Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  I sighed, loudly enough to make sure he heard, then I got out. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To the diner. We need to talk.”

  “Wha—talk? Jesus, Donovan! We can talk in the car. We’ve got almost four hours of driving ahead. Don’t you just want to get—”

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “I want lunch.”

  With a couple of flicks of his first two fingers, he motioned for me to follow him, turning his back on me with the certainty that I would.

  And, damn him, I did. I couldn’t help how drawn I was to him. Like an unwilling magnet, I seemed to have no choice in the matter.

  He strode ahead of me, his dark hair and dark shirt both catching the wind and dancing with it, until we were right in front of Johansen’s. Then he paused and held the door open for me when I got there. Such a show of being a gentleman.

  As I breezed past him, he said, “Ask for a booth in the back.”

  I shot him the evil eye and was about to tell him to ask for it himself, but the greeter guy was already there, looking expectantly at me.

  When we were seated with menus in our hands, the waitress, who looked older than me by a few years, placed a bread basket in front of us and glanced at Donovan, then at me, then back at Donovan. She licked her lips and smoothed down one side of her strawberry-blond hair.

  I tried to keep from openly scowling and just ordered a cup of their fish chowder and a Coke. I’d had this here once before, thought it tasted okay and knew it wouldn’t be too expensive. Donovan had snitched the journal and insisted we meet at this place, he could sure as hell buy me lunch for $1.09.

  Donovan raised an amused eyebrow at my modest choices and ordered a Coke as well, plus a sausage rolled in thin lefse with potato dumplings and homemade gravy…and a cup of Sandvik’s stew…and a side of Norwegian meatballs…and a piece of lingonberry cake.

  I stared at him.

  When the waitress left, I hissed, “There are restaurants and grocery stores in Wisconsin, you know. You won’t starve there.”

  He grabbed a sesame roll from the basket, took a big bite and pointedly ignored me.

  “Fine.” I fiddled with the glass sugar dispenser at the edge of the table. “But you said you wanted to talk, so let’s talk.”

  He held up his finger, waiting until the waitress brought out our food, and he insisted on paying up immediately. He slipped her a handful of dollar bills while scanning her nametag. “Thanks, Debbie,” he said with a wink. “Keep the change.”

  She smiled prettily at him, scribbled a receipt and handed that to him in exchange. “Just let me know if you need anything else.”

  He nodded, glanced at the receipt as she sauntered away and grinned.

  I recognized that expression from somewhere. It took me several seconds to place it, but I finally remembered when I’d seen it last and who was wearing it. His brother Jeremy. Looking as proud as a Stanley Cup winner as he told Gideon about some cheerleader he’d felt up under the ice rink bleachers after a hockey game a few months before they graduated.

  “She gave you her number?” I blurted to Donovan. “Already?”

  He studied me with one of his assessing looks, which never failed to make me feel like I was twelve again and he was the big high-school senior—nearly a man—that I’d first met those long years ago. Too much of a child for him to trifle with…almost.

  “Debbie’s off at six,” he informed me, pocketing the receipt. “But we’ll be in Wisconsin by then, won’t we?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll still just go by myself.” I reached for the journal he held hostage on his side of the table.

  He grabbed it and put it on the seat next to him. Hmm. Fast reflexes.

  “Just give me a chance, Aurora,” he whispered. “Okay?” The grin was gone and, in its place, a grimace laced with sorrow. If I read it right, a hint of fear mingled there, too.

  “Okay,” I whispered back.

  He poked a little at his meatballs with a fork as I blew on my chowder. “I read the journal three times last night,” he said in a low voice. “Cover to cover. There was nothing that jumped out at me until I got to the page you first told me about. The one with the two dates.” He paused, stabbed at another meatball and, finally, ate one. “I’m sure you noticed the city names slipped in between the various chemical compounds.”

  I nodded.

  “Except for Crescent Cove, all of them are south of us. And I didn’t find any city in the journal further east than Chicago. So, your brother, and maybe mine, too, seemed to be keeping tabs on something in the Midwest and West. What it is—or was—I don’t know.”

  In a rush, I was reminded of Donovan’s stake in this. How close he and Jeremy had been. In his own way, delay tactics and all, I knew how much he cared about the outcome, and I could tell he’d spent some time trying to piece the unknowns of this puzzle together.

  He might be skeptical of my conclusions and afraid of getting his hopes up, but I was certain he was just as haunted by our brothers’ disappearance as I was. Maybe even more so, though I didn’t understand why I was getting that impression so strongly. He had the look of someone about to set foot in a confessional.

  “Any idea what they were trying to do with the chemicals?” I asked.

  He scrunched up his forehead and downed a few scoops of mashed potatoes and a bite of lefse-wrapped sausage before answering. My chowder had cooled enough for me to have a few spoonfuls, but I couldn’t have been less hungry for it.

  “I have a partial theory,” he said, “given the dates they went to Wisconsin. For one thing, I think they went there twice. It was the only city that seemed to be repeated, although it was abbreviated the second time. See?”

  He opened the journal and flipped a few pages past the first mention of Crescent Cove—which had been on Monday, April 19, 1976—and pointed to an entry on Monday, May 10, 1976 that listed various chemicals and car parts but, also, in Gideon’s tight scrawl, included the letters: “J & I —> C.C.”

  “So, in the spring of ’76, they went there and then, three weeks later, they returned. Maybe they ordered something from somebody and then had to go back to pick it up?” I suggested.

  “That’s what I was thinking.” He shook his head, as if trying to shake loose the direction of his thoughts. “Look, this is nuts. I don’t know what to make of it. And I think it’s way too farfetched to believe this journal means anything, but there’s something else you need to know.” He hesitated, slurped some Coke and shifted in his seat. “April nineteenth didn’t ring a bell when I read it, but the May date did. Two years ago, May tenth was the day after Mother’s Day.”

  “And that’s memorable to you…why?”

  “Because Jeremy wrote me a letter that day,” he explained. “I got it later that week, but I remembered the date. I was stationed out at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia then, but I’d sent Mom a card for Mother’s Day, and Jeremy told me she’d gotten it in time. That she’d been really excited to hear from me.” He stopped talking and massaged his temples.

  “Oh, God, Donovan. Do you have the letter with you? What else did he say?”

  I watched as he exhaled a long stream of air. “I wish I’d kept it, Aurora. I’ve wished that for two years,” he admitted, bitterness in his voice. “It was the last letter I ever got from my brother—and I threw it out.”

  He closed his eyes and shoved back whatever emotion he didn’t yet want to share with me. “But I remember it was just a short note. There was that little bit about Mom. Then he was bragging about some Wendy person he thought was real foxy. And, finally, there were a couple of lines about your brother.”

  Donovan opened his eyes and looked up at me. Held my gaze in his, and I caught my breath at the intensity of it.

  “He said the two of them had something ‘fun’ planned for the summer. Something they were working on. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. I thought he’d meant their secret graduation party up in St. Cloud. S
ince I was taking three days’ leave in June to come home for his ceremony, I figured Jeremy would fill me in then, but—” A troubled expression washed over his face, revealing the worry lines etched at the corners of his eyes and the tight brackets on each side of his mouth.

  “But he didn’t?”

  “No,” Donovan whispered. “I mentioned his ‘fun thing’ when Jeremy was driving me back to the airport. Told him the party had been great and congratulated him again. But he just laughed. He said what he’d been talking about had nothing to do with graduation at all. That he’d write and tell me about it ‘next month.’ In July.”

  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, and 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.

  10:53 a.m.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pasadena, California ~ Friday, August 15, 2014

  I sent an immediate text to my husband, who was in New York City on business.

  Did Charlie tell you he was going somewhere this weekend?

  An answer shot back to me over the ether in less than thirty seconds.

  No.

  Then a pause...followed by another short text.

  Why?

  I weighed telling him the whole story versus possibly worrying him needlessly. Especially when he was across the country and couldn’t do anything but, at most, try to help me keep my panic in check. A futile endeavor. I hadn’t even called my older son yet, and Charlie would have been more likely to confide in him than anyone.

  So, I texted my husband back.

  Just had a question for him and wondered if he was away. Call you tonight.

  The reply came fast and with an electronic sense of relief.

  Okay!

  And he was gone.

  I tried both of Charlie’s phone lines myself. What if Gloria had misdialed one of them?

  But, no. It was exactly as she’d said. No answer. Only voicemail.

  So I called Jay, Charlie’s big brother, who lived five hours north in Monterey. The receptionist at the computer company where my other son worked said he was in a meeting, so I left a message on his office line and then another on his cell. I hoped I managed to walk the fine tightrope in tone between “this isn’t an emergency” and “but don’t blow me off.”

  Funny how often I took for granted my ability to reach my family members at a moment’s notice. Usually I got one of them right away. We were all so accessible these days, weren’t we? Used to be only doctors were expected to be “on call,” but not anymore. Nowadays almost everybody was capable of being paged.

  On a whim I speed-dialed Jay’s wife Susan. She was an X-ray technician at a women’s health clinic. Very precise. Always on top of things. Excellent memory for detail. I liked her.

  As was typical with the clinic, though, I was put on hold by the front desk while electronic easy-listening tunes played in a never-ending, lyricless loop of nostalgia for those of us old enough to remember the originals. I caught the end of a classic Elton John favorite, “Philadelphia Freedom.” Then an Orleans song came on, “Dance With Me.”

  A memory rushed back that had my knees almost buckling beneath me. Late December 1975. I sat down on a kitchen chair—still on hold with the clinic—as the digital keyboard plunked out the chorus. But, in my mind, I heard all of the band’s instruments, the singers’ harmonies and the song’s hopeful lyrics...just as it had played on the radio in my parents’ living room that long-ago winter.

  Gideon had pulled our mom into a farcical waltz, dragging her away in the midst of her Christmas-cookie arranging and onto the shag carpet.

  Jeremy McCafferty was there with us, as he often had been back then. He and I watched my brother and my mom with some amusement before we glanced at each other and cracked up. Gideon was charismatic enough to get even Mom to dance, an activity she’d often claimed to hate. But her resistance to my brother was halfhearted. Her pink cheeks and quick, delighted smile told me she was loving every second.

  Jeremy and I had danced, too, laughing so hard we could barely stop.

  Then, my brother and his best friend nudged each other and
raced to the table to snitch cookies from my mom’s overflowing but currently unprotected tray.

  And my mom just shook her head at them as if they were naughty schoolboys, but she couldn’t disguise her happiness. It radiated from her. What a perfect moment. A Norman Rockwell painting of our very own—only live, with a soundtrack and in Technicolor.

  The retro melody stopped abruptly and Susan’s voice came on the line. “Aurora?”

  I cleared my throat and asked her about Charlie. In her warm but efficient way, she said she had no idea where he was. “Jay didn’t know?” she wondered.

  “I haven’t been able to reach him yet.”

  “Don’t worry,” Susan said with an assuredness I always admired about her, even while thinking, Oh, she’s so young. “We’ll find out where Charlie is,” she added.

  And I knew we would.

  Eventually.

  But when?

  And would he be all right when we did?

  “A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused

  into a considerable portion.”

  ~James Boswell

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Crescent Cove, Wisconsin ~ Friday, June 9, 1978

  After 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.