“Okay, Adam,” Lance said with a touch of a chuckle to defuse the dark mood in the room. “That’s probably enough for now. I think we all get the picture.” He tried his best to offer the woman a friendly smile, but she still looked horror-stricken. She was probably assuming he was the one letting his kid watch violent television; that or she had decided Adam was some sort of psychopath.
“Adam, maybe you can tell me some more about this bad man in your dream,” Phelicity said. She acted calm, but Lance heard the tremble in her voice.
Adam looked over at Lance as if to ask his permission before speaking more about the dream, and Lance decided this was his cue. From his cramped position on the floor, he wrestled his phone out of his pocket and pretended to read a message on the screen before slipping it back into his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” Lance said as he began to rise from the ground. “Something’s come up, and we’re going to have get going.”
“But you can’t go,” Phelicity said. “I haven’t had a chance to—”
“Sorry,” Lance said. “I’ll still pay you for the full session.”
Over the phone she had quoted him $100 for the initial session, and he had been smart enough to bring cash, no questionable credit card charges for Caitlin to quiz him about. He peeled the bills from his money clip and handed them to her as he led Adam to his feet.
“But—” Phelicity said, flustered.
“Is it time to do something fun?” Adam asked.
“Well past time,” Lance said.
“What?” Adam asked.
“Yes,” Lance said. “Come on, let’s get your shoes on.”
As he fought to get shoes back on his son’s feet before putting his own on, he regretted ever taking them off in the first place. It was difficult to leave quickly when one had to first put on footwear.
The memory hit Lance as soon as he stepped into the ice cream parlor. He had been here before with his mother. He remembered the pastel-colored walls and the swivel seats and that sickly sweet smell in the air. It was strange to him how so many things were coming back to him as he traveled around Culver Creek—stuff he hadn’t thought of in years.
After they left the dream whisperer’s, he took Adam to play a round of miniature golf, and as they teed off at the first hole, he remembered going to the mini golf place for a classmate’s birthday party. The familiar obstacles and the video game noises that emanated from the arcade dredged up memories he thought had been lost forever. And now here at the ice cream parlor, he felt a dizzying sensation as his childhood memories merged with the present day.
“Daddy, I want ’nilla,” Adam said.
“But they’ve got so many different flavors to pick from. Why don’t you try something new? Look, they’ve got banana. You like bananas.”
“’Nilla,” Adam insisted.
Lance sighed but capitulated, ordering a vanilla cone for Adam and a cone with a scoop of peach and a scoop of mango for himself. They sat down at a table by the window, and Adam was as taken with the spinning chairs as Lance had been as a boy.
“Less spinning, more licking,” Lance said. “It’s all going to melt if you don’t eat it quicker.” He watched in dismay as streaks of white ice cream dribbled down Adam’s face and began to form a vanilla-flavored lake on the table. Caitlin always ordered Adam cups of ice cream instead of cones, and Lance now saw why.
So he had made a few mistakes on this father-and-son day together. Ordering a cone instead of a cup was the least of it. Certainly the whole dream whisperer thing had been a colossal mistake. He saw the look of abject horror on Phelicity’s face as Adam described in way-too-graphic detail his horrible nightmare.
“Hey, bud,” Lance said, “we can’t be telling everyone all about our dreams, okay? You know the way your bad dreams frighten you?”
Adam nodded. There was ice cream smeared all around his mouth and streaks of it on his shirt.
“Well, when you tell all the scary parts to other people, that scares them too.”
“Dreams aren’t real,” Adam said before slurping some more soupy ice cream from his cone. Lance estimated maybe twenty percent of it actually ended up in his mouth.
“Right, exactly,” Lance said. “So there’s no need to tell people all about them, right?” Lance grabbed a wad of napkins from the dispenser on the table and began to spread them on top of the vanilla puddle. “Besides, it doesn’t really make for good conversation. People don’t want to hear about other people’s dreams. It’s about as exciting as describing watching paint dry.”
“I like painting,” Adam said.
“Sure, painting’s fun, but watching it dry is boring, and talking about watching it dry is even more boring. See what I’m saying?”
“Are we going to do painting next?” Adam asked.
“Next we’re going to find a bathroom and get you cleaned up,” Lance said. “Then we’re going to head back home, because I bet you Mommy misses you.”
15
Bud Ivan had been brought in three separate times for questioning after Lily Esposito was murdered. The house he rented sat right on the creek, literally a stone’s throw from where Lily’s body had been found, and Ivan was no stranger to the police. He had a string of convictions that stretched all the way back to an assault charge when he was eighteen. At the time of Lily’s murder, he had only been in Culver Creek less than a year, and he still managed to pick up a drunk and disorderly. He was a prime suspect, with a recently repainted car.
Bud Ivan had an alibi for the time of the murder, but it was a weak one from what Sage could see. He had been drinking at a bar, a place called the Raven’s Nest, and though he had definitely been there that night, there was some discrepancy about just when he had left. The bartender placed him there later than the customers did, and Sage wondered how good the word of any of them were. From what he could see, the main reason the police eliminated Bud Ivan from the suspect list was that sketch drawn from the psychic girl’s description. Long-haired, scruffy Bud Ivan looked nothing like the clean-cut man depicted in the drawing.
The car, the rap sheet, and Ivan’s proximity to the creek made him a likely suspect in Sage’s book, but then there was what he found out when he did a little digging. Bud Ivan no longer lived in Culver Creek. His current address was inside a state penitentiary, where he had wound up after he was convicted of murdering a child. Sage was decidedly confident as he made the drive out to the state pen, sure this was going to be a clear case of game, set, match.
A haggard-looking Bud Ivan slouched in the chair across from Sage in the small interview room. Ivan narrowed his eyes in a menacing way but otherwise seemed completely apathetic.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about when you lived in Culver Creek,” Sage said.
“Culver Creek?” Ivan said. “That’s ancient history, man. I can barely remember what happened last week, let alone twenty years ago.”
“You remember that a little girl was murdered maybe fifty yards from your back door? You remember that?”
“Sounds familiar,” Ivan said, still slouching, sneering.
Sage stared at the man with disgust. What a worthless excuse for a human being.
“You followed the girls out there that night,” Sage said. “Or you saw them and waded out into the creek.”
“Nah,” Ivan said. “Check the notes. I had an al-i-bi.” He enunciated each syllable of that last word just to be extra obnoxious.
“A weak one,” Sage said. “And then you went and repainted your car.”
“It’s a crime to paint a car?” Ivan said.
Sage’s blood started to boil. Ivan’s attitude was infuriating. Some dirtbag just like this had murdered his sweet, kind, caring sister without giving it a moment’s notice, and all Sage wanted to do was wipe that smug smile off of Ivan’s face. Instead, he slammed his hands down on the table.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do it?” His voice was loud in the small room. He spared a glance over his sh
oulder at the guard by the door, who peered in the little window to survey the situation.
“Paint my car?” Ivan asked.
“Murder Lily Esposito!” Sage roared.
This finally got Ivan to sit up. His gaze was level and calm as he looked across the table at Sage.
“Look, I may not be a saint, but I ain’t no monster who goes around murdering kids.”
“What about,” Sage paused to consult his notes, “Tammy English.”
“Tammy?” Ivan said. “Tammy weren’t no kid. Look, she told me she was twenty-two, and would a kid go and screw around behind your back with your goddamn stepbrother? Anyway, that’s who I was aiming for, that shit-weasel stepbrother of mine, but my fucking hand slipped.”
Sage cursed himself for not looking more into Ivan’s case. He got so excited when he saw that the man had been convicted for killing a child, he hadn’t looked further.
He looked over and was surprised to see mean, nasty Bud Ivan had a few tears running down his scarred and wrinkled cheeks.
“Tammy,” he said. “It’s her own fault. If she hadn’t been such a stupid slut, she wouldn’t have got herself shot.”
Sage watched Bud Ivan unravel before his eyes. His tears became sobs, and then through the crying he repeated Tammy’s name again and again. He was criminal scum to be sure, and though he might have some regrets about killing his underage girlfriend, Sage couldn’t really muster up any pity for the man. But he knew that as worthless as Bud Ivan might have been, he wasn’t the man who had murdered Lily Esposito.
The sun was low in the sky as Sage walked across the parking lot to his car. The big, ugly penitentiary building loomed behind him. He was no closer to finding Lily Esposito’s murderer, and the meeting with Bud Ivan left him with a bad taste in his mouth and the desire to take a long, hot shower.
Ivan’s tear-soaked retelling of the murder of his underage girlfriend played on repeat in Sage’s head. What if Melodie’s murder had all been some huge mistake? What if whoever shot her was aiming for someone else instead? For the longest time, this was the only thing that made any sense to Sage. Then he had discovered the web sleuth forums and had become a cop, and it quickly became apparent that just about everyone had some secret life, and he came around to the idea that whatever had gotten Melodie killed was some deep dark secret.
She hadn’t even wanted to keep it a secret, he reasoned. That weekend she came up to see him, she had tried to tell him, but he wasn’t interested in listening. He had been too busy wallowing in his own sad misery to give two shits about anyone else, even his own sister, and maybe if he had just listened to her, she would still be here.
He reached his car and slammed his fist hard into the metal panel between the back and front doors. His hand stung, and bright red spots of blood appeared on his knuckles where the skin had broken. Belatedly he looked up at the light post two spaces away and the security camera mounted there. Well, it wasn’t like he had committed a crime. They couldn’t even get him on destruction of police property. The car was fine, only his hand had suffered any damage.
He let himself into the vehicle and sat there in the parking lot with Bud Ivan’s scratchy voice still echoing in his head. Ivan had been aiming for his stepbrother. Who had Melodie’s killer been gunning for?
Bud Ivan was busy drinking himself into oblivion the night Lily Esposito was killed, and Sage would wager he had been equally drunk the fateful day he shot his girlfriend instead of his shit-weasel stepbrother. And in that way they were alike, because when his sister had needed him the most, he was drunk and useless.
Sage hadn’t needed a twelve-step program. He hadn’t touched alcohol since his sister was murdered, but even a lifetime of sobriety wouldn’t bring her back.
16
Caitlin thought she was looking at a used maxi pad. It didn’t make any sense. How would one of her pads wind up on the floor in the corner of the linen closet? Could Adam have come into their bathroom, taken it out of the trash, and stuck it in the closet? That seemed pretty gross, but then kids could be gross. There was that time she had caught him playing with some of his bath toys in the toilet, so who knows.
She wasn’t supposed to be in the linen closet, but she was desperate and held out hope that somehow some of her stash had escaped Lance’s mad purging. Unfortunately, her search hadn’t turned up any more boxes of sleeping pills.
She kicked the used pad out of the dark reaches of the closet. Once it was out in the light, she saw it wasn’t a pad at all. It was a sock, one of Lance’s socks, and it was soaked with blood. Had he cut his foot? Maybe he had a blister that started bleeding.
Two things occurred to her. First, just days ago her husband had cleaned this entire bathroom top to bottom, and second, when she had done the laundry the other day, his white athletic sock with the blue stripe had turned up mateless. She toed at the bloody sock on the floor and saw the blue stripe on it.
In the past few days, Lance hadn’t mentioned any cuts or blisters on his feet. She certainly hadn’t noticed anything, but truthfully, she didn’t spend all that much time looking at her husband’s feet. Still, it wasn’t just a spot of blood on this sock. This thing was pretty soaked.
Now she came back to that first thing. Her husband had randomly, out of the blue, cleaned their bathroom top to bottom. Why? What was he hiding? What besides her stash of sleeping pills had he thrown in the trash? Clearly he had meant to throw out this sock too but had missed it.
“Daddy is a bad man,” she heard Adam say.
Caitlin’s blood went cold. When had Adam said that? It was after waking up from one of his nightmares, wasn’t it? What if she had it all wrong? What if Adam’s dreams weren’t a rerun of her own childhood nightmares? Adam might have been dreaming about something that hadn’t happened yet, something Lance was going to do.
Caitlin shook her head. No, she was being ridiculous. This was Lance. He wouldn’t do anything bad. She looked back down at that blood-soaked sock.
Where did he and Adam go today? Had Lance actually said where they were going? She ran out of the bathroom and retrieved her phone.
She ended the call when Lance’s voicemail picked up. Should she be concerned that he didn’t answer? Maybe he was driving and couldn’t get to his phone, but didn’t he always use that hands-free thing in the car? She tried again. Then, just to be sure, two more times. Voicemail, voicemail, voicemail.
She told herself there was no need to panic. But telling herself there was no need to panic and not panicking were two different things. Of course there had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the blood-soaked sock, and it was weird that Lance took Adam for some boys’ day out, but it wasn’t necessarily suspicious.
What she needed to do was talk to someone who would be calm and reasonable and who would allay all her fears. So probably her mother was the last person she should have called, but all the same, that was the contact she selected on her phone.
Unlike Lance, her mother picked up right away. There was so much background noise, she could barely hear Luanne’s voice. It sounded like a carnival.
“Where are you?” Caitlin asked.
“Vegas,” Luanne said. “You really are gifted, I was just about to call you. You must have known.”
“I didn’t,” Caitlin insisted. “Wait, Vegas as in Las Vegas.”
“Yes!” Luanne yelled over the background noise. “Guess what? Stu and I got hitched!”
“Wait, who’s Stu? Is he the one who works at the supermarket?”
“No,” Luanne said. “Stu has the insurance agency.”
Caitlin had a hard time keeping track of all her mother’s beaus. Then the full import of her mother’s words hit her.
“Wait a minute, when you say hitched . . .”
“That’s right,” Luanne said. “Stu made an honest woman of me.”
“Oh God, Mom,” Caitlin said.
“I think the traditional response is ‘Congratulations,’” Luanne said, snippy. She h
ad moved into a quieter area, because the background noise died down.
“Yes, congratulations, I guess,” Caitlin said. “Do you even know this guy?”
“Caitlin, we’re in love!” Luanne shouted.
Caitlin tried her best to feel happy for her mother. It wasn’t easy to do when she was worried about her own husband and the safety of her son, which was all she could think about as her mother described some show she and Stu had gone to and the restaurant where they had eaten the night before.
When she could finally get a word in edgewise, Caitlin told her mother an abbreviated version of the bloody sock story. She left out the part about her sleeping pills and Adam’s pronouncement that Lance was a bad man. When she spoke everything out loud, it didn’t really sound that bad at all. She had found a sock with blood on it, and her husband had taken Adam out for the day so she could have some peace and quiet to get some work done. And here she was wasting her time looking for sleeping pills and freaking out over a sock instead of using this time to work. She felt like such an idiot. Well, maybe she still had some time to accomplish something before Lance and Adam returned.
“Mom, I’ve got to go,” Caitlin said.
“You know, I never really liked him,” Luanne said.
“What? Who?” Caitlin said. She thought—hoped—her mother must be talking about one of her other beaus, the supermarket one perhaps.
“Lance,” Luanne said. “There was always something about him. I could never really put my finger on it, but he just looks like someone who can’t be trusted.”
“Mother, honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going now.”
“Intuition,” Luanne continued. “That’s something you were never really good at, listening to your intuition.”
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