The Road to You (34 page)

I grinned at the challenge winner and, then, at Donovan. “Still time to go for it.”

He grinned back at me. “Nah,” he said, and then he muttered something almost too low for me to hear. I could have sworn he said, “Not what I’m hungry for…”

I shot him a sharp look. “What?”

But he didn’t answer me or even meet my eye. He just reached for the journal I’d pulled out and flipped through a bunch of pages until the waitress brought us our meal.

Finally, sometime later, on the drive back to the motel, I worked up the nerve to ask him, “So, do you miss Vicky?”

“Who?”

“You know,
Vicky
. From St. Cloud. That girl you were with just last week at the movie?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. She’s…nice.” He studied me from the driver’s seat when we stopped at a light. “Why are you asking about her?”

“Well, I just, um, wondered. If you missed talking with her. If she was someone you’re going to go out with again after we get back. That’s all.”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s taking us longer to get back than I thought it would.”

True enough.

I guess I hadn’t given much thought to the specifics of Donovan’s dating life, although I always supposed he’d had a fairly active one. Girls were drawn to him because of that moody, flirtatious, bad-boy thing he had going, but I didn’t remember seeing him with any one girlfriend for long. Couldn’t help but wonder which girl had been
his
first kiss…not that I’d ask. His expression didn’t invite further questioning.

From the second we walked into our room at the Cactus Flower, I felt something was different. Even before I saw it.

It wasn’t anything I could pinpoint precisely—not a sound or a scent—just the oddest sensation that a few nearly invisible things had changed in our absence.

“Something’s not right,” I told Donovan, who was staring at his camouflage duffle with a perplexed look.

He squinted at me and then again at the duffle. “I think…someone rifled through my bag.”

I watched him unzip it and poked cautiously through several of the items inside.

“Nothing important is missing,” he said. Then he clarified, “Nothing is missing at all, as far as I can tell. But I’d left it unzipped before we went out. It may have been searched.”

The contents of my bag showed subtle signs of having been sifted through as well. My clothing was jumbled—and I was a conscientiously neat packer. The bag itself was positioned a few degrees differently than I’d remembered and a number of other items in the room sat at angles slightly askew from how they’d been when we left.

“A dishonest maid looking for easy cash, maybe? Or some other staff member who overheard us talking to the lady at the front desk and knew we’d be out of the room?” I suggested, but I couldn’t quite make myself believe it.

We’d stayed at a lot of motels and never had anything like this happen before. Dressed in our old t-shirts and jeans, I knew how youthful and unexceptional we looked. Maybe we’d never been as inconspicuous as I’d have liked, but we just didn’t give off the vibe of people who carried items of much monetary value. Motel workers had to have a sense about things like that.

“Maybe,” Donovan said. “But I still don’t like it.”

I didn’t want to have to bring this up, but it seemed foolish not to mention the possibility. “Any chance our hometown cop might be behind this somehow? It’s a strange thing to have happen to us…and he’s the only one who knows we’re here.”

Donovan glanced around the room, considering. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I really don’t, but I don’t like it.” There was a long pause. “Do you have everything you need from the car?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

In a few swift motions, he locked the door, latched the chain and pushed the small but heavy wooden table in front, blocking anyone who might even consider entering. Then, he made sure the window was bolted shut from the inside and, in utter silence, did a comprehensive check of every cubic foot of the room.

After he returned from investigating the bathroom thoroughly and checking in closets and behind the shower curtain, I got as far as asking, “Did you find anyth—” before he shushed me.

“Everything looks fine,” he said, narrowing his eyes and nodding toward the small notepad and pen near the motel telephone.

I picked up both and handed them to him.

He wrote:

Don’t say anything about your brother or mine tonight—not unless Officer James calls. If he does, say as little as possible out loud. Just a precaution in case the person who came in the room wasn’t a maid.

He let me read that segment first and waited until I nodded. Then he wrote:

You and I can go somewhere early tomorrow so we can talk outside the room. And we won’t stay here a second night—that’s for sure. But I think we’re okay for now. I’ve secured every possible point of entry, and I didn’t find any bugs. Still, it’s not impossible that someone’s listening.

Bugs?

The idea sent a tremor of panic through my body. I hadn’t thought us important enough to even consider that.

And every possible point of entry?

I could see Donovan’s military training coming out. He’d gone into full protection mode and, I had to admit, I appreciated it. But realizing there might be a need for this level of security was what was beginning to seriously scare me.

I nodded at him again. “So,” I said with feigned cheeriness, “I’m just going to give the front desk a quick call to thank that lady for recommending the steakhouse. Great food.”

“Okay,” he agreed warily.

“And I’ll see if maybe my, um,
mom
tried to reach us while we were out.”

“Oh.” Understanding dawned on his face along with another just-watch-what-you-say look. “Good idea.”

He clicked on the TV and flipped through stations, waiting impatiently as I checked in with the chipper desk clerk, who confirmed that, no, she hadn’t directed any calls to our room and there weren’t any messages for us. No news yet from Officer James.

I can’t say I was actually worried about the cop’s wellbeing, but a deep sense of foreboding tangled with concern in my gut. Why hadn’t he tried to contact us yet? Was he having trouble finding Ronny’s storage unit and the stash of pipe bombs? Had something happened to him on the way to Wisconsin?

I shook my head to let Donovan know we hadn’t missed any calls, and he responded with a sigh. I could see the sweat beading up on his forehead, which he swiped away with the front of his t-shirt.

With the window closed tight, I was grateful we at least had a room fan. It was going to be a hot Texas night and this sure wasn’t the kind of place that offered air conditioning.

Donovan turned the fan on high, but I could tell his attention wasn’t on the heat. He kept glancing distractedly between the door and the telephone. Not a sound came from either, however, and, eventually, we had to give up the wait and get ready for bed.

When the lights were out and we were both lying on top of the sheets, twisting in hopes of finding a cool spot, he flipped toward me and brought his body closer than he ever had at night, especially in bed. I looked up at him, startled, as he crossed the midpoint between us for the first time.

I couldn’t bring myself to pull away. My mind went blank, my pulse began to race and I held my breath.

He drew himself nearer to me until his lips were just a hair away from my left earlobe. “Don’t be afraid of anything tonight,” he whispered. “I’m going to keep a close eye on everything until we hear back from the officer. You don’t have to worry.”

“Thanks,” I murmured back, willing my heart to stop pounding. It was so loud, I was sure he could hear it. “I’m not worried.”

This was, of course, a rather gigantic lie, and I was sure Donovan knew that, but he just said, “Good,” and he slid back to his own side of the bed.

We said our goodnights and each turned to face the opposite direction—Donovan staring at the door and me at the phone. Honestly, I doubt either of us got more than three hours of sleep. Morning couldn’t come soon enough.

When it did, though, Donovan was the first to rise. At 5:23 a.m. he made another thorough check of the room and then peered through a slit between the front curtains to gaze outside.

“How does, um, everything look?” I asked.

He gave me a thumbs up and then motioned for me to get dressed. On the notepad he scribbled:

Let’s go for a quick drive so we can talk. Take everything with you. We don’t want anyone going through our stuff again.

I nodded, slipped on a t-shirt and a thin flower-print skirt in the bathroom and grabbed my tote and overnight bag. Donovan moved the table away from the door and quietly unlocked it. Then we both jumped in the Trans Am.

“God, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for hours,” he admitted once we were out on the road.

“Me, too.” I exhaled and then inhaled deeply, rolling down the window and greeting the day. It was a bright, beautiful Sunday morning in Amarillo. Quiet and still. Donovan’s car was one of the few out at this early hour.

“How are you holding up?” he asked me. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Not a lot. You?”

He kind of laughed. “Hardly any. I kept hoping Officer James would call, and I’m sure he will soon. Probably not
this
early, though.” He stared hard out the front windshield.

“What if we don’t hear back from him?” I asked.

“You mean today…or ever?”

I exhaled. “Neither option is all that promising, but I meant today. How long are you willing to hang around Amarillo and wait?”

“Until Tuesday at least,” he said. “If he hasn’t called us by that afternoon, maybe we should check with the police department at home. Make sure nothing’s wrong. They’d know by then.”

“All right.”

Donovan drove us through the city again, which looked like a different place during the day—as did most cities, I supposed—and he got us back on Route 66 on the other side of town.

Ah, yes. The famous Cadillac Ranch awaited.

It wasn’t even six a.m. so, of course, the site was abandoned, but I found myself admiring it in spite of its strangeness. Donovan and I parked on the shoulder and leaned back against his Trans Am, gazing at the display in the distance for a couple of minutes.

It looked just like Gideon’s postcard.

I counted ten Cadillacs of various years and models, upended in the ground so only their tailfins were fully visible. Who thought up weird stuff like this?

“Odd,” I said finally.

“Genius,” Donovan replied. “Look at that lineup. A ’48 Club Sedan all the way up to a ’63 Sedan de Ville. Right in a row.” He gazed at it with the same level of admiration that I reserved for leather-bound first editions of literary classics.

I tried to imagine I was staring at a shelf with rare copies of novels by Austen, Brontë and Dickens. Even so, I still wasn’t feeling the same zing of excitement about it that he did. But, then, unlike Donovan, I’d never worked on a car nor had that kind of love affair with a vehicle.

I wasn’t surprised my brother had been drawn to this site, either, but it made me wonder if he’d left any graffiti for us to find on one of the cars. He’d been here less than two weeks ago.

Donovan boosted our bags out of the backseat and transferred them to the trunk for safekeeping and so we could leave the doors unlocked and the car windows rolled down without worry. Even this early in the day, we knew it was going to be a scorcher.

“Let’s go take a closer look at it,” he said.

We meandered across the dusty field. Once we were standing next to the cars, I began examining the words spray-painted on the sides of every Cadillac. While I didn’t find anything that struck me as being a coded message from Gideon, I found a few phone numbers for a “good time,” if ever I wanted one, and lots of names of people who were once “here.”

I caught up with Donovan, who was walking the length of the display, examining each of the Caddies stuck at a forty-five degree angle and appreciating something about every one of them.

“Which is your favorite?” I asked.

He patted the one he was standing next to with reverence. “This baby. The ’59 Coupe de Ville. She’s a beaut.”

I’d probably never get over the way guys talked about cars, motorcycles and boats as if they were female but, given how just seeing this car put Donovan into an instantly better mood, I wasn’t going to be quick to criticize.

As we turned to head back to the road, though, we noticed a patrol car pulling up behind ours. Donovan’s smile vanished like light in a black hole, and he quickened his pace.

The Amarillo cop was inspecting Donovan’s car when we reached him, and he gazed at us both with the expectancy of an authority figure.

“This Trans Am belong to you kids?” His voice was serious and his eyes shaded by the low brim of his police hat. Made it hard for me to read his expression. And, with the way the sun was glinting, I couldn’t see the name on his nameplate or the specifics on his badge.