The Road to You (23 page)

“Fine. Be that way.” I told him the first few turns, taking us past the big Sears on Irving Park Road and following the signs so we could merge onto Interstate 90/94. Eventually, since I wasn’t afraid to read a map—unlike
some
people—I knew we’d meet up with 55 South, which would take us all the way to Missouri.

But, as soon as Donovan looked comfortable with the roads, I dug through my purse for the cassette I’d been saving for just such an occasion, and I popped it in. As the opening strains of the Bee Gees’s hit “Stayin’ Alive” came on, I had the satisfaction of seeing Donovan make a disgusted face and reach to turn it off.

I batted his hand away from the cassette deck. “Do you really think disco is a
fad?
” I said, mimicking Vicky from St. Cloud. Then I started singing along with the song’s chorus. I’d heard the lyrics about, oh,
sixty thousand times
since the movie came out last year. I knew every word.

“Uh! God, stop that!” he said, half laughing.

“What’s my name?” I asked him sweetly during an instrumental moment.

He shot me a dirty look. “Just cut it out.”

I sang along with the entire second verse. Loudly.

“Hell, Aurora.
Stop
.”

“What did you just say my name was?” I asked. Then, more threateningly, “You do realize that ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ is coming up next, right?”

He made a gagging sound that I took as a precursor to his inevitable surrender. I was right.

“Your name is Aurora, but I will
strangle
you with the long threads of tape that I’m going to yank out of my deck in about ten seconds if you don’t do it first.”

I snapped the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack out of the player.

“If you call me Nancy Drew again, you can expect a full hour of disco hits. I can sing ‘If I Can’t Have You’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing’ and more. All of them
a cappella
. And, yeah, that’s a warning. Be scared.”

The look he gave me was nothing short of scathing but, a few minutes later, when I was studying the Illinois map in the middle of the atlas, I caught him glancing at me and smothering a laugh.

“Who knew you’d grow up to be such a weirdo…
Aurora,
” he said, emphasizing my name, of course.

“Oh, you’re funny.”

“I am, actually. But I guess it’s been a while since I felt much like laughing.”

I was surprised to hear him say that. Not because I didn’t believe him—just because I didn’t think he’d be quick to disclose something personal if he didn’t have to. Something that might invite follow-up questions.

“It’s been a rough two years,” I said, stating the obvious. Making it easy for him.

“Yep.”

For a while we rode along in silence. I wanted to ask him what theories he had about our brothers. If he finally believed me that Gideon was alive. What he thought it meant that we hadn’t gotten any recent news at all about Jeremy. But Donovan still wasn’t ready for that. I decided to look more closely at the atlas.

At one point, he peered over at me and leaned in close to read the map I was studying.

“Shouldn’t your eyes be on the road?” I asked him.

“Well, you keep staring at that thing like it’s the Holy Grail. Is there something coming up I should know about?”

In fact, yes, there was. I just wasn’t ready to tell him about it yet because, to be honest, I hadn’t entirely figured it out.

I was hoping reading the names of the upcoming cities in the atlas would help. I
knew
I knew something important. I
knew
I’d been given some solid clues at Amy Lynn’s apartment to figure out a few new puzzle pieces. I just wasn’t sure which pieces. So, I was sifting through my memories of what she’d said and what I’d learned—names, details, places and dates—trying to let my conscious mind catch up with my intuition.

“There’s something here that I’m looking at but not seeing,” I told him. “It’ll help us if I can figure it out. And I know it’s somewhere on these pages.”

I tapped the Illinois map with my index finger and then waved my hand at Treak’s notes and Gideon’s journal, which I’d set on the dash. Before we’d left, Amy Lynn had given me the two postcards my brother had sent her, and they were sticking out of the small leather book, taunting me even more than Donovan had been.

What was I missing?

“What’s on the next page of the journal?” Donovan asked. “You usually get some kind of weird clue from that. Why don’t you read it aloud?”

I exhaled on a sigh. I’d scanned it back at Amy Lynn’s and there hadn’t been anything that’d jumped out at me there. But Donovan was looking at me expectantly and, if he was finally willing to discuss our search, I didn’t want to discourage him.

Besides, staring at the atlas for fifteen minutes straight hadn’t done me any good.

So, I opened the journal and shuffled through the pages until I got to the one right after “J & I in Chicago” but just before “Cardinal Town.”

As usual, Gideon had his list of car thingies, chemical substances and directions for some automotive procedure—about half a page’s worth—which I read to Donovan, even when it got a little embarrassing:

Donovan snickered next to me. “Do you have any idea what a drain cock is?”

I shrugged and tried not to look as awkward as I felt. “I don’t care what it is. You told me you wanted me to read this out loud, so I’m reading.”

He laughed openly. “Yeah, but I remember seeing this page when you first showed me the journal and I wondered then why your brother would’ve written down the steps for this. It isn’t a tough procedure. Hell, the way Gideon loved cars, he probably learned how to drain coolant when he was ten.”

“Well, I don’t know why he did half the things he did,” I said stiffly. “I’m sure he had a reason.”

“If you say so,” he said.

I returned to the page and kept reading:

Donovan found that line to be pretty darned hilarious, too, but I just ignored him:

I paused. That was the end of the latest lesson in car mechanics and, just below it, the ink changed. It was really subtle—I had to strain my eyes to see it—but I knew as soon as I read the words underneath that I’d been wrong in thinking Gideon hadn’t given us a place name on this page. He had.

“Listen to this,” I told Donovan, and then I read him the last three lines:

“So?” he said.

“So Gideon wrote ‘Nothing’s Normal’ in the new ink section.” I snagged the atlas, still open to the Illinois page, and pointed excitedly to a city in the middle of the state. “Interstate 55 runs right through Normal, Illinois. It’s right here.” I held up the map so he could see the black dot. “It’s next to Bloomington. Then, further south on 55 is Springfield and, finally, St. Louis, just across the Missouri state line.”

“And that proves…what? That they’d stopped in a place called Normal on their way to St. Louis?”

“Yes!” And, for a moment, I was relieved. I knew all along we were headed on the right path, but I still appreciated having these little acknowledgments of our progress along the way. Like getting to check the answer key in the back of my high-school algebra book. Even when I’d solved the equations completely on my own, I liked knowing I could double check just to be sure I got them right.

Then Donovan added, “In May?”

“What?”

“The date,” he said. “It was May eighteenth. You told me on the way to Chicago that you thought either the dates or the places were wrong.”

And my uncomfortable feeling of “knowing without knowing” returned full force. There was definitely another clue to find, and I was so close to it I could almost hear it whispering in my ear.

“No, it has to be July. If they met up with Amy Lynn in Chicago on July fourth, they had to be in Normal and St. Louis after that.” I flipped back a page in the journal. “We know for sure they were in Chicago on Independence Day, but the date written down on the page for their Chicago visit is May thirteenth—a Thursday in the middle of a school week. They couldn’t have been in Illinois then. We know Gideon sent Amy Lynn a postcard from Flagstaff that was dated September eighth.”

I pulled it out and reread the postmark on the back. “But, in his journal, the only reference I can find to Flagstaff is here.” I skipped through several pages to get to the one where the city in Arizona was mentioned briefly. “It’s on a page that Gideon dated June 22, 1976.”

I returned to the
Normal
page and reread those last three lines to myself: