The Road to You (7 page)

He shot me a glance that said he didn’t believe I was that close to adulthood, dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a rubber band. “Here.” He held it out to me. “Put your hair up with this. Might make you look a little older.”

I finger-combed my straight hair upward, fashioning a loose bun, and secured it with the band. I thought I did a pretty good job considering I only had a shop window as a mirror. “Better?”

He studied me for a long moment, looking more displeased than approving. But then he shrugged and said, “Close enough.” And he pushed open the door to Bar #1.

The pungent aroma of cigarette smoke floated up at us, immediately making my nose twitch, as Donovan led me toward a table halfway to the bar. There were a handful of unoccupied tables nearby, but this one had the advantage of being mostly clean.

I swiped a few potato-chip crumbs off my chair before sitting down and scanned my surroundings. Dark wood paneling. Smudged windows. Low overhead lighting but a fair bit of neon. The pervasive scent of beer. And Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” playing a little louder than it needed to be.

About a dozen people were already working toward various states of drunkenness, including a group of laughing thirty-something women, a few old men, a trio of guys playing pool in the back and a middle-aged couple sitting at the bar, drinking side-by-side but in silence.

I was about to ask Donovan if he’d seen a bartender or a waitress anywhere—because I sure hadn’t spotted one—when I got to witness a remarkable transformation in his expression.

Turned out, a waitress was headed straight for our table. Tall and willowy with long, sleek, black hair, the girl reminded me of a twenty-two-year-old Cher. But what was far more interesting was Donovan’s face, which seemed to lose its angry intensity and adopt the look of a reckless charmer. More astonishing still was the way he turned a magnetic smile on the waitress before she even reached our table. It was as if he’d been waiting all his life for someone like her.

“Hey, there, folks,” the Cher-lookalike said brightly. “I’m Kim. What can I get ‘cha to drink?”

“You got Budweiser on tap?” he asked.

“Sure do.”

“We’ll take two of those and—” He paused, glancing at the laminated card on the table with the bar’s limited food options. “You hungry for a sandwich, uh…Sis?” he asked me.

My mouth dropped open.

Sis?!

But he was nodding at me and encouraging me to nod right back. So I did—mutely—as Donovan kept smiling that weirdly sensual grin at the waitress, managing to give off the vibe that, while he might be visiting town with
his sister,
he was still very much open to a little frolicking adventure with one of the locals.

“We got tuna, ham-n-Swiss, roast beef or egg salad. All sandwiches are served with potato chips and a pickle. Coleslaw is an extra twenty cents,” the waitress said, smiling back at Donovan. “Where are ya two from?”

“St. Paul,” he answered quickly. “You always lived here in Crescent Cove…Kim?”

She shook her dark head. “Oh, no. I grew up in Ripon, but I’ve been up here for three years now. I moved on account of my boyfriend, but then—” She lifted her slim shoulders in a shrug. “Well, Hal was a trucker. He left town.”

“Sorry to hear that. Nice place, though,” he said conversationally. “Real quiet.”

She laughed. “Too quiet. Nothin’ much happens.”

He leaned closer, the pull of his charismatic sensuality—a trait he could turn on and off like a light switch—drawing the waitress nearer as well. “Really?” he whispered to her. “Nothing exciting? No infidelities, murders or mysterious disappearances?”

She laughed again but then lowered her voice to match his. “Just the old explosion near the Indian Rez a couple of years ago. Blew up Sammy Bonner’s scrap-metal mill. And the usual gossip about the fire chief’s wife and that American history teacher in Ashburn Falls.”

Kim raised her eyebrows in the direction of the couple sitting at the bar and murmured, “Rob over there is the fire chief’s brother and Stella used to be best friends with the wife. They’re not speakin’ to that side of the family anymore.”

I gave a cursory glance to the pair at the bar but refused to stare at them the way the waitress did. I remembered all too well the gossip that swirled around me and my parents in the months that followed Gideon’s disappearance. Gossip that
still
swirled, sometimes. I wasn’t going to inflict the same punishment on someone else. And Donovan, I noticed, didn’t look at them for long either.

“And, well, Officer Mendelsson’s daughter, Ronelle, ran away with some big-city business guy. He looked like Burt Reynolds and drove a new Camaro. Nothin’ mysterious about that disappearance,” she said, sounding wistful. And in that second I knew this was
exactly
what Kim was hoping would happen to her someday. Knew she was looking Donovan over as if he might just be her Burt Reynolds.

I found my voice. “Do you get a lot of out-of-towners visiting? Guys driving through, picking up local girls?” I asked sweetly.

Donovan narrowed his eyes at me.

Kim seemed surprised to hear me talk. Probably had forgotten I was there, what with all that ogling of Donovan and all his flirting back. It seemed I couldn’t take him anywhere without him making passes at the wait staff.

“Not all that often,” she said, leaning away from the table and scribbling something on her order pad. “Did you say you wanted sandwiches?”

“Oh, yeah,” Donovan said. “Ham-n-Swiss for me, with the coleslaw.” He poked at my forearm, and none too gently. “You, too?”

“That’s fine. Anything but tuna,” I said, sitting back and crossing my arms. As if I gave a fig about the food.

The waitress made a few more notes on her order pad. “Be back with your beers in a sec. Sandwiches’ll take about ten minutes, okay?”

“Thanks, Kim,” Donovan said affably.

She smiled again at him, ducked her head almost shyly and headed for the counter.

When Kim’s back was finally turned, I smacked his arm with the back of my hand. “What. Are. You. Doing?” I murmured.

Donovan’s smile didn’t dim one iota. He radiated confidence, warmth and raw sexuality. But, deep in his eyes, I saw something hard and angry still lingering there. “Just. Play. Along,” he murmured back. “I’m gathering information. Don’t throw any roadblocks up.”

Kim returned with our beers and, a few minutes later, with our sandwiches and sides. “Here you go,” she said. “And, um, here are some napkins, if you want. Anything else I can get you two?”

I smiled tightly at her but said nothing.

Donovan took a long, slow sip of his beer and licked his lips. “No, this is great. Just what we needed.” His eyes twinkled when he glanced up at the waitress. No sign of hardness in them.

I was just beginning to understand what a skilled actor he could be and why, perhaps, I couldn’t read his reactions half as easily as I did with most people.

“Hey,” he said, “this may be a while ago, probably two years or so, but you seem to have a great…um, memory.” The way he gave Kim the compliment made it sound like he was telling her she had great tits.

The waitress blushed. “Oh, thanks.”

He lifted the pickle wedge from his plate and bit off the end like it was a cigar. “You ever see a couple of guys hanging around town who drove a two-tone, late-model Ford Galaxie? Had a white hardtop, a real nice royal blue body and Minnesota plates. They’d be about your age, I’d say.”

Kim squinted off into the distance. “I remember seeing a car or two like that, sure, but it could’ve been anybody’s. Those guys friends of yours?”

“Friends of friends,” Donovan said easily. “We haven’t run into them in long time, but I know they liked Crescent Cove and I thought, maybe, they lived in the area now. They said it had a lotta good things for a town its size.” His sexy grin implied Kim might have been one of those good things.

I studied the waitress’s body language and knew if Kim had even the slightest recollection of Gideon and Jeremy she would have said so, if only to please an attractive out-of-towner. But she didn’t.

“Do you maybe have a picture or anything?” the woman asked.

He stroked one dark sideburn then tapped his lips with his index finger. He kept drawing attention to his mouth, something that could hardly have escaped our waitress’s notice. “You know, I don’t think—”

“I do,” I interrupted.

I opened my purse and began rummaging through it. “Yes. Here’s one of the guys.” I pointed to a photo I’d taken of Gideon, posing with about six other boys on their graduation day. Jeremy was standing next to my brother in the picture. “And the other guy is to his left.”

“Do they look familiar to you now?” Donovan asked her.

“Kinda,” Kim said, nodding.

I did everything I could not to roll my eyes. No way had she ever seen either guy before in her life.

I motioned with a quick head tilt toward the bartender, hoping Donovan would get the message. I was pleased when he asked Kim, “Think anybody else might recognize them? The bartender, maybe?”

“Nah. He’s from out East somewhere. Massachusetts, I think,” Kim said. “He’s only been in the area since March.”

I thought about the music in the bar. The bartender wasn’t playing a radio station but, instead, Boston’s debut album—in its entirety. I’d listened to it all the way through at Betsy’s house and liked it. A lot. But it’d been released just a few weeks after Gideon disappeared, and in a gut-punching way, it always reminded me of him. These were my brother’s kind of songs. Roll-the-car-windows-down and turn-the-volume-up songs of the open road. Strains of “Hitch a Ride,” faded as another tune began.

Kim wandered off again and, since Donovan had turned suddenly silent while devouring his ham-n-Swiss sandwich, I nibbled at my coleslaw and watched Kim make the rounds.

The waitress was over by the pool players within moments, flirting with one of them and letting a tall, scraggly-looking man put his arm around her and run his chalky fingers down the length of her side, from shoulder to hip. Was she hoping this spectacle would make Donovan jealous? If so, it was wasted effort. Looked like Donovan only had eyes for his sandwich.

More people had filtered into the bar, but I kept a watch on our waitress, unable to stop observing her desperate attempts at connecting with some guy. She was as easy to read as a kindergartener. I could tell Kim was the type to have barely squeaked through high school. She reminded me a lot of Sandy from work. Nice enough, but not exactly the sharpest tool in the box.

I sensed Kim’s decision to relocate to the wilds of western Wisconsin for a trucker named Hal had been an impulsive one. That every night at the bar was another opportunity to meet a new man and, hopefully, make her escape again. But with a happier ending this time.

I also more than suspected that Kim both pitied and envied me. Pitied me because, in her eyes, I was every bit the uninteresting kid sister that Donovan had painted me to be. And, yet, she envied me, too, because, however platonic the relationship, I’d be the one leaving with him. Or, maybe, it was as simple as the fact that I’d be
leaving
—period.

With “Let Me Take You Home Tonight” playing loud and ironically, a second waitress came into the bar, stopped to chat with Kim and the bartender and, then, grabbed her order pad and got to work. It wasn’t long before Kim dragged the new waitress over to our table, glad to have another excuse to chitchat with Donovan.

“Hey, this is Cindy,” Kim said of her friend, who looked like a slightly older version of Kim, but with lighter hair and less of an air of hopefulness. “She’s worked here for longer than me and also at Jacky’s, the bar halfway down the block. Maybe she knows those guys you were looking for.”

Donovan cranked up the charm level with his grin again, and even the older waitress wasn’t immune to it.

“These guys in any kind of trouble?” Cindy asked when I handed her the photo, showing she was brighter than her fellow waitress.

Donovan shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he lied convincingly. “Haven’t seen them since a party we were all at a couple of years ago, and I thought they might be traveling together. Maybe through the area.”

Cindy looked relieved. She also looked at the picture with far more genuine recognition than Kim had, I realized, but she was holding her tongue.

I tried to help her along. “They were so funny,” I gushed, faking the kind of girlish laugh that my best friend Betsy did so well. “It’d be really cool to catch up with them again.”

Donovan bobbed his head heartily.

“I’m pretty sure they were in town before,” Cindy admitted. “I remember this one in the middle real well.” She pointed to Gideon. “Speedy white and blue car, right? Taped up back window?”

I saw Donovan’s Adam’s apple slide up and down a few times before he could compose himself enough to answer. “That’s right.”

He sent me a careful, knowing look. Kim might have told Cindy about the colors of Gideon’s car, but no one had said
anything
about the broken window. It had been a detail even I hadn’t thought to mention until that moment.