“A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused
into a considerable portion.”
~James Boswell
Crescent Cove, Wisconsin ~ Friday, June 9, 1978
After what might have been the longest three hours and forty-seven minutes of my entire life, the Trans Am crossed the state line into Wisconsin.
I eyed Donovan warily. He’d uttered aloud only a handful of syllables on the drive, letting the rock on the car radio speak for him.
But, while Wings, the Eagles and Crosby, Stills and Nash gave voice to his love of the fast lane and general discontent with society, the increasing tension in his body called out to me like a scream. I could feel the vibrations of his stress in the claw-like grip he had on the steering wheel, the pale cast to his knuckles, the way he punched the buttons to change stations when one radio signal grew too weak, the ropy tautness of his neck and the steely intensity riveting his eyes to the pavement.
Donovan flicked off the radio finally. “We’re almost there,” he informed me.
I opened my mouth to say, “Thank God, it’s about time,” but something in his tone and the set of his jaw stopped me. He was not only anxious, I realized, he was angry.
Very angry.
Even knowing this anger wasn’t directed at me but at the Crescent Cove city limits sign (“Population 949”) wasn’t much consolation. It shimmered off of him like light on a lake, and I was sure those waters were deep with danger.
“What do you want to do first?” I asked him, trying to come across as reasonable, accommodating and not likely to piss him off. “Once we drive through town, that is.”
He turned his dark-brown eyes in my direction, taking them off the road only long enough to blink and say, “Let’s see what we see there.”
Yeah, that sounded simple enough, but it wasn’t. Donovan was glaring at everything in Crescent Cove through his own increasingly frustrated lens. We wouldn’t be able to figure out anything that way. I knew we were going to have to view the place through Gideon and Jeremy’s open and optimistic perspective instead. But both of us were out of practice being upbeat, and trying to tell Donovan what to do would get me exactly nowhere. I’d asked him once on the road if we should, maybe, stop for gas and the look he gave me would’ve made the Incredible Hulk cower in fright.
“Let’s just consider how our brothers might have seen everything here,” I suggested carefully, glancing at the one-street, two-stop-sign town, which was significantly smaller than even Chameleon Lake.
Donovan narrowed his eyes and pulled into a farmhouse driveway on the edge of the town so he could turn his Trans Am around and go down the main drag once again. This time more slowly.
“This place is a bunch of rubble in the road,” he pronounced after taking an especially long look at the vendor lineup on the left side of the street: Bar with burnt-out neon lights, brownish-brick corner store, paint-chipped post office, ramshackle bar, hardware store with taped-up window, shuttered empty store front, yet another bar… “What the hell were they doing in this dump?” he muttered.
I had to admit, I was almost as mystified.
Had our brothers liked hanging out at one of the bars? It seemed too long of a drive from Chameleon Lake just to come over for a beer, though the drinking age in Wisconsin was only eighteen while, in Minnesota, it was nineteen. That was reason enough for a lot of my old high-school friends to cross the state line.
But my parents had never been strict about stuff like that. Once Gideon and Jeremy got to high school, Mom and Dad let them drink a bottle or two of beer at the house without batting an eyelash. Dad even fixed us all—me included—whiskey sours one New Year’s Eve. I remembered how quickly I got a buzz from it.
I also remembered how funny Jeremy had been that night, laughing with us as Gideon pulled Mom into a crazy waltz in the middle of the living room. “Dance With Me” by Orleans had been playing on the radio. Jeremy turned the volume up even higher and suddenly said, “Well, c’mon, Aurora. We can’t let ‘em show us up, can we?” So, I took his hand and he spun me around and around, until we both finally collapsed on the shag carpet from too much giggling and dizziness and, maybe, the whiskey.
Had Gideon and Jeremy danced with anyone here in Crescent Cove? Could it have been that one of them had a crush on a chick he’d met at a bar up here? Maybe. With so little information, it was hard to rule out anything...
But, while they’d both dated casually quite a bit, I didn’t think either guy had been serious about a girlfriend two years ago. At their graduation party, they’d each been flirting outrageously with the girls in the hotel room, and I would’ve bet money they both got laid that night. But there were no longstanding relationships afterward. Not that I knew of, that was for sure.
“Could there be some other section of the town?” I asked Donovan. “There has to be a church here somewhere. A school. A library, maybe.”
He looked at me like I was schizo. “Aurora, they don’t even have a gas station in this stinkin’ hell pit. You really think they’d have a library?”
He shook his head and went back to glaring at the handful of rundown buildings again, this time the ones on the right side of the street. A couple of local boys, who’d seen us zip down and back, eyed Donovan’s car curiously, no doubt recognizing a pair of out-of-towners when they saw them.
Donovan abruptly turned the car down a narrow country lane. “You wanna look for a church? A school? A library?” he asked me. “Let’s just go for a little spin around these parts and take in the diversity.”
Hard to miss the sarcasm in his voice.
We cut a wide square driving through the surrounding farmland but, as Donovan had predicted, there were no signs of any large public buildings anywhere in the vicinity. We did, however, see a smallish lake.
“Behold, the Cove,” Donovan said in full mocking mode.
There was also an entrance to one of the Saint Croix Chippewa Reservation Communities (know-it-all Donovan informed me that there were several tribal lands in the area) and a dark-green sign pointing in the direction of Ashburn Falls, a town thirteen miles away.
Donovan pulled off the pavement and onto the gravel, grabbing his road atlas from under the seat and locating the place.
“That might be our best bet for a motel,” he told me. “Ashburn Falls has got a population of almost six thousand, so that’s probably where the nearest school and church are. And your library,” he added drily.
I had to agree on the prospects of the new town, although I forced all thoughts of a motel stay with Donovan out of my mind for now—I just couldn’t let myself imagine that! Besides, our work in Crescent Cove wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.
“Gideon and Jeremy never mentioned Ashburn Falls in the journal,” I told him. “Gideon specifically wrote about Crescent Cove, though. So, there’s something right here that is—or was—important to them.” Not that I had any idea what that might be. “We need to park the car and go down that main street again. This time on foot. I think we should walk into some of these bars and little shops. Get a feel for them.”
He nodded. “I know,” he said, like he’d been fighting against it. Like doing this was going to cost him something.
He parallel-parked in front of the tiny post office and the two of us began strolling down the sidewalk, peeking into the various storefronts as if we were window shopping.
Since it was nearly six p.m., many of the places were already closed, including the corner grocery, which had a poster of Wonder Bread in the window and an orange sign next to it that read, “Sale on Peanut Butter!”
Bar #1 (with the burnt-out neon lights) was doing brisk business, though.
“You got an ID?” Donovan asked.
I grimaced, knowing what was coming. “I’ve got my driver’s license with me, yeah. But it says my real birth date.”
“What? No fake ID?” he asked, surprised.
I shook my head. Yeah, yeah, I knew it was odd. Everyone had a fake ID but me. I didn’t go out much.
“How long ‘til you’re legal?”
“In this state? Three weeks,” I admitted. I’d be eighteen on July first.
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 store 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.
“Yeah. Those two stood out. Had to be about two years back, though,” Cindy said. “Pretty sure they were here a couple of times with Ben Rainwater, God rest his soul.”
Donovan shot her a very sharp look. “Who is…or was Ben Rainwater?”
Cindy sighed. “He was from the rez. A nice guy, I always thought. Sad story, though. He died in an accident. We still miss him ‘round here.”
“What kind of an accident?” Donovan asked.
“The Bonner Mill explosion,” Cindy said.
“You brought that up earlier, didn’t you?” Donovan said, directing his question at Kim. “When, uh…when did that happen?”
Kim looked pleased to be asked. “Two summers ago.”
“Fourth of July weekend,” Cindy added. “The night before the Bicentennial.”
Donovan caught my eye, but I wasn’t able to breathe—let alone speak—after hearing this news. This was the same time frame, the same time frame exactly, that Gideon and Jeremy had disappeared. What were our brothers doing in this town? What were they doing with a man who died the same weekend they disappeared? Was it just some strange coincidence? Had they gotten caught in the same explosion as Ben Rainwater?
Or—an almost inconceivable thought—were they the ones who’d caused it?
I finally recovered my voice, though it was shaky and soft. “That’s…so sad. Does Ben have any relatives nearby?”
Cindy and Kim exchanged a look. “Just his cousin Ronny,” Kim said. “His mom and sister moved away.”
“Ronny?” Donovan parroted.
“Ronny Lee Wolf,” Cindy said. “He owns the corner grocery store. Works there ten a.m. to five p.m. every day. Even weekends.”
I knew, whether Donovan liked it or not, that we’d need to have a little conversation with Ronny tomorrow.
“Hey, Kim! Where’s my beer?” one of the pool-playing guys bellowed across the room.
“I’m comin’, Jesse!” the younger waitress bellowed back. She raced toward the bar to grab what he needed.
Cindy, older than her coworker by eight, maybe ten, years, glanced at the pool players for a moment, thoughtfully, then said, “I gotta get back to work. Y’all let me know if you have any other questions. I hope you find your friends.”
“Thanks,” Donovan murmured. “Appreciate your help.” As soon as she was gone, though, he pushed himself to standing and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
I caught one last look at Cindy taking orders on the other side of the room while Donovan shoved some cash at the bartender to cover our bill and a tip for Kim. Despite our age difference of a decade, Cindy reminded me more of myself than Kim did. And I wondered if that sense of hopelessness I read in her gestures would be my fate someday, too—especially if I kept working at Dale’s Grocery Mart, kept living with my parents in Chameleon Lake, kept postponing my dreams indefinitely.
I recognized something particular in Cindy’s gaze. Sensed she knew Kim had limited time to make her escape. Knew her own days of doing so were probably closing in behind her. And I felt a warning in Cindy’s wistful expression that led me to thoughts of college again.
It wouldn’t be easy for either me or my parents if I finally applied to a college and moved away, but I wasn’t helping them by remaining frozen in time in Minnesota. Leaving would be better than numbness, better than becoming yet another disillusioned girl who wrote eloquently about topics like women’s lib and equal rights in my high-school history papers but hoped some white knight would ride into town in his King Cobra and rescue me.
And, God, if Gideon and Jeremy were still alive, not only might I get to see them and make our families whole again, but I could be free. Really and truly free.
When we walked out into the night, it had turned darkish, past twilight, and I remembered with a sudden panic that I hadn’t yet called home.
“I need to find a payphone,” I told Donovan.
“Why?” He looked frustrated by what we’d just learned, and I could see the anger inside him simmering again, burning hot enough to leave beads of sweat on his skin.
“I promised my mother I’d call her tonight.”
He stared at me. “Why?” he repeated. “What are you gonna tell her?”
“Just that I’m fine and that the party’s going well.” My mom might barely notice my movements back at home, but her parental worry kicked into high gear when I was away.
“The party? Where does she think you are?” Donovan spit out.
“Not here,” I spit back. “And not with you.” He’d horned in on my weekend research expedition. I didn’t owe him any damn explanations.
He blew the air slowly out of his mouth, as if trying to control the flow and sizzle of his temper. Recognizing, I suspected, on some more mature level that I wasn’t the person he was actually mad at that night.
“The bartender back there, Mike, said there’s a decent motel in Ashburn Falls. They’ll have a phone.”
I glanced at my watch. “I can’t wait that long. She must be worried already.”
“Fine.” That he didn’t argue with me about this was proof he’d witnessed his own mother’s unbearable pain of loss. Knew it was an emotional hole that could never be filled, no matter how many reassurances followed.
Crescent Cove may have been a town without a gas station, but it did at least have a glass-sided phone booth, even if it was hidden in the shadows, around the corner in an alley, near the last bar on the street.
Donovan insisted on standing right next to me as I dropped my coins into the box. He scowled through the entire phone call as I fibbed to my mother about how much fun I was having at the birthday party for Betsy’s cousin. After a minute, I actually had to turn my back on him so I wouldn’t have to face his expression of disapproval.
“Well, what did you expect me to tell her?” I said to him, once I’d hung up. “The truth? Hmm? You try explaining that.”
He gritted his teeth, but I knew he didn’t have a good answer to these questions, which was why I didn’t call him on it when he said instead, “Are we free to go now?”
“Yeah,” I told him.
Technically, this was true. However, lost momentarily in the tension over my phone call home was the fact that we’d discovered some new information about events surrounding the time of our brothers’ disappearance. Aside from Gideon’s journal, this was the first real lead we’d had in two years! Just wondering what we’d learn at the little store the next day made my stomach churn with anxiety.
Then again, I had yet another reason to be nervous.
Although I’d managed to avoid thinking about spending the night with Donovan until we were on the road to Ashburn Falls, once we were actually in the Nite Lite Inn’s parking lot, I couldn’t ignore the reality of it.
Crap.
When he killed the engine on the Trans Am, he stared hard out the window before abruptly pulling his duffle bag up to the front seat. I watched as he began digging through it, eventually retrieving a thin gold ring that looked a lot like a wedding band.
“What’s that for?” I blurted.
He thrust it at me. “Put this on your left hand, at least while we’re checking in.”
I thrust it right back at him, too shocked to even bother trying to disguise it. “Are you joking, Donovan? Back at the bar, you said I was your sister. Now you need for us to pretend to be married? That’s ridiculous! It’s not the 1800s. It’s 1978. Couples check into motel rooms all the time now without even being engaged and, besides, no one knows us here.”
Donovan glanced between my face and the flashing neon lights of the motel’s “Welcome” sign and, for a moment, I was touched that this big army guy was so interested in propriety and preserving my good reputation, even among strangers, that he’d come up with such an absurd idea. That he’d actually planned for it while packing…
But he didn’t take back the ring, and he was not at all joking.
“Small-town business owners tend to be old-fashioned, Aurora,” he said. “Anyone with decent eyesight can tell you’re not my sister. We don’t have any of the same features. Kim at the bar wanted to believe that, but no hotel manager will think so. There’ll be fewer questions, and we’ll be less conspicuous this way.” A small smile replaced the words but there was no mistaking the seriousness of his command. Especially after he added, “Put it on and size it to fit.”
In examining the ring more closely, I could see it wasn’t real gold. It was kind of like a Cracker Jack prize and had a slice in it so it could be adjusted with an easy squeeze.
Sighing, I did as he requested, pressing the gold-colored band just hard enough to keep it firmly on my ring finger. Then I held up my left hand and waved it at him. “Happy now?”
He grunted something that sounded like “happiness is overrated,” but I wasn’t completely sure because he’d already jumped out of the car.
I trailed him into the motel’s office unit and hung a step or two back as the lady owner greeted us coolly, shuffled some paperwork around and made Donovan fill out a few registration sheets.
“It’ll be twelve dollars for a double bed,” she informed us, eyeing my ‘wedding’ band with undisguised curiosity. “You two newlyweds?”
“Very much so,” I told her, forcing a smile. Like as of three minutes ago.
“Congratulations,” the woman said with almost no emotion. Definitely not a romantic. “From around here?”
I shook my head and Donovan said, “Nope.” He pointed to something he’d written on the first sheet. “St. Paul,” he told her, ignoring both my sharp glance and the ten-dollar bill and two ones that I tried to hand him. “I got this…honey,” he said firmly as the older lady took a step back to snatch our room key.
“Number Nine.” The woman sniffed as she dropped the key in Donovan’s palm, and then she gestured toward a bright yellow sign hanging near the counter. “No smokin’ in bed. No, uh, real loud noises—”
Donovan raised his eyebrows at her.
“Like TV, yellin’ and…such,” she clarified. But there was no denying the suggestiveness of her words.
I fought a blush and studied the dirty tile floor as Donovan handed over the cash.
“Checkout time’s eleven a.m. tomorrow,” the woman added. “You can park your car out in front of your unit, and there’s a drop box for your key just by the office door, if you don’t have to pay for any extras, like phone calls, in the morning.”
He nodded once and swiveled toward the door. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder, as he strode outside. As usual, I followed him. Then he repositioned his Trans Am in front of “9” and grabbed our bags.
When we were safely in the privacy of our room, I whispered, “Why do you keep telling everyone we’re from St. Paul?”
“Because people here wanna think we’re big-city folks. They let their guard down with us more when we seem to be just what they expect. Human nature.”
I shook my head. “It’s human nature to be more comfortable around people who are similar to you. We should be pretending we’re from a town as small as theirs. It’s not like we have to try all that hard, Donovan. Chameleon Lake is miniscule.”
He snickered. “You’d be right if the people here would believe that, but you’re not as small-town as you think you are.” He gave me look that bordered on condescending. “And I’m sure not.”
He dumped our bags on a nubby orange armchair, flipped on the TV and adjusted the antennas. The Rockford Files was on. As we watched actor James Garner puzzle through a case, Donovan got more comfortable in the room, kicking off his sneakers, propping up a few pillows against the headboard, stretching out on the side of the double bed with his arms folded up and resting behind his neck.
If it’d been math class and there’d been a line intersecting the bed longitudinally, dividing it into halves, he would not have been charged with crossing over the midpoint. I’d give him full credit for geometric fairness, and I knew he’d keep a chaste distance from me all night, too. But I couldn’t deny how imposing he was, lounging there on the mattress, filling up such a large amount of space without even trying.
I sat awkwardly on the other side of the bed, struggling to keep myself from remembering our brothers’ graduation party and how once—very briefly—I’d felt Donovan’s big body up against mine. How I had been temporarily sandwiched between his hard torso and a hotel-room wall...
Weird to be so close to him, having that whole scene play out again in my memory, like a movie of someone else’s life. Focusing on the feelings hurt too much, though. There was always that low, jagged ache whenever I remembered my early attraction to Donovan (a.k.a. the “older mystery man” that I’d been so drawn to back then), or whenever I let myself inhale for a split second the happy silliness of summertime. The lusty, breezy freedom of it. I couldn’t help but associate those feelings with the trauma that came later.
But when I just let myself get caught up in the mental motion-picture screening of that night, it was a different experience. Easier. I could be detached from that former me, from living in a time and an emotional state that no longer existed, because it was as if I’d just been an ordinary character in an ordinary film.
And that ordinary character had been gazing at Donovan all during the grad party.
Admittedly, I’d felt a lot like an actress that night. For one thing, I wasn’t remotely as reserved as usual, thanks to being away from home and, also, being a little buzzed. At one point, the bourbon and the careless abandon of summer made me kind of bold, and I walked up to him when he was alone in the kitchenette part of the suite.
“Hey, Donovan,” I murmured, standing much closer to him than I ever would have normally. But I was nearly a high-school junior then. I thought I was almost cool.
“Aurora,” he whispered, watching me with a rare inquisitive look as I smiled at him and leaned against the mauve-colored wall. That glint of interest in his gaze gave me courage.
I reached out to stroke his chest—firm against my fingertips—and I grabbed a handful of his t-shirt because I liked the sensation of it. It was deep red, newish and much softer than I’d expected. Somehow, it made sense to me in that moment to tug him close, my fingers letting go of his shirt’s front and reaching all the way around him. Caressing his back and pressing him to me. I raised my head to kiss him and noticed he was holding his breath.
For a second, he let me touch his lips with mine. Just that one single time. Then he stepped away, abruptly, and with an apology.
“Been drinking,” he said, glancing to either side of us, not that anyone else was looking. “Sorry.”
At first I didn’t know if he’d been talking about my drinking or his. I sort of laughed. “Everyone’s been drinking. Half the people in the other room are passed out.” I shrugged. “Nobody’s, um...watching us.”
I knew Betsy was making out with some townie in the hall. My brother was on the sofa—a blonde sprawled languorously on top of him. Jeremy was smoking weed with a few people in the bathroom. I could smell it. Hear them laughing.
“You’re too young,” Donovan said simply.
I was almost sixteen then and, in my expert opinion, at least as mature as a twenty-nine year old. He’d just turned twenty-one and had to be going on about thirty-five. But I liked older men. Well, specifically, this man. He was just five years older, really. And, anyway, if he had a point, I wasn’t about to admit it.
“We’re both young and inconspicuous,” I stated. “I like it that way, Donovan.”
He squinted at me. “Hmm. You don’t want to be the center of attention, do you?”
“No. Not usually. I’m an observer. I watch people. I know you know that.” I grinned at him, feeling the strange high of being so direct and honest with someone I was attracted to. Someone I desperately wanted to touch again with my fingertips, my palms, my arms and more. I inched closer to him. “I want to get out of this bucolic little place and see the world. Anonymously.”
“Boo—what?” He stepped back to restore the distance between us and chuckled at my phrase. “Anyone ever tell you that you use too many big words?”
I didn’t answer. Alcohol made some people giddily drunk. For me, it had the primary effect of making me more introspective. And, apparently, it strengthened my vocabulary.
He exhaled, pecked a light kiss on my forehead and said, “Don’t rush things, Aurora. It’ll all happen for you.” Then, with those patronizing words still hanging in the air between us, he raised his palm in a parting wave and marched himself out of the hotel suite.
I slumped against the kitchenette wall and grimaced, hoping he’d come back—wishing and almost praying for it—but knowing he wouldn’t.
A half hour later, when Betsy stumbled in the room without the St. Cloud townie (he was snoring in the hallway), she said to me, “I’m tired. Can we go?”
So she and I left. I thought it would be years before I saw Donovan McCafferty again...but it turned out to be much sooner than that. Just a little over a month later, he came home briefly for a week, during the missing persons investigation. And everything that had happened between us before that just seemed frivolous, embarrassing and improbable.
I never would have predicted that we’d ever be in a motel room together again. That I’d be studying him like this as he sat on the bed with me, acting like he owned it, while he faked the appearance of being calm.
What a lie. He couldn’t have been more wound up if he’d been a yo-yo.
During the TV commercials, I tried to get him to strategize with me about the next day. Discuss what we’d do when we went to the corner store and found this Ronny guy. What we’d ask him.
“I don’t want to talk right now, Aurora. I don’t want to overanalyze anything. And I sure as hell don’t want to plan what I’m gonna say twelve hours from now,” he snapped. “I just want to relax, okay?” He underscored this statement by yawning loudly, stretching out even more and gluing his eyes to Jim Rockford.
Intellectually, I understood this was his way of resisting change, and I was starting to get a sense of what, exactly, fueled his anger.
I remembered beyond the investigation, even beyond the “funeral” services our parents had held for our brothers. In the early days, Donovan had been hopeful, so sure we’d find the answers quickly, much like a couple of lead actors in a detective show.
But he didn’t deal well with ambiguity. Didn’t like all the “I don’t knows” that lingered. And, so, he’d made a choice. A choice to slam the door on all hope. To reopen that door could be potentially very painful and undoubtedly very frightening.
Donovan, I realized, wasn’t a man who’d easily admit to fear. Anger, of course, was an acceptable emotion.
Sometime before the end of the show, he fell asleep on top of the bed, fully clothed—the TV crime still unsolved and me still watching him, thinking about how to get him to see the world a little more like I did. Get him to perceive a few more impulses, so he’d understand the complexity.
Not only of the situation, but of me.