The Road to You (6 page)

The month our brothers disappeared.

I left the words unspoken because, of course, both of us knew the timeline.

“You didn’t tell the cops about that when they were investigating?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I tried to, but it was a pretty weak statement. They didn’t take it seriously, and I had no other info then. Nothing to tie it to the disappearance until you showed me the journal yesterday. When the cops called the base to ask me questions, they wanted to know about major things—unusual behaviors or anything strange or out of character that I’d picked up on when I last saw Jeremy or heard from him. But I honestly hadn’t noticed a single thing at the time that was different. Maybe I wasn’t looking closely enough. Or listening hard enough.”

Or maybe the cops were the ones not looking and listening.

I still wanted to strangle the police for their lousy investigation. Difficult to imagine a more ineffective one. Even more difficult to imagine me working jointly with Donovan on anything. Our approaches couldn’t have been less similar, our temperaments weren’t exactly complementary and, God, just being around him made me jumpy.

But on this very first step…well, pairing up with him might not only be helpful, it might also be necessary.

“So, our brothers were involved with something that—at least initially—they both thought would be really fun,” I said. “And what they were doing was premeditated. Weeks in the making. Lots of planning. Something that may have had its origins in Crescent Cove.”

I flipped back to the first Crescent Cove mention on April 19, 1976 and Gideon’s note in the upper right-hand corner of that page, dated Monday, May 29, 1978.

Start here. G.

“Sure as hell seems that way,” Donovan muttered.

We both managed to finish about half of our meals, though mostly in silence after that. At one point he pushed the small plate with the lingonberry cake toward me and said, “I got this for you. Eat some of it.”

And, because it was easier than talking, I took a few bites. It was sweet and moist, but it tasted like paste in my mouth.

As we walked back to the parking garage afterward (he slowed his pace enough for me to keep up this time), I studied the planes of his face, his shoulders and his chest. He looked every bit of his five years older than me. Every ounce of him was masculine, Army tough and uncompromising. I knew, even if I put up a fuss, I was going to lose the battle of who’d get to drive.

I also knew there was no point in worrying about being inconspicuous. Not only was it futile, it was irrelevant. No matter which car we took to Wisconsin, people were going to remember Donovan McCafferty. It was pure foolishness to think otherwise.

In the garage, he pointed at my old Buick. “You got a bag in there?” he asked.

I boosted my tan-and-white overnighter out of the trunk. He took it from me and tossed it effortlessly into the backseat of his Trans Am, next to his camouflage-colored Army duffle. Then he opened the passenger door for me, and I slid inside.

When we were safely out on the open road, the whispering wind whipping through the windows and ruffling our hair, Led Zeppelin blaring on the radio and the golden summer sun beating down on us—heating our skin and threatening a burn if we left our arms exposed for too long—I felt an object being pressed onto my lap.

Gideon’s journal.

I ran my fingertips across the leather cover, tracing the butterfly, then I shuffled the pages in time with “Stairway to Heaven.” Yeah. Sometimes words
did
have two meanings.

“You can have it back,” Donovan said, the first specter of a smile crossing his lips in over an hour. “For now.”

I laughed at that, almost under my breath, but not quite. He almost laughed back.

And, while the boys on the radio may have disagreed on this, I sensed that, no, there wasn’t any time to change the road we were on. The piper had called us, and we’d chosen our path.

In that expectant space between silence and melody, our trip began.

Crescent Cove, Wisconsin

A
FTER WHAT
might have been the longest three hours and forty-seven minutes of my entire life, the Trans Am crossed the state line into Wisconsin.

I eyed Donovan warily. He’d uttered aloud only a handful of syllables on the drive, letting the rock on the car radio speak for him.

But, while Wings, the Eagles and Crosby, Stills and Nash gave voice to his love of the fast lane and general discontent with society, the increasing tension in his body called out to me like a scream. I could feel the vibrations of his stress in the claw-like grip he had on the steering wheel, the pale cast to his knuckles, the way he punched the buttons to change stations when one radio signal grew too weak, the ropy tautness of his neck and the steely intensity riveting his eyes to the pavement.

Donovan flicked off the radio finally. “We’re almost there,” he informed me.

I opened my mouth to say, “Thank God, it’s about time,” but something in his tone and the set of his jaw stopped me. He was not only anxious, I realized, he was angry.

Very
angry.

Even knowing this anger wasn’t directed at me but at the Crescent Cove city limits sign (“Population 949”) wasn’t much consolation. It shimmered off of him like light on a lake, and I was sure those waters were deep with danger.

“What do you want to do first?” I asked him, trying to come across as reasonable, accommodating and not likely to piss him off. “Once we drive through town, that is.”

He turned his dark brown eyes in my direction, taking them off the road only long enough to blink and say, “Let’s see what we see there.”

Yeah, that
sounded
simple enough, but it wasn’t. Donovan was glaring at everything in Crescent Cove through his own increasingly frustrated lens. We wouldn’t be able to figure out anything that way. I knew we were going to have to view the place through Gideon and Jeremy’s open and optimistic perspective instead. But both of us were out of practice being upbeat, and trying to tell Donovan what to do would get me exactly nowhere. I’d asked him once on the road if we should, maybe, stop for gas and the look he gave me would’ve made the Incredible Hulk cower in fright.

“Let’s just consider how our brothers might have seen everything here,” I suggested carefully, glancing at the one-street, two-stop-sign town, which was significantly smaller than even Chameleon Lake.

Donovan narrowed his eyes and pulled into a farmhouse driveway on the edge of the town so he could turn his Trans Am around and go down the main drag once again. This time more slowly.

“This place is a bunch of rubble in the road,” he pronounced after taking an especially long look at the vendor lineup on the left side of the street: Bar with burnt-out neon lights, brownish brick corner store, paint-chipped post office, ramshackle bar, hardware store with taped-up window, shuttered empty store front, yet another bar… “What the hell were they doing in this dump?” he muttered.

I had to admit, I was almost as mystified.

Had our brothers liked hanging out at one of the bars? It seemed too long of a drive from Chameleon Lake just to come up for a beer, though the drinking age in Wisconsin was only eighteen while, in Minnesota, it was nineteen. That was reason enough for a lot of my old high-school friends to cross the state line.

But my parents had never been strict about stuff like that. Once Gideon and Jeremy got to high school, Mom and Dad let them drink a bottle or two of beer at the house without batting an eyelash. Dad even fixed us all—me included—whiskey sours one New Year’s Eve. I remembered how quickly I got a buzz from it.

I also remembered how funny Jeremy had been that night, laughing with us as Gideon pulled Mom into a crazy waltz in the middle of the living room. “Dance With Me” by Orleans had been playing on the radio. Jeremy turned the volume up even higher and suddenly said, “Well, c’mon, Aurora. We can’t let ‘em show us up, can we?” So, I took his hand and he spun me around and around, until we both finally collapsed on the shag carpet from too much giggling and dizziness and, maybe, the whiskey.

Had Gideon and Jeremy danced with anyone here in Crescent Cove? Could it have been that one of them had a crush on a chick he’d met at a bar up here? Maybe. With so little information, it was hard to rule out anything...

But, while they’d both dated casually quite a bit, I didn’t think either guy had been serious about a girlfriend two years ago. At their graduation party, they’d each been flirting outrageously with the girls in the hotel room, and I would’ve bet money they both got laid that night. But there were no longstanding relationships afterward. Not that I knew of, that was for sure.

“Could there be some other section of the town?” I asked Donovan. “There has to be a church here somewhere. A school. A library, maybe.”

He looked at me like I was schizo. “Aurora, they don’t even have a
gas station
in this stinkin’ hell pit. You really think they’d have a
library?
”

He shook his head and went back to glaring at the handful of rundown buildings again, this time the ones on the right side of the street. A couple of local boys, who’d seen us zip down and back, eyed Donovan’s car curiously, no doubt recognizing a pair of out-of-towners when they saw some.

Donovan abruptly turned the car down a narrow country lane. “You wanna look for a church? A school? A library?” he asked me. “Let’s just go for a little spin around these parts and take in the diversity.”

Hard to miss the sarcasm in his voice.

We cut a wide square driving through the surrounding farmland but, as Donovan had predicted, there were no signs of any large public buildings anywhere in the vicinity. We did, however, see a smallish lake.

“Behold, the Cove,” Donovan said in full mocking mode.

There was also an entrance to one of the Saint Croix Chippewa Reservation Communities (know-it-all Donovan informed me that there were several tribal lands in the area) and a dark-green sign pointing in the direction of Ashburn Falls, a town thirteen miles away.

Donovan pulled off the pavement and onto the gravel, grabbing his road atlas from under the seat and locating the place.

“That might be our best bet for a motel,” he told me. “Ashburn Falls has got a population of almost six thousand, so that’s probably where the nearest school and church are. And your library,” he added drily.

I had to agree on the prospects of the new town, although I forced all thoughts of a motel stay with Donovan out of my mind for now—I just couldn’t let myself imagine
that!
Besides, our work in Crescent Cove wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.

“Gideon and Jeremy never mentioned Ashburn Falls in the journal,” I told him. “Gideon specifically wrote about Crescent Cove, though. So, there’s something right here that is…or was…important to them.” Not that I had any idea what that might be. “We need to park the car and go down that main street again—this time on foot. I think we should walk into some of these bars and little shops. Get a feel for them.”

He nodded. “I know,” he said, like he’d been fighting against it. Like doing this was going to cost him something.

He parallel-parked in front of the tiny post office and the two of us began strolling down the sidewalk, peeking into the various storefronts as if we were window shopping.

Since it was nearly six p.m., many of the places were already closed, including the corner grocery, which had a poster of Wonder Bread in the window and an orange sign next to it that read: “Sale on Peanut Butter!”

Bar #1 (with the burnt-out neon lights) was doing brisk business, though.

“You got an ID?” Donovan asked.

I grimaced, knowing what was coming. “I’ve got my driver’s license with me, yeah. But it says my real birth date.”

“What? No fake ID?” he asked, surprised.

I shook my head. Yeah, yeah, I knew it was odd.
Everyone
had a fake ID but me. I didn’t go out much.

“How long ‘til you’re legal?”

“In this state? Three weeks,” I admitted. I’d be eighteen on July first.