The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  He shot me the withering look of someone convinced of his self importance. “Vacations need to be put in at least a month ahead of time.”

  I nodded. I knew this. But he owed me a few favors and I was going to get my way. Period.

  “I’m not going on vacation. I’m going on a college scouting trip,” I said, mentally commanding him to hear the determination in my voice. “The admissions offices already have shorter hours and they’ll be closed once the summer-school sessions are over.” Not sure if that was really true but, hey, it sounded good. “So, I really have to go now.”

  “You couldn’t have decided this last month?”

  “No, Dale. I couldn’t have.”

  I stood still and faced him. Looked into those beady, bloodshot eyes of his and willed him to remember how my intuitive skills kept his store from being robbed by a couple of grimy thugs in the early spring. I’d warned Dale about them. Said they were big-city hoods who were up to no good. Pointed out how they were casing the place. And, in response, he’d called in Officer Cleary for backup. Major crisis averted.

  After a moment of glaring at me, Dale exhaled—a longsuffering stream of hot air and irritation. “You really need all of next week off?”

  “At least. Maybe we should make it a week and a half.”

  His squirminess told me that I was pushing it, but Dale was a coward. He gave in out of fear of confrontation rather than out of any sense of compassion or desire to help.

  “One week,” he muttered with a scowl and a dismissive huff, then he headed into the back alley for a smoke.

  I smiled grimly to myself. My victory was small but important.

  One battle down, two to go.

  IT TOOK all of seven minutes on Tuesday night for Donovan to start picking a fight with me.

  “You need to think about this,” Donovan insisted when I informed him I’d gotten a week off from work for the trip. “Do we really need to rush into it?”

  “Rush?” I stared at him. “Your concept of time is seriously warped. Being two years late is hardly rushing.”

  I could hear the exasperation in my voice, but I wasn’t backing down. And, besides, in my not very humble opinion, I’d already won this damned argument.

  “You were standing right next to me in Crescent Cove, weren’t you?” I said. “We got more leads in twenty-four hours than the cops had managed to track down in a month, and that’s even with their tromping all over our houses and putting out missing persons bulletins.”

  I shook my head, remembering Officer James and Officer Cleary tearing apart Gideon’s bedroom, asking if he “always listened to disturbing music” (he owned a few KISS albums) or “looked at a lot of dark art” (he had one Van Gogh poster up on his wall) or “frequently read Commie literature” (someone gave him a book by Karl Marx, but I’m pretty sure he never cracked it open).

  To some extent, I appreciated what the police were trying to do: Establish his patterns of behavior before the disappearance, determine what was or wasn’t in character, check to see if there were other suspicious activities dotting his past—any juvie criminal records, disabilities that might impair judgment, indications of burgeoning mental illness, drug or gambling habits.

  I’d overheard Officer James making some comment about “solvability factors” to his partner as they sifted through Gideon’s old school notebooks, hunting for hints about why someone else might want to abduct him or why he might feel the need to either kill himself or disappear indefinitely.

  But they couldn’t find anything obvious.

  No missing favorite things from his bedroom. No money trail. No suicide notes tucked inside his LP liners. Apparently, listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite” from KISS’s Alive! album over and over again was not quite enough evidence to qualify an eighteen-year-old male as “troubled,” although the cops called into question his musical taste more than once.

  Donovan made a face and started digging around in a desk drawer for something. “What did you tell Old Man Geiger you’d be doing anyway?” he asked.

  “College scouting,” I replied. “Can’t you tell your boss you’re doing that, too?”

  He stopped fiddling around and leveled an odd look at me. “Um,” he said, which I took to mean, Yes…yes, he could, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  I was aware he’d been in the Army long enough to pay for four years of college, thanks to the GI Bill, but he hadn’t started taking any classes yet—at least not as far as I knew.

  Deciding to push my luck, I said, “That’s what we could tell everyone. The explanation for why we’re leaving town together for a week. We’re both just looking at a few colleges. That sounds reasonable enough, right?”

  He cleared his throat. “Um,” he said again. “I just…I don’t know.”

  I sighed. There were a bunch of things I could do in Chicago by myself, and I would, but Donovan had been more help in Crescent Cove than I’d wanted to admit. It wasn’t like I could force him to come with me, though. (He was a lot stronger than me.) But there was also no way he could force me to stay home. “It’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. “I can take it from here.”

  He shot me a look of disbelief and went back to scrounging through the desk drawer until he retrieved a stack of stapled sheets of yellow paper and a pen. He walked over to the Muscle-Car Babe calendar and studied the dates beneath the red Mustang and the too-perky blonde, comparing them to whatever was written on one of the yellow sheets. He exhaled slowly and jotted down a few notes on the calendar and then a few more on the paper.

  My excitement began to rise at the sight. He was doing it. He was blocking off the time. He was going to go with me to Chicago.

  I smothered a grin, knowing that—in Donovan’s case—the only obstacle to his departure was work-related. Unlike me, he didn’t have to clear anything with his parents. Both his real dad and his stepdad were out of the picture, and his mom, while still very much in his life, had her own house.

  Donovan had been living in a small apartment on his own since he’d gotten back from the Army and, though of course he was always respectful of his mother, he didn’t have to answer to anybody. Not even his boss at the garage, really. Everyone knew they needed him there more than the other way around.

  “Stop looking so pleased with yourself,” he growled at me. “Listen, I’m taking next week off, but that’s it. We’ll drive to Chicago and, maybe, another city or two in Illinois, but then we’re coming back home.”

  He shot me the stern look of an elder brother, which seemed an act calculated to provoke me, even before he said, “Now you’d better get permission from your parents. I don’t want you sneaking around behind their backs, and I really don’t want them calling the cops on me and accusing me of kidnapping you.”

  I gaped at him. He couldn’t be serious. “That’s not funny.”

  “No shit, Aurora,” he said without a trace of humor in his voice.

  I crossed my arms. “Fine. I’ll talk with them tomorrow, I promise. My plan was to leave on Saturday morning, but we could take off even earlier. Friday night. Betsy wanted to see some new movie, that Fifties musical, but I’d rather skip it and just—”

  “No, you should go,” he interrupted. “You know how people talk in this dinky little town.” Impossible to miss the bitterness that clung to his words. “We need to use that to our advantage. You know we can’t both be gone from here for more than a day or two and not have people notice. Or speculate.”

  He wrinkled his nose and paced the length of the office and back. “Friday night would be a good chance for us to spread your rumor about where we’re going. I can plan to run into you and Betsy by the theater. If we talk about that college-scouting crap on the street for five minutes, there’ll be enough people eavesdropping that maybe we won’t have to deal with gossip about us being a couple or running away together or anything stupid like that.”

  I bit my lip to keep from spouting off a self-incriminating, completely embarrassing re
sponse to this. His dismissal of me as not being someone even worthy of dating gossip needled me to no end, but it wasn’t like I could argue with him over it. What would I say?

  Oh, c’mon! Why shouldn’t they think we’re a couple?

  Wouldn’t it be great if everyone talked about how we’d skipped town together to go on a wild road trip? That we were just irresponsible kids with loose morals, who’d probably even break the law a time or two?

  That plan would be a hard sell with Donovan…and it wouldn’t help me convince my parents to let me drive with him to Chicago either.

  I shrugged. “Okay. Betsy and I will go to the show in town. Seven-thirty on Friday night. See you on the sidewalk afterwards.”

  I swiveled on my sneaker toe to leave—I couldn’t get out of that cramped office fast enough—but he stopped me by gently grabbing my upper arm and tugging me toward him. “Hang on,” he said. “There’s something else we have to do tonight.”

  My pulse thrummed at the spot where he touched me, and I wished desperately that I didn’t like the sensation. I snatched my arm away. “What?”

  He flashed one of his grins at me, leaned close until his nose was just a couple of inches from mine and whispered, “Boom.” Then he pointed toward the parking lot. “We got some bootleg fireworks to blow up.”

  Oh, yeah. We did.

  He drove us out beyond the Chameleon Lake city limits, through the rolling countryside and halfway to St. Cloud, before he pulled the Trans Am onto the shoulder of the road. He nodded at the mostly open field to our right, sprinkled only with a few large maple-tree clusters.

  With the crunch of gravel beneath our feet and the sun just starting to dip down to tree level, we made our way to the field, each of us having grabbed a decent sampling of fireworks from the cardboard box in the trunk.

  “Let’s just try this bunch first,” Donovan said. “No telling how powerful they’ll be.”

  Using a small, dried branch he picked up off the ground, he lit the stick with his cigarette lighter and, being careful to keep the lit branch away from the fireworks, took just one cherry bomb with him to the most open part of the field.

  “Stay behind the tree,” he commanded, and I didn’t dare disobey.

  He set the firecracker down on a rock and, then, using the branch to give himself a little distance, lit the cherry bomb with the tip of the flaming stick—arm outstretched, eyes shielded—and when the wick caught fire, he ran like hell back to where I was standing.

  Like a mini snake, it hissed as though about to strike, and then…

  Boom!

  It went off, shooting sound waves and angry dust particles into the still-bright sky.

  He glanced at me, a grin tugging his lips upward. “They’re a little stronger than the county-fair variety.” He reached for the M-80 next. “I’m almost afraid to light this one.”

  But light it he did. It sparked a hot, bright flash and sounded like the detonation of a cannon.

  The two of us looked at each other and started laughing, so instinctively, so uncontrollably, at the sheer power of these small objects, it verged on hysteria.

  “Good thing we’re alone out here,” I commented, wiping away a stray tear from the corner of my eye and handing Donovan one of the quarter sticks. “I wouldn’t want to have to explain to anybody what we’re doing.”

  “Me neither,” he said, glancing at the empty road. “Sounds like we’re trying to level the entire field.”

  We lit the remainder of our first batch, then Donovan went back to the Trans Am to retrieve another couple of handfuls from the box. After a few cars went by, he lit those one at a time as well.

  We were laughing again at the spark and sound of a particularly deafening quarter stick when I asked, “How many more do we have left?” just a second before a male voice behind us asked, “What have you got there, kids?”

  I gasped and pivoted toward the voice

  And Donovan swung around so fast he looked like one of those cartoon whirling dervishes. “Uh, Officer James,” he said. “We, uh, didn’t hear you.”

  The young cop smiled indulgently at us. “Well, it was a little noisy down here, wasn’t it?”

  He had a thick head of reddish-brown hair that he tended to run his left hand through whenever he grinned. It was a casual, easygoing motion that seemed oddly paired—a connection of face and limb. Out of uniform, as he was just then, and dressed in jeans and a clean blue t-shirt, he appeared even younger than his early thirties. More like a peer than an authority figure. More like one of us.

  Donovan and I didn’t say anything, although we both shot a quick glance at the base of the maple tree where he’d been stashing the fireworks. I didn’t see any left. Of course, I knew there were still some in his trunk.

  “Celebrating the Fourth of July a little early, aren’t you two?” the officer asked.

  I watched Donovan swallow and nod. “A guy at the shop gave me a few of these, and I just wanted to see if they were any good.”

  Officer James raised an eyebrow. “One of your coworkers?”

  “No,” Donovan said quickly. “Just a guy who was passing through. Needed a little work done on his back bumper and an oil change. He was from out of town.”

  I studied the cop’s expression as the cop, in turn, studied Donovan’s, and I knew we were in trouble. Officer James wasn’t buying this explanation.

  “This guy from out of town, he just gave you a bunch of—” The officer waved his palm in the air. “What would you call them? Specialty fireworks?” He grinned some more and ran that same palm through his hair again, catching his fingers up in the chestnut strands like a spider dancing through a web.

  Donovan winced. “I didn’t know what they were for sure,” he lied. “They did look a little, uh, different from the usual ones we get.”

  At that, the officer laughed. He may have been a small-town cop, but he was nobody’s fool.

  He clasped Donovan’s shoulder with his wide hand and glanced between the two of us. “Well, son, I’m off duty, so you’re in luck. When I saw your car by the side of the road, I thought you might’ve just had some engine trouble. Glad to hear that’s not the case.”

  He gave each of us a significant look and let go of Donovan to examine the spot where the fireworks had been lit. Little bits of burnt black wadding remained at the scene, although, thankfully, most of the objects in question had been blown to bits.

  Donovan muttered something under his breath when Officer James picked up a slip of smoky, blackened wadding paper—a remnant from one of the cherry bombs.

  The cop’s suspicious expression said it all but, for good measure, he added, “Thought with your military background you might know better, Mr. McCafferty.”

  But then, after an interminable pause, he broke into yet another smile, raking his fingers through his thick hair once more. “I remember these from when I was a kid. They used to pack a lot more punch back then. I’m not sure who, er…designed the ones you had in your possession but, from the look and sound of them, they were made the old-fashioned way.”

  I couldn’t help but notice that, while Officer James glanced at me from time to time, he’d pretty much dismissed me from the start. There was no thought on the cop’s part of my having been involved in the acquisition of the fireworks. No sense that I might have any pyrotechnic knowledge, however minimal. Nothing out of the ordinary about me that would require him to look at me with any real scrutiny.

  It had been much the same during the missing persons’ investigation. Not that I had been in any way involved with Gideon’s disappearance, but shouldn’t a good cop consider every possible angle?

  Addressing Donovan, Officer James said, “You’re not within the boundaries of the town of Chameleon Lake and, even if you were, I’m not on duty again until tomorrow morning. So, I won’t be checking your pockets or your car right now, and I trust there’d be no unexploded evidence for me to find anywhere, would there?”

  “No, sir,” Donovan
answered solemnly. I was reminded yet again how smoothly he could lie when motivated.

  “Good.” The cop laughed and steered us back away from the scene and toward the road. “Well, then I guess there’s nothing to report. This time. But I wouldn’t recommend that you pick up any more of those special fireworks from anywhere, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Donovan replied, his tone respectful but with a hint of his trademark charm. Playing the game. Maybe even enjoying it.

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to act playful, but I tried to appear appropriately compliant. Because as jovial as the coolest, hippest cop in Chameleon Lake seemed at the moment, I remembered Officer William James well from the time of the investigation. Knew what a hard ass he could be when he wanted to. I wasn’t inclined to get on his bad side.

  Since he seemed to like me best when I played the part of the meek, easy-to-direct schoolgirl, I just kept quiet and let him think what he wanted.

  Thing was, no offense to the good officer and his buddies at the police station but, as of two years ago, I hated all cops. Every last one of them. And I’d never trust them again.

  When we got up to the road, Officer James jumped into his snazzy yellow VW Bug with a wave, but he insisted that Donovan drive ahead of him. So, of course, Donovan pulled out first and had to drive under the speed limit the whole way back into town. It wasn’t until the cop turned left onto a side street that we could finally breathe deeply again.

  “What are we going to do with the rest of the fireworks?” I asked. “There’s still some in the trunk, right?”

  Donovan shrugged as he pulled into the auto shop’s parking lot next to my Buick. “Yeah, we’ve got five or six left. We’ll take them with us, I guess. Maybe find a larger, more remote area when we’re on the way to Chicago and light them there. We’ve got to be more careful out of state. Lucky it was Officer James who saw us tonight and not someone who didn’t know us. Like some hardnosed cop from St. Cloud or another town.”

  “Yeah. Very lucky,” I murmured.

  He didn’t catch my sarcasm and, at least for the moment, he didn’t seem plagued with worrisome questions about our brothers’ possible involvement in the building of these types of fireworks. Or, maybe, he just didn’t want to tell me his thoughts. He was so irritatingly practical. So one-day-at-a-time focused.