Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You Read online

  THE ROAD AND BEYOND

  The Expanded Book-Club Edition of

  The Road to You

  by

  Marilyn Brant

  Smashwords Edition

  The Road and Beyond:

  The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You

  Twelfth Night Publishing

  © 2014 by Marilyn B. Weigel

  Editor: Karen Dale Harris

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book, excepting brief quotations used in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, businesses or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Smashwords License Notes:

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Learn more about New York Times & USA Today bestselling author Marilyn Brant by visiting her website:

  www.marilynbrant.com

  “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

  ~Martin Buber

  Table of Contents

  About the Book

  Aurora’s Notes - Beginning

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Aurora’s Notes - End

  Connect with Marilyn

  Soundtrack of the Story

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by Marilyn

  Dedication

  About the Author

  About the Book

  The Road and Beyond is the expanded book-club edition of The Road to You. This novel contains not only the completed original story set in the late 1970s, but it also includes the brand-new present-day tale of Aurora, now a mature and married woman with two adult sons, who must confront her worst parental nightmare.

  One Disappearance Had Been Enough To Last Her A Lifetime…

  Aurora Gray is no stranger to tragedy. In the summer of 1976, when she was just sixteen, her world turned upside down when her big brother Gideon and his best friend Jeremy disappeared. For two years, there’s no word from either of them. No trace of their whereabouts. But then, shortly after her high-school graduation, she unexpectedly finds her brother’s journal and sees that it’s been written in again. Recently. By him.

  There are secret messages coded within the journal’s pages and Aurora, who is unusually perceptive and a natural puzzle solver, is determined to follow where they lead, no matter what the cost. She confides in the only person she feels might help her interpret the clues: Donovan McCafferty, Jeremy’s older brother and a guy she’s always been drawn to…even against her better judgment.

  The two of them set out on a road trip of discovery and danger, heading westward along America’s historic Route 66 in search of their siblings and the answers to questions they haven’t dared to ask aloud. The mystery they uncover will forever change the course of their lives.

  …But Now It Was Happening Again

  Decades later, in the summer of 2014, fifty-four-year-old Aurora receives a terrifying phone call—her adult son Charlie is missing—and this news inevitably brings the memories of her adolescent years rushing back. Haunting recollections she’d hoped to keep buried.

  Were the choices she’d made in her youth responsible for her son’s disappearance now? And how on earth can she find him—quickly—so that she might be able to prevent the trauma of the past from repeating itself?

  “Hindsight is 20/20.”

  ~Unknown

  AURORA’S NOTES

  Pasadena, California ~ Summer 2020

  It’s been forty-two years since the summer of 1978. The summer I was seventeen going on eighteen. The summer I found Gideon’s journal.

  We didn’t have then what’s so commonplace now: cell phones, wireless Internet and all of our twenty-first century devices. No routine DNA testing, GPS or forensic anthropology experts like the ones so prevalent today, even on nighttime TV. If we’d had these then, it might have all been different, of course. I might have gotten my questions answered sooner, more easily.

  Or maybe not. Knowing what happened six years ago, maybe it would have been just as mystifying, only more hi-tech.

  Some things I do know from my vantage point in the future, however, and I guess if there’s a year to look back on the past with perfect clarity, 2020 would be that year.

  I would have likely felt less disconnected from my peers if I’d realized when I was younger that there were others like me out there. Those who didn’t possess any kind of extrasensory power, per se, but for whom the world was a tapestry of intuitive impulses and observations. People who were simply more perceptive than most. More aware of everything.

  But teens are notoriously self-involved. They can’t help but think they’re “special”—a quality they simultaneously crave and dread. This colored my perceptions back then, I know.

  One day, perhaps, I’ll chronicle the years between the memorable summer that defined the end of my adolescence and the weekend six summers ago that forever marked my adulthood. Especially as a mother.

  But not now.

  Now I need to share a memory. Or two, I guess. Reminiscences that unite the past with the present. The earliest ones are Kodacolor snapshots of a time that is no longer—complete with weighty, cumbersome reflections I’d worked hard to shed in my twenties, thirties, even forties, as if they were layers of warm clothing I could strip off in relief when summer began.

  Only, the seasons are cyclical, and summer is a fleeting little sparrow.

  Which is why, after these long decades, I’ve found it’s best to be truthful about the past, not try to bury it in my waking unconscious. Age has a tendency to sharpen our internal vision. At sixty years old, I crave lucidity, precision, freedom from constraint. I may have gained the ability to dance around in the heavy fabric of ambiguity, b
ut I’ve lost all desire to do it.

  So, in answer to a question I was once asked at seventeen, I’ll say boldly that, yes, I know exactly where my moral compass can be found, and I can read it clearly. I know who my traveling companions are, too—those who’ve been truest to me over time.

  As proof, I present my assembly of carefully reconstructed recollections of youth and family…of history and journeys…of loss and love. And of finding oneself again by retracing a handful of unforgettable steps.

  ~Aurora, 7-1-20

  “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to the truth;

  not going all the way, and not starting.”

  ~Buddha

  CHAPTER ONE

  Chameleon Lake, Minnesota ~ Thursday, June 8, 1978

  My hands trembled as I unlocked the cedar box in the tool shed. I listened for the distinctive click, lifted the lid and peered inside, not knowing what I’d find in its shadowy depths.

  I half expected to see my old diary resting at the bottom, even though I knew it was safely back in my room. I used to hide it in here years ago, before the key to the box was lost. A key that mysteriously resurfaced this week.

  But it wasn’t my diary.

  Instead, I found a different book. The small brown-leather journal that had once belonged to my older brother, Gideon. My only sibling. The one who’d disappeared two years ago. The one everyone said was dead.

  I bit back the usual sob that always rose up in my throat when I remembered him, then stared at the medium-sized box and its contents, almost afraid to touch anything. To my eye, my brother’s book seemed to have been conjured there, as if by magic. I hadn’t seen Gideon’s journal since the day he’d gone missing... What was written in it? And why, all of a sudden, had it reappeared—much like the key to this box—here, now?

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I snatched up the journal and began to examine it.

  Funny, even with the impression of a delicate butterfly stamped on the front cover, the book still managed to be tinged with Gideon’s masculinity. To an outsider, it probably looked like it contained some kid’s observations on nature. Something safe, simple, innocuous.

  And the first few pages really were ordinary. So typical of my big brother that I caught myself in a sigh, missing him. I still missed him so damned much—with every breath, every memory.

  Like the way he’d grin at me whenever I saw him scribbling in it. Even if I teased him about the butterfly or keeping secrets or writing notes about his girlfriends, he’d just laugh.

  “Aurora, I love butterflies and secrets...and girls,” he’d tell me, amused and so self-confident.

  But here I was, skimming through a dozen pages, and I hadn’t found any dating exploits yet. Just details about cars and engines cluttering the first third of the journal. I spotted a step-by-step flowchart for performing an oil change. Something about the testing of transmission fluid. A procedure for fixing a leaky head gasket and the supplies needed to do so:

  1 gallon antifreeze

  1 radiator drainage pan

  1 quart engine block sealer

  …and so on.

  Looked kind of like a recipe to me.

  Lists of standard adjustable wrenches (8”/203mm, 10”/254mm, 12”/305mm) and screwdrivers (Torx #15, Phillips #00) followed. I squinted at them all. For a girly, bookish seventeen-year-old like me, this was about as riveting as reading an old J.C. Penney catalog.

  I kept reading anyway, my heart pounding as I traced my brother’s words with my fingertip. The familiar raw ache twisted deeper.

  On the page, Gideon was going on for an eternity and a half, specifying the differences between long nose pliers and nippers but, truth was, I didn’t care. I knew the only reason I continued to flip the jaundiced, grease-stained pages was because this journal had once belonged to him. Just seeing that curious cramped script of his—far less even and so much smaller than my own—made me feel as though he were standing next to me, instructing me on something yet again. And Gideon had liked to teach lessons...when he was alive.

  I shoved back at least fifty memories of my warm, funny, clever big brother, grasping for the emotional anesthesia that I knew cool over-analysis would bring—my default setting ever since he’d been gone. The same questions kept running through my head, but I didn’t have any answers.

  Why was this journal here? Why was I finding it now?

  But then I turned the page once more and read a line that made me stop short.

  The strangeness of what I saw left me struggling to inhale the musty air of the tool shed, and I felt tiny shivers sweep like lightning crackles across my skin.

  The date somewhere in the middle of the page was from April 1976, but notated in the upper right-hand corner was a much more recent date: Monday, May 29, 1978.

  Memorial Day. Less than two weeks ago.

  I checked and double-checked the numbers, almost positive my eyesight was playing tricks on me in the dim light. I had to be misreading this. It couldn’t be real.

  A few months after Gideon disappeared, the cops told us he must be dead. Insisted it had to be true. And due to the force of everyone’s conviction, my parents and I had been persuaded to accept the police’s assessment…although, I could never quite squelch the flicker of hope that lurked in my heart and flared up at the oddest moments. I could never really stop believing that everyone might just be wrong.

  And now I had this.

  Underneath the recent date were the words: Start here. G.

  Logical or not, it was as if this were a message written just for me. Oh, God. Could it be?

  My brain swam in a soup of questions and possibilities, a mix of elements and matter. Whos, hows and whens. Origins and endings. My hidden flicker of hope burst into flame.

  There had been a lot of strangers filtering through our town over Memorial Day weekend—visitors from places nearby, friends and relatives of residents, the occasional herd of curious wildlife—for the annual Chameleon Fest. Three days of hastily assembled carnival rides, taste tests, fireworks in the evening. A weekend of some small excitement in our otherwise sleepy lakeside village.

  And then the key to the cedar box reappeared.

  It had been lost for ages but, out of nowhere, it materialized again. In my room. In my desk. In my plastic paperclip tray.

  Gideon used to tease me about how much I loved personalized stationery and office supplies. All of my neatly stacked notepads. My smooth-writing Bic pens. My colored bulletin-board tacks. For a couple of days, I tried to dismiss my discovery. I tried to convince myself I’d just overlooked the key in my numbness of the past two years.

  But the jab of peculiarity pressed upon my senses and only grew stronger.

  It was too strange to have found the key there, buried beneath a sea of paperclips, since I knew I’d replenished them just a few weeks ago. Even in grief, I wasn’t someone who’d forget something like that. And I couldn’t keep denying my instincts.

  Standing here in the middle of the tool shed and holding Gideon’s journal, I knew for sure that finding this key couldn’t have been accidental. Like the trajectory of a pinball, if you hit the metal flapper so it connected with the ball in just the right, sweet spot, it would send the orb rolling with a smack, straight into the diamond center and—bing, bing, bing, bing, bing—you’d get the 10,000-point bonus.

  The person who put the key in my paperclip bin knew I’d eventually find it, recognize it and head to the tool shed to hunt down the cedar box.

  The person who put the key in my paperclip bin knew how organized I was, how much of a puzzle solver I’d always been and that I wouldn’t stop looking until I’d found the box, opened it and discovered the journal resting there.

  And the only someone who would know these things about me was my brother.

  Somehow, Gideon must have come into town on Memorial Day weekend, snuck into the house while we were away and left the key for me, knowing the path he’d set me on.

&
nbsp; Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

  I felt myself slam into the 10,000-point bonus, my mind reeling. I tried to shake the mental machine hard enough to clear my head. Flash. Bing. Tilt.

  But it was too late. My world had already tilted and, suddenly, I knew I was playing a very different game.

  ***

  I wandered back to our house, my brain still swirling and Gideon’s voice—loud and insistent—in my mind.

  “You can’t tell,” I could almost hear him say. A line from our childhood that he’d used more than once when he was doing something dangerous.

  “Mom and Dad will freak,” he’d add. Then he’d laugh and try to reassure me.

  “Oh, stop worrying, Sis. They don’t have to know everything all the time.”

  “We’re not kids anymore. We can handle this.”

  “Trust me, it’ll be fine. Really.”

  And it usually was...until it wasn’t. Until, one day, he was gone.

  Any normal person would’ve ignored the pleading voice from the past and run, not walked, to the telephone, to call her still-grieving parents. To give them a surge of hope that their missing son might be alive after all. Because, oh, God—I didn’t want to witness even another minute of my parents’ pain. Not if it was within my power to stop it.

  But I wasn’t a totally normal person. I knew intuitively—with a mysterious certainty I’d come to expect and rely on—that this wasn’t what Gideon wanted. He didn’t want my parents to find the journal. He wanted me to find it.