The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  The chain of events sparked by our brothers’ disappearance led to both of us being in Chameleon Lake almost against our will. My future plans had been murky, but they’d involved going away to college and moving somewhere larger, more cosmopolitan.

  For the first time, I wondered what Donovan’s dreams had been.

  WE AROSE the next morning, not well rested but grateful for the day to begin, tiptoeing gently around each other as we felt our way through an unfamiliar routine.

  “May I use your shower?” Donovan asked.

  “Of course,” Amy Lynn replied. “Let me get you a towel.” Then, to me, “Aurora, can I offer you some toast or cereal? Coffee, tea or cocoa?”

  “Oh, thank you,” I said. “Just toast and coffee, please.”

  Such politeness.

  It was like that until Amy Lynn deemed it late enough to patter down the hallway to her landlord’s apartment. As good as her word, she asked to borrow his projector for the day and was soon spooling up a small, light-blue, plastic film reel with the word “Tribute” written in jaunty black permanent marker across the diameter. Jeremy’s handwriting this time.

  I glanced at Donovan to see if he’d noticed. He had.

  To help out, he and I strung up a white bed sheet across one wall, attaching our screen with a few strong tacks from Amy Lynn’s sewing drawer. But, as she turned on the machine and the film began threading its way through the projector, I couldn’t help but think back to the last film Donovan and I had watched, just two days before. There would be no singing in this picture. No poodle skirts. And I doubted much humor.

  But I was wrong—at least about that latter point.

  There was no sound, save for the clickety-clacking of the 8mm Kodachrome film as it snaked around the spools and fed into the empty white reel, but Donovan and I watched the grainy images come into focus in color on the bed sheet in front of us. The first of these was stunning: Our brothers, running around outside somewhere.

  My breath caught as I saw them both on our flimsy fabric screen. Laughing. Taking turns being in the frame and, then, pushing the other one out of it.

  In the two years since they’d been gone, I’d caught up to them in age. They were now timelessly eighteen. As young as we’d remembered or, perhaps, young in a way we didn’t quite remember…since our recollections were tinged with such heavy loss. We’d forgotten the rawness of their joy. Their shared streak of mischievousness. Their energy, which leaped into the room to dance with us.

  Donovan cleared his throat. “You said Ben Rainwater—he was the one who filmed this?”

  “Yes,” Amy Lynn replied. “There are a few different segments to it.”

  We continued to watch as Gideon and Jeremy horsed around in the summer sunshine. I noticed their clothing. Both clad in old blue jeans, Gideon was wearing that distinctive red t-shirt of his with the white stripe slashing diagonally across the front. He loved that one. And Jeremy had on a sleeveless muscle shirt featuring a faded American flag and the words “Fort Monroe, U.S. Army” stamped above it.

  I saw the softening in Donovan’s eyes as he got a closer look at his brother’s shirt, and I remembered how proudly Jeremy had worn this gift from his big brother. It’d been a birthday present, given to Jeremy after Donovan’s first year of his enlistment.

  But it wasn’t until they’d set off the first firework that I realized Jeremy and Gideon’s patriotic colors weren’t unintentional. That the clothing was, in fact, a vital part of the message.

  A few more seconds of goofing around followed and then, suddenly, it stopped. As if the “testing: one, two, three” stage had ended, and now the guys were going to get serious.

  The camera turned its attention to a largish tag-board sign with the words, “In Honor of the Bicentennial…” written on it with the briskness of Jeremy’s block printing. Black marker on a crisp white surface.

  Then a second firework was launched. And a third. Ben’s camera caught both of these explosions on film, capturing the powerful burst of sparkling light and smoke, if not the deafening sound.

  Another tag-board message followed. This one read, “Happy 4th of July to our Military Heroes!” That board was removed and, in its place, Gideon stood with a smaller sign that said, “Dad.” Jeremy squished his way into the frame with his own sign—one that read, “And Donovan.”

  Next to me, I heard Donovan make an involuntary, indistinct noise, but his eyes were fixed on our bed-sheet screen.

  There were two more fireworks set off after that before we saw the final tag-board sign: “Our Country’s 200 Years of Freedom…is Thanks to Men Like You!” Then each of our brothers saluted and lit a series of more visual fireworks, ones that had a few aerial bursts and rivaled the display the Chameleon Lake police and fire department hosted every year.

  I stole another glance at Donovan. His eyes were moist and he was rapidly blinking, clenching his jaw so hard I almost expected to hear a molar crack. Was this the “fun thing” Jeremy had spoken to him about?

  Regardless, neither Donovan nor I could speak while watching it, and if Amy Lynn had anything to say, she was holding her tongue.

  But then the screen went dark. And the scene changed.

  The laughing, cheering pair of young men we’d loved so much weren’t in this shot. But their fireworks were. Buckets and buckets of them, labeled and carefully stashed on long shelves in what looked to be a backroom somewhere.

  I shot Amy Lynn a questioning look.

  “I don’t know where that is,” she said, sensing this was what I wanted to know. “But I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere near Crescent Cove.”

  “It’s a kind of storage facility,” Donovan said and, then, the camera focused on a picture ID, which was face up on a small table by the entrance. “That’s Ronny Lee Wolf,” Donovan murmured.

  There was no disputing it. “It is,” I said.

  The eye of the camera took in more of the room, swinging in an arc—sector by sector—until we were given a full three hundred and sixty degree view. And what we saw was that the regular fireworks and firecrackers we recognized from Ronny’s store weren’t the half of it. Alongside the shelving with the buckets of M-80s, quarter sticks and cherry bombs, was a different brand of firework. One I hadn’t seen before. And, jeez, there was a lot of it. Enough to almost fill the rest of the room.

  As the camera zoomed in on a box of them, I got a closer look. The casing was kind of like a tube—the type you might find at a hardware store for plumbing. A silvery color. Sturdy steel. Not quite…legal-looking. But I was hardly an expert.

  Donovan was.

  “Holy Jesus,” he hissed. “Those aren’t fireworks. They’re pipe bombs.”

  The screen went to black again and, finally, spliced onto the end of the reel was the last segment of film with close-ups of a few remnants of those silver casings—blown apart into metal shards like shrapnel. Dirt and rubble lay all around.

  Following this image, and zooming wider and upward, were exterior shots of a place I vaguely recognized but couldn’t, at first glance, pinpoint. Then I did.

  “It’s Bonner Mill,” I whispered.

  Donovan was already nodding. “I know.”

  Sunday, June 18

  IT WAS the film that began to change Donovan’s mind about the trip.

  I didn’t know if the Bicentennial tribute played the bigger role or if it was the realization that Ronny dealt in pipe bombs as well as fireworks that sealed the deal…but, suddenly, Donovan stopped challenging my certainty that Gideon’s journal was leading us to more information than the cops ever had or were willing to share.

  I saw in his expression a slew of questions that had been raised in the past twenty-four hours, not the least of which was—if Gideon had really been in Amarillo, Texas just a couple of weeks before and if, in fact, no one had been forging his handwriting on those postcards—where the hell was Jeremy?

  We asked, but Amy Lynn didn’t know the answer. With her help, though, we were able t
o piece together a few additional tidbits about that Fourth of July weekend two years ago.

  Our brothers had said to her that Ben Rainwater’s cousin was involved, but she didn’t know his name was Ronny until we told her. Our brothers also explained to her that there’d been more than one explosion at Bonner Mill, which, of course, Donovan and I already knew, thanks to the microfilm we’d read at the Ashburn Falls Public Library.

  From Ben’s film footage around the mill, Donovan and I concluded that the first explosion was caused by Ronny’s stash of pipe bombs, which Ben had somehow caught on camera and spliced onto Gideon and Jeremy’s tribute reel.

  Amy Lynn explained that Ben wasn’t done with his Super 8 project. He’d been doing a lot of filming in and around town and gathering more evidence against his cousin (related by marriage, not by blood) who, in Ben’s opinion, had always played fast and loose with the law.

  But, one of the most surprisingly things I’d heard was that, however shady Ronny Lee Wolf appeared to all of us to be, he wasn’t the one actually setting off the bombs.

  “Then who was?” Donovan asked.

  Amy Lynn sighed. “Your brothers didn’t know that.”

  “Then how did they know he wasn’t doing it?” Donovan said back.

  “Because of what happened next,” she said. “Because of what they witnessed during the second explosion.”

  “Wait—did they know if the same pipe bombs caused both explosions? The first one that Ben filmed and also the one that killed Ben and Treak?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “That’s what they believed, but they’d just seen Ben’s cousin in downtown Crescent Cove before they drove to the mill. He was strolling down the street. So, although the guy—Ronny, you said his name was—seemed to be involved in the storing and maybe even the manufacturing of these bombs, your brothers were convinced he wasn’t lighting them personally.”

  Donovan was struggling to assemble all of these details. “How is it that our brothers even knew Ben Rainwater? What made them go up to Crescent Cove in the first place? I just don’t understand.” He scored his fingers through his hair. “What exactly did Jeremy and Gideon say about that?”

  Amy Lynn rubbed the center of her forehead, as if trying to bring the memories back to the surface. “They told me they’d first met Ben Rainwater at a party in St. Cloud—I don’t know how long ago—but that Ben invited them up to visit him and to make a film. Your brothers had gone to Crescent Cove once or twice before the Bicentennial, mostly to buy fireworks to bring home, they said, to keep for the upcoming holiday parties. But they also got together with Ben for drinks and shot some of the film footage. The guys went up on the Friday night before the Fourth, and Ben said he’d just picked up the developed reel with everything he’d filmed recently on it. On Saturday afternoon, they all met Treak at his motel in the next town over—”

  “Ashburn Falls?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “I remember Treak telling me how there weren’t motels in Crescent Cove, so he had to stay somewhere else. Gideon and Jeremy were at a different motel, but not that far away. And Ben brought his film projector with him to Treak’s place so the four of them could watch what he’d shot in the past week or two. Gideon and Jeremy were going to take their portion home with them—first to show Gideon’s dad and, then, to mail to you, Donovan.”

  He nodded at this, but then glanced away in silence, either not willing or not able to speak.

  Amy Lynn continued, “I guess Ben had his suspicions about his cousin’s ‘fireworks’ supply already—he’d discovered the storage unit not long before Treak came into town and had snuck in there a few times to check it out—but Gideon and Jeremy recognized how powerful the pipe bombs really were and explained it to them. As for Treak, at least according to what your brothers said, he’d been digging up information all over the place. Ben’s film confirmed a few details that he’d been investigating—it was all somehow connected to his big story—and he was desperate to go back to Bonner Mill with Ben. To shoot some more footage and to document whatever evidence of a bombing cover-up they could find.”

  Donovan massaged his temples. “So, Jeremy and Gideon went with them then?”

  “No,” Amy Lynn said. “Aurora’s brother had some kind of car trouble. He knew they were headed into a holiday weekend, so he wanted to try to get the problem fixed as soon as possible. I guess he and Jeremy fiddled around with it for a while and knew they needed to get a car part from an auto shop, but Ben and Treak were impatient to drive to the mill. Ben didn’t want to leave them stranded, so he loaned them his car—a white Oldsmobile Cutlass—so they could get the part they needed, while Ben and Treak went to the mill in Treak’s Chevy. Your brothers planned to meet them there as soon as the car got fixed.”

  She started packing up her landlord’s projector. “But they weren’t able to fix the car. The part they needed wasn’t in stock and, with the Bicentennial, they weren’t going to be able to buy it until Tuesday at the earliest. So, they left Gideon’s car at the motel and took Ben’s Oldsmobile into Crescent Cove, driving through the center of town and, finally, getting to Bonner Mill.”

  She fiddled with the white leader tape on the Super 8 reel then stared at us both for a long moment. “Look, I got all of this secondhand on a day that was the most awful one of my entire life…but I remember it. I remember exactly what your brothers said. That’s what you asked for, right?” She met Donovan’s eye.

  He nodded.

  And I said, “I know it’s hard to remember all of this stuff, but it’s helping us to understand. Just tell us what you know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So, when they finally got to the mill, it was getting dark and it was a woodsy area without much light. But they could make out Treak’s car, so they parked behind it, and they noticed there was another vehicle in the lot. They could hear voices coming from inside the mill. At first, they thought it was just Ben and Treak talking really loudly to each other, but they soon realized there was a third man and that he was shouting at the other guys. Gideon and Jeremy hunted for a flashlight so they could see better outside, and tried to decide how serious the argument was. Bad enough for a fist fight to break out? Or bad enough that their friends might needed the help of the authorities?”

  She paused. “They finally found a flashlight in Ben’s glove compartment and got out of the car. When they did, they saw that the other vehicle had markings on the sides. It was a police car. They were worried about Ben and Treak getting in trouble for trespassing. Or, maybe, that it was illegal to film home movies in a privately owned building or something. But as they got closer, they heard Ben yelling at someone. And Gideon told me that Treak shouted that he had notes on the guy, and that the truth would come out.”

  She took several deep and steadying breaths. “The next thing they heard was a series of blasts. And, suddenly, Jeremy said they could see more than they’d wanted to because parts of the mill were on fire, and there were more explosions still happening.”

  Donovan put his head against his fist and closed his eyes. “Then what?” he whispered.

  “Then they ran back to Ben’s car just as the cop came racing out of the building—setting more bombs off behind him and carrying Ben’s movie camera. Your brothers didn’t get a clear look at the man’s face, and they didn’t think he got much of a look at theirs either. They said everything was in shadows. But he must have recognized immediately that Gideon and Jeremy were live witnesses to his crime. So, he lit a pipe bomb filled with gun powder and flung it at them. It landed just a few feet in front of them, on Treak’s Chevy, and pretty much torched half the car.”

  My bottom lip was raw and bleeding from biting it. More dirty cops. I hated them all. “But, obviously, our brothers got away from that crazy policeman and made it here,” I said. “He didn’t try to follow them after that, did he?”

  “Actually, he did,” Amy Lynn said. “But they’d had a tiny lead on him and, eventually, were able to lose him. T
hey didn’t dare go back toward Crescent Cove, or even Ashburn Falls, though, because the cop probably got a good enough look at the car’s make and model and very likely caught the numbers on the plates.”

  Donovan’s jaw was clenched, but he was nodding. “The cop would run the plates with dispatch and Ben Rainwater’s name and address would turn up. He’d figure out in no time, since he’d just killed Ben, that someone else had to be behind the wheel. Our brothers were so sociable. So open and friendly.” He said it almost like it was an indictment. “In a small town like Crescent Cove, it would take less than ten minutes of talking to people at the bar to figure out that Gideon and Jeremy had been with Ben…to find out their names, what type of car they drove, where they were from.”

  “Right,” Amy Lynn said. “So, of course, they were too afraid to go back to get their car or to even think about driving home to Minnesota. With Ben and Treak dead, they didn’t have anyone they could trust in the area. They thought a cop as dirty as that one might keep trying to kill them or, if that didn’t work, he might try to frame them for the Bonner Mill explosion. As it was, that cop somehow managed to get police records to show that Treak’s car had been eviscerated in a ‘crash’ that I don’t think ever happened…at least not if your brothers were telling me the truth, and I believe they were.”

  She shook her head angrily. “I really think your brothers were right to run. They didn’t stop until they got to Milwaukee. That’s when they called me from a payphone downtown. And where, I later learned, they stole the Illinois plates off a parked car at a motel before they left the city. To make themselves harder to trace that night.”

  I let out a long breath I’d been holding. Yeah. My brother and his best friend were clever that way. No one asleep at a motel would notice a missing license plate, at least not until the next morning. It would buy the guys a few hours of driving without worry and, since they were heading into Illinois, it would make Ben’s car as inconspicuous as possible there. How many white Oldsmobiles with Illinois plates were traveling on those very same roads that night? Hundreds. Maybe thousands.