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

by Brant, Marilyn

  “Did the three of you talk right there? At the student union?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “We didn’t go in, but we found a private area to one side of the building where we could talk without being interrupted and where no one would be able to hear our whispers. Gideon and Jeremy introduced themselves to me and showed me the business card they’d gotten from Treak. That’s how they’d known which phone number to call. They showed me other papers of his, too. Some notes he’d taken on this story he was working on. I was pretty much a mess, though, and I could barely concentrate on what they were saying at first. I hadn’t slept since they’d awakened me, and the fact that a guy I liked a lot, someone I was living with, might really be dead had just begun to sink in.”

  Just remembering that day made Amy Lynn look shaken and pale. I knew how she felt. Even two years later, whenever I thought back on that moment when we first suspected Gideon and Jeremy were missing, not just out having fun somewhere, I felt a dark wave of nausea.

  “The whole day was as bizarre as it was scary,” Amy Lynn admitted. “It didn’t feel real to me at all, even though I’d done what they said. I’d all but erased evidence of myself from Treak’s apartment. I threw my clothes, photo albums, important papers and a few keepsakes—I didn’t have much—into one large suitcase. Then I grabbed my playbills, a few 8-tracks and cassettes, Treak’s address book and a gold chain with a St. Christopher’s medallion that he’d loved because it had once been his grandfather’s. The patron saint of travelers. I wish he would have worn it to Wisconsin,” she said wistfully.

  “Anyway, I stuffed those things in my bag, too, and took my purse, filling it with whatever cash I could find. I also raided Treak’s private dresser drawer, where he kept a couple of emergency one-hundred-dollar bills. My secret worry was that Gideon and Jeremy were lying to me, and that Treak would come home that day and think I’d robbed him and then left him without even a note.” She shuddered. “It was horrible to imagine how betrayed he’d feel, but that was only because I was avoiding trying to accept that your brothers might not be lying. But then, when I saw the two of them—”

  “Yes?” Donovan prompted.

  “Then the horror of it hit me hard. They seemed too frightened, both for themselves and for me, to be making it all up. I’d been around lots of actors. Good ones. Bad ones. Not even the exceptionally gifted ones could’ve pulled off that kind of fear.”

  Amy Lynn suddenly stood and started pacing around the room, her own very composed performance having begun to unravel at last.

  “Turned out, Jeremy and Gideon weren’t just here to tell me about what happened to Treak and this guy named Ben Rainwater,” she said, “but they also wanted me to fill in some gaps for them. The part of the story they didn’t know. Stuff about his reporter’s life before he went to Crescent Cove. And, while I could give them a little more information, there were huge chunks I didn’t know myself.”

  My head began to throb. A low but rising ache that started behind my eyes and pulsed outward. A sob I’d tried to contain threatened to come out if I didn’t get more answers. But I had so many questions…I didn’t know which to ask first.

  “What did they say about Treak and Ben?” I said. “How did your boyfriend even know Ben Rainwater?”

  “Treak didn’t know him. Not until he went up to Crescent Cove,” Amy Lynn replied. “At the time, all I knew about the story Treak was working on was that it involved some shady Chicago union stuff. Something about problems in the city because of the power struggles between the workers’ unions—mostly the Teamsters—and the mob. Reporters were covering all different angles, but the one Treak was working on led him to a trucker from out of state. A guy from Wisconsin.”

  “From Crescent Cove,” Donovan murmured.

  The woman nodded. “Treak went up there to investigate, and he met Ben Rainwater after a few days. Ben was an amateur filmmaker, did you know that?”

  We shook our heads.

  “From what Treak said, Ben was just getting started. He’d bought an 8mm camera a few months before and was filming things for fun, whenever he had time, and trying to learn the best shots. He worked in his cousin’s shop—some little grocery store, I guess—but filming was his passion. Treak liked him right away and said he was a natural behind the camera. Told me Ben was going to show him some film footage that he’d shot in and around the town.” She paused. “That was our last conversation.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Me, too,” Amy Lynn said. She bit her lip and inhaled a few times. “Anyway, I came to the same conclusion that you’re probably coming to now. That the filmmaker caught something on camera he wasn’t supposed to see. Your brothers knew all about it. They’d seen the film, too. They were in Crescent Cove that weekend and they’d actually watched it with Treak and Ben. That film reel was one of the things they brought me, along with a few pages of my boyfriend’s notes.”

  “Where is it? The film?” Donovan said, speaking softly but it came across as a demand nonetheless. “And what’s on it?”

  “It’s in a safe place,” she replied. “I only watched it once, by myself, a few weeks after they gave it to me. And I only half understood what I was seeing.”

  “Can we see it?” he asked, his breath shallower than normal. “Please?”

  “Of course,” Amy Lynn said. “I’d already planned to show you. But I’d need to borrow a projector. I might be able to arrange to do that tomorrow. The landlord is a friend of mine, and I know he has one, but he won’t be home until really late tonight.”

  Donovan, quite clearly, didn’t look like he could be that patient.

  I was feeling my own frustrations rising. If there were answers to be had, I wanted them now. “You must have some idea of what your boyfriend was uncovering in Crescent Cove,” I said to her. “Just from talking to our brothers and reading Treak’s notes. It had to be something really big to put them all in such danger.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So big that Treak didn’t want to talk about it on the phone. So big that I had to pull the details out of your brothers. They were afraid to tell me more than they had to when they saw me because, in their opinion, the less I knew, the safer I was.”

  She peered out the window. “They made me promise on my grandmother’s grave that I wouldn’t contact the police or report Treak missing. That I would go back to using my real name, cut off contact with the people I knew from my actress life and stay away from Treak’s apartment. That if the cops were to ever manage to piece together that Chelsea Carew and Amy Lynn Dreamson were the same person, I should deny knowing anything more about Treak’s disappearance. I was just supposed to say that he was a jerk who’d left me one day and never came back. That I had no idea why.”

  Her expression turned hard as she stopped pacing and sank into a chair across from us. “I can’t express just how difficult it was to try to absorb all of this that day. I’d taken the train up to my friend’s place, and Karen let me in at six a.m. without any questions. But what your brothers were asking me to do was going to require me to explain at least a few things to her, and I didn’t want to do that if I didn’t have to. Especially if this was all so dangerous.”

  She massaged her forehead for a moment. “The Bicentennial fireworks were set for that night. It was a big deal, so I watched them with Karen and a few of her friends, and then I slept like the dead afterward because I was so exhausted. The next day was a Monday, but it was a holiday because the Fourth of July had been on Sunday. I couldn’t stop thinking about Treak and everything that happened in the past twenty-four hours.”

  I remembered that weekend well. Gideon had been gone on overnight trips before, so my family didn’t panic at first when he hadn’t shown up for the big fireworks celebration. But when, after a whole weekend away, he wasn’t there on Monday either, or on Tuesday…

  Amy Lynn said, “The first time I could slip away was on Monday afternoon. I took the train back down to the old neighborhood—
just to see if Treak’s car was there. Maybe peek in the apartment and check for any last things I should bring along. But I didn’t even go in the building. His Chevy was nowhere in sight, but there were three cop cars lined up outside, and I could see a couple of officers milling around inside his second-floor apartment as I looked up from the street into his front window. I hid in the shadow of the doorway of the apartment complex across the street and watched for half an hour as policemen went in empty-handed and came out carting boxes of Treak’s files.”

  She shivered in the summer heat. “It was awfully strange that they’d shown up there so fast, taking his papers with them. And I knew then that your brothers had been right to warn me. To be scared. There was something really off about the cops raiding his place. Treak wasn’t, perhaps, the one true love of my life, but he was an honest man. A dedicated reporter. And a seeker of the truth. Whatever the police were looking for, I didn’t get the sense that it was to protect him.”

  Her expression pleaded with us to understand. She’d cared about Treak Bradley—as a friend and fellow human, if not as a lover. And I could tell he’d been kind to her when few others had. She was helping us because, even two years after he was dead, she still wanted to help him.

  “Something about the intensity of the cops made me think that whatever the police were looking for wasn’t just about him,” Amy Lynn said. “I doubted he would’ve been important enough for that kind of attention and focus. I think they were looking for something else. Some dirt on someone or, maybe, a way to protect somebody or some group. I felt like I’d dodged a heck of a lot of trouble, thanks to your brothers, and I hoped that Treak’s work wouldn’t be in vain. Especially after I saw his obituary in the Chicago Tribune a week later.”

  She grimaced. “It read to me like a monstrous lie, and I don’t know if that was the fault of the press or the cops. All I know is that the paper wrote he’d been killed in ‘a car accident in rural Wisconsin’ on Independence Day. That there were no witnesses but ‘evidence at the scene’ showed he’d been driving too fast and had collided with a cement divider. That there was an explosion and his body was badly burned, so much so that his grieving parents in Indiana were sent only his ashes. Now wasn’t that convenient?” Amy Lynn’s bitterness at this was impossible to hide. “I knew then that my old life had ended.”

  Yours wasn’t the only one.

  “Could we, maybe, take a look at his notes in a bit?” I asked. “I don’t know if anything written in them will stand out as a clue, but it’s possible Donovan or I might recognize something.”

  Amy Lynn nodded. “You can try. I’ll pull them out for you later and you guys can see if you’re able to make anything of them. To me, it was gobbledygook.”

  I glanced at Donovan. He looked beat. Like he’d gone twelve rounds against Muhammad Ali and was lucky to still be upright. Processing all of this new information was exhausting, I knew, but I still had a lot of questions. There were tons of things Donovan and I would need to know just to fill in a small portion of our brothers’ story. I was about to ask my most pressing question—the one that made my heart rise into my throat just thinking about it—when Donovan abruptly jumped up.

  “Anyone hungry?” he asked.

  I stared at him.

  Amy Lynn tilted her head to one side as if not quite comprehending the question.

  He tried again. “I’m starving. Is there somewhere close to here where I could pick up a snack for us? Burgers, pizza, anything like that?”

  “There’s a Roma’s on Cicero,” Amy Lynn said, pointing out her window. “They’ve got Chicago-style hot dogs, sausage and Italian beef sandwiches.”

  “Okay,” Donovan said quickly.

  “Or—” She wandered into her kitchenette and peered into a couple of cupboards. “I have noodles. I could cook those up instead with a little tomato sauce and—”

  “No,” he blurted. “No, thank you. That’s very generous of you, but I don’t want you to go to any trouble.” He paced the room like a caged baby Bengal. “How do I get to this hot dog joint?”

  “It’s a green-topped building—you can’t miss it. It’s just north of the Six Corners shopping area, where Cicero, Milwaukee and Irving Park Road all meet. A three-minute drive. Maybe a fifteen-minute walk.”

  “I’m just going to walk down there and grab a few to go. It sounds perfect.”

  I offered to go along but he immediately shot down that idea.

  “What would you ladies like?” he asked. “You each want one? Two?”

  Amy Lynn smiled kindly back at him. “One is plenty for me, thank you.”

  I didn’t feel the need to eat anything, but it was obvious he was desperate to get out of the apartment and be alone. So I held up an index finger to signal “one” and said, “Thanks, Donovan.” He sent me one of the most grateful looks I’d ever seen.

  “Yeah, no problem. I’ll be back in about a half hour or so.” He was in the hallway before I could even say, “Okay.”

  “It’s a lot to take in,” Amy Lynn said to me, her voice gentle. “Why don’t we take a break, too. You must be tired. Would you like some coffee? Wine?” Then she regarded me more intently for a moment. “How old are you, Aurora?”

  “Almost eighteen,” I said. “And thanks, but I’m fine. Maybe I’ll have some water or something in a bit. I probably need to splash my face with it more than drink it, though.” I laughed. “I want to be able to stay awake a lot longer, but I’m wearing out. It’s been an action-packed day.”

  “Where are you and Donovan staying tonight?”

  “Not sure yet,” I admitted. “Honestly, we didn’t get that far in our planning. We were just trying to figure out any information we could from my brother’s journal.” I explained how I’d guessed at what Amy Lynn’s real last name was from the description Gideon had written next to her name.

  “Clever guy,” Amy Lynn said.

  “He was. I mean, he is.” My hopefulness surged every time I thought about that, although there was a big “but” attached to it. But, if he was alive out there like I wanted to believe, even if he’d seen or heard something horrible, was it still impossible…still too dangerous…for him to come forward?

  “You’re clever, too, Aurora.”

  I mumbled, “Thanks,” but I didn’t feel as smart as I would have if I’d have just ignored the cops’ dismissal of me and worked harder at figuring out what had happened two summers ago. I should’ve trusted my intuition from the start and not wasted all of this time. Time when Gideon must have urgently needed my help. A glance at the clock told me it was after eight p.m. already, and I realized I owed my parents a phone call.

  “May I use your telephone?” I asked. “My mom and dad in Minnesota are expecting a call from me, but I’ll reverse the charges.”

  “Go right ahead.” The other woman pointed to the phone and left the room to give me a few minutes of privacy. The operator dialed my parents’ number, asking my father if he’d accept a collect call from me, which, of course, he did.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said, filling him in briefly on our long driving day and our arrival in the Chicago area. “I’ve only got a couple of minutes, but I wanted to let you know that everything’s going really well so far. We were just talking with someone who’s familiar with the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, and we’ll check it out tomorrow,” I told him, which was kind of true. At least the first half of the sentence.

  There was a long pause on the line. “Have you learned anything…new?” he asked carefully.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “It’s…mostly helpful news, but I’ll, um, find out more tomorrow. And we’ll talk again then.”

  He asked how Donovan was treating me—if he was being “a gentleman”—and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, yeah. He’s been fine, Dad. Don’t worry about that. He just went out to get us some more food.” And to walk off some of his edginess and fear. Then I changed the subject and told him to give my love to Mom, who was in the bath. I
said that, really and truly, everything was okay. “Better than okay,” I insisted.

  It took another minute of assurances, but I was finally able to hang up. It was going to get harder, I knew, to pile on the falsehoods if our trip lasted for more than a week. Much more challenging to tell fractional truths as the chasm between what we were really doing and what we said we were doing continued to expand.

  Even if my father knew enough to understand that a search for Gideon and Jeremy played a part in this road trip, he didn’t know about the journal. He didn’t know anything about Crescent Cove, Ben Rainwater, Treak Bradley or the Bonner Mill explosion. And I couldn’t explain any of it over the phone, even if I’d wanted to.

  Not only was it too chancy—he might tell someone he shouldn’t—but I was also worried he’d react too strongly to the news that his son was most likely still alive. He was like Donovan that way. He’d slammed the door on any hope that my brother and his friend had survived.

  When Dad had given his permission for this trip, all he’d really wanted was for our family to finally get closure on Gideon’s death. To find out for sure what had happened. Why Gideon and Jeremy had left town. I knew my father had no idea I was tracking Gideon himself. Veering right onto the path where my brother had last tread and all but walking in his footsteps.

  Dad would not like the potential danger of that—not one little bit.

  Amy Lynn returned to the room. “I brought the notes,” she said, setting a thin manila folder down on her small glass coffee table. She glanced at the telephone. “Everything okay?”

  I nodded. “Yes, thanks. Just overprotective parents.”

  “I’d be overprotective, too, in their shoes,” she admitted.

  Donovan knocked on the door and, when Amy Lynn opened it for him, he strode into the room with a bag filled with warm hot dogs and fries. They smelled so good, I actually felt a pang of hunger.