“Now we need to find a phone booth,” I told him.
It took us a few minutes to spot one in the parking lot near a movie theater. I noticed that Grease was playing here as well, along with three other films. Imagine living in a place where four movies were shown every day. It was that type of thing I loved so much about life outside of Chameleon Lake. The incredible number of choices. The options paired with anonymity.
We parked and walked to the empty booth. “There’s no directory,” I said, pointing to the silvery chain where the phonebook had once been attached.
“Damn.” He picked up the receiver and dug his hand deep into his jeans pocket, retrieving a dime. “Well, we can call the operator—”
I snatched the phone from his hand. “No. I want us to look up her name ourselves. I don’t just want to be connected to her line without knowing anything about her. Her address, for instance, or if there’s anyone else listed with her.”
“Or if this person even exists,” Donovan added sarcastically. “It could be that there’s no one by that name anywhere in the city. I think the whole idea to come here was—”
“I already know what you think.” I glanced across the street. “There’s a gas station over there. Don’t they usually have phone directories?”
He shrugged a halfhearted “yes.”
Sure enough, when we asked the older guy behind the counter, he pulled out a thick copy of the phonebook and plunked it down in front of us.
I flashed the guy a smile and began flipping to the “D’s” just as soon as he turned his attention to one of the other customers.
Dream, James P., 23 Park Ave W……… 324-5645
Dreamsly, Steve, 1556 Green Bay Rd ……… 354-9091
Dreamson, Amy L., 653 Ashton St, Apt 301-C ……… 467-8207
Dreamstrand, William & Gail, 21006 Michigan Ave ……… 316-0866
Amy L. Dreamson. Amy Lynn?
I pointed at the name. “Pretty close to what I thought,” I whispered. “I think this is her. It’d be too much of a coincidence otherwise.”
Donovan made a doubtful face and glanced away.
I pulled a pen and mini notepad out of my purse and jotted down the address and phone number. “Thanks,” I told the guy as I handed the big book back.
Donovan nodded at him, too, and bought a dollar’s worth of Kit Kat bars. “Snack,” he told me, though I was mystified that he could even think of eating right then.
We walked back across the street to the phone booth and Donovan unwrapped one of the candy bars and snapped off the first chocolate-covered wafer. He waved it in front of my nose, but I took a step back and shook my head.
“Suit yourself,” he said, crunching the stick in half. “Want me to make the call?” He devoured the other half of the wafer in one bite and broke off a second one.
For the first time since I’d met him, he looked young to me. Like a ten-year-old kid chomping on his Halloween candy. And I got a hint of what he must have been like as a boy, on a day when he was happy and unfettered by life’s burdens. There was a fun-loving recklessness lurking just beneath the surface, waiting to emerge.
“You look…preoccupied,” I told him with a scowl. “I’ll call the number.”
He shrugged, as if not caring, and handed me a dime. But, as he gobbled down his third chocolate wafer, I understood the reason he needed a snack. I knew a nervous habit when I saw one. The tremor that ran through his hand as he watched me reach for the phone was a dead giveaway.
I punched in the phone number and waited—my stomach flipping—as it rang. After five long rings, someone picked it up. A woman.
“Hello?” she said with a voice that sounded younger than I’d expected.
I cleared my throat. “Hello,” I said back. “May I speak with Amy Lynn Dreamson, please?”
There was a longish pause on the line, and I could almost feel the woman’s hesitation. “This is Amy Lynn,” she said at last, quietly. “May I ask who’s calling?”
I swallowed. Hard. And Donovan, who was listening attentively next to me, stuffed the last of his Kit Kat into his mouth and swiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“Yes,” I said, realizing suddenly that I hadn’t thought out this next part when I envisioned myself contacting Amy Lynn. Didn’t know what, exactly, to say.
I cleared my throat again. “My name is Aurora Gray. You and I have never met, and you may not know anything about me at all, but I believe you might have met my brother and his best friend. They…they, um, visited Chicago two summers ago.”
There was another long pause. “What were their names?” the lady asked, and I couldn’t help but detect a hint of dread in her soft voice.
“Gideon,” I said. “That’s my brother. And—”
“Jeremy,” Amy Lynn whispered, interrupting. “Right?”
“Right,” I managed to say. Oh, God! So they really were here! When? Why?
Beside me, Donovan was as still as if he’d been flash frozen.
“Yeah,” the woman said. “They were here. Have you, um, talked to them recently?”
“No,” I admitted. “They…they haven’t been home since then. I was hoping you might know something about what happened that summer.”
Amy Lynn’s breath caught. “There are a few things I could tell you, but I’d rather not talk on the phone. Where are you?”
“In Chicago,” I replied, my heart pounding. “It won’t be a problem to meet you wherever or whenever you want. Are you free today? Tonight? Tomorrow morning?”
I needed to see her in person. To find out what she knew about my brother, of course, but also so I could study her reactions face to face. There were only so many signals I could read over the telephone.
“Are you alone?”
I shook my head, aware that my pulse was racing against itself and my throat had begun to clog up. Then I realized the lady on the line couldn’t see me.
“No,” I said, explaining that Donovan was with me.
“Jeremy’s older brother.” Amy Lynn stated this with a certainty that was both gratifying and anxiety producing. “I knew about him,” she added. “Army guy, right?”
“Right.”
Donovan, who was able to hear every word, not only looked as unmoving as a marble statue, he now looked as pale as one.
“Okay. He can come, too, but no one else,” Amy Lynn said, giving me her address, which matched exactly the one we’d found in the phonebook, and suggesting we meet her there at six o’clock.
She paused and made a sound that was almost like a laugh, but a little strangled and uneasy. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you for a few days,” Amy Lynn murmured in the seconds before she hung up. “Gideon said you might be coming.”
***
The drive to Amy Lynn’s apartment in the Portage Park neighborhood only took about twenty minutes, even with the busy Saturday-night traffic. Figuring out where 653 Ashton Street was, however, took twice as long as that and required Donovan to finally buy a city of Chicago map, because, God knew, he was too cool to even consider asking for directions.
But we did manage to get there with twelve minutes to spare and find one of the few available parking spots. We waited impatiently in Donovan’s car until my watch read two minutes to six.
“Let’s go in,” he said, every muscle in his body so taut, he looked like he might snap.
The security in the four-story brick building was stronger than in most of the apartment complexes I’d seen in Chameleon Lake or even in Minneapolis/St. Paul. We couldn’t just walk in and take the stairs up. We had to press a button to be buzzed into the lobby first.
Donovan knocked on the door to 301-C, his body language a study in rigidity and seriousness. I could tell this Amy Lynn person was taking her sweet time inside and checking us out. A shadow passed behind the keyhole, and a number of bolts needed to be unlocked on the other side of the heavy oak door before it swung even halfway open.
When, at last, it did, I got a g
ood view of the woman who’d been on the other end of the line during our phone conversation. I had to admit my surprise.
I’d always considered myself kind of on the mousy-looking side, being of slight build and fair complexion, with longish light-brown hair that hung limp, just past my shoulders, unless I pulled it back into a ponytail. But Amy Lynn took “mousy” to the tenth power.
She was around twenty-five years old, painfully thin, with wrists so delicate and pale that the veins protruded. Her short, goldish hair was pixie-like in style, giving her face and features a look that reminded me of Peter Pan. Her eyes—clear, blue and wary—studied me right back.
I introduced myself and Donovan, using a well-honed super-calm voice and working to put this new person at ease. With the back of my palm pressed against his chest, I physically held Donovan in the hallway, keeping him from stepping forward into the apartment until Amy Lynn was ready to receive us.
She kept us waiting longer than I’d expected but, thankfully, Donovan took my lead and allowed me to watch Amy Lynn’s reactions. He gave me time to carefully adjust my mannerisms until I felt the two of us girls were on a similar vibration. Until I could sense she was sure of us.
To my eye, Amy Lynn might have given off an air of timidity at first glance, but I could feel a resolute core beneath her fragile appearance. When she smiled carefully and stepped back to allow us to enter, I got the distinct sense that she was, in fact, choreographing every move.
Her first words to us weren’t greetings. Instead, she said, “You both resemble your brothers.” Then she turned to Donovan and added, “Especially you.”
I watched him process this. While I didn’t understand him so well as to be able to gauge half of his responses in advance, I knew him well enough to realize an inquisition was coming. Soon.
“How did you meet him?” Donovan asked almost immediately. He glanced at me for a split second, then back at Amy Lynn. “How did you meet them both—Jeremy and Gideon?”
The slender woman nodded and motioned for us to sit down. My insides twisted wildly at the thought of her parting words on the phone and the questions that were burning my tongue. I couldn’t wait a second longer to ask, “And when did Gideon tell you we might be coming? How did he contact you?”
But the other woman shook her head slightly and said, “I promise I’ll get to all of that. This—” She pointed at me then at Donovan then at herself. “This is all a little overwhelming for me, too. Just let me organize my thoughts so I can tell you both the whole story.”
So, I was forced to bide my time, knowing it was too important a meeting to screw up with impatience. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t itching to hurry her along. And Donovan looked like he was about to jump out of his skin with restless anxiety.
I forced myself to sit politely at the edge of the sofa, a foot away from Donovan, acutely aware of the tension straining his leg muscles, the rigidity of his torso and the pressure of his fingertips as they dug into the cushion between us, surely leaving angry indentations in the thinning fabric.
But then, when Amy Lynn started to speak in a curiously measured and melodious voice, I began to lose myself in her story, as cleverly executed as if by a professional narrator.
“I’ve been waiting to tell someone about this for a long time,” she said and, from my perspective, Amy Lynn did look more relieved than fearful. “In the spring of 1976, I’d just moved in with my new boyfriend, Patrick Bradley—everyone called him Treak—who was a couple of years older than me and a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.”
She nodded at a copy she had of the newspaper on her coffee table.
“I was an actress back then, only getting small parts in small theaters, and while I liked to think my big break was on the verge of finally happening, I suspected my life probably wouldn’t play out that way. That I wouldn’t end up being discovered and landing in a Broadway show or in a Hollywood movie. More likely, I was on the fast track to being either a strung-out hostess at an adults-only nightclub or a married mom juggling three kids and a sheepdog.” She laughed but I wasn’t reading a lot of genuine humor in her expression.
“Anyway, I figured when Treak asked me to move into his South Side apartment with him, this would be a better choice than doing lap dances at dive bars on Mannheim Road to pay for groceries, so I did.”
Amy Lynn shrugged. “Back then, everybody who knew me called me by my stage name, Chelsea Carew. My parents lived in western Ohio, and I hadn’t bothered to get a driver’s license when I moved to Chicago because I didn’t have a car. Since most of my work transactions were done ‘under the table,’ so to speak, I avoided stuff like filing income taxes and, because I was crashing on the floors or the sofas of other actors’ apartments, my name never showed up on a lease. Turns out, the fact that I was pretty much an irresponsible adult probably saved my life.”
Donovan was listening intently to her, and Amy Lynn, in turn, studied him carefully before continuing, her words something she seemed to weigh like fresh produce at the Grocery Mart.
“One day, about a month after I moved in, Treak came home all excited because he’d finally gotten a lead on a big story he was working on. Only problem was that he’d need to be gone—out of town somewhere—to work on it. I wasn’t going to get to see him for at least a week. Maybe two.” She looked at us and then away. “The first few nights he was away, he’d call me and we’d chat. Things still seemed normal, but then his digging led him to this little town in Wisconsin. Crescent Cove.”
I inhaled a sudden rush of air, but it didn’t help. Yet another link between my brother, his best friend and that Wisconsin town—it made me lightheaded.
Start here, Gideon had written.
I struggled not to slump back against the sofa cushions and cradle my head in my palms, but Amy Lynn noticed the change in me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I forced a nod. “Yes, please go on. So, you’re saying your boyfriend followed some clues for a story and they led him to Crescent Cove?”
“Yes,” Amy Lynn replied. “That’s where he eventually ended up. We were talking less frequently by then. He’d call only once every few days and usually just for five or ten minutes. He was hot on the trail of something, and he was busy with it for hours at a time. Almost all day and well into the night. The last time he called me was on July 1, 1976. It was a Thursday afternoon.”
Donovan bowed his head, bit his lip and then said, in a very stilted voice, “Do you mean that was the last time Treak called you on that trip? Or the last time you ever heard from him?”
“Both,” Amy Lynn replied.
She let this sink in, belatedly asking if either of us wanted something to drink, almost enjoying the dramatic moment, I felt. Definitely a former actress.
But, much as I hated the skilled performance and the pregnant pauses used to great effect, I also strongly sensed that there was very little exaggeration in Amy Lynn’s retelling. Sure, her delivery bordered on stagey, but the actress formerly known as Chelsea Carew didn’t need to heighten the tension with unnecessary theatrics. The real story provided more than enough natural drama.
Donovan and I both declined a drink and pressed Amy Lynn to tell us what happened next.
“Sunday morning, about two a.m. on the Fourth of July, I got a phone call out of nowhere from these guys I didn’t know. They sounded really scared, and just being shaken awake like that made me really scared, too. They told me I was in a lot of danger. That they had some stuff of Treak’s and had to give it to me, but that I needed to get myself somewhere safer first.”
She slanted an odd smile at us. “Of course, I thought they were wackos, and I almost hung up on them. But one of the guys started listing all kinds of things he knew about me because of their conversations with my boyfriend. And then he listed all kinds of things he knew about Treak. And he said—I’ll never forget this—‘I know you don’t want to believe us, and I know you have to be freaking out getting this kind of a call,
but we saw two men get blown up in an explosion tonight, and Treak was one of them. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you that, but I’ll be even sorrier if you get killed, too, when I could’ve helped prevent it. So take what you need. Take anything with your picture or with your name on it. Any important documents. Then get the hell out of there, Chelsea.’ And I listened to him,” Amy Lynn said. “That was how I met your brothers.”
I tried to digest this. I knew, even without Amy Lynn telling me so, that Gideon was the one who had been listing things during that phone call.
It was very much like him. I could picture all too well what had happened that night, at least from the point where there was an explosion at Bonner Mill—killing Ben Rainwater and the unknown man, who must have been Treak, I realized—and then Jeremy and Gideon racing out of Crescent Cove, stopping somewhere to call and warn Amy Lynn.
But I still didn’t know what had set off that chain of events. Who had caused the explosion and why. Although, thank God, it didn’t seem to be either of our brothers who’d done it—at least not on purpose.
Donovan seemed to be thinking through this chronologically, too, and he was a few steps ahead of me.
“If you left Treak’s apartment, how were Jeremy and Gideon able to find you?” he asked. “How long after that did you actually meet them in person?”
Amy Lynn squinted a bit, remembering. “Well, I still didn’t totally trust them then, but I knew there was only one place in Chicago I could go to that no one in my current life knew about. It was my friend Karen’s place, and she lived on the far north side of the city. Unlike most of the people I hung around with, she wasn’t an aspiring actress, and she wasn’t someone who knew Treak and his small circle of friends either. She was a grad student at Northwestern.”
“Living alone?” Donovan asked.
“Yes, she did. So, I told Gideon and Jeremy that I’d meet them on the Evanston campus that afternoon, just outside of the student union. School wasn’t in session, of course, but there were always college kids roaming around, so I figured I could blend in with the crowd pretty well, especially on a national holiday.” She paused. “I knew it was them the second I saw them, though. They looked real jumpy and they were the only two people on the lawn who weren’t smiling.”
Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You Page 13