I knew right away what he was looking for, so I waited—letting him test his theory, holding my breath and hoping my memory of the entries was accurate.
“I’m sure I saw a reference to ‘J’ at least once in those later pages,” I whispered after a moment. I didn’t think Jeremy was the one to die in the explosion along with Ben. It couldn’t have been him. And, whether or not Donovan believed me, I knew it wasn’t Gideon.
No.
I watched as a hint of color returned to Donovan’s cheeks. He ran the tip of his index finger underneath the phrase “J & I in Chicago” and nodded at me in obvious relief. Then, for good measure, he flipped a few pages further into the journal, hunting for additional “J”s, one of which he found in the vicinity of another handwritten city name: Tulsa.
“Oklahoma?” he said. “Any idea why there?”
I shook my head. “But, Donovan, I know, somehow, all of this is connected. I just know it. Is there any other city mentioned before Chicago?”
“No. There’s only one entry between the ‘Start here’ page and the ‘Chicago’ one. It’s got just one date on it—Monday, May 10, 1976, when Jeremy and Gideon went to Crescent Cove the second time—and another list of supplies, mostly chemicals.”
I scanned a few more screens on the microfilm reader, articles in the paper following the Fourth of July explosion. There wasn’t much else that referred to either Bonner Mill or Ben Rainwater, aside from some photographs of them both. (Ben definitely had the darker features of his tribe members, I noticed, which made me all the more curious about his relationship to Ronny.) But, as the librarian had insinuated, the incident seemed to be brushed under the rug very quickly. Too quickly.
Donovan had set the journal aside and was sifting through the sections of print paper, dated from late last year, and finding only a handful of columns referencing the closing of the mill. No new details. Nothing we hadn’t already seen before.
“We need to go to Chicago,” I told him.
Donovan looked up from the newspaper. “No,” he said. Then lowering his voice to barely audible, he added, “I came with you here. You got to see everything for yourself. And now you need to stop acting like Nancy Drew. This is where we bring the police in, if we want things to go further, Aurora. We have more evidence now. Maybe they could use it to reopen the case.”
“They won’t do it,” I said, as certain of this as I was of my own name. And I was equally certain that however much Donovan pretended to be willing to have our brothers’ case reopened, he wasn’t committed to it.
“…if we want things to go further…”
He was angry at the guys for leaving in the first place, and he’d decided they must be dead or they would have come back. It was too big of a betrayal otherwise. He did not want to know the truth at all costs. Nor did he want to have to challenge the memory he had of his brother. And I knew he was going to fight me on every step, even as he tried to humor me. Even as he told me all the right words.
But I missed Gideon—and Jeremy, too. I couldn’t let them down. I wouldn’t.
Donovan leaned in close. I could feel his insistence in the heat of his breath as he spoke. “We’re going to go back and talk to Officer James. He’s a good guy, and the department has better resources for stuff like this than we do. They’ll help us. Don’t worry.”
I unthreaded the spool of microfilm, turned off the reader and gathered the newspaper pages. “I don’t like Officer James, and I’m not all that fond of the other two Chameleon Lake police officers either,” I hissed. “They didn’t solve any part of this last time, and the case has been all but closed for a year and a half. Reopening it now won’t be a priority for them, but it’s a priority for us.”
I motioned for Donovan to follow me out of the library, putting the materials on the cart on the way and waving a goodbye to the librarian, who was thankfully too busy with another patron to ask any follow-up questions.
When we were outside the building, I turned to Donovan. “Gideon didn’t want the authorities involved—that much I know. He chose to give the journal to me.” I paused, making sure this sank in, and then I held up the journal I’d collected from the table back when I was picking up the reference material.
“I want to go to Chicago…and I’m going to go. With you or without you,” I said. “And if you breathe a word of this to Officer James or to anyone, I’ll light that bag of fireworks in the trunk of your car myself, and we’ll just see what it does to your groovy Trans Am.”
At this he actually laughed.
“Just hold on, hold on. Slow down and stop making threats.” He sighed. “Though, you’re kinda funny when you’re angry. We need—”
I glared at him. “Donovan, I’m telling you—”
“Jesus, let me finish,” he said. “We can’t tell our folks, ‘Hey, we’re going to Chicago.’ It’s not logical for us to just up and leave like that, and it’s not safe for you to do it on your own. You’re smart, Aurora, I know, but you’re not even eighteen. And you’re going to do what? Act like an amateur sleuth? Just follow your hunches around the country? Go to every city your brother jotted down in his journal?” He shrugged this off like it was ludicrous.
I’d reached the frayed end of my rope. “Maybe that doesn’t seem logical to you, but to me, that’s the only thing that feels right.”
I looked him in the eye and didn’t blink. He could damn well try, but I knew he couldn’t talk me out of this by brushing me off and calling me names. Nancy Drew? Screw him.
“Just look at what we’ve managed to pick up in only twenty-four hours,” I reminded him. “By going to only one place Gideon wrote about in the journal. I know there’s more we’ll find—in Chicago, in Tulsa, in a half dozen other cities. I remember Gideon mentioned a few Southwestern states and, at one point, the city of Pasadena…”
“California?” His jaw dropped. “That’s not somewhere we can just drive to for a weekend so you can test out your people-reading skills,” he said, mockery coloring his voice. “You aren’t going to be able to lie to your mom about that trip and get away with it.”
He shook his head. “No. This is crazy. We go back home. We talk about this. And I think you’ll realize, after a good night’s sleep or two, telling the cops about what we found here will be the best way.” He crossed his arms—a show of resistance, defiance and pointed unwillingness to participate in my plan.
Fine, Donovan. Have it your way.
“That’s not how it’s going to happen,” I said, adamant. “I’ve already spent two years wondering what went wrong in their investigation. Why they didn’t find anything. Why they shut the case down so quickly.”
I poked him in the direction of his car and waited until we’d both gotten in, feeling that maddening jolt of powerlessness that I hated so much. Remembering how my questions had been dismissed by the cops because I was “just a kid”…“just a girl.” I wasn’t putting up with that shit again. Not from the police, and sure as hell not from Jeremy’s older brother.
“This is not some simple case,” I told him. “Our brothers didn’t disappear for no reason. They didn’t get themselves killed somewhere because they were ‘high on drugs,’ like that one cop suspected. They weren’t ‘secret homosexual lovers’ who ran away together, like that other cop said. Both of us know that.”
I shot him a significant look, remembering how Donovan had bristled silently at this particular insinuation a couple of years ago because it had showed such a lack of knowledge about both guys. Anyone who knew Jeremy or Gideon, even casually, knew they were straight. And, yeah, they both liked to party. They drank booze and smoked a joint every once in a while, but they weren’t druggies.
“They may have been kidnapped or they may have committed a crime and gone into hiding,” I said. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m positive there’s more to this than what we’ve been led to believe. More than the police either know or are willing to tell.”
I paused and studied his face for a
long, slow moment. Watched the tiny flicker of agreement in his eyes. Watched him try to blink it away, unsuccessfully. “You know I’m right,” I said with conviction.
He swallowed, refusing to admit aloud the truth of it, of course, but the fact that he didn’t immediately contradict me was enough.
“Well, there’s nothing left to do around here,” he said instead.
I didn’t disagree.
“So, let’s head back. No reason to stay another night in Wisconsin just because we can.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re going to have a lot to figure out in the next few days, so we might as well go home and get to it.”
I knew I’d earned the right to boast winning one battle against him, but I stayed silent because there was a full-scale war ahead. I needed to save my energy so I could win that, too.
Donovan filled the car up with gas—sixty-one cents per gallon out in Ashburn Falls, a whole two cents cheaper than in Chameleon Lake, it was that remote—and we began the drive toward Minnesota. I noticed his anger was more directed this time. Less of a simmering general malevolence than a laser-focused frustration.
Something else was different, too. Unlike the ride up, there were fewer pockets of silence on the way back. This time he actually initiated a few conversations. One in particular surprised me.
“Do you think our brothers were lying to us? To everyone?” he asked over the low crooning of Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” on the radio. “Do you think they were trying to get away with something illegal? I know they were capable of it. It’s just—do you think they’d actually do it?”
I’d wondered about this. Over and over again I’d wondered.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I hope not. My sense is that they wouldn’t do something really bad on purpose but, maybe…maybe, accidentally…”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”
“You know, there’s a lot of risk in going to the police, Donovan. Not only might they botch up the investigation again, but if they find out something bad about our brothers, they’d expose them both. Our parents don’t need that kind of heartbreak. Not on top of everything else.”
He nodded, saying nothing but just running his fingers through his dark hair. I could see a tremor in them as he did it. Just one. Then he pulled the fingers of that hand into a tight fist and clenched the steering wheel with the other.
In the parking lot in Alexandra, he dropped me off alongside my car, getting out to put my bag into the backseat of the Buick for me. I dug out my keys and stood in the distance between our two vehicles for a minute, remembering something. The ring.
I tugged it off my hand and ceremoniously returned it to him—making a face as I did it and trying to get him to smile just a little after the seriousness of our conversation on the drive.
He did smile, and he pocketed the dorky golden band. “Too much of a women’s libber for a ring, huh?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said, trying to sound casual and sophisticated. At least that’s how I hoped he’d interpret my words. “But, in any case, I won’t need it here.”
“Fair enough. And I’ll let you have your way with the journal, since I’m not going to wrestle it away from you,” he said, the smile mutating into a smirk because I’d been holding onto Gideon’s leather book with a death grip, like it was my passport to get out of a foreign land.
“We need to talk in a few days and really figure out what we’re going to do next,” I said.
Donovan grimaced. “I’ve got to work this week, and I think you do, too.”
I agreed. I’d probably need the week to come up with a good excuse for taking off some time from Dale’s Grocery Mart. Not sure what, exactly, I’d say to my boss. And then, of course, there were my parents. Hmm, that could be difficult. But I’d deal with one problem at a time.
“How about we meet on Tuesday night?” I suggested. “It’ll give us three days to mull over some ideas on our own, then we can run a few possibilities back and forth. About Chicago.” I paused to gauge his reaction. “And, maybe…beyond Chicago.”
His reaction was nearly nonexistent, his face devoid of all emotion. But, after a long moment, he consented with a short nod.
“Okay, so, Tuesday night then,” I said. “Should I come to the auto shop?”
“Yeah. Make it seven p.m. And Aurora?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t run off before then,” he said, slipping into the Trans Am with a wave and a tight grin that bordered on threatening. “I’ll be watching around town for you.”
Chameleon Lake, Minnesota ~ Sunday, June 11
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.”
The Road to You Page 8