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

by Brant, Marilyn

  And the Bonners’ troubles were complicated even further by Ben Rainwater’s death. Partly because he wasn’t a worker there, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—or so said the authorities—but, also, because he wasn’t the only one who died there.

  An unidentified man perished the same night as well. His name was a mystery because his human remains were so badly charred he had no fingerprints (they’d been burned off his hands), and his teeth didn’t match any dental records of missing persons that the police had on file.

  Donovan, who wasn’t someone prone to a whole lot of intuitive leaping, at least not that I’d seen, jumped to a conclusion just then that really upset him. I saw it happening. Watched as he flipped through Gideon’s journal in panic, the blood seeping from his face as he scanned the second half of the book.

  I knew right away what he was looking for, so I waited—letting him test his theory, holding my breath and hoping my memory of the entries was accurate.

  “I’m sure I saw a reference to ‘J’ at least once in those later pages,” I whispered after a moment. I didn’t think Jeremy was the one to die in the explosion along with Ben. It couldn’t have been him. And, whether or not Donovan believed me, I knew it wasn’t Gideon.

  No.

  I watched as a hint of color returned to Donovan’s cheeks. He ran the tip of his index finger underneath the phrase “J & I in Chicago” and nodded at me in obvious relief. Then, for good measure, he flipped a few pages further into the journal, hunting for additional “J”s, one of which he found in the vicinity of another handwritten city name: Tulsa.

  “Oklahoma?” he said. “Any idea why there?”

  I shook my head. “But, Donovan, I know, somehow, all of this is connected. I just know it. Is there any other city mentioned before Chicago?”

  “No. There’s only one entry between the ‘Start here’ page and the ‘Chicago’ one. It’s got just one date on it—Monday, May 10, 1976, when Jeremy and Gideon went to Crescent Cove the second time—and another list of supplies, mostly chemicals.”

  I scanned a few more screens on the microfilm reader, articles in the paper following the Fourth of July explosion. There wasn’t much else that referred to either Bonner Mill or Ben Rainwater, aside from some photographs of them both. (Ben definitely had the darker features of his tribe members, I noticed, which made me all the more curious about his relationship to Ronny.) But, as the librarian had insinuated, the incident seemed to be brushed under the rug very quickly. Too quickly.

  Donovan had set the journal aside and was sifting through the sections of print paper, dated from late last year, and finding only a handful of columns referencing the closing of the mill. No new details. Nothing we hadn’t already seen before.

  “We need to go to Chicago,” I told him.

  Donovan looked up from the newspaper. “No,” he said. Then lowering his voice to barely audible, he added, “I came with you here. You got to see everything for yourself. And now you need to stop acting like Nancy Drew. This is where we bring the police in, if we want things to go further, Aurora. We have more evidence now. Maybe they could use it to reopen the case.”

  “They won’t do it,” I said, as certain of this as I was of my own name. And I was equally certain that however much Donovan pretended to be willing to have our brothers’ case reopened, he wasn’t committed to it.

  “…if we want things to go further…”

  He was angry at the guys for leaving in the first place, and he’d decided they must be dead or they would have come back. It was too big of a betrayal otherwise. He did not want to know the truth at all costs. Nor did he want to have to challenge the memory he had of his brother. And I knew he was going to fight me on every step, even as he tried to humor me. Even as he told me all the right words.

  But I missed Gideon—and Jeremy, too. I couldn’t let them down. I wouldn’t.

  Donovan leaned in close. I could feel his insistence in the heat of his breath as he spoke. “We’re going to go back and talk to Officer James. He’s a good guy, and the department has better resources for stuff like this than we do. They’ll help us. Don’t worry.”

  I unthreaded the spool of microfilm, turned off the reader and gathered the newspaper pages. “I don’t like Officer James, and I’m not all that fond of the other two Chameleon Lake police officers either,” I hissed. “They didn’t solve any part of this last time, and the case has been all but closed for a year and a half. Reopening it now won’t be a priority for them, but it’s a priority for us.”

  I motioned for Donovan to follow me out of the library, putting the materials on the cart on the way and waving a goodbye to the librarian, who was thankfully too busy with another patron to ask any follow-up questions.

  When we were outside the building, I turned to Donovan. “Gideon didn’t want the authorities involved—that much I know. He chose to give the journal to me.” I paused, making sure this sank in, and then I held up the journal I’d collected from the table back when I was picking up the reference material.

  “I want to go to Chicago…and I’m going to go. With you or without you,” I said. “And if you breathe a word of this to Officer James or to anyone, I’ll light that bag of fireworks in the trunk of your car myself, and we’ll just see what it does to your groovy Trans Am.”

  At this he actually laughed.

  “Just hold on, hold on. Slow down and stop making threats.” He sighed. “Though, you’re kinda funny when you’re angry. We need—”

  I glared at him. “Donovan, I’m telling you—”

  “Jesus, let me finish,” he said. “We can’t tell our folks, ‘Hey, we’re going to Chicago.’ It’s not logical for us to just up and leave like that, and it’s not safe for you to do it on your own. You’re smart, Aurora, I know, but you’re not even eighteen. And you’re going to do what? Act like an amateur sleuth? Just follow your hunches around the country? Go to every city your brother jotted down in his journal?” He shrugged this off like it was ludicrous.

  I’d reached the frayed end of my rope. “Maybe that doesn’t seem logical to you, but to me, that’s the only thing that feels right.”

  I looked him in the eye and didn’t blink. He could damn well try, but I knew he couldn’t talk me out of this by brushing me off and calling me names. Nancy Drew? Screw him.

  “Just look at what we’ve managed to pick up in only twenty-four hours,” I reminded him. “By going to only one place Gideon wrote about in the journal. I know there’s more we’ll find—in Chicago, in Tulsa, in a half dozen other cities. I remember Gideon mentioned a few Southwestern states and, at one point, the city of Pasadena…”

  “California?” His jaw dropped. “That’s not somewhere we can just drive to for a weekend so you can test out your people-reading skills,” he said, mockery coloring his voice. “You aren’t going to be able to lie to your mom about that trip and get away with it.”

  He shook his head. “No. This is crazy. We go back home. We talk about this. And I think you’ll realize, after a good night’s sleep or two, telling the cops about what we found here will be the best way.” He crossed his arms—a show of resistance, defiance and pointed unwillingness to participate in my plan.

  Fine, Donovan. Have it your way.

  “That’s not how it’s going to happen,” I said, adamant. “I’ve already spent two years wondering what went wrong in their investigation. Why they didn’t find anything. Why they shut the case down so quickly.”

  I poked him in the direction of his car and waited until we’d both gotten in, feeling that maddening jolt of powerlessness that I hated so much. Remembering how my questions had been dismissed by the cops because I was “just a kid”…“just a girl.” I wasn’t putting up with that shit again. Not from the police, and sure as hell not from Jeremy’s older brother.

  “This is not some simple case,” I told him. “Our brothers didn’t disappear for no reason. They didn’t get themselves killed somewhere because the
y were ‘high on drugs,’ like that one cop suspected. They weren’t ‘secret homosexual lovers’ who ran away together, like that other cop said. Both of us know that.”

  I shot him a significant look, remembering how Donovan had bristled silently at this particular insinuation a couple of years ago because it had showed such a lack of knowledge about both guys. Anyone who knew Jeremy or Gideon, even casually, knew they were straight. And, yeah, they both liked to party. They drank booze and smoked a joint every once in a while, but they weren’t druggies.

  “They may have been kidnapped or they may have committed a crime and gone into hiding,” I said. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m positive there’s more to this than what we’ve been led to believe. More than the police either know or are willing to tell.”

  I paused and studied his face for a long, slow moment. Watched the tiny flicker of agreement in his eyes. Watched him try to blink it away, unsuccessfully. “You know I’m right,” I said with conviction.

  He swallowed, refusing to admit aloud the truth of it, of course, but the fact that he didn’t immediately contradict me was enough.

  “Well, there’s nothing left to do around here,” he said instead.

  I didn’t disagree.

  “So, let’s head back. No reason to stay another night in Wisconsin just because we can.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re going to have a lot to figure out in the next few days, so we might as well go home and get to it.”

  I knew I’d earned the right to boast winning one battle against him, but I stayed silent because there was a full-scale war ahead. I needed to save my energy so I could win that, too.

  Donovan filled the car up with gas—sixty-one cents per gallon out in Ashburn Falls, a whole two cents cheaper than in Chameleon Lake, it was that remote—and we began the drive toward Minnesota. I noticed his anger was more directed this time. Less of a simmering general malevolence than a laser-focused frustration.

  Something else was different, too. Unlike the ride up, there were fewer pockets of silence on the way back. This time he actually initiated a few conversations. One in particular surprised me.

  “Do you think our brothers were lying to us? To everyone?” he asked over the low crooning of Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” on the radio. “Do you think they were trying to get away with something illegal? I know they were capable of it. It’s just—do you think they’d actually do it?”

  I’d wondered about this. Over and over again I’d wondered.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I hope not. My sense is that they wouldn’t do something really bad on purpose but, maybe…maybe, accidentally…”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”

  “You know, there’s a lot of risk in going to the police, Donovan. Not only might they botch up the investigation again, but if they find out something bad about our brothers, they’d expose them both. Our parents don’t need that kind of heartbreak. Not on top of everything else.”

  He nodded, saying nothing but just running his fingers through his dark hair. I could see a tremor in them as he did it. Just one. Then he pulled the fingers of that hand into a tight fist and clenched the steering wheel with the other.

  In the parking lot in Alexandra, he dropped me off alongside my car, getting out to put my bag into the backseat of the Buick for me. I dug out my keys and stood in the distance between our two vehicles for a minute, remembering something. The ring.

  I tugged it off my hand and ceremoniously returned it to him—making a face as I did it and trying to get him to smile just a little after the seriousness of our conversation on the drive.

  He did smile, and he pocketed the dorky golden band. “Too much of a women’s libber for a ring, huh?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I said, trying to sound casual and sophisticated. At least that’s how I hoped he’d interpret my words. “But, in any case, I won’t need it here.”

  “Fair enough. And I’ll let you have your way with the journal, since I’m not going to wrestle it away from you,” he said, the smile mutating into a smirk because I’d been holding onto Gideon’s leather book with a death grip, like it was my passport to get out of a foreign land.

  “We need to talk in a few days and really figure out what we’re going to do next,” I said.

  Donovan grimaced. “I’ve got to work this week, and I think you do, too.”

  I agreed. I’d probably need the week to come up with a good excuse for taking off some time from Dale’s Grocery Mart. Not sure what, exactly, I’d say to my boss. And then, of course, there were my parents. Hmm, that could be difficult. But I’d deal with one problem at a time.

  “How about we meet on Tuesday night?” I suggested. “It’ll give us three days to mull over some ideas on our own, then we can run a few possibilities back and forth. About Chicago.” I paused to gauge his reaction. “And, maybe…beyond Chicago.”

  His reaction was nearly nonexistent, his face devoid of all emotion. But, after a long moment, he consented with a short nod.

  “Okay, so, Tuesday night then,” I said. “Should I come to the auto shop?”

  “Yeah. Make it seven p.m. And Aurora?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t run off before then,” he said, slipping into the Trans Am with a wave and a tight grin that bordered on threatening. “I’ll be watching around town for you.”

  6:47 p.m.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pasadena, California ~ Friday, August 15, 2014

  I spoke with my husband for only about five minutes between his afternoon meetings and the clients’ big evening event. It was three hours later out in New York than it was at home, so when he’d called earlier, I knew he still had a very busy and very long night awaiting him.

  Again, I didn’t want to worry him needlessly, but I also didn’t want him to be blindsided by disaster if our son didn’t show up on someone’s radar soon. So, I told him only that Charlie had been impossible to reach during the day and asked again if he had any idea where he might be.

  “There are only so many places he’d go,” my husband said, distracted, I could tell, by the swarm of business people around him. Sounded like he was somewhere cavernous. A large reception room, maybe? “He probably took Cassandra on some romantic getaway.”

  Ah. So he hadn’t known about their breakup either. This made me feel marginally better, although I decided to wait to tell my husband about that, too.

  I still couldn’t believe I’d missed seeing my son’s relationship fizzle.

  My so-called “mother’s intuition” may have been running at less than one-hundred percent lately, but my record over the past three decades had been pretty decent. Not only had I detected obvious things, like the time I caught Jay smoking in high school, but I’d also picked up on subtler ones, like Charlie’s school frustrations and his touch of ADD. He’d had trouble in reading for “no good reason,” according to his clueless fourth-grade teacher, who later admitted that the only material she ever personally read were fashion magazines. “It’s so weird,” she’d said at our conference, “because he likes telling stories.”

  I suspected then that this was her attempt at diplomacy, since Charlie was a boy who loved exaggeration. So much so that he couldn’t always distinguish between where the tall tale ended and the outright lie began. But, once I’d pointed out the likely source of the problem, help was given and school fell into place quickly for Charlie.

  My accuracy in picking up signals had begun to wane only after the boys left home. I needed the person I was studying to be there—ideally, right in front of me—in order to intuit at my highest level. Phone calls were less effective, of course, but I did my best.

  I was not, however, psychic. I couldn’t read a damn thing without any visual or auditory input. With no facial expressions. No vocal tones. No gestures or tells.

  After my husband and I clicked off, I decided the only productive use for my nervous energy would be to clean the house, starting with the k
itchen. I systematically went through the lower cabinets (how did we get so much Tupperware?), collected a bag of canned goods from the pantry for whenever the next local food drive would be, wiped the dust away from my teapots on the window ledge and scrubbed the tile floor. Then I tackled the refrigerator, which made me feel even less like eating than I had all day. I had a small apple and a cheese stick for dinner, but that was all I could manage.

  The rest of the night I spent thinking through possibilities of where Charlie might be—clinging onto the most likely, the most reasonable, as if they were my life preservers, while my imagination ran the gamut of the most wacky, the most dangerous, and I tried desperately to ignore those.

  And, well, I had to admit, I even briefly entertained the notion of an alien abduction. It didn’t seem the worst of the possibilities out there because, based on what little I knew of UFO lore (I’d watched some sci-fi movies recently on FX), the aliens tended to return the stolen humans back to Earth. With amnesia or an occasional implant, perhaps, but generally unharmed.

  Certainly, it said something about me that I was comforted by this farfetched idea. I didn’t want to dwell on the more commonplace possibilities like violent muggings, car crashes or serial killers.

  The most probable scenarios for Charlie’s unexplained absence, though, involved experiences I knew about firsthand. Spontaneous road trips out of state. Involvement with illegal items that could cause injury, like, oh, explosives. Wild parties where sex, drugs and rock-n-roll were the norm.

  If my son followed in my footsteps in any way at all, I knew he could be in a lot of trouble.

  “If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.”

  ~Isaac Newton