Up the Creek

by Alissa C. Grosso

  “So that’s it? You’re not going to tell me anything?” His voice was on the verge of shouting.

  “I made a mistake,” she said. “I rolled through a stop sign. I’m a fuckup of a mother who endangered the life of my child with my carelessness! Are you happy?”

  She angrily lay down on her pillow with her back to him, yanking the covers over her, which actually exposed half of Lance’s leg to mercifully cool air.

  “No, I’m not happy,” he said, careful to stay calm. Had he brought on her angry outburst with his near shouting? “Look, you’re not a fuckup. It was just a little accident. No one was hurt. I mean, even the cars barely had a scratch on them, right?”

  He waited for a response, but Caitlin didn’t say anything. Instead he heard a muffled whimpering noise. Shit, was she crying? He couldn’t believe he had made her cry.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I sounded angry,” he said.

  “What if the timing had been different?” Caitlin asked. “A second later or a few seconds earlier? The other car could have crashed into us. Adam could have been hurt or worse.” Her sniffles turned into full-out sobbing, and Lance felt helpless. He petted her shoulder as she cried herself to sleep.

  Lance knew something was wrong the second he opened his eyes. He didn’t know where he was, but he wasn’t in his bed. He also wasn’t alone. The muffled whimpering noise was vaguely familiar, and in an instant he was back at Ryerson, kneeling on the hard linoleum dormitory floor, his fists sore and raw from pummeling Eric Pitt. He felt sick.

  The queasiness brought him back to reality, and with a sudden shock, he realized where he was and what he was doing. He recognized the dim light filling the room. It was Adam’s nightlight, and the whimpering was coming not from Eric Pitt but from his own son, and—oh God, what had he done?

  He let go of what he was gripping as he realized it was his son’s neck, and he jumped back from the bed as if it were on fire. His hands didn’t ache like they had all those years ago, but he felt a stiffness in them not unlike the feeling he got after tightly gripping a screwdriver or the steering wheel. But the thing he had been gripping wasn’t an inanimate object. Seconds ago, his fingers had been wrapped about his son’s small, fragile neck. For how long?

  “Adam,” Lance whispered urgently. He heard only whimpers in the silence. “Adam?” He said it again, more tentative, on the verge of tears himself.

  “Daddy?” Adam finally answered, his voice so small and scared in the darkness.

  The darkness. Lance went over and fumbled around on the wall before finding the light switch. He turned slowly to face his son, scared of what he would see.

  “Please don’t hurt me, Daddy,” Adam said. “I’m sorry for crying. I won’t do it anymore, I promise.”

  “No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” Lance sat down on the side of Adam’s bed. He reached to brush Adam’s damp hair from his face, but the boy shied away from him. Sadness stabbed Lance’s heart, but he forced himself to look at his frightened son. He was relieved to see no blood. There did seem to be some faint red marks on Adam’s neck. Would they turn to bruises, or were they light enough to fade away?

  Even as he was basking in the relief that things did not appear to be too bad, a little voice at the back of his head reminded him that if he hadn’t woken up when he did, he could have killed his son. What if next time he wasn’t so lucky? There couldn’t be a next time. He had to make sure of that.

  “It’s okay.” He wasn’t sure if he was trying to soothe his son or himself.

  “Daddy, you were hurting me,” Adam said.

  Lance realized that even if there were no telltale bruises, Adam was sure to tell Caitlin about what happened, and how would he explain that? His deep-sleeping wife would no more understand that than she could Adam’s nightmares.

  What was so frustrating was that this was all her fault. She was the one who insisted on unlocking the door. He meant to get up and re-lock it after she fell asleep, but he must have drifted off before he had the chance. He couldn’t let that happen again, and she need never know about this.

  “No,” Lance said, “you were having a bad dream. I came in here to try to wake you. It was all just a dream. It wasn’t real.”

  Adam blinked several times. His cheeks were damp with tears. Lance reached out to wipe them away, and this time Adam didn’t shy away, though his expression remained uncertain.

  “You hurt me,” Adam said quietly.

  “Just a dream,” Lance promised him.

  Adam seemed to accept this. His small body relaxed as he lay back down on his pillow, and for the second time that night, Lance stroked an upset family member’s shoulder as he waited for them to fall asleep. He rose when he felt his own eyelids growing heavy and heard Adam’s steady sleep-breathing.

  So long as Adam kept having his nightmares, Caitlin was going to insist on keeping their door unlocked. He had to make sure he got up to lock it after she fell asleep, but could he rely on that? All it would take was one time. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

  So what could he do? Maybe he could impress on his wife the importance of locking their bedroom door. Perhaps it was time to tell her everything. She would hate him. How couldn’t she? What’s more, she would blame him for Adam’s nightmares, and as Lance glanced down at his now-sleeping son and noticed those reddish marks his hands had left on the boy’s neck, he realized he couldn’t confess everything to Caitlin right now.

  He felt so utterly helpless as he watched his son sleep. Was this how his own mother had felt? He recalled how it had been for the two of them in that sad little house in Culver Creek. He heard Corey reading out the town’s name as he studied that business card, and Lance knew what he had to do.

  In the morning, he would call the dream whisperer. Caitlin had said no doctors, but the so-called dream whisperer wasn’t a doctor. Caitlin wouldn’t approve, but she didn’t have to know.

  He would take Adam to see the dream whisperer. Maybe she had some wacky new-age cure for his nightmares. Adam would stop having bad dreams. They could sleep with their bedroom door locked again. Everything would go back to normal. Everything would be fine.

  12

  Sage awoke in a panic, and for a second or two he was convinced he was in his college dorm, but the layout of the room was all wrong. Then the last shred of his dream melted away, and he saw that he was in his Culver Creek apartment. As the dream disappeared, so too did Melodie. She had been about to say something, but he woke up too soon. He closed his eyes and tried to return to the dream, but that wasn’t the way dreams worked. With sleep and the dream out of reach, he rose from bed and wandered into his living room, where he had tacked up a map he’d sketched out of Lily Esposito’s neighborhood on butcher paper. It took up one whole wall of his not especially large living room.

  The previous night before going to bed, he had cross-referenced all the witness statements taken after the murder with the addresses of each of the witnesses on the map. He had thought this monumental task would bring clarity to the confusing case, but as he studied his handiwork in the dim, gray early morning light, it all just looked like useless busywork. He was just spinning his wheels, nothing obvious was jumping out at him.

  He had marked a star by one of the houses and now tried to remember why. The house was on a different street than Lily’s, but the backyards were nearly adjacent. He consulted the witness statements to refresh his mind as to why there was a star there, and then he remembered.

  The starred house belonged to Raquel Walker, who had told police she saw a suspicious vehicle the day before Lily’s murder. It wasn’t much, but the house was close enough to Lily’s that maybe it might have been something. He felt like he was grasping at straws. Something about the description of the vehicle nagged at him. Raquel wasn’t sure of the make or model of the older blue sedan. “A real beater” was the phrase she had used to describe it.

  Something about it seemed significant. Did it match the description of the vehicle belo
nging to Rick, Lily’s estranged father? He flipped through the papers from the old case that now filled every surface of his living room until he found the one with the information on Rick, but no, Rick drove a pickup truck.

  There had been another description of a car like the one Raquel Walker had seen, wasn’t there? He was sure it was in the files somewhere. He wasted forty-five minutes combing through the mess of papers before he decided to shower and get ready for work. It was as frustrating as his dream.

  It figured that the one morning he was late, his boss was there waiting for his arrival. Rayanne Lawrence didn’t need to glance at the clock or a watch as she stood beside his desk. He could read the disappointment in her eyes.

  He stammered out an apology, but she cut him off.

  “I need you to go down to the high school,” she said. “There was an incident last night.”

  Before he had a chance to ask what sort of incident, she returned to her office. So, he learned the particulars from Principal Brim as they stood in front of a trophy case now taped over with plastic.

  “There was glass everywhere,” Brim said, waving his arm to indicate the stretch of hallway. “I had the janitor clean it up first thing, for safety reasons.”

  Sage pulled back a corner of plastic and peered into the display case. He hadn’t seen what it looked like before, but judging by the sparse contents, he guessed that more than a few trophies had been stolen. Crude graffiti marred some of the photos left behind in the case.

  “Do you think it was students?” Sage asked.

  “Former students,” Brim said. “I can give you their names and a copy of the security footage.”

  Sage wondered why Lawrence had sent him here. This wasn’t something in need of any detective skills. He followed Brim back to his office, where the principal handed him the list of four male suspects and a USB stick with the security camera footage. Sage glanced at the list, and one of the names leapt out at him.

  “Kevin Arlo,” Sage read. “Is he—”

  “Steve’s son.” Brim nodded. “Steve’s a nice guy, but Kevin . . . well, let’s just say this isn’t the first time there’s been trouble with him.”

  “When did he graduate?” Sage asked.

  “A couple of years ago,” Brim said. “Since then he’s been hanging around this town going nowhere fast. Culver Creek’s not exactly awash in opportunities. The kids who don’t go away to college tend to spend their time getting drunk and acting like assholes.”

  Sage almost said the description could probably apply to the kids who went away to college, too, but he didn’t want to make it sound like he was dunking on Culver Creek, because from his experience, the phenomenon was more of a universal thing.

  Wisps of last night’s dream came back to him, and they blended with his actual memories of that weekend Melodie came out to see him at school. Sage might not have been breaking into high schools and vandalizing trophy cases, but like Kevin Arlo and his pals, he had been a drunken asshole. He could see the look of disgust in his sister’s eyes, and it felt like someone was taking a knife and stabbing him in the gut.

  With a start, he realized Brim had asked him a question.

  “Sorry, what?” Sage said.

  “Can you arrange for them to be given community service hours?” Brim asked. “It’s about time they started giving back in some way.”

  “That’s all up to the judge,” Sage said.

  When Sage found Kevin Arlo hanging out in his buddy’s backyard in the trailer park out by the highway, the young man denied everything.

  “You’re on camera,” Sage said.

  “So,” Kevin said. “Do you know who my father is?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Sage said. “You want me to call him and have him come down here?”

  “You can’t do that,” Kevin said. “I’m an adult.”

  So that was the kind of logic he was dealing with. Sage had better things to do with his time than deal with oversized juvenile delinquents, and he knew it was only because Kevin was Steve’s son that he was even here in the first place. He really wasn’t in the mood to deal with this today.

  He hated Kevin Arlo because he was the sort of loser who contributed nothing to society, but that wasn’t it. What he really despised was how much this arrogant, self-centered jerk reminded him of himself.

  “If you don’t wake up soon, someone’s going to get hurt,” Sage said. “You want that on your conscience?”

  “Are you threatening me?” Kevin asked as he leaned forward and fixed Sage with a defiant stare.

  “Would it make a difference if I was?” Sage wished someone had been there to give him a wakeup call, but he realized that was exactly what Melodie had been doing there. The problem was he had been as thick and senseless as Kevin Arlo. “Look, it will make things easier all around if you just come down to the station with me.”

  “What, now?” Kevin asked. “I’m in the middle of painting my truck.”

  He waved a hand at the pickup parked behind him, covered in a still-wet coat of gray primer. Sage blinked at Kevin’s truck, but he wasn’t really seeing it. What he was seeing were police notes in Bill’s not quite illegible hand, a car with a homemade paint job, an empty can of gray primer spray paint found beside a driveway. The car hadn’t jumped out at him when he reread the notes this morning because the color was wrong.

  “Come with me now or I send your father back here with a warrant to arrest you,” Sage said. “It’s your choice.”

  Kevin jumped up from the plastic lawn chair and practically ran to Sage’s car.

  That night at his apartment, Sage flipped back through the old case file. He lost track of how many pages he had gone through before he found it, but his heart skipped a beat as he read the information scrawled there: 1986 Pontiac Grand Am, belonging to a Mr. Bud Ivan.

  Sage went over to his hand-drawn map to locate Bud Ivan’s address.

  “Bingo,” he said aloud in the empty apartment.

  13

  Caitlin still felt groggy as she helped Adam get dressed. She had gotten out of bed roughly an hour ago—right around when Lance was leaving for work—but she felt barely awake. She noticed red marks on his neck as she slipped his shirt on. They didn’t look that bad—the skin wasn’t broken, at least—but they worried her.

  Could he have done it to himself during one of his nightmares? She tried to picture him clawing at his own skin during one of the bad dreams. It was one explanation, but she didn’t think it was the only one. It was possible he hadn’t been asleep at all.

  The first time Caitlin harmed herself was in college. She was fully awake when she deliberately tore her skin with a pair of dull scissors, but a dream was to blame.

  For over a week she had been having a frightening nightmare. It was the same dream each time—a young woman attacked in an ill-lit parking lot. What she saw in terms of details varied from night to night, which was why it wasn’t until the third night of the recurring dream that she recognized the parking lot. It was the one between one of the dorm buildings and the student center. She went there the next afternoon just to be sure. She shivered as she stood there examining the lot. Even in the light of day, it felt like a creepy place.

  She didn’t recognize the woman in the dream, and she never got a good look at her attacker. All she had to go on was the location. She walked down to the campus security office and tried to explain to the security guard manning the desk that they needed to keep a guard posted at the parking lot by the student center.

  “Has something happened?” the guard asked. He barely looked up from the game of computer solitaire he was playing.

  “Something will happen,” Caitlin said, but she was pretty sure if she told him she was getting her information from a dream, she would lose any chance she had of convincing the guard to do anything. “It’s not safe over there.”

  “Could you be more specific?” the guard asked as he slid digital playing cards around on the screen. “Is there a light out? An u
neven sidewalk?”

  For all Caitlin knew, there might have been a light out or an uneven sidewalk, though she hadn’t noticed either. Something told her neither of those safety hazards would prompt any kind of immediate action. So she fudged the truth a bit.

  “I’ve seen someone over there a few times,” Caitlin said. Technically this was true. It was just that she had only seen this in a dream. “He looked suspicious, just sort of hanging out in the shadows there.”

  This was enough to cause the guard to turn away from his computer screen.

  “Did he say anything to you? Did he try to follow you?” the guard asked. Caitlin shook her head. “What did he look like?”

  Caitlin did her best to describe the shadowy figure she had seen in her dream. It was Culver Creek all over again, but the difference here was she was ahead of the game. Maybe with her report and her frustratingly vague description, they could actually catch this guy before anything happened. She allowed herself to believe this.

  She wasn’t so much surprised as she was crushed when the news broke less than a week later. She wanted to blame the campus security guards for not doing more to prevent the senseless tragedy, but deep down she knew she bore the full responsibility for that innocent woman’s murder.

  How could she have possibly thought that telling one solitary security guard was going to be enough? She should have gone to the police. What about the dean of students? Even if no one in a position of authority was willing to listen to her, she should have organized some sort of student version of a neighborhood watch. They could have made sure that parking lot was under surveillance. Instead, she had done the bare minimum and foolishly hoped this time everything would turn out different.

  Stabbing her arm with a pair of scissors until she bled might not have solved anyone’s problems, but it helped to ease the burden weighing her down. She considered it her penance. Often it was her mother’s voice she heard as she stabbed the scissor blades into her flesh. Luanne’s chipper voice filled her head, reminding her she was like a superhero or telling her she had a gift. That was how Luanne had always seen it—a gift, not a curse.