The Road to You (14 page)

Donovan had been living in a small apartment on his own since he’d gotten back from the Army and, though of course he was always respectful of his mother, he didn’t have to answer to anybody. Not even his boss at the garage, really. Everyone knew they needed him there more than the other way around.

“Stop looking so pleased with yourself,” he growled at me. “Listen, I’m taking next week off, but that’s it. We’ll drive to Chicago and, maybe, another city or two in Illinois, but then we’re coming back home.”

He shot me the stern look of an elder brother, which seemed an act calculated to provoke me, even before he said, “Now you’d better get permission from your parents. I don’t want you sneaking around behind their backs, and I really don’t want them calling the cops on me and accusing me of kidnapping you.”

I gaped at him. He couldn’t be serious. “That’s not funny.”

“No shit, Aurora,” he said without a trace of humor in his voice.

I crossed my arms. “Fine. I’ll talk with them tomorrow, I promise. My plan was to leave on Saturday morning, but we could take off even earlier. Friday night. Betsy wanted to see some new movie, that Fifties musical, but I’d rather skip it and just—”

“No, you should go,” he interrupted. “You know how people talk in this dinky little town.” Impossible to miss the bitterness that clung to his words. “We need to use that to our advantage. You know we can’t
both
be gone from here for more than a day or two and not have people notice. Or
speculate
.”

He wrinkled his nose and paced the length of the office and back. “Friday night would be a good chance for us to spread your rumor about where we’re going. I can plan to run into you and Betsy by the theater. If we talk about that college-scouting crap on the street for five minutes, there’ll be enough people eavesdropping that maybe we won’t have to deal with gossip about us being a couple or running away together or anything stupid like that.”

I bit my lip to keep from spouting off a self-incriminating, completely embarrassing response to this. His dismissal of me as not being someone even worthy of dating
gossip
needled me to no end, but it wasn’t like I could argue with him over it. What would I say?

Oh, c’mon! Why shouldn’t they think we’re a couple?

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone talked about how we’d skipped town together to go on a wild road trip? That we were just irresponsible kids with loose morals, who’d probably even break the law a time or two?

That plan would be a hard sell with Donovan…and it wouldn’t help me convince my parents to let me drive with him to Chicago either.

I shrugged. “Okay. Betsy and I will go to the show in town. Seven-thirty on Friday night. See you on the sidewalk afterwards.”

I swiveled on my sneaker toe to leave—I couldn’t get out of that cramped office fast enough—but he stopped me by gently grabbing my upper arm and tugging me toward him. “Hang on,” he said. “There’s something else we have to do tonight.”

My pulse thrummed at the spot where he touched me, and I wished desperately that I didn’t like the sensation. I snatched my arm away. “What?”

He flashed one of his grins at me, leaned close until his nose was just a couple of inches from mine and whispered, “Boom.” Then he pointed toward the parking lot. “We got some bootleg fireworks to blow up.”

Oh, yeah. We did.

He drove us out beyond the Chameleon Lake city limits, through the rolling countryside and halfway to St. Cloud, before he pulled the Trans Am onto the shoulder of the road. He nodded at the mostly open field to our right, sprinkled only with a few large maple-tree clusters.

With the crunch of gravel beneath our feet and the sun just starting to dip down to tree level, we made our way to the field, each of us having grabbed a decent sampling of fireworks from the cardboard box in the trunk.

“Let’s just try this bunch first,” Donovan said. “No telling how powerful they’ll be.”

Using a small, dried branch he picked up off the ground, he lit the stick with his cigarette lighter and, being careful to keep the lit branch away from the fireworks, took just one cherry bomb with him to the most open part of the field.

“Stay behind the tree,” he commanded, and I didn’t dare disobey.

He set the firecracker down on a rock and, then, using the branch to give himself a little distance, lit the cherry bomb with the tip of the flaming stick—arm outstretched, eyes shielded—and when the wick caught fire, he ran like hell back to where I was standing.

Like a mini snake, it hissed as though about to strike, and then…

Boom!

It went off, shooting sound waves and angry dust particles into the still-bright sky.

He glanced at me, a grin tugging his lips upward. “They’re a little stronger than the county-fair variety.” He reached for the M-80 next. “I’m almost afraid to light this one.”

But light it he did. It sparked a hot, bright flash and sounded like the detonation of a cannon.

The two of us looked at each other and started laughing, so instinctively, so uncontrollably, at the sheer power of these small objects, it verged on hysteria.

“Good thing we’re alone out here,” I commented, wiping away a stray tear from the corner of my eye and handing Donovan one of the quarter sticks. “I wouldn’t want to have to explain to anybody what we’re doing.”

“Me neither,” he said, glancing at the empty road. “Sounds like we’re trying to level the entire field.”

We lit the remainder of our first batch, then Donovan went back to the Trans Am to retrieve another couple of handfuls from the box. After a few cars went by, he lit those one at a time as well.

We were laughing again at the spark and sound of a particularly deafening quarter stick when I asked, “How many more do we have left?” just a second before a male voice behind us asked, “What have you got there, kids?”

I gasped and pivoted toward the voice

And Donovan swung around so fast he looked like one of those cartoon whirling dervishes. “Uh, Officer James,” he said. “We, uh, didn’t hear you.”

The young cop smiled indulgently at us. “Well, it was a little noisy down here, wasn’t it?”

He had a thick head of reddish-brown hair that he tended to run his left hand through whenever he grinned. It was a casual, easygoing motion that seemed oddly paired—a connection of face and limb. Out of uniform, as he was just then, and dressed in jeans and a clean blue t-shirt, he appeared even younger than his early thirties. More like a peer than an authority figure. More like one of us.

Donovan and I didn’t say anything, although we both shot a quick glance at the base of the maple tree where he’d been stashing the fireworks. I didn’t see any left. Of course, I knew there were still some in his trunk.

“Celebrating the Fourth of July a little early, aren’t you two?” the officer asked.

I watched Donovan swallow and nod. “A guy at the shop gave me a few of these, and I just wanted to see if they were any good.”

Officer James raised an eyebrow. “One of your coworkers?”

“No,” Donovan said quickly. “Just a guy who was passing through. Needed a little work done on his back bumper and an oil change. He was from out of town.”

I studied the cop’s expression as the cop, in turn, studied Donovan’s, and I knew we were in trouble. Officer James wasn’t buying this explanation.

“This guy from out of town, he just
gave
you a bunch of—” The officer waved his palm in the air. “What would you call them?
Specialty
fireworks?” He grinned some more and ran that same palm through his hair again, catching his fingers up in the chestnut strands like a spider dancing through a web.

Donovan winced. “I didn’t know what they were for sure,” he lied. “They did look a little, uh, different from the usual ones we get.”

At that, the officer laughed. He may have been a small-town cop, but he was nobody’s fool.

He clasped Donovan’s shoulder with his wide hand and glanced between the two of us. “Well, son, I’m off duty, so you’re in luck. When I saw your car by the side of the road, I thought you might’ve just had some engine trouble. Glad to hear that’s not the case.”

He gave each of us a significant look and let go of Donovan to examine the spot where the fireworks had been lit. Little bits of burnt black wadding remained at the scene, although, thankfully, most of the objects in question had been blown to bits.

Donovan muttered something under his breath when Officer James picked up a slip of smoky, blackened wadding paper—a remnant from one of the cherry bombs.

The cop’s suspicious expression said it all but, for good measure, he added, “Thought with your military background you might know better, Mr. McCafferty.”

But then, after an interminable pause, he broke into yet another smile, raking his fingers through his thick hair once more. “I remember these from when I was a kid. They used to pack a lot more punch back then. I’m not sure who, er…
designed
the ones you had in your possession but, from the look and sound of them, they were made the old-fashioned way.”

I couldn’t help but notice that, while Officer James glanced at me from time to time, he’d pretty much dismissed me from the start. There was no thought on the cop’s part of my having been involved in the acquisition of the fireworks. No sense that I might have any pyrotechnic knowledge, however minimal. Nothing out of the ordinary about me that would require him to look at me with any real scrutiny.

It had been much the same during the missing persons’ investigation. Not that I had been in any way involved with Gideon’s disappearance, but shouldn’t a good cop consider every possible angle?

Addressing Donovan, Officer James said, “You’re not within the boundaries of the town of Chameleon Lake and, even if you were, I’m not on duty again until tomorrow morning. So, I won’t be checking your pockets or your car right now, and I trust there’d be no unexploded evidence for me to find anywhere, would there?”

“No, sir,” Donovan answered solemnly. I was reminded yet again how smoothly he could lie when motivated.

“Good.” The cop laughed and steered us back away from the scene and toward the road. “Well, then I guess there’s nothing to report. This time. But I wouldn’t recommend that you pick up any more of those special fireworks from anywhere, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” Donovan replied, his tone respectful but with a hint of his trademark charm. Playing the game. Maybe even enjoying it.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to act playful, but I tried to appear appropriately compliant. Because as jovial as the coolest, hippest cop in Chameleon Lake seemed at the moment, I remembered Officer William James well from the time of the investigation. Knew what a hard ass he could be when he wanted to. I wasn’t inclined to get on his bad side.

Since he seemed to like me best when I played the part of the meek, easy-to-direct schoolgirl, I just kept quiet and let him think what he wanted.

Thing was, no offense to the good officer and his buddies at the police station but, as of two years ago, I hated all cops. Every last one of them. And I’d never trust them again.

When we got up to the road, Officer James jumped into his snazzy yellow VW Bug with a wave, but he insisted that Donovan drive ahead of him. So, of course, Donovan pulled out first and had to drive under the speed limit the whole way back into town. It wasn’t until the cop turned left onto a side street that we could finally breathe deeply again.

“What are we going to do with the rest of the fireworks?” I asked. “There’s still some in the trunk, right?”

Donovan shrugged as he pulled into the auto shop’s parking lot next to my Buick. “Yeah, we’ve got five or six left. We’ll take them with us, I guess. Maybe find a larger, more remote area when we’re on the way to Chicago and light them there. We’ve got to be more careful out of state. Lucky it was Officer James who saw us tonight and not someone who didn’t know us. Like some hardnosed cop from St. Cloud or another town.”

“Yeah. Very lucky,” I murmured.

He didn’t catch my sarcasm and, at least for the moment, he didn’t seem plagued with worrisome questions about our brothers’ possible involvement in the building of these types of fireworks. Or, maybe, he just didn’t want to tell me his thoughts. He was so irritatingly practical. So one-day-at-a-time focused.

I could scarcely keep myself from grimacing when he said, “Okay. I’ll meet you by the movie theater on Friday night. Try not to get yourself into any trouble before then.”

“No one ever suspects
me
of getting into trouble,” I shot back and had the satisfaction of seeing him squint at me for a second in consideration.

“Well, then, I guess people are underestimating you, Aurora.” He grinned. “I’m not that dumb. Or, at least, not as dumb as you think.” He got out of his car, slammed the door behind him and walked toward the office. “Go home,” he said over his shoulder. “Talk to your parents. We’re not going anywhere unless they say it’s okay.”

He didn’t even turn back to wave. But I didn’t need to get in the last word. I’d accomplished two out of my three missions for the week. Dale—
check
. Donovan—
check
. Only one more to go.