The Road to You (46 page)

“I’m putting my heart in your hands tonight,” he whispered. “Be gentle with it.”

I
AWOKE
on Sunday morning to find Donovan’s arms encircling me. I snuggled closer to him, enjoying the scent of his very warm, very male body beside mine. Remembering the way he’d touched me, skimming his fingertips against the side of my neck and down my shoulder. And then further still—between my breasts, my thighs. Pulling me nearer. Holding me tighter. Pressing into me, our bodies joining together in a union that felt destined. Magical.

My stomach growled, disrupting the memory and breaking the spell.

Donovan blinked open his eyes and laughed. “I’m starving, too,” he admitted.

And, so, reluctantly, we began the day.

As Donovan showered and shaved, I smiled to myself, reliving even more images and sensations from the evening before, as if it were a romantic movie playing on a continuous loop in my brain. As long as I lived, I knew I’d never be able to explain how much being with him last night meant to me. Truly, I was
happy
...contented in a way I hadn’t thought possible. A near miracle, actually, for someone like me who lived so much of her life in her mind, rather than in her body.

I wriggled and stretched in bed, slowly working my way up to a sitting position. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to step out of my cozy cocoon or leave the afterglow of the night completely behind me yet.

So, I reached for yesterday’s newspaper, which was on the side table, trapped underneath our half-eaten box of Good & Plenty. I nibbled on a few licorice candies to quell the hunger pangs as I thumbed through the pages of the paper, at least until I came to my favorite section—the puzzles.

Growing up, Gideon and I used to fight over who’d get first crack at this page in our daily newspaper. I often got to it soonest because I tended to wake up earlier than my brother did. Sometimes I’d start with the crossword, other times the cryptoquote. If I really wanted to annoy him, I’d tackle the word jumble. That one was Gideon’s hands-down favorite.

For old time’s sake, I began unscrambling the individual words in the puzzle before me, rewriting the clues into a disordered constellation of letters on the edge of the page and trying to imagine them anew. As words that were surely familiar but, as yet, unseen.

And, suddenly, I
did
see something. Something that made me bolt out of bed.

I couldn’t say for sure which of my word doodles was the one that sparked my insight, just that I wrote and rewrote a completely different pairing of words in the newspaper’s margin. A duo that had nothing at all to do with the puzzle on the page.

Then, with my pulse sprinting, I reached for the phone.

“I’m sorry for calling so early on a Sunday,” I said to Billy Neville, “but I need to speak with your partner, Andy. It’s important. Could you please ask him to give me a call here?”

“I can try,” the police detective said. “What’s this about, Aurora?”

“I think you know,” I told him. “And thank you—for all you’ve done.”

Not even ten minutes later, the motel phone rang.

I smiled and said, “Hello?”

Then I listened to Andy Reggio’s heavy Texas drawl as he told me that he’d just gotten a call from Billy. “Said you wanted to speak with me?”

“Yes,” I replied. “You know, you almost fooled me with the anagram. Same ten letters, just jumbled into a different name. I hadn’t expected that, but I guess I should have...considering
you
were involved.”

Suddenly, the faux accent disappeared and I heard a rueful chuckle on the line.

“I think you did really well figuring out so much, Sis,” my brother said. “And, by the way, sorry to be a little late with it, but happy birthday.”

San Bernardino, California ~ Tuesday, July 4

W
ITH
B
ILLY
Neville’s help, we had a short but incredibly joyful family reunion in San Bernardino, California just two days later.

It was the Fourth of July.

We called my parents and asked them to fly down—not telling them the reason, just that it was important—and, of course, they came.

Donovan, Billy and I met them at the airport, and Gideon, who’d been on the road somewhere in Southern California, drove his motorcycle to the secluded picnic site Billy had reserved just for us that day.

The moment when Gideon took off his helmet and ran toward Mom and Dad, the world stopped spinning for a second. And then...everyone cried. Both of my parents. Me. Gideon himself. Donovan. And even Billy Neville.

My brother looked different. There were some similarities, of course. His build hadn’t changed too much, although I could tell he was more muscular and a bit broader than he’d once been. His skin was tanned and starting to approach leathery. Like a California boy, rather than a Minnesota son.

His hair color was noticeably lighter, and he sported a beard I’d never seen before. He no longer wore his ruby graduation ring. Honestly, at first glance, I might not have recognized him. (After all, I
hadn’t
when he’d been clad in biker gear in Amarillo or at the church cemetery in New Mexico.)

But his voice—without that phony “Andy Reggio” accent—was the same as always. And when he smiled at me again and hugged me close, I knew I’d gotten my big brother back.

There was nothing insignificant about the day. It was as if we all fully understood what a rare and precious gift this moment was and knew better than to waste a single second.

We conversed as a whole group but, also, in smaller, intense configurations. Billy, my mom and Gideon. My dad and me. Gideon and Donovan. We grouped and regrouped all day long.

My parents needed the most time with my brother, of course—both alone and, also, with Billy, who could so expertly provide explanations of the case. The police detective filled them in on what had happened over the past several years and, in particular, all of the events that took place involving their children.

I was relieved not to have to hold that secret anymore, and I could tell this was exponentially true for Gideon.

Even so, Billy still insisted upon strict confidentiality as we moved forward. He invited my parents to discuss anything else with him at any time but, despite the fact that William James seemed to be operating alone in the Chameleon Lake Police Department and the other two fulltime officers there had been cleared of general suspicion, Billy and the FBI preferred to keep their circle of confidants extremely small.

Donovan and I were told we were free to return home.

Gideon’s safety was much less assured if he went back, but Billy told me privately that the final decision was really up to my brother.

“There will always be a risk,” he said. “But I think the choice for Gideon is more complicated than that.”

I didn’t really understand what the police detective meant, though, until later, when I finally got a half hour alone with my brother.

I asked him a few of the questions I hadn’t been able to on the phone:
What made you so certain I’d correctly follow the clues in the journal? Were you trailing us from city to city to make sure? Now that this is all over, will you come back home?

He answered each of them, but in his own meandering and somewhat mysterious way.

“You’re my sister, Aurora,” he said with one of his flash grins. “You think I wouldn’t remember how persistent you could be when you wanted to figure out something? I lived with you for sixteen years.”

But then the deeper truth emerged. He confessed it had been his instincts that had saved his life in Amarillo, along with a little knowledge of explosives. He’d been only a few perceptive seconds ahead of Rick Brice and Sebastian James. “Still not quick enough to save Jeremy,” he lamented, but it was enough for Gideon to get away, even though he’d had to kill a man to do it. The experience changed him, and he was reminded of the intuitive gift he knew I possessed.

“Once I’d sort of gotten my head together again, I tried to come up with a creative way to help Billy—and the special unit of the FBI—so we could get those bastards.” he said. “And I remembered the journal.”

It was, as I suspected, an object he just happened to have with him in his backpack when he and Jeremy took Ben’s car to Bonner Mill. Slowly, months after the incident in Amarillo, the idea to use to journal took hold. He came up with the coded messages, wrote them down, brought the journal up to Chameleon Lake and planted it in the cedar box where he knew only I would find it.

“My main concern was to keep you safe, even as you worked to solve the puzzle,” he said. “I knew, though, if anyone would be capable of skirting danger while piecing together the clues, it would be you.”

And so, yes, he tracked our progress whenever he could. In Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma for sure. “Not nearly well enough in Texas,” he said with an apology. “Sometimes you and Donovan were faster than I’d expected. In fact—” He paused. Studied my face silently for a few seconds and glanced at Jeremy’s big brother, who was having a private discussion with my dad. “I didn’t know for sure that you’d even involve Donovan until the two of you went to Crescent Cove together. I thought it was at least fifty-fifty that you’d go it alone.”

“No, I needed his help,” I admitted. “I did from the very first day.” Then I pulled out Gideon’s leather journal, which had been my constant companion for the past month and my touchstone of hope, and I offered it to him. “Would you like to have it back?”

He traced the butterfly on the cover with his fingertip and smiled at me. “No. See, the journal was always meant for you, Sis. That’s why I thought of you whenever I looked at it. Some of the pages at the beginning were my own notes, but I’d been writing down car maintenance procedures in it to give to you after you graduated and moved into the big wide world. I knew you were going to be a very independent young woman, and I figured you might wanna know stuff like how to change the oil in your car,” he said with a laugh.

He told me a little more about what his life had been like since that Bicentennial weekend—the regrets he’d had, the challenges he’d confronted, the hours he’d spent alone on his motorcycle just thinking. He’d become “Andy” after Billy saved his life. My brother described how he’d actually begun training as an agent himself for the past year. Being taught the proper procedures. Learning how to shoot a gun. Strengthening his undercover guises. Putting his natural talents in science and mechanics to work, along with his social skills.

And he explained, too, that he’d been given some unusual opportunities and privileges as part of Billy’s special undercover team. Like getting to be the one to take down Sebastian James in Albuquerque.

“But wasn’t it hard for you to kill somebody, Gideon?” I asked him. “Even someone that bad?”

“Not as hard as it probably should’ve been,” he replied. “Besides, I did it for Jeremy. And for you and Donovan, too.”

However, he also told me he was at a personal crossroads. If he wanted to continue on the agency path, it would take more formal schooling. A degree to earn. A set of rules to follow. A lifestyle to accept.

“There would be all of that settling down, grown-up stuff. Health insurance, income tax returns, being part of the system,” Gideon said with an involuntary grimace. “Billy’s been great and my FBI mentor has been real cool, too. They say I’m an asset to my team and my country, and I want to help them—I just don’t know if that’s the life for me. And I don’t think I can just go back to how things were before I left Chameleon Lake either. I’m no longer that same guy. I need to be…more free than even the old Gideon was. But I also wanted to make sure you and our folks were just as free first.”