Free The Road to You by Marilyn Brant Page A

private, though. And I want to check your brother’s journal again, too.”
    We drove down one of the long country roads, headed in the direction of the St. Croix Chippewa Tribal Lands.
    “We should poke around the Reservation area,” I said. “And check out the site of this Bonner Mill, too.” The more we looked around, the more people I could talk to face to face, the more subtle information I’d be able to pick up.
    “First we go through everything in this bag. Then,” he said, “we’ll see.”
    After about a mile or so, he pulled the car into the driveway of an abandoned farmhouse, parked in the shade and began rifling through the contents of the sack—very gingerly.
    As he studied each of the fireworks, he sniffed them, looked at their wicks and their casings, tested their weight in his palms and gently set them down on the dashboard, until he’d lined most of them up like a ragtag band of soldiers.
    “Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath as he held up a pair of red-tube firecrackers, each one not even two inches long, but they had a stiff fuse sticking out of their middles and paper end caps covering their sides like little bonnets.
    To me, they looked kind of like those fake bombs you might see on a kids’ cartoon. The ones poor Wile E. Coyote used to try to blow the Roadrunner up with—again and again.
    Donovan wasn’t laughing, though. “These are M-80s, Aurora. They might look harmless to you but, if they’re what I think they are, they’ve got about sixty times more flash powder in each tube than is legal in the U.S.A. And there are cherry bombs in here and…oh, shit.” He pulled something silvery out of the bag. “Original quarter sticks.”
    “What’s that mean?” I asked.
    My brother was the kind of kid who was always building models or experimenting with chemistry sets, taking apart old clocks or connecting electrical circuits—none of which I’d had any personal interest in growing up. I’d only played with sparklers on the Fourth of July and the occasional child-friendly Roman candle our dad had gotten for Gideon and me at the local drugstore.
    To my inexperienced eye, the cherry bombs didn’t look all that different from the smoke bombs I saw my brother and some of the neighbor boys fooling around with when we were kids, but Donovan was staring in horror at the silver tube in his hand. It was, maybe, four-inches long but he was looking at it like it was a lethal weapon.
    He let out a long, slow breath. “It means if we get caught with this, we’ll get one hell of a fine.”
    He shook his head, careful not to jostle the firecracker too much as he scrutinized it from every angle, looking for markings, touching the green fuse with just the tip of his index finger and wincing as if it hurt him to have to hold it.
    “Legal quarter sticks can only have fifty milligrams of flash powder,” Donovan explained. “Too many people got injured using originals like these, so they outlawed them. But this particular firecracker was either made a dozen years ago, before the ban, or it was made recently and in secret. From the size and heft to it, it most likely has ten grams of flash powder. That’s two hundred times more than the legal limit. Enough to blow off a hand and, possibly, even kill a man.”
    Scary.
    I leaned as far away from it as I could get in the passenger’s seat. “Do you think Ronny makes them himself?” I asked. “Or, maybe, it’s something they assemble together on the Reservation. Maybe it’s not illegal there.”
    “Maybe, maybe not, but I can tell you it’s illegal everywhere else. I spent four years in the U.S. Army, and I did some demolition work for a while. The M in M-80 stands for ‘Military.’ These are low explosives. Not as destructive as dynamite with high-explosive material like nitroglycerine and picric acid, but it’s no plaything either. One spark of static electricity in the wrong place and boom!”
    I flinched.
    “Would you open up the