Up the Creek

by Alissa C. Grosso

  The parking area was significant because it was the nearest creek access to where Lily had been killed. The surrounding area was residential. This little strip of pavement and the short path that led down to the creek was town property. The murderer had either walked down this little path to the creek or had done as Lily and Jade had most likely done and cut through a backyard to get there.

  The terrain on the opposite side of the creek meant that the killer almost certainly came from this bank. Navigating the narrow path or one of the backyards in the dark suggested to Sage someone local, someone who knew the area well enough to find their way around in the dark.

  No one recalled seeing a car parked in the pull-off that night, but Sage had read the interviews closely. While no one could recall seeing a car there, there was also no one who could say with certainty that the parking area had been empty. Sage slowly turned around. There was only one, maybe two houses that would have really had a clear view of the parking area, and then only from certain windows. How likely was it that they would be looking out them in the middle of the night?

  Someone could have parked in the parking area long enough to walk down to the creek and murder Lily and leave without anyone ever noticing, but why? And how would the killer have known Lily and Jade would be down at the creek? Had they arranged to meet the girls there? Was it just dumb luck?

  Lily would have tried to run away from a stranger she met at the creek. She wouldn’t have stood there facing them. His skin prickled as he stood there looking at his car parked on the shoulder, but he wasn’t seeing it. He was seeing Melodie’s little Kia, pulled off at the side of the road less than a hundred feet from where they had found her body.

  She had been working the closing shift that night. She was killed sometime between ten fifteen and eleven p.m. Her car had been in working order, so why would she have pulled off the road and gotten out of it? Could she have stopped to try to help what she assumed was another motorist in distress? He knew his sister and couldn’t see her doing something so foolish. Not that late at night, anyway. She would have called for help, perhaps, but she wouldn’t have stopped her car and got out, unless it was someone she knew, and that was the thing, wasn’t it? Like Lily Esposito, Melodie had been facing her killer. She hadn’t tried to run away.

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” Melodie said to him. He could hear her voice like she was right there, and like history repeating itself, he ignored her phantom voice. He stepped into his car, slammed the door after him and drove away like he could escape his past mistakes.

  10

  Brittney’s office looked like it had come straight out of a catalog. Her desk and the bookcases held a small assortment of accent pieces, giving it just the right amount of color, but the whole room had an impersonal feel. Caitlin had never really noticed the lack of photographs and mementos in her boss’s office before, and realizing it now made her feel pity for Brittney, who had devoted her life to her business. The pity didn’t last long.

  “I don’t suppose you know why I asked you to come in here today,” Brittney said. She sat behind her desk. Caitlin sat in one of the expensive but uncomfortable chairs across from her while Adam played quietly on the floor beside her. She had picked him up from school a little early so she could make it to this afternoon meeting on time.

  Caitlin had misread Brittney’s neutral tone on the phone and assumed the meeting was to discuss some new, upcoming project, but now she wasn’t so sure. She shook her head because she felt too nervous to speak.

  “Look, you’re a hard worker, and your work is good, top-notch,” Brittney said. “I’ve always thought so.”

  “Thank you,” Caitlin said, still confused about where Brittney was going with this.

  “But I think you also understand how important this business is to me, and how I can’t afford anything that jeopardizes our accounts,” Brittney continued.

  “Of course,” Caitlin said. Beside her, Adam asked her something, but she tried to silently signal to him that now was not the right time.

  “Last week, you mistakenly sent an email to our liaison at the lottery commission that should have been sent here to the office,” Brittney said.

  Panic seized Caitlin. She had no recollection of making this error, but she realized it was a real possibility. She searched her memory for emails she had sent last week. Could she have made some sort of disparaging remark about the lottery people or the campaign? But nothing came to mind.

  “I’m sorry,” Caitlin stammered. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Brittney waved the comment away. “It was no big deal, nothing damaging in the message. This time.”

  Adam was on his feet now, tugging on Caitlin’s sleeve to get her attention. She couldn’t gracefully ignore him. She held up a finger to pause the conversation with her boss and turned to her son.

  “What is it?” Caitlin whispered to him.

  “I’m tired of playing with my dinosaur,” he said.

  Caitlin dug through the tote bag she had brought with her and found some paper and a box of crayons, which she handed to Adam. Satisfied, he sat back down on the floor and began doodling.

  “Sorry,” Caitlin said, turning back to Brittney.

  “Right, well. It’s not the first mistake I’ve noticed,” Brittney said. “And I’m worried that the next time you mistakenly send an email like this, it will be far more damaging.”

  “Honestly, it was just a stupid mistake,” Caitlin said. “It won’t happen again.” She glanced at Adam humming to himself as he colored quietly. “We’ve been having a difficult time lately. It’s Adam. He’s been having these nightmares.”

  Brittney nodded in a way that Caitlin supposed was meant to be sympathetic, but it felt hollow.

  “You know, I was going to say that you looked exhausted,” Brittney said, “but I didn’t want to be rude.”

  Caitlin nodded slowly. The truth was, thanks to her Pacifcleon, her sleep hadn’t really been affected by Adam’s nightmares. She slept soundly and tended to get a minimum of eight hours of solid sleep each night, but no way was she going to mention that now after her young, perky boss told her she looked tired.

  “It’s just a phase, I’m sure,” Caitlin said, glancing again at Adam. He pressed so hard on the paper with the red crayon in his fist that she was sure it would break.

  “You know, sometimes you just can’t do it all,” Brittney said. “You have to pick between being a mother and having a career.”

  Caitlin tried to tamp down the rage that began to boil inside of her. What did childless Brittney know about being a mother? And what kind of antiquated, sexist bullshit was this women-can’t-be-mothers-and-have-careers philosophy of hers?

  There were a lot of choice words Caitlin could have said, but all that came out was, “Are you firing me? Is that what this is?”

  “No, absolutely not.” Brittney acted mock-horrified at the very suggestion, even though that had clearly been the implication of her words. “But I can’t stress enough that we can’t afford to have any more errors like this. Maybe for now it’s best that you don’t email the clients directly, at all, just in case. We can do everything through an intermediary here at the office.”

  “It will take more time.” Caitlin didn’t often have reason to email clients, but when she did, it was usually to ask a quick question about a design she was working on. Having to do this through a third person here at the office would just add to the time it would take to get a response.

  “It will,” Brittney said, “but for now I think that’s the best solution.”

  Her sentence was light, but still Caitlin bristled at the idea of being punished. Brittney began talking about some upcoming projects they would be working on, but Caitlin barely heard her as she silently fumed. It was only when Brittney rose from her desk that she realized the meeting had mercifully concluded. Caitlin stood as well, then leaned down to gather up Adam’s things.

  “Come on,” she said to him. “We�
�ve got to get going.”

  “I drew you a picture,” Adam said.

  He handed her the masterpiece he had been working on, and at first glance all she saw was a page full of crayon scribbles, but soon the drawing resolved itself into an all-too-familiar picture. Her attention was drawn first to the intense red scribbles. Blood, she saw now. It spurted from the top of the little girl’s head. It dripped from the rock held in the tall man’s hand. It ran into the blue squiggles of water. Beyond this was another girl, a little shorter than the bleeding one. Caitlin could clearly see the tears on the girl’s face. In an instant she was seeing not Adam’s drawing in front of her, but the image that was so seared in her memory. This was exactly how it had looked, but how could Adam have known this? She knew how. He was drawing a picture of his nightmare, but why would he have a nightmare about this now?

  “Caitlin?” From a million miles away, she heard Brittney saying her name. “Is everything okay?” Brittney asked.

  Caitlin finally looked up from the drawing. She shoved it quickly into her tote bag, creasing its corner in her haste, not that this was a drawing she would be hanging on the refrigerator.

  “Fine,” Caitlin said. “We’ve got to go.”

  She bustled Adam into his windbreaker, but her hands were shaking too badly to zip it, and she left it undone as she led him out of her boss’s office.

  “Don’t forget to stop in with Tonya and fill out that updated form,” Brittney said.

  Caitlin nodded even though she had no idea what form Brittney was talking about, and she had no intention of going to see Tonya. She just wanted to get the hell out of there.

  As Caitlin drove home, her mind was a million miles away, or more accurately, nineteen years away. She was ten years old, but she could remember it as if it happened yesterday. She awoke in the dark with her heart racing from a terrifying dream. None of her psychic dreams were especially pleasant, but this one had been truly awful, maybe the worst one yet.

  In her dream, she had watched a little girl get attacked by a man wielding a rock. They had been beside some sort of river or stream, and she had watched the girl collapse to the ground and saw with frightening clarity the way the blood flowed from the wound on her head and ran into the water. There was another little girl there as well, and she stood there silently, frozen with fear, her eyes wide as saucers.

  Caitlin wanted to go back to sleep and forget all about the awful dream, but the dream didn’t want to be forgotten. She tossed and turned until the sky turned to the purply-blue of early morning. The house was still silent, but she rose and dressed before heading downstairs. When she couldn’t find anything good to watch on television, she put her Little Mermaid tape into the VCR, but even Ariel couldn’t distract her from the frightening nightmare.

  She didn’t want to tell her mother about the dream. She didn’t want to speak or think about the awful, ugly thing. So when her mother came down and made breakfast for her and inevitably asked if Caitlin had any dreams the previous evening, she shook her head no. Was it the way she shook her head? Was it the haunted look in her eyes? Whatever it was, her mother was not fooled by her denial. She knew Caitlin had a dream, and she wanted to know all about it.

  Caitlin let her cereal turn to soggy mush in the bowl as she shared the details of the frightening dream. Her mother jotted them down in her notebook, and though she made an effort to remain impassive, Caitlin noticed the little shudder that went through her when she described the attack.

  “Who was the girl?” her mother wanted to know. “Did you recognize her?”

  For the second time that morning, Caitlin shook her head, but this time she was being honest. She had never seen the girl before. Her mother wanted to know what the girl looked like.

  “She had dark hair,” Caitlin said.

  “Was she your age? Could it be someone you go to school with?”

  Caitlin shook her head to both questions. The girl was younger, definitely.

  “She looked like maybe she was in first or second grade.” Caitlin closed her eyes and pictured the terrible dream even though she really didn’t want to, and she noticed another detail. The dress the girl was wearing had ruffled cap sleeves and an illustration on the front, and Caitlin realized it wasn’t a dress at all. “I think she was wearing her pajamas,” Caitlin said when she reopened her eyes, “a nightshirt.”

  Her mother dutifully noted this detail in her notebook. She pressed Caitlin for more details about the man in the dream. What did he look like? Did Caitlin recognize him?

  Caitlin hadn’t spent as much time in the dream looking at the man as she had the little girls, but she had caught a glimpse of him. Except for the fact that he was wielding a rock as a weapon, he didn’t seem that scary at all.

  “Did you recognize him?” her mother asked. “Maybe he’s the dad of one of the kids you go to school with.”

  To Caitlin this seemed like a strange suggestion, but just like with the girl, she was sure she had never seen him before. Caitlin was relieved when her mother finally ran out of questions. She thought it was all over, but in truth it was only beginning.

  Because that night her mother was watching the news when she saw the story about the little girl in Pennsylvania who was killed in a brutal and shocking murder. The news story offered scant details, but the school portrait of the little girl with the dark pigtails and the information that the murder had occurred outdoors near a creek, in the middle of the night, made her shout Caitlin’s name.

  Caitlin looked up from the picture she had been coloring to see the all-too-familiar face on the screen.

  “What’s going on?” her father asked as her mother ran to grab a pen and paper to write down the phone number to call for tips.

  “Caitlin saw the murder,” her mother said, “in her dream.”

  Her father looked over at Caitlin, and his look was both sympathetic and concerned. Maybe if he had spoken up and said something right then, everything would have been different, but as usual he said nothing, and within seconds Luanne had their cordless kitchen phone and was dialing the tips number.

  Caitlin slammed on her brakes, and the Land Cruiser lurched to a sudden stop, but it was a fraction of a second too late. The bumper had connected with the fender of the small black car. She blinked in surprise as she tried to make sense of what had just happened. She knew the intersection well. They were just a couple of blocks from home. Had she not seen the black car before proceeding through the stop sign? But as she tried her best to recall the last minute or so, she had the sudden awful realization that she had gone straight through the intersection without stopping.

  Someone rapped on her window, and she jumped. She stared at the woman standing there in surprise.

  “Are you okay?” the woman asked. Caitlin nodded her reply.

  The driver of the black car stepped out, and he was swearing and waving his fist in the air. Two other cars had pulled over to the curb, and now their drivers stepped out to assist. One of them, a large man, intervened before the angry, shouting driver made his way over to Caitlin. The woman at Caitlin’s window said she should move her car out of the intersection and wait for the police, which she did.

  “What’s going on?” Adam asked in the backseat.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Caitlin assured him, and she hoped she was right.

  11

  At dinner, Caitlin said she didn’t want to talk about her accident. Well, maybe said was the wrong word. It was more like she snarled the words in an angry, under-her-breath sort of way. Lance thought she meant she didn’t want to talk about it in front of Adam because she didn’t want to upset him. Lance thought it was sort of like the way she insisted they stress to him that his dreams weren’t real, as if he was going to go around telling his son that the monsters in his nightmares were real. Sometimes Lance thought his wife assumed he was an idiot.

  But now that Adam was safely tucked in his bed and they were sequestered behind their closed bedroom door, he felt it w
as safe to bring up the little fender bender. He waited impatiently in bed as Caitlin puttered endlessly in the bathroom. He roasted beneath the too-thick comforter, and he flung it back to try to cool off.

  “This comforter’s too warm,” he said in a voice loud enough for her to hear in the bathroom. “What happened to the old one? That one was better.”

  “That one was ugly,” Caitlin said, at last emerging from the bathroom.

  “It looked fine to me,” Lance said. One downside to having a graphic designer as a wife was that Caitlin was always picking form over function. Sometimes it was maddening. She rolled her eyes at him as she went over and unlocked the bedroom door. That was the other maddening thing. “I don’t see what difference it makes if our door is locked,” he said. “It’s not like Adam ever gets out of bed and comes looking for us.”

  “Well, what’s the point in keeping it locked?” she asked.

  The argument was valid, and he couldn’t explain to her why it was better to keep the door locked. It didn’t really matter. He would wait until she was snoring away, then get up and re-lock the door.

  Caitlin climbed into bed and pulled the bulky comforter up over her, which meant she pulled it up over his legs as well. He reminded himself that Caitlin had a rough day, and there really was no point in starting an argument over bed linens.

  “Hey, so what happened this afternoon?” he asked.

  “What happened?” she asked, like she didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. She was testing his patience, and honestly, it didn’t help that he was trapped under the blanket of molten lava.

  “The accident,” he reminded her, unable to keep his annoyance out of his voice.

  “I said I didn’t want to talk about it,” Caitlin said.