Up the Creek

by Alissa C. Grosso

Tom reached into his pocket and slipped out a wallet. He searched inside before pulling out something and handing to Lance. It was a business card, but not his own. This one was purple with a watercolor background. The name on it was Phelicity Green. Her title was listed as Dream Whisperer.

  “If he ever does experience any more difficulties, I can highly recommend Phelicity. She’s exceptional. Really helped me to heal my chakras and correct the energy flow in my life, and it made all the difference.”

  “Thank you,” Lance said, and he waved the card in the air before slipping it into his pocket to indicate how grateful he was for this gift.

  “That was fucking brilliant, man!”

  Corey had just downed his third bloody mary, and all his sentences came out as shouts. Other diners in the steakhouse where they were enjoying their celebratory lunch swiveled around to gawk at the commotion. The attention might have made some uncomfortable, but Lance reveled in it. After all, they were the cool kids in the room.

  “That shit about your son and his nightmares? Stroke of genius!” Corey waved his celery stick garnish in the air, and red droplets splattered on the crisp white tablecloth.

  The waitress came by to check on them. She didn’t actually tell them to keep it down, but it was implied in the way she asked if there was anything she could get for them.

  “How about your number?” Corey did that thing where he waggled his eyebrows at her. It was something he had been doing since he was at least fifteen. Back then, the girls at the annual combined school dance had thought it was cute, but at thirty it just made him look pathetic. It didn’t help that he was wearing his wedding band.

  “Excuse me?” the waitress said.

  “Sorry,” Lance said. “Don’t mind him. He’s just a bit giddy. We had some good news earlier.”

  The waitress left them, but not without a backward glance that brimmed with disgust. Lance decided it would probably be a good idea if they didn’t order anything else, because there was a strong risk it would be laced with annoyed waitress spit.

  “Some good news,” Corey repeated with a bark of a laugh. “Understatement of the year! Hey, sorry, man. I had no idea that Marks character was going to be such a weirdo, but you picked up on it, didn’t you? That’s why our planned speech didn’t work, but you saw that, didn’t you? Genius!”

  “Sometimes you have to improvise.” Lance didn’t add that improvising was pretty much what he had been doing his whole life.

  “Healed his chakras,” Corey muttered. “Weirdo. Hey, what was that card he gave you anyway?”

  Lance fished the business card out of his pocket and passed it across the table to Corey. The glossy purple coating caught the light as Corey read it.

  “Phelicity Green,” Corey said. “Dream whisperer. Yeah, I bet she healed his chakras. I wouldn’t mind healing her chakras, if you know what I’m saying.”

  Lance did that thing where he smiled and sort of half-laughed, but he noticed more glares from the others in the restaurant. It was probably time to get the check.

  “We should get back to the office,” Lance suggested.

  Corey waved the idea away as if it was absurd.

  “Hey, did you see this?” Corey asked, still looking at the business card. “Says she’s in Culver Creek. Isn’t that your old stomping grounds?”

  The floor fell out from under Lance. He felt like he was tumbling off a skyscraper after being punched in the gut. The house of cards he had so meticulously constructed began to fall in on itself.

  “Culver Creek?” He managed to squeak out the words through a suddenly dry throat. “No, I never lived in Culver Creek.”

  “No, I know you’re from Atkins, but isn’t Culver Creek near there?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lance said. The relief took several seconds to make it to his racing heart. “I mean, kind of. Not that far, I guess.”

  “Small world.” Corey flipped the business card back to Lance, and it skimmed into a red bloody mary droplet. “Where’s that waitress? I need another drink.”

  “We should get back.” Lance wiped the business card on his napkin and shoved it back in his pocket. “Hey, I’m gonna hit the john.”

  Lance splashed cool tap water on his face and patted it dry with a couple of paper towels. He had almost lost it back there. Stupid. Thankfully, Corey was mildly inebriated and probably hadn’t noticed a thing, but that was just luck.

  Then there was the meeting earlier. He had almost screwed that up completely. He had saved himself, and it all came right in the end, but he had come very close to ruining things. Way too close. He needed to get it together.

  He wasn’t getting enough sleep, not quality sleep. He couldn’t function without sleep. It may have been a line from Zooest ad copy, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Something needed to be done about Adam’s nightmares. Caitlin was dead set against taking Adam to a shrink, but this problem seemed to be above the pediatrician’s pay grade.

  He fired off a quick text to his mother. He had already discussed his concerns about Adam and the bad dreams. His text said he wanted to try taking Adam to a psychologist but that Caitlin was resistant to the idea, and he wondered if she had any advice. He hesitated for a second before hitting the send button. Maybe this was the sort of thing more worthy of a phone call than a text, but he didn’t have time for that.

  He needed to get back out there. If he left Corey alone for too long, he would order another drink, or worse, attempt to grab the waitress’s ass or something. He hit the Send button and headed out of the men’s room.

  3

  Culver Creek, Pennsylvania, population 14,335. It was home to the Everluster Paint factory and the Rixby Potato Chip plant. The town was named for the body of water that wound through it. The creek was barely more than a trickle of water much of the year, though it swelled up after heavy rains, and during the spring rainy season it resembled a raging river. On a few notable occasions it had overflowed its banks and flooded homes and businesses in and around Culver Creek’s downtown.

  Right now it was somewhere in between, thanks to the rain they had the previous day. Sage Dorian stared at the water as he sat in his department-issue car eating a tomato-and-Swiss sandwich.

  Culver Creek’s two factories meant that the small town would always have a certain number of transients, and that led to the occasional problem, but for the most part this was a quiet, working-class town. Major crimes were nearly nonexistent, except, of course, for that one—the one that made Culver Creek famous in the crime forums.

  A nineteen-year-old unsolved murder was the reason he had up and moved to this sad little town in the middle of nowhere. When he thought about it too much, he’d start to wonder if he was as mentally stable as he pretended to be. He feared the answer. Moving to a strange town because of a little girl he’d never known who had gotten killed there nineteen years ago was hardly the most impulsive thing he had done. He owed his whole career to an obsession with web sleuth crime forums that stemmed from an entirely different unsolved murder.

  It was how he had wound up in law enforcement, first as a uniformed officer and then as a detective in a small Pennsylvania city. He had job security and just enough work to keep him from being too bored. But he’d thrown it all away when he saw the job posting that someone from the web sleuth forum had shared with him.

  Two weeks later, he headed to the town, which was somewhat notorious on the forum, for a job interview.

  Five months ago, Sage Dorian sat in the Culver Creek police department trying his best not to sweat through his interview suit. Rayanne Lawrence drummed her fingers on the desk as she reviewed his resume. Culver Creek’s chief of police didn’t rate a big shiny office, but it was her own private space, which was more than any of the other officers in the department had. Her fingernails, like her hair, were cut short and practical. Sage guessed her to be around thirty-five. He attempted to do his best Sherlock Holmes on her, trying to read her life story in the condition of her skin and the way she wor
e her clothes.

  From the way she held herself, he got the impression she hadn’t grown up with much. Maybe she was raised by a single mom. Was she from Culver Creek or a nearby town? If she was from here, she would have grown up in one of those apartment buildings downtown or maybe one of the sad little houses near the town’s two factories. He had been in Culver Creek all of twenty minutes, but he had spent a lot of time reading up on the town via internet forums, and he got the impression of a closed-off town that didn’t trust outsiders much. For them to make Rayanne Lawrence, a woman, chief of police, she would probably have to be from here. She would have worked her way up from the bottom. He liked this about her. He felt a kinship with her.

  “So, I have to ask,” she said after a few moments, “why are you applying for this job, Sage?”

  She spoke in the blunt, direct way of a cop. He knew he wasn’t wrong about her working her way up the ranks. He also knew this wasn’t just some canned job interview question. She was genuinely mystified why someone with his background would leave a city police department, where he was on track to be promoted to lieutenant and later captain, to come to this backwater burg and take what was effectively a dead-end detective job. He knew the right answer was not that he was looking for a challenge.

  Folded into the smallish chair that sat across from Rayanne’s desk, Sage shifted in an effort to get comfortable. He found that most furniture seemed to be constructed for someone of a smaller stature.

  “I think it would be a good fit for me,” Sage said.

  Rayanne nodded speculatively as she gave him an appraising look. A support bar in the chair dug into the backs of his thighs, and it took every ounce of his willpower not to shift around again. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was squirming beneath her gaze. It felt like this was what she wanted, and for one conspiracy-theory moment, he entertained the thought that she had deliberately chosen this too-small chair for the interview because she wanted him to be uncomfortable. Of course, that was absurd. She wouldn’t have known how tall he was until he showed up here.

  “I’m just wondering if you’ll find the pace of things here a bit slow for your liking,” Rayanne said. “We don’t have too many murders.”

  He wondered if she was baiting him.

  “If memory serves,” Sage said, “wasn’t there a notorious murder in this town some years ago?”

  She raised one eyebrow at him, and her lips twitched into what could have been called a smirk.

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  “Comes with the territory,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but that was probably the last exciting thing to happen in this town, and that was nearly twenty years ago.”

  Was it weird to describe the murder of a little girl as an “exciting thing”? Sage thought the word choice made him even more uncomfortable than the chair he was sitting in, but the murder had occurred long before Rayanne was a cop. Temporal distance could make people forget about the human victims of old tragedies. He wondered what the cutoff point was when a murder victim ceased to be a human and became a sort of mythical figure. He figured it had to be more than six years. Six years hardly seemed to be any time at all.

  As if she could read his mind, Rayanne asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

  I want to have caught my sister’s murderer, he thought, but of course he didn’t say that out loud.

  “I’d like to be in a position where my work makes a difference, where people are more than just numbers.”

  “The town council has mandated that the department add a detective to our staff,” she explained. “There was a series of incidents, nothing too serious, but they all happened to occur right in a row and no arrests were made.” She ticked them off one by one on her fingers. “A series of businesses downtown were burglarized, a woman was attacked while walking home from work one night, and then someone stole some equipment and fixtures from the park. As crime waves go, it was fairly mild. So if that’s the sort of police work that would suit you, the job is yours.”

  A month after he got the job, he had solved the three crime wave cases. Well, the one—the missing park equipment—had already been solved. That had been local teens messing around, and since some of the guys on the force knew some of the kids’ parents, they had handled things quietly without arresting anyone. Sage traced the downtown burglaries to a meth addict living in one of the apartment buildings in town. That took less than half a day. Finding the woman’s attacker required a little more digging, but in the end it all stemmed from a love triangle and a case of mistaken identity.

  Sage had been on the job five months, and Rayanne Lawrence had been right about the slower pace. Detective work in Culver Creek was boring as sin, but that was all about to change. This morning he had asked and Rayanne had granted Sage permission to tackle Culver Creek’s notorious cold case, the murder of Lily Esposito.

  But it was a different murder on Sage’s mind as he watched the creek and finished his sandwich. Last night he dreamed about Melodie. His sister showed up at his front door, much the way she had shown up at his college dorm room the last time he saw her. In his dream, she kept trying to tell him something, but her voice was too quiet or there were too many other noises for him to hear what she said. He awoke frustrated, never having heard her words. Well, he didn’t need a dream interpretation guide to know what that meant.

  Memories of the last time he had seen his sister started to come back to him, and he crumpled up the last few bites of his sandwich in the paper wrapper and shoved it into a plastic shopping bag. He didn’t have time for that. He had a murder to solve.

  4

  Caitlin Walker had not had a dream in over nine years. It was hard to believe she had experienced nearly a decade of beautiful, dreamless sleep, but maybe that was why she could still remember bits and pieces of the nightmares she had when she was younger with such vivid clarity. There was another explanation; a memory popped into her head of her mother seated at their kitchen table frantically scribbling down Caitlin’s words in a notebook as she dutifully described her latest dream.

  It was better if Adam didn’t describe his nightmares. Better for who? Caitlin ignored the voice in her head. This wasn’t about her comfort. This was about not making the dream real by describing it. It would be that much more difficult to forget once he framed it with words.

  Certainly that was the case for Caitlin, who had spent the better part of the morning obsessing over the dream Adam had described to her the previous night, or at least replaying a scene in her head that looked an awful lot like the ugly dream Adam had described. The creepy shadows could not obscure the little girl standing beside the creek, the fear on her face as she looked up at the big rock bearing down on her. Caitlin saw the girl’s crumpled form lying in the mud beside the creek. She saw the blood that ran down her pale face. Adam said there had been a bad boy that hurt the girl, but that wasn’t right. It was a man, Caitlin was sure of it.

  Her phone pinged with a notification, and she abandoned the memory and returned to the real world. She glanced at the phone to make sure it wasn’t any kind of alert from Adam’s nursery school. It wasn’t. She saw her mother-in-law’s name on the display and decided she could safely ignore it. Raquel was probably busy planning her latest party and wanted to brag to Caitlin about the menu she had ordered from the caterer or some other inanity.

  Instead Caitlin returned to her work, or in this case the blank screen she had been staring at for the better part of the day. The graphic design firm Caitlin worked for was generous enough to allow her to work from home most days. This was perfect because it meant she didn’t have to hire a babysitter for Adam or send him to daycare. And in an ideal world, it meant that the three days per week he had his full-day pre-k, she had hours of distraction-free time to get work done. Distractions managed to find her all the same. Even in a quiet house, she was capable of distracting herself by worrying about Adam and the nig
htmares that plagued him on a near daily basis.

  “Enough,” she said to her empty office, and reread the project notes for what must have been the tenth time.

  They were working on an ad campaign for a state lottery commission. It was a huge account and a major score for the agency. Caitlin was honored and proud that Brittney had entrusted her with the ad design, but stupid doubts and her old sense of inferiority were interfering with her ability to create. Then there was the slogan. “Dreams come true.” On the surface it was a simple, maybe even banal slogan, but every time Caitlin read it, she found herself taking it literally. That image of the little girl lying dead in the mud came back to her, and it was all she could see. She tried to conjure up visions of someone gleefully driving an expensive car or waving from the window of a palatial home, and for a moment she saw these things, then the dead little girl chased them from her mind.

  Maybe she should tell Brittney she wasn’t the right person for this ad campaign. How would she put it? She could say she wasn’t feeling it. She knew how well that would go over with her business-minded boss. Plus, if she turned down a major project like this, they would be that much less likely to give her big accounts going forward. No, she had to knuckle down and get this done. She wouldn’t get distracted by the slogan. She would leave that part until the end, get everything else set first.

  She took a deep breath and got as far as opening her artwork folder when her phone rang. Unless it was the school, she wasn’t picking up. She looked at the display. Oh, good. It was her mother-in-law. Was she calling because Caitlin hadn’t responded to her text message quick enough? Caitlin had asked Lance on more than one occasion to tell his mother not to bug her during the day when she was working, but it was useless. Raquel didn’t seem to understand that what Caitlin did was actual work and not some sort of quirky hobby. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Raquel spent her days surrounded by women who were fellow members of the Flower Arranging Society or the Lunching Ladies or any of the dozen or so social clubs she belonged to.