said with a smile. “And on the other side of the city, right along Route 66, there’s the Cadillac Ranch. It’s a pretty famous landmark.”

I thought of my brother’s second postcard to Amy Lynn and nodded.

We thanked her, dropped our overnight bags in the room and headed into the heart of Amarillo.

With darkness having fallen over the city and the lights all around, I was finally beginning to see it as the largest Texas town in the north of the state. After driving through the Interstate-40 business district, I had to admit I wasn’t sure why Officer James had specifically told us to stay at the Cactus Flower Inn and not a motel nearer the city center.

“He really has us on the fringes,” I said to Donovan.

“Yeah, it’s an odd choice, but he probably knows what he’s doing,” Donovan said, giving the cop his vote of confidence yet again. “Maybe it’s a place he’s stayed at before and he liked it. I just hope—” He hesitated.

“You hope what?”

“That us going through all of this won’t be for nothing. That it’ll make the world safe for our brothers.” He exhaled. “I just haven’t wanted to let myself believe…you know, that Jeremy might still be out there. Alive. Unharmed. That I might get to actually see my kid brother again.”

“I know.” I’d believed Gideon and his friend might be alive for much longer than Donovan had, but I, too, wondered what it might be like to simply see and chat with my brother once more. Wondered about it all the time, in fact.

“Hey, there’s that place.” He nodded toward a bright yellow building with blue trim that said
The Big Texan
on the side. “Hungry?”

I pulled out the large advertising card the motel lady gave us about the steakhouse and read a bit about it. “Not hungry enough for The Texas King,” I told him.

“What’s that?”

“Their famous 72-ounce sirloin steak, served with salad, shrimp cocktail, baked potato and a dinner roll. It’s free if you can eat the whole thing by yourself in an hour. Otherwise, you pay for it.”

“I’ve got an appetite, but I don’t think I could finish all that tonight,” he admitted. “Maybe just a steak sandwich or a burger?”

“Sounds good.”

Inside, it was more like a three-ring circus than a typical restaurant. So many people, so many sizzling steaks hissing on the grill. In the center of the main dining room there were a couple of lumberjack-like men going for The Texas King challenge. One of them looked red and overheated from the colossal meal, and he seemed to be slowing down. The other was munching steadily, like he’d polish off everything on his plate but the silverware and lick the dish clean, too.

We were seated at a table for two near a wall that had the stuffed head of a heavily antlered beast above us. Just a buck, but it looked scary hovering over our heads that way. Like it might attack at any moment.

I glanced uneasily at it as we ordered our sandwiches—or, rather, “steakwiches”—and glasses of iced tea. Donovan opted for mashed potatoes and I got a side salad just to be contrary. Not that lettuce made that big of a statement, but it at least made me feel better that I wasn’t just blindly following along with everything he did.

I could tell he was still riding high on his victory, being right, in his opinion, about trusting Officer James and handing over our findings to an authority figure. Just because I wasn’t openly arguing with him, though, it didn’t mean I was convinced that was the best move.

He glanced around the large room, his gaze resting on a picture that showed the outline of Texas. “Didn’t think we’d get this far south and west,” he said. “We’re a long way from central Minnesota.”

“That we are,” I had to agree, sidestepping any commentary on the first part of his statement because, of course, I
did
think we’d get this far away from home. I’d begun imagining myself trekking along the same route as Gideon ever since I saw all of the locations listed in his journal.

Donovan seemed to sense the direction of my thoughts. “You got the journal with you?”

I nodded. I kept everything with me in my tote bag—my brother’s journal, the two postcards, the envelope Andy delivered to us, Treak’s decoded notes, the Route 66 placemat and any other scrap of paper with helpful information on it. I was a walking, talking card catalog for anything remotely important that we’d discovered.

“Did you want to look up something?”

“Maybe just check to see what he’d written in the days after Amarillo—” he began, but he was interrupted by a loud cheer. One of lumberjack guys had finished his steak.