The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  I also knew there was no point in worrying about being inconspicuous. Not only was it futile, it was irrelevant. No matter which car we took to Wisconsin, people were going to remember Donovan McCafferty. It was pure foolishness to think otherwise.

  In the garage, he pointed at my old Buick. “You got a bag in there?” he asked.

  I boosted my tan-and-white overnighter out of the trunk. He took it from me and tossed it effortlessly into the backseat of his Trans Am, next to his camouflage-colored Army duffle. Then he opened the passenger door for me, and I slid inside.

  When we were safely out on the open road, the whispering wind whipping through the windows and ruffling our hair, Led Zeppelin blaring on the radio and the golden summer sun beating down on us—heating our skin and threatening a burn if we left our arms exposed for too long—I felt an object being pressed onto my lap.

  Gideon’s journal.

  I ran my fingertips across the leather cover, tracing the butterfly, then I shuffled the pages in time with “Stairway to Heaven.” Yeah. Sometimes words did have two meanings.

  “You can have it back,” Donovan said, the first specter of a smile crossing his lips in over an hour. “For now.”

  I laughed at that, almost under my breath, but not quite. He almost laughed back.

  And, while the boys on the radio may have disagreed on this, I sensed that, no, there wasn’t any time to change the road we were on. The piper had called us, and we’d chosen our path.

  In that expectant space between silence and melody, our trip began.

  Crescent Cove, Wisconsin

  AFTER WHAT might have been the longest three hours and forty-seven minutes of my entire life, the Trans Am crossed the state line into Wisconsin.

  I eyed Donovan warily. He’d uttered aloud only a handful of syllables on the drive, letting the rock on the car radio speak for him.

  But, while Wings, the Eagles and Crosby, Stills and Nash gave voice to his love of the fast lane and general discontent with society, the increasing tension in his body called out to me like a scream. I could feel the vibrations of his stress in the claw-like grip he had on the steering wheel, the pale cast to his knuckles, the way he punched the buttons to change stations when one radio signal grew too weak, the ropy tautness of his neck and the steely intensity riveting his eyes to the pavement.

  Donovan flicked off the radio finally. “We’re almost there,” he informed me.

  I opened my mouth to say, “Thank God, it’s about time,” but something in his tone and the set of his jaw stopped me. He was not only anxious, I realized, he was angry.

  Very angry.

  Even knowing this anger wasn’t directed at me but at the Crescent Cove city limits sign (“Population 949”) wasn’t much consolation. It shimmered off of him like light on a lake, and I was sure those waters were deep with danger.

  “What do you want to do first?” I asked him, trying to come across as reasonable, accommodating and not likely to piss him off. “Once we drive through town, that is.”

  He turned his dark brown eyes in my direction, taking them off the road only long enough to blink and say, “Let’s see what we see there.”

  Yeah, that sounded simple enough, but it wasn’t. Donovan was glaring at everything in Crescent Cove through his own increasingly frustrated lens. We wouldn’t be able to figure out anything that way. I knew we were going to have to view the place through Gideon and Jeremy’s open and optimistic perspective instead. But both of us were out of practice being upbeat, and trying to tell Donovan what to do would get me exactly nowhere. I’d asked him once on the road if we should, maybe, stop for gas and the look he gave me would’ve made the Incredible Hulk cower in fright.

  “Let’s just consider how our brothers might have seen everything here,” I suggested carefully, glancing at the one-street, two-stop-sign town, which was significantly smaller than even Chameleon Lake.

  Donovan narrowed his eyes and pulled into a farmhouse driveway on the edge of the town so he could turn his Trans Am around and go down the main drag once again. This time more slowly.

  “This place is a bunch of rubble in the road,” he pronounced after taking an especially long look at the vendor lineup on the left side of the street: Bar with burnt-out neon lights, brownish brick corner store, paint-chipped post office, ramshackle bar, hardware store with taped-up window, shuttered empty store front, yet another bar… “What the hell were they doing in this dump?” he muttered.

  I had to admit, I was almost as mystified.

  Had our brothers liked hanging out at one of the bars? It seemed too long of a drive from Chameleon Lake just to come up for a beer, though the drinking age in Wisconsin was only eighteen while, in Minnesota, it was nineteen. That was reason enough for a lot of my old high-school friends to cross the state line.

  But my parents had never been strict about stuff like that. Once Gideon and Jeremy got to high school, Mom and Dad let them drink a bottle or two of beer at the house without batting an eyelash. Dad even fixed us all—me included—whiskey sours one New Year’s Eve. I remembered how quickly I got a buzz from it.

  I also remembered how funny Jeremy had been that night, laughing with us as Gideon pulled Mom into a crazy waltz in the middle of the living room. “Dance With Me” by Orleans had been playing on the radio. Jeremy turned the volume up even higher and suddenly said, “Well, c’mon, Aurora. We can’t let ‘em show us up, can we?” So, I took his hand and he spun me around and around, until we both finally collapsed on the shag carpet from too much giggling and dizziness and, maybe, the whiskey.

  Had Gideon and Jeremy danced with anyone here in Crescent Cove? Could it have been that one of them had a crush on a chick he’d met at a bar up here? Maybe. With so little information, it was hard to rule out anything...

  But, while they’d both dated casually quite a bit, I didn’t think either guy had been serious about a girlfriend two years ago. At their graduation party, they’d each been flirting outrageously with the girls in the hotel room, and I would’ve bet money they both got laid that night. But there were no longstanding relationships afterward. Not that I knew of, that was for sure.

  “Could there be some other section of the town?” I asked Donovan. “There has to be a church here somewhere. A school. A library, maybe.”

  He looked at me like I was schizo. “Aurora, they don’t even have a gas station in this stinkin’ hell pit. You really think they’d have a library?”

  He shook his head and went back to glaring at the handful of rundown buildings again, this time the ones on the right side of the street. A couple of local boys, who’d seen us zip down and back, eyed Donovan’s car curiously, no doubt recognizing a pair of out-of-towners when they saw some.

  Donovan abruptly turned the car down a narrow country lane. “You wanna look for a church? A school? A library?” he asked me. “Let’s just go for a little spin around these parts and take in the diversity.”

  Hard to miss the sarcasm in his voice.

  We cut a wide square driving through the surrounding farmland but, as Donovan had predicted, there were no signs of any large public buildings anywhere in the vicinity. We did, however, see a smallish lake.

  “Behold, the Cove,” Donovan said in full mocking mode.

  There was also an entrance to one of the Saint Croix Chippewa Reservation Communities (know-it-all Donovan informed me that there were several tribal lands in the area) and a dark-green sign pointing in the direction of Ashburn Falls, a town thirteen miles away.

  Donovan pulled off the pavement and onto the gravel, grabbing his road atlas from under the seat and locating the place.

  “That might be our best bet for a motel,” he told me. “Ashburn Falls has got a population of almost six thousand, so that’s probably where the nearest school and church are. And your library,” he added drily.

  I had to agree on the prospects of the new town, although I forced all thoughts of a motel stay with Donovan out of my mind for now—I just
couldn’t let myself imagine that! Besides, our work in Crescent Cove wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.

  “Gideon and Jeremy never mentioned Ashburn Falls in the journal,” I told him. “Gideon specifically wrote about Crescent Cove, though. So, there’s something right here that is…or was…important to them.” Not that I had any idea what that might be. “We need to park the car and go down that main street again—this time on foot. I think we should walk into some of these bars and little shops. Get a feel for them.”

  He nodded. “I know,” he said, like he’d been fighting against it. Like doing this was going to cost him something.

  He parallel-parked in front of the tiny post office and the two of us began strolling down the sidewalk, peeking into the various storefronts as if we were window shopping.

  Since it was nearly six p.m., many of the places were already closed, including the corner grocery, which had a poster of Wonder Bread in the window and an orange sign next to it that read: “Sale on Peanut Butter!”

  Bar #1 (with the burnt-out neon lights) was doing brisk business, though.

  “You got an ID?” Donovan asked.

  I grimaced, knowing what was coming. “I’ve got my driver’s license with me, yeah. But it says my real birth date.”

  “What? No fake ID?” he asked, surprised.

  I shook my head. Yeah, yeah, I knew it was odd. Everyone had a fake ID but me. I didn’t go out much.

  “How long ‘til you’re legal?”

  “In this state? Three weeks,” I admitted. I’d be eighteen on July first.

  He shot me a glance that said he didn’t believe I was that close to adulthood, dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a rubber band. “Here.” He held it out to me. “Put your hair up with this. Might make you look a little older.”

  I finger-combed my straight hair upward, fashioning a loose bun, and secured it with the band. I thought I did a pretty good job considering I only had a shop window as a mirror. “Better?”

  He studied me for a long moment, looking more displeased than approving. But then he shrugged and said, “Close enough.” And he pushed open the door to Bar #1.

  The pungent aroma of cigarette smoke floated up at us, immediately making my nose twitch, as Donovan led me toward a table halfway to the bar. There were a handful of unoccupied tables nearby, but this one had the advantage of being mostly clean.

  I swiped a few potato-chip crumbs off my chair before sitting down and scanned my surroundings. Dark wood paneling. Smudged windows. Low overhead lighting but a fair bit of neon. The pervasive scent of beer. And Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” playing a little louder than it needed to be.

  About a dozen people were already working toward various states of drunkenness, including a group of laughing thirty-something women, a few old men, a trio of guys playing pool in the back and a middle-aged couple sitting at the bar, drinking side-by-side but in silence.

  I was about to ask Donovan if he’d seen a bartender or a waitress anywhere—because I sure hadn’t spotted one—when I got to witness a remarkable transformation in his expression.

  Turned out, a waitress was headed straight for our table. Tall and willowy with long, sleek, black hair, the girl reminded me of a twenty-two-year-old Cher. But what was far more interesting was Donovan’s face, which seemed to lose its angry intensity and adopt the look of a reckless charmer. More astonishing still was the way he turned a magnetic smile on the waitress before she even reached our table. It was as if he’d been waiting all his life for someone like her.

  “Hey, there, folks,” the Cher-lookalike said brightly. “I’m Kim. What can I get ‘cha to drink?”

  “You got Budweiser on tap?” he asked.

  “Sure do.”

  “We’ll take two of those and—” He paused, glancing at the laminated card on the table with the bar’s limited food options. “You hungry for a sandwich, uh…Sis?” he asked me.

  My mouth dropped open.

  Sis?!

  But he was nodding at me and encouraging me to nod right back. So I did—mutely—as Donovan kept smiling that weirdly sensual grin at the waitress, managing to give off the vibe that, while he might be visiting town with his sister, he was still very much open to a little frolicking adventure with one of the locals.

  “We got tuna, ham-n-Swiss, roast beef or egg salad. All sandwiches are served with potato chips and a pickle. Coleslaw is an extra twenty cents,” the waitress said, smiling back at Donovan. “Where are ya two from?”

  “St. Paul,” he answered quickly. “You always lived here in Crescent Cove…Kim?”

  She shook her dark head. “Oh, no. I grew up in Ripon, but I’ve been up here for three years now. I moved on account of my boyfriend, but then—” She lifted her slim shoulders in a shrug. “Well, Hal was a trucker. He left town.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Nice place, though,” he said conversationally. “Real quiet.”

  She laughed. “Too quiet. Nothin’ much happens.”

  He leaned closer, the pull of his charismatic sensuality—a trait he could turn on and off like a light switch—drawing the waitress nearer as well. “Really?” he whispered to her. “Nothing exciting? No infidelities, murders or mysterious disappearances?”

  She laughed again but then lowered her voice to match his. “Just the old explosion near the Indian Rez a couple of years ago. Blew up Sammy Bonner’s scrap-metal mill. And the usual gossip about the fire chief’s wife and that American history teacher in Ashburn Falls.”

  Kim raised her eyebrows in the direction of the couple sitting at the bar and murmured, “Rob over there is the fire chief’s brother and Stella used to be best friends with the wife. They’re not speakin’ to that side of the family anymore.”

  I gave a cursory glance to the pair at the bar but refused to stare at them the way the waitress did. I remembered all too well the gossip that swirled around me and my parents in the months that followed Gideon’s disappearance. Gossip that still swirled, sometimes. I wasn’t going to inflict the same punishment on someone else. And Donovan, I noticed, didn’t look at them for long either.

  “And, well, Officer Mendelsson’s daughter, Ronelle, ran away with some big-city business guy. He looked like Burt Reynolds and drove a new Camaro. Nothin’ mysterious about that disappearance,” she said, sounding wistful. And in that second I knew this was exactly what Kim was hoping would happen to her someday. Knew she was looking Donovan over as if he might just be her Burt Reynolds.

  I found my voice. “Do you get a lot of out-of-towners visiting? Guys driving through, picking up local girls?” I asked sweetly.

  Donovan narrowed his eyes at me.

  Kim seemed surprised to hear me talk. Probably had forgotten I was there, what with all that ogling of Donovan and all his flirting back. It seemed I couldn’t take him anywhere without him making passes at the wait staff.

  “Not all that often,” she said, leaning away from the table and scribbling something on her order pad. “Did you say you wanted sandwiches?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Donovan said. “Ham-n-Swiss for me, with the coleslaw.” He poked at my forearm, and none too gently. “You, too?”

  “That’s fine. Anything but tuna,” I said, sitting back and crossing my arms. As if I gave a fig about the food.

  The waitress made a few more notes on her order pad. “Be back with your beers in a sec. Sandwiches’ll take about ten minutes, okay?”

  “Thanks, Kim,” Donovan said affably.

  She smiled again at him, ducked her head almost shyly and headed for the counter.

  When Kim’s back was finally turned, I smacked his arm with the back of my hand. “What. Are. You. Doing?” I murmured.

  Donovan’s smile didn’t dim one iota. He radiated confidence, warmth and raw sexuality. But, deep in his eyes, I saw something hard and angry still lingering there. “Just. Play. Along,” he murmured back. “I’m gathering information. Don’t throw any roadblocks up.”

  Kim returned with our
beers and, a few minutes later, with our sandwiches and sides. “Here you go,” she said. “And, um, here are some napkins, if you want. Anything else I can get you two?”

  I smiled tightly at her but said nothing.

  Donovan took a long, slow sip of his beer and licked his lips. “No, this is great. Just what we needed.” His eyes twinkled when he glanced up at the waitress. No sign of hardness in them.

  I was just beginning to understand what a skilled actor he could be and why, perhaps, I couldn’t read his reactions half as easily as I did with most people.

  “Hey,” he said, “this may be a while ago, probably two years or so, but you seem to have a great…um, memory.” The way he gave Kim the compliment made it sound like he was telling her she had great tits.

  The waitress blushed. “Oh, thanks.”

  He lifted the pickle wedge from his plate and bit off the end like it was a cigar. “You ever see a couple of guys hanging around town who drove a two-tone, late-model Ford Galaxie? Had a white hardtop, a real nice royal blue body and Minnesota plates. They’d be about your age, I’d say.”

  Kim squinted off into the distance. “I remember seeing a car or two like that, sure, but it could’ve been anybody’s. Those guys friends of yours?”

  “Friends of friends,” Donovan said easily. “We haven’t run into them in long time, but I know they liked Crescent Cove and I thought, maybe, they lived in the area now. They said it had a lotta good things for a town its size.” His sexy grin implied Kim might have been one of those good things.

  I studied the waitress’s body language and knew if Kim had even the slightest recollection of Gideon and Jeremy she would have said so, if only to please an attractive out-of-towner. But she didn’t.

  “Do you maybe have a picture or anything?” the woman asked.

  He stroked one dark sideburn then tapped his lips with his index finger. He kept drawing attention to his mouth, something that could hardly have escaped our waitress’s notice. “You know, I don’t think—”

  “I do,” I interrupted.