Donovan gave it his best shot, but I held out for longer. Finally, with a resigned sigh, he said, “Fine. We can stay at the motel down the block for tonight. Just tonight.”
“Great!”
He chuckled at my burst of enthusiasm. “You get to write the note, though. I’ll go check us in quick so you can tell him our room number.”
It took me almost the whole twenty minutes he was gone to compose a five-sentence message, but it had to be written just right. Something anyone could read without raising suspicion. In a spurt of inspiration, I finally scribbled:
Hello, Mr. Reggio,
I think my brother Gideon and his friend may have visited your shop two summers ago. Do you remember them? Perhaps they’ve come back to see you since? My brother thought highly of you, and I’d love to hear about your meeting. Please call room #6 at the Prairie Pine Lodge tonight, if you’re able, and thank you.
Sincerely,
Aurora
Donovan, who’d returned with the room key, okayed my note with a shrug when he read it. I’d purposely avoided mentioning anyone’s last names, and I hadn’t even given out Jeremy’s first name. Amy Lynn had known exactly who I’d been talking about when I called her in Chicago. This Andy guy would have to bring some extra knowledge to the table before I’d believe we could trust him, too.
The call, when it came that night, wasn’t quite what I’d expected, though.
“Mrs. McCafferty?” the weary front desk clerk asked when he telephoned our room at 10:37 p.m.
“Um, yes?” I still wasn’t used to being called that, no matter how many times Donovan and I lied to motel clerks about being married.
“I hope I’m not waking you or your husband—”
I gazed at Donovan, who was sprawled on the bed, flipping with great amusement through last month’s issue of Seventeen magazine, which he’d found on the nightstand. He sat up fast when I caught his eye.
“—but the lodge just received a call from a delivery service asking us to make sure you received your package. Should’ve been dropped off by your door tonight.”
“At our door?” I asked. “Let me just check.”
But Donovan jumped off the bed and raced me there, literally pushing my hand away from the knob and motioning for me to stay back. He first glanced through the peephole. Then he shoved aside the heavy curtains to look out the front window and, finally, spotting nothing yet that alarmed him, he cracked the door open—leaving the chain still on—and cautiously peered into the night.
A large, thick, light-brown mailing envelope leaned against the doorframe.
Donovan prodded at it a time or two with his fingers, then he snatched the package and pulled it inside the room.
“Uh, yeah. Thanks,” I told the desk clerk. “We did receive it.” I said a quick goodnight to the guy and hung up, watching as Donovan cautiously sliced the side of the large envelope open with his pocket knife. “What’s in it?” I asked him.
“Papers. Lots of them.” He showed me the stack of sheets he’d pulled from inside the package. There were a bunch of newspaper clippings, a few mimeographed pages of what looked like police reports and a neatly typed note paperclipped to the top of the stack. Donovan unclipped it and handed it to me. “You should read this.”
I took it from him and scanned the page. It said:
Aurora,
Got your message at the bike shop tonight. Last time I saw Gideon, he told me that if you ever came looking for me that I should give you this packet. It has some info about what happened in Amarillo, and he said you’d know what that meant.
I really liked meeting both your brother and his buddy Jeremy and wished we all could’ve talked for longer.
It’s late and I need to head back to Texas real early in the morning, but if you have any questions, just leave me a message at the bike shop with the direct phone number to wherever you’re staying tomorrow. I can give you a call from Shamrock later in the day.
Andy R.
Donovan and I spent half the night going through the clippings page by page. Unlike the two brief newspaper announcements we’d read on the microfilm at the public library in Joplin, these actual pages were from several Texan newspapers, a few of them smaller, less conventional publications. They contained longer and more speculative passages about Americana Trucking and the Amarillo disaster in early August 1976. And though the information provided might have been less reliable than a mainstream paper, it did seem to fill in some possible missing gaps.
According to one clipping, the driver of the truck, whose name was still not officially released to the public, “disappeared after the incident, but a search of private Americana correspondence suggested that a trucker with a last name of Chaney was reported missing from work the following week.”
Another clipping stated that “there was one man confirmed dead on the scene and, though the police would not verify the identity of the victim, a hospital source leaked his name to be Rick Brice of Chicago, IL.”
There were mimeographed pages of police reports that showed this Rick Brice person as being “a former Chicago cop, wanted in connection with some still-unsolved labor union dispute that resulted in the mysterious deaths of two union leaders back in 1974.”
“Can these be real reports?” I asked Donovan, who looked alarmed when he read what they said.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe. But how would your brother have gotten them?”
“I don’t know.”
Still, the name of the guy mentioned looked unsettlingly familiar to me and, when I flipped back through my translation of Treak’s shorthand notes, I saw why. The name and place, Rick Brice - Chic, stared up at me from the middle of the page.
But that wasn’t all.
There was another police report for Timothy Wick, that Americana Trucking executive who’d gotten jail time for his involvement in ordering the explosives to be shipped to Albuquerque. The private report stated that he had “a verified association to Chicago crime boss Vincent Leto and to Leto’s right-hand man, Rick Brice.”
Guess whose name and city was right above Rick Brice’s on Treak’s note page?
Yeah. Vincent Leto - Chic.
Somehow all of these bad men—Leto, Wick, Brice and more—were connected. And somehow my brother had an important reason to be interested in them.
***
As soon as the bike shop opened the next morning—“Not ‘til ten o’clock on Saturdays, dammit,” Donovan muttered—we telephoned them and left a message for Andy to call us at the Prairie Pine Lodge.
“You realize this means at least one of us has to stay here all day,” I told him. “We’re not missing this call.”
He was striding around the room like a wild animal held in captivity, but he nodded. “Dammit,” he said again. “Why couldn’t he have just come over last night? Talked to us then? He had to know we’d have a thousand questions.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” For the trillionth time, I flipped through the pages we’d gotten the night before, shaking my head. “We don’t know what Gideon told Andy about Amarillo when he gave him these papers. Or when my brother gave them to him. It could’ve been a year ago. We don’t know how well Gideon and Andy even know each other, just that my brother must have had a good reason to think him trustworthy.”
“Well, we were supposed to check out of here by noon,” he said. “You’re right. We can’t drive home until he calls us back, but that might not be for hours.”
“Look, why don’t you go out for a little while? Get some fresh air,” I suggested.
“I don’t feel comfortable leaving you alone here.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “See if the desk clerk will give us a later check-out time. It’s possible, if no one’s waiting for the room, they might let us stay until three or four this afternoon.”
He shrugged. “Worth a shot, I guess.” He slipped on his sneakers. “I’ll get us something else to eat, too.” He tossed the now-empty bags of cookie
s and potato chips into the trash bin with a heavy sigh.
“Some fresh fruit, perhaps?” I suggested, given that we’d eaten nothing but junk food for the past twenty-four hours.
He laughed. “Yeah, okay. Some fruit…and maybe a couple of Kit Kats.”
I smiled and watched Donovan close the door and, for my safety, lock it securely behind him. “Don’t open this for anyone,” he threatened from outside the room.
“I won’t,” I called back.
He might not be quick to think of healthy dining options, but he never stopped remembering his promise to my dad to protect me. And, on top of that, every night—unfailingly—he was a gentleman when it came to our sleeping arrangements. If we could get a room with twin beds, he opted for that. If we couldn’t, he scrupulously stayed on his side of our double bed.
In an irritating way, he’d taken on the role of both father and brother for this trip. I sometimes wondered if he ever even saw me as that girl who had once kissed him at our brothers’ graduation party. If he ever even thought of me as someone who would become a legal adult in just a week.
Donovan returned to the room long before the phone rang, bearing a bottle of orange juice, crunchy red apples and fresh chicken salad on sliced wheat bread. He also brought news of a new four p.m. checkout time and was in possession of two slightly melted Milky Way bars.
“They were out of Kit Kats,” he informed me.
“Ah.”
We passed the hours eating, watching snippets of various Saturday morning cartoons, playing a couple of rounds of gin rummy with a deck of cards Donovan found in the desk drawer and holding our collective breaths.
At 2:08 our patience was rewarded.
Donovan snatched the phone before the end of the first ring. “Hello?”
Through the tinny receiver and the stuffy airwaves separating Donovan from me, I could hear the strains of a distinctive Texan accent coming through the line. I heard Andy Reggio ask for me by name.
“She’s here,” Donovan said coldly. “But I want to talk to you first. I’m Jeremy’s brother, Donovan McCafferty.” There was a pause and, from what I could gather, a jovial greeting—enough so that when Donovan spoke again, his voice had warmed up about ten degrees. “Thank you,” he said. Then, “Yeah, Jeremy was…” Another pause. “Yes, I always thought highly of them both.”
I moved closer to where Donovan was standing so I might be able to better hear Andy’s comments. It was much harder to read reactions when I only had a voice to go by, but I was going to try. Andy said something about how the three men had all met at the bike shop two years ago, just as I’d guessed.
“You said you saw Gideon when he gave you the papers,” Donovan said. “Was it recently?”
“Oh, yeah, ‘bout a month ago.”
“Really? What about Jeremy? Was he there, too?”
“Nope, not this time,” I could hear Andy say clearly. “Gideon was alone. He just stopped by the shop for a bit—first time we’d crossed paths since ’76. When I asked about Jeremy, though, he said he expected to see him soon, but he didn’t give out any specifics.”
A look of pure hope bathed Donovan’s face in a flash of light, effusing it in joy and amazement. It was an expression unlike any I’d seen him wear, at least for the split second that he allowed it to be shown. He covered his eyes with his palm, almost immediately muting the effect, or, perhaps, it was to prevent any tears from leaking out. He cleared his throat several times.
In almost a whisper, Donovan said, “We haven’t seen our brothers in a long time. What do you know about the incident in Amarillo?”
I strained to hear Andy’s response, and Donovan, finally seeing how hard I was trying to follow both sides of the conversation, yanked me close to him and shared the phone with me—putting the receiver between our ears, holding it tight.
“Not much more than what was in the papers,” Andy confessed. “Though Gideon did hint he knew the rumor was true about the trucker being some Yankee named Chaney.”
I glanced at Donovan and tugged the receiver just a fraction of an inch closer to my mouth before speaking. “Hello, Mr. Reggio. This is Aurora.”
“Why, hello, Miz Aurora,” the friendly voice on the line said with one of the thickest accents I’d ever heard. You know the kind—so strong you almost think it’s fake. As a Minnesota native, it was hard to believe anyone could draw out their syllables for that long. “With you and Donovan, y’all can call me Andy.”
“Andy,” I breathed, “thank you for calling us back and for delivering these papers to us last night. Do you have any idea how my brother might have gotten ahold of the police reports? They seemed pretty…um, confidential and official, so I wondered.”
“Don’t rightly know,” the Texan replied. “But your brother told me to hang onto them for ya, so that’s what I did. He had a law enforcement friend, though, so maybe that was how he got ‘em.”
Donovan pulled the phone back toward his mouth and repeated, “A law enforcement friend?” He sent me a perplexed glance. “Do you know who, Andy? Or even which city this friend of his lived in?”
“Sure do,” Andy’s cheery voice boomed back. “Gideon told me about a cop from your hometown. Guy by the name of James—William James. I remember ‘cuz Gideon mentioned him a bunch of times. Fact is, he told me if his sister were ever to be in Oklahoma and askin’ for advice on what to do that I should tell her it was all right to call this police officer. Share the information in the envelope with him…but only him. Say there were details about the Amarillo explosion that Gideon had given to a friend to give to her and that she could bring those papers home to show him.”
No way!
I couldn’t believe this. It couldn’t be right. I felt the blood rushing from my face at Andy’s suggestion, but Donovan shot me a triumphant look. He said into the receiver, “So, Gideon specifically told you we could trust Officer James?” I knew he was saying this far more for my benefit than to clarify anything with Andy.
“Yep,” the Texan said. “But, again, just him. You don’t wanna be tellin’ the whole entire police force about what you know just yet. Probably best to call him personally, at home on the weekend, maybe, rather than go in to see him. There’d be more questions and such if you were at the station.”
I exhaled slowly, trying to control my desire to contradict everything Andy Reggio was saying. I snatched the phone from Donovan.
“Do you know how to reach my brother?” I asked Andy.
How was I supposed to believe we could trust any cop after everything that’d happened? Maybe if the words came directly from Gideon’s mouth…but still. It just felt wrong to me. In opposition to every one of my heightened perceptions.
“‘Fraid not,” Andy replied, a hint of sadness in his voice. “Would like to see him more often myself. Seems he moves around a lot. But,” his tone brightened, “he told me if you needed proof that what I was sayin’ was the truth, that I should tell you something only you would know, Miz Aurora.”
I held my breath for a full fifteen seconds before I managed to ask, “What’s that?”
There was a low chuckle on the line. “In your diary, when you and your brother were kids, he read about your first kiss.”
“He never read my diary,” I replied. “At least, he said he didn’t.”
“Ah, brothers do things like that,” Andy said with gentle humor. “Sometimes they lie to their sisters when they’re trying to protect them.”
My distrust of Andy’s opinion was growing by the minute. “Oh, really? What did he tell you?”
“Said the boy’s name was Mike somethin’. Klausen, I think. You were fourteen. And you told your friends you liked his kiss, but in your diary you said he was as ‘slobbery as a sheepdog.’ Did I remember that rightly?”
My mind reeled. Truly, no one in the universe but Gideon could have known that. It was the exact phrase I’d used…and only in my diary. I hadn’t even told Betsy my real reaction.
“One day
, I hope I’ll see my brother again,” I told the chuckling Texan with a sigh, “so I can get even with him for that.” I tried to joke about it, but it was just a flimsy cover for my shock. I was trembling from the inside out.
“Well, I wish you luck finding him,” Andy said kindly before he hung up.
Donovan slanted me an odd look. “Mike Klausen was your first kiss? That bonehead—really?”
“Oh, shut up.”
He laughed. “So, okay. We’ll talk about something else, like how we now can tell all of this stuff we’ve found out on the road to Officer James.”
“We don’t know that for sure. I just—I don’t think we should reveal everything, Donovan. I mean, Andy told us that Gideon said we could share the clippings and the reports from the envelope with Officer James, but what about the names in Treak’s notes? Or Ben’s film? What about Crescent Cove and the pipe bombs that Ronny Lee Wolf had stashed up there? What about Amy Lynn? We might be willing to take a risk and trust what Andy said, but I don’t feel comfortable forcing that risk on Amy Lynn, especially not without her knowledge or permission.”
I implored him with my eyes to understand. “Do you see the difference? It’s one thing to tell the officer about information we got from Gideon. It’s another to connect the dots for him and involve someone innocent.”
I may as well have been talking to the chipped imitation-marble nightstand for all Donovan was listening to me. He was too busy, I could tell, striding around the room and feeling vindicated.
And stunned by the thought that Jeremy might just be fine.
And elated that my brother was on his side when it came to trusting the police.
And pleased that we’d be heading back home in less than an hour because, let’s face it, I’d already pleaded with him to let us keep searching for Gideon, and this dead end—contacting the police at home, for God’s sake!—was where it had led. I could no longer dream up reasons to keep us on the road.
Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You Page 23