The Road to You (3 page)

But it was a collection of words that was branded in ink, probably by my brother, as recently as ten days ago. And if it was proof that Gideon was still alive—and if my instincts about him having left our town for a reason had been right all along—then Jeremy might be alive, too. Was that possible?

I could almost feel the pinball of connectivity rolling between the different centers of knowledge and recognition in my brain, leading inevitably to the
one other person
who not only had an immediate, strong and highly personal stake in the outcome of this question, but who also had a solid mechanical background. Somebody who might be able to draw secret understandings from words that, to me, resembled a form of hieroglyphic gibberish.

That would be Jeremy’s older brother, Donovan.

Oh, crap.

I
COULD
count on one hand the things I knew were true about Donovan McCafferty:

He was twenty-three—just over five years older than I was.

He’d escaped into the Army at age eighteen and, except for a few quick but memorable visits, hadn’t returned to Minnesota until this past winter.

He had an excellent mechanical mind.

And he made me very nervous.

Underneath my skin, every nerve fiber was fast twitching. Just thinking about Donovan always did that to me but, this time, it was also about the trip.

I couldn’t have been more impatient to get on the road to Crescent Cove, and I really didn’t want to make a stop at Donovan’s workplace. But, awkward though it would be, he knew a few things I didn’t. And he just might signal to me (whether he realized it or not) some very useful directions.

I waited until after dinner, biding my time. Made the three of us broiled chicken, mashed potatoes, broccoli. Boring, yes, but it wasn’t like anyone cared.

Then I excused myself from the usual watching of TV news and Thursday-night shows—they were repeat episodes anyway—and drove to the only auto repair shop and gas station in town. The one I avoided like the plague whenever possible, preferring to fill up in places where no one knew me, like Alexandria or St. Cloud. Places where Donovan McCafferty...wasn’t.

It was 7:05 p.m. by the time I got to the shop, and I parked a fair distance from the entrance. They closed at seven, but the work light in the back was on and two out of the three garage doors were still open. I knew he was in there. Not because I’d caught even one glimpse of Mr. Tall, Dark and Intense yet, but because the only other car in the lot was a crimson Trans Am with the giant Firebird decal in black and gold across the hood. His, of course.

I pushed open my car door, grabbed my tote bag with Gideon’s journal tucked safely inside and inhaled several lungfuls of the cloying summer air. So early in June and already every breath was wrapped in sticky-sweet bugginess.

I didn’t make it more than five steps before Donovan came out. A solid, broad-shouldered, six-foot-two mass of frequently impenetrable emotions. Not impenetrable enough this time, though.

Even at a distance of half a parking lot, I detected two powerful sensations that crashed, one after the other, into my awareness:

One, he was hugely curious about why I was here.

And, two, he very much wished I hadn’t been.

He walked up to me and cleared his throat. “Car trouble, Aurora?” He glanced at my hand-me-down, smoke-blue, five-year-old Buick Century, which had done nothing but purr contentedly during my drives around town. Donovan was the type to have noticed this, so I could tell he knew it wasn’t the car.

I shook my head. “I need to show you something,” I told him. “Privately.”

A small flash of amusement quirked one corner of his mouth upward. I was surprised he allowed me to read this, especially since he knew I could. Surprised he was letting me see that one of his possible explanations for my presence was flirtatious in origin—even as he immediately dismissed the idea.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that,” I murmured.

He pressed his lips together, but the amusement still simmered just beneath the surface. “Too bad. ‘We’re both
young
and
inconspicuous
,’” he said, parroting the hideously embarrassing words I’d said to him one night when I was a sophomore and had snuck into our brothers’ secret high-school graduation party with my best friend Betsy. The guys had held it forty minutes away in St. Cloud so none of our parents would know.

I fought a blush. “We’re not
that
young,” I told him, trying to stand straighter and look older. “And we’re not inconspicuous
here
.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” He turned and motioned for me to follow him inside, clicking the shop’s cool new garage-door opener so the second of the three garage doors came down behind us, rattling until it touched the concrete.

He led me into the back office and ushered me in. “You want me to close this door, too? Snap the blinds shut?” He was mocking me, but there was a layer of concern beneath it. He knew something serious was up. In a town of 2,485 people, where you’d run into the majority of the residents a handful of times each week, I’d spoken with Donovan McCafferty in private exactly six times in the past five years.

Here’s to lucky number seven
.

“Yes to the door,” I said. “No to the blinds.”

He did as I asked and then leaned against the smudged once-white wall, crossed his arms and studied me. “What’s this all about, Aurora?”

I nodded and pulled Gideon’s journal out of my bag.

“I found this,” I told him, explaining the odd circumstances of my discovery, and watched as his dark eyes narrowed. The curiosity of a few minutes before became heavily spiked with suspicion. He flipped through several pages of the journal, silent. He was processing all of this, I knew, but he didn’t quite seem to get it. To be able—or willing—to take the appropriate intuitive leap. To allow himself to follow the fated path of the pinball.

So, I pointed again to the recently dated page and to Gideon’s words on it, scrutinizing Donovan’s face as he read it a second time. I saw every nuance of his reaction. Couldn’t miss the two major transitions, shifting his expressions in slow motion like tectonic plates made visible. Incredulity hardening into doubt. Hope melding into anger.

“What makes you think this new date written down is even real?” he growled at me. “Your brother could’ve just scribbled it in the corner two years ago as a note for himself. Or somebody else could have written it. There are a hundred possible explanations. Finding this journal all of a sudden doesn’t prove anything.”

“I think it does,” I said quickly, but very cautiously.

Insight into a guy’s emotions was no guarantee I’d correctly predict his behavior. In Donovan’s case, he was a human knot of tension and anger. I had no earthly idea what he’d do next, so I did my best to come across as super calm.

“I know this is probably difficult to accept,” I said, “but I’m almost positive Gideon wrote in this recently and that he brought it back to Chameleon Lake himself.”

Still, Donovan didn’t believe me.

“Your brother is
dead
, Aurora. And so is Jeremy. You know that. We
all
know that. Otherwise, they would’ve come back by now.” For a second, his voice broke, giving away the anguish behind the words. He tried to cover it up. “You show this thing to anyone and they’ll think you’re crazy. ‘Oh, look, my brother wrote me notes from the grave,’” he said with full-on sarcasm. “‘And, hey, sometimes he visits me at my house, too.’ Yeah. Have fun convincing anybody of that.”

“I’m not showing it to anyone else, at least not until I have an idea of what it all means,” I snapped. “But try to imagine I’m right. Just
try
. You knew your brother best. Is there anything here that jumps out at you a little? Makes sense to you? Especially those technical terms. Can you figure out what they were working on?”

Donovan wasn’t a person who took orders willingly, at least not from someone he didn’t consider his direct superior, so, of course, he didn’t answer any of my questions.

“Tell me
exactly
what you’re planning to do with this.” He held up the journal.

I shrugged. “I’m just trying to understand it.” This was mostly truthful.

Donovan stared at me—his face moving closer to mine as he searched for whatever clue he was looking for in my expression. It was precisely
this
uncomfortable sensation of being so carefully observed that made me keep my distance from the guy. I was used to analyzing the minute movements, body language and facial changes of others. It was not, however, my idea of a good time to be the subject of such scrutiny myself. Thankfully, that rarely happened.

I knew Donovan didn’t make a habit of reading reactions like I did, but he seemed to enjoy turning the tables on me whenever possible. He was one of the only people I’d ever met who instinctively knew from Day One that I possessed this heightened perceptiveness. A natural gift and, alternately, a curse. I’d been only twelve years old the first time we spoke, but he was guarded with me even then.

“Just read the page. Please.” I motioned to the journal. “I looked up some of the words in an encyclopedia but, aside from figuring out that they’re chemicals, they don’t mean anything to me.”

He read each of these hard-to-pronounce compounds aloud, along with the numbers and the mention of Jeremy and Gideon going to Crescent Cove. He shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why they’d need most of it at all. A few of these are used for car engines, like the propylene glycol, so they might have needed that, but the others are common oxidizers.”

I squinted at him. “In English, please?”

“Chemicals that blow things up. Potassium perchlorate and sodium nitrate are used as fuels for things like fireworks,” he explained. “They’re not hard to find. If our brothers wanted to get their hands on them, they wouldn’t have had to drive three hours to Wisconsin. They could find them in St. Cloud. So, if they went to Crescent Cove two summers ago, it must have been for a different reason. To meet somebody, maybe.”

Yes!
And that was why I’d come here, risking sheer mortification and that pit-of-my-stomach unease, just to ask Donovan that question. I figured he’d know about stuff like this. And I could work with his conclusion. I could
do
something now… I only wished we’d had this clue two years ago.