The Road to You (39 page)

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “Really.” I gave his arm a reassuring pat and scooched back to my side of the bed.

He slid himself as far to the other side as he could go and collapsed against his pillow—staring at the ceiling again as if watching a fiery meteor shower in the night sky. The sweat started to return to his brow. He groaned and covered his eyes with his palm. “I’m not…myself. I’m not—”

“I know. Don’t worry about it.” I faked a yawn. “We need more sleep.” I twisted away from him and tried to still every one of my limbs. I only allowed myself to take quiet, shallow breaths until I knew he was asleep again.

But no matter how motionless my body may have appeared on the outside, my insides were careening wildly, threatening to give me and my deepest secrets away.

Donovan and I had just
kissed
.

I knew better than anyone that it didn’t mean anything to him—especially since alcohol had been involved. But just the fact that it had happened, and that I’d felt what I felt while it was happening, was enough to throw me into a disorienting whirl.

It wasn’t just about my attraction to him. Those feelings had always been there. No, it was also about what I told my dad before we’d left on the trip. My lie to my own father. My insistence that there was
nothing
between Donovan and me other than a desire to find out what had happened to our brothers.

I guess I’d never expected that Donovan would let down his guard long enough for anything to actually occur between us. And, now that he had, I was confused.

Were my feelings for him
real
…or just a product of being a romance-hungry American teen growing up in a lustful generation? And what were his feelings toward me? What would he think of me the next day when he remembered my behavior from tonight? He might only be twenty-three, but he was already such a man of honor. Too much of one to ever take advantage of me, even a couple of years ago, before any tragedies had taken place, and back when I was practically throwing myself at him in the middle of a wild party.

Yet, here he was tonight—sad, emotionally distraught and under the influence—and when he moved to kiss me, I didn’t immediately stop him.

I kissed him back. And I enjoyed it.

Sure, eventually I pulled away, but I hadn’t wanted to, even knowing how he’d later consider this all to be his fault. That he’d try to take responsibility for it, like he did for everything.

I’d been acting smug and superior toward him ever since I first showed him the journal, just because I was more intuitive, but, in so many ways, he’d proven to be the more mature person of the two of us. It wasn’t because he was older but, rather, because he lived by an unshakable code of conduct. Firm guiding principles. Ethics that wouldn’t waver, even in the face of tragedy and injustice.

W
E WOKE
up to a clear, hot weekday morning in Albuquerque—as deceptively bright and unthreatening as the morning before in Amarillo—but look at how wrong we’d been about that, huh?

I was exhausted still. Donovan was, of course, more than a little worse for the wear, but he was making a heroic effort to get back to a healthy equilibrium after his whiskey bender.

He scrubbed his face with his palms, ran his fingers through his dark hair and looked at me with concern. “Morning,” he said. Then, after gulping down a few Dixie cups of tap water, “Um, Aurora, last night—”

I used his pause as an excuse to jump in. “Yeah, I know you were pretty sick. How are you feeling? I hope you’re not too headachy today, but we can take it easy if you are. I’m not sure what you feel like eating, but I think simpler and plainer food is better, right?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “And maybe you’ll want to take an aspirin now and a nap later. I know you didn’t get as much sleep as usual.”

He glanced at me warily. “Yeah. Aurora, about that—”

“Oh, and we should really go over some things in the journal,” I babbled. “A few new words or phrases might stand out more for us now.”

He exhaled, walked up to where I was standing by the edge of the bed and put his hands on my shoulders. “We’ll do that today, I promise. But first, I just wanted to apologize for yesterday. All of it. The morning and all the danger I put us in. The afternoon, the evening and especially the middle of the night. I was just…I don’t know…for some stupid reason I thought the alcohol would help take the edge off, but it didn’t really work that way. And then I kept waking up a thousand times and waking you up along with me.”

I put my index finger up to his lips. “Been drinking,” I said, parroting his words from the night of the graduation party. “I understand. I really do. Nothing happened last night.” When he shook his head and opened his mouth to contradict me, though, I added, “Nothing you need to worry about, okay? Please, Donovan. Please don’t.”

He still looked like he wanted to continue debating this point, but I was determined to put an end to any further apologies. Especially since I should be the one apologizing for most of it.

Instead, I pulled out Treak’s notes and reviewed with Donovan what I’d noticed when I reread them last night. Then I opened up Gideon’s journal to the Albuquerque/Santa Fe page and read it aloud:

“So, the date, when run through the month/day equation, is actually August 10, 1976,” I said. “Five days after the explosion in Amarillo.”

“And ‘NevilleB’? What’s that?” he asked.

“Treak listed a ‘Billy Neville’ in his notes, and he was from Albuquerque, so that’s my best guess. As for the numbers following the name, I’m not sure. Zero times two is zero. And zero plus seven is seven. So maybe the number seven has some meaning in connection with this Neville guy.”

But Donovan was staring at the page with an odd expression. “I know you’re better than me at this stuff, but could the zero times two equal a double zero with the seven added onto the end? So it’s actually 007?”

Instantly I saw what he saw and knew he had to be right.

“Wow, yeah,” I said. “That’s it for sure. It’s exactly the kind of thing Gideon would write.” Then I thought about it. “I just don’t know why. Is Billy Neville some kind of spy? Someone who’s British? Or does it refer to something else from the Bond films?”

He shrugged, but I couldn’t help but notice that he looked fleetingly proud of himself for having cracked one of my brother’s little codes.

As for the final line—
RIP in Traveling St.
—neither of us had any idea what that meant specifically, but I felt justified in fearing that the “RIP” probably had something to do with Jeremy.

Donovan may have been thinking exactly the same thing, but he willed me with his eyes not to verbalize it. So I didn’t. Instead, I confessed something that had been bothering me.

“I hate that we can’t trust the cops we know personally. I hate that we don’t know who the ‘good guys’ are anymore. Until our brothers disappeared, I always thought we could count on the police to uphold the law, but it feels like they’re more often the criminals. At least when it comes to this case.” I knew I sounded bitter, but I couldn’t help it.

Donovan sighed. “Whatever’s happening here feels more like war than crime, Aurora. With an act of war, a soldier’s moral compass isn’t set to true north. Depending on the side you’re fighting on, you’d label one act as ‘justice,’ if it was your troop doing it, and the same act as ‘terrorism,’ if it came from your enemies.”

He had another cup of water and took a few steadying breaths. “I didn’t get sent to ‘Nam, but I had friends who were there and lived to talk about it. And my grandpa fought in World War I, dropping depth chargers on enemy U-boats. These were all good and honest men here at home. Heroes, in my book. But to the other side—to the Viet Cong, to the Germans—they were monsters. In war, no one is totally good. Everyone loses.”

I nodded. What he was saying made sense. Gideon and Jeremy had been doing something patriotic, yet Jeremy ended up dying senselessly. And even though it appeared that Gideon managed to survive, it was only in body. Nothing of my brother’s prior life remained. He’d lost his best friend, his family, his home, the world as he knew it, the future he had planned, however casually… None of this was fair, but we all knew war wasn’t known for its fairness.

“We still don’t know the whole story, though,” I said. “After our brothers fled Crescent Cove, what led them to Texas in hopes of uncovering the truth? Sebastian said they’d been talking with Hal. Stirring up trouble, in Sebastian’s opinion. Were they ignoring what they knew to be the
safe
thing in hopes of doing the
right
thing? Were they
trying
to be heroes?”

He wrinkled his nose and gave his head a shake. “That’s my point. In an act of war—foreign or domestic—there’s no standard or unquestionably ‘right’ side. It all depends. Could Gideon and Jeremy always clearly read their moral compass? If so, would we agree with their choices? I don’t think we can say.” He sort of smiled at me. “I mean, are you always sure of what your moral compass says? Are you positive you’re acting the
right
way? Doing the
right
thing all the time?”

I felt my face begin to flush as I remembered our kiss from the night before. Had I been doing the right thing? Had I genuinely been comforting Donovan…or had I been taking advantage of his weakened state?

I mumbled something noncommittal and changed the subject.

“I still think we should head towards home again. Maybe not drive all the way back to Minnesota, but get within striking distance.” I pointed at the journal. “I suppose if we search, we might find somebody in Albuquerque named Billy Neville, but I don’t think there was anyone on Treak’s list who wasn’t a big crook, a nasty killer or both. I don’t want to take a chance on running into somebody else who might start shooting at us.”

But Donovan was already pulling out the phonebook and flipping to the Ns.

“Neville, B.J.” the listing read. “157 Greenleaf Cir.” And there was a phone number, too, that I didn’t even bother to memorize.

“But I don’t want to find him,” I said again, more insistently. “I’m scared of these people, Donovan.”
I’m scared of what they might do to me...and especially to you.

Never before had I felt the weight of my mortality so strongly. The consequences my life—or death—would have on other people that I cared about. It wasn’t about giving up the search. I just knew I had to be grown-up enough to take my loved ones into consideration.

“I know,” he said. “Me, too.” He blew out some air. “But we’re not going back home. Not yet. And I can’t spend another day in this motel, so I have an idea. I think we need to take a little field trip today.”

“To where? The grocery store?” I glanced at the bags and boxes of food on the table that we’d both rummaged through all day yesterday and had half eaten. I was, admittedly, pretty sick of Ritz crackers and beef jerky. “Or maybe the library?”

He laughed. “No. I think we need to go to Santa Fe.”

“I thought you didn’t want to drive anywhere for a few days. That the point of being at this motor lodge was to hide the Trans Am in the garage.”

“It is,” he said, thumbing back to a reference page in an earlier section of the phonebook—one with a timetable of some kind and a bunch of multicolored routes listed on it. “That’s why we’re going to take the bus.”