The Road to You (9 page)

But when I just let myself get caught up in the mental motion-picture screening of that night, it was a different experience. Easier. I could be detached from that former me, from living in a time and an emotional state that no longer existed, because it was as if I’d just been an ordinary character in an ordinary film.

And that ordinary character had been gazing at Donovan
all
during the grad party.

Admittedly, I’d felt a lot like an actress that night. For one thing, I wasn’t remotely as reserved as usual, thanks to being away from home and, also, being a little buzzed. At one point, the bourbon and the careless abandon of summer made me kind of bold, and I walked up to him when he was alone in the kitchenette part of the suite.

“Hey, Donovan,” I murmured, standing much closer to him than I ever would have normally. But I was nearly a high-school junior then. I thought I was almost cool.

“Aurora,” he whispered, watching me with a rare inquisitive look as I smiled at him and leaned against the mauve-colored wall. That glint of interest in his gaze gave me courage.

I reached out to stroke his chest—firm against my fingertips—and I grabbed a handful of his t-shirt because I liked the sensation of it. It was deep red, newish and much softer than I’d expected. Somehow, it made sense to me in that moment to tug him close, my fingers letting go of his shirt’s front and reaching all the way around him. Caressing his back and pressing him to me. I raised my head to kiss him and noticed he was holding his breath.

For a second, he let me touch his lips with mine. Just that one single time. Then he stepped away, abruptly, and with an apology.

“Been drinking,” he said, glancing to either side of us, not that anyone else was looking. “Sorry.”

At first I didn’t know if he’d been talking about my drinking or his. I sort of laughed. “
Everyone’s
been drinking. Half the people in the other room are passed out.” I shrugged. “Nobody’s, um...watching us.”

I knew Betsy was making out with some townie in the hall. My brother was on the sofa—a blonde sprawled languorously on top of him. Jeremy was smoking weed with a few people in the bathroom. I could smell it. Hear them laughing.

“You’re too young,” Donovan said simply.

I was almost sixteen then and, in my expert opinion, at least as mature as a twenty-nine year old. He’d just turned twenty-one and had to be going on about thirty-five. But I liked older men. Well, specifically,
this
man. He was just five years older, really. And, anyway, if he had a point, I wasn’t about to admit it.

“We’re
both
young and inconspicuous,” I stated. “I like it that way, Donovan.”

He squinted at me. “Hmm. You don’t want to be the center of attention, do you?”

“No. Not usually. I’m an observer. I watch people. I know you know that.” I grinned at him, feeling the strange high of being so direct and honest with someone I was attracted to. Someone I desperately wanted to touch again with my fingertips, my palms, my arms and more. I inched closer to him. “I want to get out of this bucolic little place and see the world. Anonymously.”

“
Boo
—what?” He stepped back to restore the distance between us and chuckled at my phrase. “Anyone ever tell you that you use too many big words?”

I didn’t answer. Alcohol made some people giddily drunk. For me, it had the primary effect of making me more introspective. And, apparently, it strengthened my vocabulary.

He exhaled, pecked a light kiss on my forehead and said, “Don’t rush things, Aurora. It’ll all happen for you.” Then, with those patronizing words still hanging in the air between us, he raised his palm in a parting wave and marched himself out of the hotel suite.

I slumped against the kitchenette wall and grimaced, hoping he’d come back—wishing and almost praying for it—but knowing he wouldn’t.

A half hour later, when Betsy stumbled in the room without the St. Cloud townie (he was snoring in the hallway), she said to me, “I’m tired. Can we go?”

So she and I left. I thought it would be years before I saw Donovan McCafferty again...but it turned out to be much sooner than that. Just a little over a month later, he came home briefly for a week, during the missing persons’ investigation. And everything that had happened between us before that just seemed frivolous, embarrassing and improbable.

I never would have predicted that we’d ever be in a motel room together again. That I’d be studying him like this as he sat on the bed with me, acting like he owned it, while he faked the appearance of being calm.

What a lie. He couldn’t have been more wound up if he’d been a yo-yo.

During the TV commercials, I tried to get him to strategize with me about the next day. Discuss what we’d do when we went to the corner store and found this Ronny guy. What we’d ask him.

“I don’t want to talk right now, Aurora. I don’t want to overanalyze anything. And I sure as hell don’t want to plan what I’m gonna say
twelve hours
from now,” he snapped. “I just want to relax, okay?” He underscored this statement by yawning loudly, stretching out even more and gluing his eyes to Jim Rockford.

Intellectually, I understood this was his way of resisting change, and I was starting to get a sense of what, exactly, fueled his anger.

I remembered beyond the investigation, even beyond the “funeral” services our parents had held for our brothers. In the early days, Donovan had been hopeful, so sure we’d find the answers quickly, much like a couple of lead actors in a detective show.

But he didn’t deal well with ambiguity. Didn’t like all the “I don’t knows” that lingered. And, so, he’d made a choice. A choice to slam the door on all hope. To reopen that door could be potentially very painful and undoubtedly very frightening.

Donovan, I realized, wasn’t a man who’d easily admit to fear. Anger, of course, was an acceptable emotion.

Sometime before the end of the show, he fell asleep on top of the bed, fully clothed—the TV crime still unsolved and me still watching him, thinking about how to get him to see the world a little more like I did. Get him to perceive a few more impulses, so he’d understand the complexity.

Not only of the situation, but of
me
.

Saturday, June 10

D
ONOVAN AND
I waited until a respectable ten a.m. before checking out of the motel and driving back to Crescent Cove.

During a lazy weekend morning, the town looked different than it had the night before. Not that the prior evening had been “bustling” by any stretch of the imagination, but there had, in fact, been people visible on Friday. Awake. Drinking. Wandering about the town and such. On a Saturday, midmorning, it was like the sun shining on a corpse—brightly lit but dead.

As we pushed our way through the corner store’s torn-screen front door, I couldn’t help but make comparisons again between Dale’s Grocery Mart and this place. This store was even smaller and mustier than where I worked, but that depressing, end-of-the-line feeling I got just crossing the threshold was identical.

Only two people were in the store—the clerk, who was a twenty-something, very fair-haired male, and an old lady, who wore a thin print dress and was coughing up half a lung into her handkerchief.

I didn’t have a problem with the old-lady shopper. I’d served an endless stream of customers like that. Always on a strict budget. Always a little sick with something. Almost always alone.

The clerk, however, gave me a distinctly negative vibe, especially when the very first time he glanced at us he shot us a look so irritated you would’ve thought we’d interrupted him in the middle of his lunch break.

Donovan drew in a surprised breath next to me when he spotted the clerk, and I knew why. We’d both been expecting Ronny Lee Wolf to be a Native American.

But this dude looked more Scandinavian than anything else, with eyebrows so blond they disappeared into his pale skin, and none of the traditional Chippewa facial features. Forget the “Wolf” surname, if he had even a drop of Native American blood I would have been surprised. Apparently, he was Ben Rainwater’s “cousin,” although maybe that term was used loosely. We knew for a fact that Ben had lived on the tribal lands when he was alive.

Unless the clerk
wasn’t
Ben’s cousin. Unless he was somebody else entirely—someone filling in for the cousin.

I couldn’t shake the hope that this cold, creepy guy might not be Ronny. That the real Ronny would be someone else. Someone more approachable. Someone who wouldn’t make my senses tingle with the absolute certainty that we couldn’t trust him.

“You two need anything?” the clerk asked, a hard edge to his voice.

For a moment, Donovan looked as if he might stare the guy down, but then he seemed to remember his role and, instead, broke into a sloppy grin. “Just a couple of supplies, man. We’ll find ‘em.” He grabbed a loaf of bread. To help, I snatched a jar of peanut butter and held it up like a prop.

The clerk grunted but continued to eye us suspiciously. Every tiny hair on my body rose when he looked in our direction.

The old lady coughed some more in that unhealthy, croaking way. Hunched over her little plastic basket with just a few items in it, she said, “Ronny, are you out of tomato soup? I don’t see none here.”

“Might be a few cans in the back, Ms. Ida,” the clerk—who
was
Ronny, oh, damn—called out to her, his voice softening a little when he said her name. “I’ll check for ya quick.”

He disappeared for a minute, and Donovan, whose first thought actually mirrored mine for a change, murmured, “Shit. That’s
him
.”

I nodded and sighed.

Donovan sniffed the air and gazed down the aisles. “Something just smells funny about this place,” he whispered, almost inaudibly. “I think he’s selling more than Wonder Bread and Jif.”

“Weed?” I mouthed.

“Maybe…or maybe something stronger,” he mouthed back. “Acid. Angel dust. Cocaine. I don’t know.”

Ronny returned and handed over one soup can to the older lady. “This is all we’ve got for now. I’ll get an order put in for more this week.”

The Ida woman shuffled to the register, purchased her few items and left. Then, unfortunately, the clerk’s full attention was on us.

Donovan swung into action, turning up his laidback charm-o-meter and finally putting to use some of the information he’d collected last night. He grinned again at the clerk. “So, man, you’re Ronny Lee Wolf, right?”

“What’s it to you?” Ronny threaded his fingers through his fine blond hair, which was longish in the back and stringy, like the way some stoner in a rock band would wear it.

“Just wanted to make sure I had the boss, you know, the big man.”

How Donovan managed to make that line sound sincere was beyond me, but it seemed effective in buttering up Ronny, at least a little. The clerk shrugged. “Okay, yeah. So, what do you want?”

Donovan sidled up to the register, put the bread and the jar of peanut butter on the counter and glanced (a bit too obviously, in my opinion) around the store, as if sweeping for eavesdroppers.

“I didn’t wanna say anything while the little old lady was in here, but we just came into town last night to visit some friends, and they told us about you.” Donovan paused. Leaned forward. “Said you had, you know, extra
provisions
…” He let the thought trail off and smiled knowingly at the clerk.

This was a big gamble on Donovan’s part. I tried to look relaxed and natural, but the edges of worry cut lines of anxiety into my gut. It was a dangerous game, playing on a hunch like that. Not only implying that Ronny was some kind of dealer, but that we knew intimately anyone at all in Crescent Cove, a town not much larger than some extended families.

My fears grew deeper when Ronny asked, “Which friends are those?”

I studied the clerk’s face for tells. Caught the way his glance shifted for a split second toward the backroom. The way he flinched then forced his features into an approximation of a smile. The way his hands hovered just above the counter and trembled ever so slightly from the effort it took to keep from grabbing something—a weapon, maybe—from below the register.