CHAPTER NINE
Chameleon Lake, Minnesota ~ Sunday, June 11, 1978
So as not to entirely lie to my mother, I drove to St. Cloud after Donovan dropped me off—to hang out with Betsy for the evening and to pretend this was just another event in a normal teenage girl’s life.
Though surprised to see me, Betsy had dedicated herself to a weekend of heavy partying, and nothing was going to deter her from her agenda.
She just thrust a bottle of Old Style at me Saturday night and then loudly introduced me to the gang before returning to the sofa, where she was wedged between a lava lamp and a beefy looking guy named Stan.
The next morning, though, my friend’s curiosity returned.
“Why did it take you so long to get here?” Betsy asked for the third time, attempting to rub away a hangover with the pads of her fingers. She winced. “Were you with a guy?”
I didn’t trust myself to answer this directly, so I shook my head. “I just needed to research something without my parents wondering where I was.”
“Research what?”
“Um…colleges,” I blurted. I didn’t know why I said that, but it seemed to be a reasonable response. A normal teenage girl kind of explanation. Versus the truth, which was not exactly normal.
My friend raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You’re back to maybe going to the Twin Cities in the fall?”
Betsy and I had planned to go to college together in our early years of high school. Before the disappearance. Then my plans for the future had stalled. Betsy’s hadn’t.
“I doubt I could get in for the fall,” I told her, trying to be honest whenever I could. “I may have already missed the application deadline. But I’m thinking of maybe trying to register for the second semester.” I forced a smile. “That’d be fun, right?”
Betsy agreed right away, but I wasn’t blind. Hangover or not, there was a flash of guardedness in my friend’s eyes. A sudden crease in the middle of her forehead that she smoothed away—just not fast enough.
It was clear she’d already begun to construct her upcoming college experience without the tragic story of her high-school best friend. Someone whose personal drama would, no doubt, draw attention away from her lightness and add an unwanted shadow to an otherwise fresh, new adventure.
Not that Betsy would ever admit to this. I knew she cared about me and our friendship. Had stood by me through all of my stages of grief. I could even understand why she’d appreciate a little natural distance between us.
Still, the realization that my best friend had been hoping to cut ties…hurt. Made me wish I couldn’t so often guess what people were thinking.
“Nothing is for sure,” I said with a shrug. “I figured my parents wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea, so I just wanted to have time to get some info without them suspecting anything. I’ll probably need to wait a year or two to go anywhere anyway.”
“Well, keep me posted,” she said, the urgency in her voice tinged with relief. Then she sort of laughed. “So, there’s really no secret guy?”
“Of course not.” I laughed, too. “If there was one, wouldn’t I tell you?”
“Yeah,” Betsy said, although her tone actually said, “Probably.”
As I was getting ready to leave and, finally, return home, my friend asked if I wanted to get together on Friday night. “Maybe see the movie that’s coming to town?” she suggested. “I keep hearing about Grease, but I don’t know if it’ll be any good.”
“Sure,” I replied, fully intending to cancel in a few days. I’d likely be spending the night getting ready for the trip—with or without Donovan. Either way, I was headed to Chicago no later than Saturday morning. “It looked kind of silly in the previews—all those poodle skirts and Fifties songs—but I bet it’ll be fun.” For someone else.
“Great!” Betsy said, seeming happy to be on such a neutral, easy subject. “See you then, if not before.”
I waved goodbye and drove home, the sheer commitment of what I’d planned to do the following weekend settling on my shoulders like lead weights.
With my parents both otherwise occupied, I snuck in the backdoor and stole up to my room. Mom would soon notice the Buick back in the driveway again and feel relief at my return. Dad would be glad to have me home but even gladder to see his wife’s jitteriness lessen for a little while. And, later, we’d all just pretend that we were still a normal family. Normal, in spite of everything.
There was something decidedly abnormal about that.
***
On Monday morning, I found myself back at work with Sandy, who was babbling about finally having gone to see Corvette Summer in St. Cloud over the weekend. (Ohhh, Mark Hamill! Love, love, love!)
Sandy was chitchatting about wanting to watch Grease soon, too. (It looks so cute! And you should just see John Travolta dancing! It’s going to be even bigger than Saturday Night Fever…)
Yeah, right.
That feeling of being like the older waitress—like Cindy at that Crescent Cove bar—kept coming back to me. That sense of being trapped at the Grocery Mart for the next decade with Sandy, Dale and the occasional shopper looking for Hamburger Helper. It was too depressing a fate to keep imagining.
When I finally got a break, I cornered my boss in the backroom.
“Dale, I’m sorry to ask you this on short notice, but I’m going to need to take off work next week.”
He shot me the withering look of someone convinced of his self-importance. “Vacations need to be put in at least a month ahead of time.”
I nodded. I knew this. But he owed me a few favors and I was going to get my way. Period.
“I’m not going on vacation. I’m going on a college scouting trip,” I said, mentally commanding him to hear the determination in my voice. “The admissions offices already have shorter hours and they’ll be closed once the summer-school sessions are over.” Not sure if that was really true but, hey, it sounded good. “So, I really have to go now.”
“You couldn’t have decided this last month?”
“No, Dale. I couldn’t have.”
I stood still and faced him. Looked into those beady, bloodshot eyes of his and willed him to remember how my intuitive skills kept his store from being robbed by a couple of grimy thugs in the early spring. I’d warned Dale about them. Said they were big-city hoods who were up to no good. Pointed out how they were casing the place. And, in response, he’d called in Officer Cleary for backup. Major crisis averted.
After a moment of glaring at me, Dale exhaled—a long-suffering stream of hot air and irritation. “You really need all of next week off?”
“At least. Maybe we should make it a week and a half.”
His squirminess told me that I was pushing it, but Dale was a coward. He gave in out of fear of confrontation rather than out of any sense of compassion or desire to help.
“One week,” he muttered with a scowl and a dismissive huff. Then he headed into the back alley for a smoke.
I smiled grimly to myself. My victory was small but important.
One battle down, two to go.
***
It took all of seven minutes on Tuesday night for Donovan to start picking a fight with me.
“You need to think about this,” Donovan insisted when I informed him I’d gotten a week off from work for the trip. “Do we really need to rush into it?”
“Rush?” I stared at him. “Your concept of time is seriously warped. Being two years late is hardly rushing.”
I could hear the exasperation in my voice, but I wasn’t backing down. And, besides, in my not very humble opinion, I’d already won this damned argument.
“You were standing right next to me in Crescent Cove, weren’t you?” I said. “We got more leads in twenty-four hours than the cops had managed to track down in a month, and that’s even with their tromping all over our houses and putting out missing persons bulletins.”
I shook my head, remembering Officer James and Officer Cleary tearing apart
Gideon’s bedroom, asking if he “always listened to disturbing music” (he owned a few KISS albums) or “looked at a lot of dark art” (he had one Van Gogh poster up on his wall) or “frequently read Commie literature” (someone gave him a book by Karl Marx, but I’m pretty sure he never cracked it open).
To some extent, I appreciated what the police were trying to do. Establish his patterns of behavior before the disappearance, determine what was or wasn’t in character, check to see if there were other suspicious activities dotting his past—any juvie criminal records, disabilities that might impair judgment, indications of burgeoning mental illness, drug or gambling habits.
I’d overheard Officer James making some comment about “solvability factors” to his partner as they sifted through Gideon’s old school notebooks, hunting for hints about why someone else might want to abduct him or why he might feel the need to either kill himself or disappear indefinitely.
But they couldn’t find anything obvious.
No missing favorite things from his bedroom. No money trail. No suicide notes tucked inside his LP liners. Apparently, listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite” from KISS’s Alive! album over and over again was not quite enough evidence to qualify an eighteen-year-old male as “troubled,” although the cops called into question his musical taste more than once.
Donovan made a face and started digging around in a desk drawer for something. “What did you tell Old Man Geiger you’d be doing anyway?” he asked.
“College scouting,” I replied. “Can’t you tell your boss you’re doing that, too?”
He stopped fiddling around and leveled an odd look at me. “Um,” he said, which I took to mean, Yes…yes, he could, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
I was aware he’d been in the army long enough to pay for four years of college, thanks to the GI Bill, but he hadn’t started taking any classes yet—at least not as far as I knew.
Deciding to push my luck, I said, “That’s what we could tell everyone. The explanation for why we’re leaving town together for a week. We’re both just looking at a few colleges. That sounds reasonable enough, right?”
He cleared his throat. “Um,” he said again. “I just…I don’t know.”
I sighed. There were a bunch of things I could do in Chicago by myself, and I would, but Donovan had been more help in Crescent Cove than I’d wanted to admit. It wasn’t like I could force him to come with me, though. (He was a lot stronger than me.) But there was also no way he could force me to stay home. “It’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. “I can take it from here.”
He shot me a look of disbelief and went back to scrounging through the desk drawer until he retrieved a stack of stapled sheets of yellow paper and a pen. He walked over to the Muscle-Car Babe calendar and studied the dates beneath the red Mustang and the too-perky blonde, comparing them to whatever was written on one of the yellow sheets. He exhaled slowly and jotted down a few notes on the calendar and then a few more on the paper.
My excitement began to rise at the sight. He was doing it. He was blocking off the time. He was going to go with me to Chicago.
I smothered a grin, knowing that—in Donovan’s case—the only obstacle to his departure was work-related. Unlike me, he didn’t have to clear anything with his parents. Both his real dad and his stepdad were out of the picture, and his mom, while still very much in his life, had her own house.
Donovan had been living in a small apartment on his own since he’d gotten back from the army and, though of course he was always respectful of his mother, he didn’t have to answer to anybody. Not even his boss at the garage, really. Everyone knew they needed him there more than the other way around.
“Stop looking so pleased with yourself,” he growled at me. “Listen, I’m taking next week off, but that’s it. We’ll drive to Chicago and, maybe, another city or two in Illinois, but then we’re coming back home.”
He shot me the stern look of an elder brother, which seemed an act calculated to provoke me, even before he said, “Now you’d better get permission from your parents. I don’t want you sneaking around behind their backs, and I really don’t want them calling the cops on me and accusing me of kidnapping you.”
I gaped at him. He couldn’t be serious. “That’s not funny.”
“No shit, Aurora,” he said without a trace of humor in his voice.
I crossed my arms. “Fine. I’ll talk with them tomorrow, I promise. My plan was to leave on Saturday morning, but we could take off even earlier. Friday night. Betsy wanted to see some new movie, that Fifties musical, but I’d rather skip it and just—”
“No, you should go,” he interrupted. “You know how people talk in this dinky little town.” Impossible to miss the bitterness that clung to his words. “We need to use that to our advantage. You know we can’t both be gone from here for more than a day or two and not have people notice. Or speculate.”
He wrinkled his nose and paced the length of the office and back. “Friday night would be a good chance for us to spread your rumor about where we’re going. I can plan to run into you and Betsy by the theater. If we talk about that college-scouting crap on the street for five minutes, there’ll be enough people eavesdropping that maybe we won’t have to deal with gossip about us being a couple or running away together or anything stupid like that.”
I bit my lip to keep from spouting off a self-incriminating, completely embarrassing response to this. His dismissal of me as not being someone even worthy of dating gossip needled me to no end, but it wasn’t like I could argue with him over it. What would I say?
Oh, c’mon! Why shouldn’t they think we’re a couple?
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone talked about how we’d skipped town together to go on a wild road trip? That we were just irresponsible kids with loose morals, who’d probably even break the law a time or two?
That plan would be a hard sell with Donovan…and it wouldn’t help me convince my parents to let me drive with him to Chicago either.
I shrugged. “Okay. Betsy and I will go to the show in town. Seven-thirty on Friday night. See you on the sidewalk afterwards.”
I swiveled on my sneaker toe to leave—I couldn’t get out of that cramped office fast enough—but he stopped me by gently grabbing my upper arm and tugging me toward him. “Hang on,” he said. “There’s something else we have to do tonight.”
My pulse thrummed at the spot where he touched me, and I wished desperately that I didn’t like the sensation. I snatched my arm away. “What?”
He flashed one of his grins at me, leaned close until his nose was just a couple of inches from mine and whispered, “Boom.” Then he pointed toward the parking lot. “We got some bootleg fireworks to blow up.”
Oh, yeah. We did.
He drove us out beyond the Chameleon Lake city limits, through the rolling countryside and halfway to St. Cloud, before he pulled the Trans Am onto the shoulder of the road. He nodded at the mostly open field to our right, sprinkled only with a few large maple-tree clusters.
With the crunch of gravel beneath our feet and the sun just starting to dip down to tree level, we made our way to the field, each of us having grabbed a decent sampling of fireworks from the cardboard box in the trunk.
“Let’s just try this bunch first,” Donovan said. “No telling how powerful they’ll be.”
Using a small, dried branch he picked up off the ground, he lit the stick with his cigarette lighter and, being careful to keep the lit branch away from the fireworks, took just one cherry bomb with him to the most open part of the field.
“Stay behind the tree,” he commanded, and I didn’t dare disobey.
He set the firecracker down on a rock and, then, using the branch to give himself a little distance, lit the cherry bomb with the tip of the flaming stick—arm outstretched, eyes shielded—and when the wick caught fire, he ran like hell back to where I was standing.
Like a mini snake, it hissed as though about to strike, and then…
Bo
om!
It went off, shooting sound waves and angry dust particles into the still-bright sky.
He glanced at me, a grin tugging his lips upward. “They’re a little stronger than the county-fair variety.” He reached for the M-80 next. “I’m almost afraid to light this one.”
But light it he did. It sparked a hot, bright flash and sounded like the detonation of a cannon.
The two of us looked at each other and started laughing, so instinctively, so uncontrollably, at the sheer power of these small objects, it verged on hysteria.
“Good thing we’re alone out here,” I commented, wiping away a stray tear from the corner of my eye and handing Donovan one of the quarter sticks. “I wouldn’t want to have to explain to anybody what we’re doing.”
“Me neither,” he said, glancing at the empty road. “Sounds like we’re trying to level the entire field.”
We lit the remainder of our first batch, then Donovan went back to the Trans Am to retrieve another couple of handfuls from the box. After a few cars went by, he lit those one at a time as well.
We were laughing again at the spark and sound of a particularly deafening quarter stick when I asked, “How many more do we have left?” just a second before a male voice behind us asked, “What have you got there, kids?”
I gasped and pivoted toward the voice.
And Donovan swung around so fast he looked like one of those cartoon whirling dervishes. “Uh, Officer James,” he said. “We, uh, didn’t hear you.”
The young cop smiled indulgently at us. “Well, it was a little noisy down here, wasn’t it?”
He had a thick head of reddish-brown hair that he tended to run his left hand through whenever he grinned. It was a casual, easygoing motion that seemed oddly paired—a connection of face and limb. Out of uniform, as he was just then, and dressed in jeans and a clean blue t-shirt, he appeared even younger than his early thirties. More like a peer than an authority figure. More like one of us.
Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You Page 10