Up the Creek

by Alissa C. Grosso

  “Mattresses,” Lance said, “and they pay me plenty. Who’s Jacob Pinochet?”

  Young raised one eyebrow at him, like he was sizing him up.

  “Jacob Pinochet is the man you beat the ever-loving crap out of on March nineteenth, oh around 12:42 a.m. outside the Wild Boar Tavern,” Young said matter-of-factly. “You know, there was something so familiar about you when we were talking to you earlier. It was nagging at me, but I thought maybe I had seen you around town somewhere, and then I remembered those stills we pulled from the security camera outside the Wild Boar.”

  A chill passed over Lance. It began with Young saying the words the man you beat the ever-loving crap out of and led him down a dizzying spiral of realization. It wasn’t the first time Lance had beaten the ever-loving crap out of someone, and that combined with the haunting memory of that day he had woken up in the bathroom in bloodstained clothing with no recollection of how he had gotten there or what had happened. He couldn’t be sure about the date, but now he was 99 percent positive that March nineteenth was the same day he had gone on his bathroom cleaning spree and inadvertently thrown out his wife’s stash of expired sleeping pills. That was what made what happened next all the more dizzying.

  Marley threw a plastic shopping bag on the table. Lance flinched.

  “Did you drug your son, Mr. Walker?” Marley asked. The question caught Lance off guard.

  “No! No, of course not,” he said.

  “No? Then how the hell do you explain this?” Marley asked. The cop picked the bag back up and this time spilled the contents out onto the table.

  Lance watched as assorted boxes of sleeping aids fell onto the table.

  “Because according to this receipt,” Marley said, pulling the strip of paper out of the bag, “you purchased all these last night. That’s your signature at the bottom, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but these were for Caitlin,” Lance explained calmly.

  “You drugged your wife?” Young asked.

  “I didn’t drug anyone!” Lance shouted. His voice broke on the word anyone.

  The door to the room burst open, and the three men turned to stare. In the doorway stood a large man with a florid complexion and a crazed expression in his eye. That coupled with his rumpled suit made Lance assume this was a vagrant who had wandered in off the street.

  “Lance Walker?” the vagrant said to him. Lance gulped and nodded. “Octavius Garvey,” the man said by way of introduction, and Lance heard his stepfather saying the name Garvey. This was his attorney. Lance looked the man up and down again, trying to see him as a competent professional and not someone who was possibly homeless. “I got here as quickly as I could,” Garvey said.

  Garvey availed himself of the seat beside Lance and pushed aside some of the sleeping pill boxes to set his briefcase on the table. He unsnapped the latches, opened the case and removed a manila folder.

  “You’re under no obligation to answer any of their questions,” Garvey said to Lance. Turning to the police officers, he said, “Now, where were we, gentlemen?”

  “Where we were,” Young said in a snide tone of voice, “is we were trying to figure out where Mr. Walker’s son is.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Mr. Walker has already explained that he does not know where his son is, which is why he engaged the services of the police,” Garvey said.

  “Actually, it was Mrs. Walker who contacted us,” Marley said with a hint of a grin. “We had to track down Mr. Walker ourselves.”

  “Well, perhaps in the interest of clearing things up,” Young said, “Mr. Walker would be willing to explain to us what he was doing in Culver Creek, Pennsylvania, last weekend.”

  In an attempt to make it look like he had nothing to hide, Lance answered quickly. “I took my son to play miniature golf.”

  Garvey made a little throat-clearing noise.

  “You are under no obligation to answer any questions,” the attorney reminded him, and after considering both the question and his quick reply, Lance wondered how the police even knew he was in Culver Creek. Perhaps his mom’s friend Pamela had been gossiping to them as well.

  “Pretty far to go to play miniature golf,” Young commented.

  “I grew up around there,” Lance said.

  Garvey cleared his throat again because he was too polite to shout, Shut up, you damn bastard! or so Lance assumed.

  “You having an affair?” Young asked.

  “What? No,” Lance said.

  “Might I advise you, Mr. Walker, that you please refrain from answering any further questions,” Garvey said. Then to the police he added, “Gentlemen, if you’re just going to waste everyone’s time with this wild, baseless speculation, then I think we should consider this interview concluded.”

  Young continued as if Garvey hadn’t said a word. “Because the way I see it, is you went out there for some sort of lovers tryst. Because I’m pretty sure if we contact the owner of this Culver Creek phone number, which called you repeatedly immediately following that weekend, we’ll discover the young woman with whom you had intimate relations. Or perhaps it was a young man. Is that the way you swing, Mr. Walker?”

  Lance opened his mouth to talk, but Garvey beat him to the punch.

  “A series of phone calls?” Garvey asked. “I assume you have a warrant to examine Mr. Walker’s phone records.” He paused, but Young and Marley neither confirmed nor denied this. “I must say I’m a little curious. Young Adam went missing all of seven hours ago now, so how is it that you were able to obtain both a search warrant and a copy of these phone records?”

  “It’s a matter of official police business,” Marley said with a sneer, but Lance noticed that Young looked decidedly uncomfortable. Well, that was point one for Octavius Garvey. The man might have looked like a bum, but he had already turned the tables on the cops, so he might just be worth his retainer, however exorbitant it was.

  “So let me get this straight,” Garvey said. “Adam goes missing from a parking lot in New Jersey, while his father is at work, and you think the fact that the previous week his father took him on a miniature golf outing in Pennsylvania somehow makes him a suspect in his son’s disappearance?”

  “Don’t forget the sleeping pills,” Marley said, pointing at the brightly colored boxes spread out on the table.

  Garvey regarded them with distaste.

  “And Jacob Pinochet,” Young said. “If we wanted to, we could arrest Mr. Walker right now for assaulting Pinochet, but we’re nice guys and we’re taking pity on a man whose son is missing.”

  “Pity,” Garvey muttered. “Interesting way of showing it.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Lance sat across from Garvey at a tiny table in the corner of the coffee shop down the road from the police station. After taking several sips from an extra large glass of iced tea, the lawyer took out a pen and a yellow legal pad and, there being no room on the table, did his best to balance it on his lap.

  “Ideally, I would have liked to have spoken to you before our little tête-à-tête with the police, but it is what it is,” Garvey said.

  “I shouldn’t have spoken to them,” Lance said. “I thought maybe they had found out something about Adam.”

  “No, I understand,” Garvey said as he sipped more tea. “Your son is missing, and you don’t want to appear uncooperative. Unfortunately, I believe you’re presently the prime suspect in your son’s disappearance. So it’s definitely time we got some facts straight. First things first, tell me about Culver Creek.”

  At first, Lance was impressed. He thought Garvey must have really done his homework to know that Lance was from that Pennsylvania town, and he was about to launch into an explanation that would capture the essence of the down-on-its-luck town. He stopped himself just in time. Garvey didn’t want to know about Culver Creek’s stagnating economy or its geography. He wanted to know why Lance had been there last weekend.

  “I took Adam out there to go to a miniature golf place I remember from m
y childhood,” Lance said. That statement was maybe two-thirds true, which he didn’t think was bad at all, and he figured busybody Pamela could always back him up.

  “This will all go a lot smoother if you’re completely honest with me,” Garvey said. “So let’s try this again. What were you doing in Culver Creek? Are you having an affair?”

  “No,” Lance said. “I wouldn’t even consider it.”

  “Word of advice,” Garvey said. “When someone, especially but not limited to the police, ask you a yes/no question, a one-word response is probably best. You aren’t helping yourself with these little comments of yours, and it makes me wonder if you’re a liar, because even the most faithful husband has certainly entertained the idea of an affair now and then.”

  “I took my son to see a dream whisperer,” Lance said sullenly. He surprised himself by saying this out loud. He hadn’t intended to share this information because he realized that it painted him as a bit of a kook, but maybe if they just cleared the air about things, everything would get back to normal.

  “A what whisperer?” Garvey asked, scribbling notes on his pad.

  “Dream whisperer,” Lance said. “Adam was having nightmares. She was recommended by a work acquaintance. I was desperate, and I figured it was worth a shot. I changed my mind once I got out there. It was all too woo-woo, and I didn’t want to subject Adam to that. Then the woman started calling me repeatedly. That’s the phone number they referred to.”

  “Right, well, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. I don’t think that’s ever going to be legal to use in a court of law thanks to dumb and dumber’s heavy-handed police work.”

  Talk of Adam and his nightmares reminded him of Caitlin ransacking Adam’s room. A strange, uneasy feeling passed through him as he saw that piece of paper she was waving around, the one Adam had drawn based on his nightmare. It was the same nightmare he had described to Phelicity Green, the dream whisperer. He saw the crude crayon drawing in his mind, horrifying in its graphic depiction of a murder. Where had his innocent little boy gotten such a disturbing idea from?

  He heard an echo of his wife’s voice in his head. Adam had a dream about this. He knew this was going to happen. Why would she say that? He reminded himself that Caitlin wasn’t thinking clearly, that those damn pills had her messed up, and on top of that the stress of Adam going missing, because that’s all it was.

  Adam was missing. No harm had come to him, despite what Caitlin said. Maybe he had wandered out of the car on his own, and some sweet old lady had taken pity on him and he was sitting in her kitchen drinking tea and eating graham crackers. Lance tried to hold this image in his mind and to banish that nightmare drawing from his head.

  “What I’m more concerned about is Jacob Pinochet,” Garvey said. “You had some sort of altercation with him apparently. Is he someone you did business with?”

  Lance came back to reality.

  “I’ve never in my waking life laid eyes on the man,” Lance said. It was the truth, but he could see Garvey was not satisfied.

  “It was outside some bar,” Garvey said. “Do you have a drinking problem, Lance?”

  “No,” Lance said, and for a moment he was fourteen years old again, sitting in the chair outside the headmaster’s office, his stomach in knots because he knew he was going to be expelled. Lance never really knew if it was Tucker’s money, the sheer unpopularity of Eric Pitt, or the testimony of his fellow students who saw Lance as a sort of savior for taking on a bully, that had saved him. Maybe it was some combination of the three. What he knew was that none of those things could save him now. “It began when I was away at boarding school,” Lance said.

  As soon as he spoke the words, he knew they weren’t true. He caught another glimpse of a memory. Standing in the kitchen of their small Culver Creek home with no memory of how he had wound up there. It was the middle of the night, and there on the table in front of him was a bowl of cereal floating in apple juice. Judging by the amount remaining in the bowl and the peculiar taste in his mouth, he had already eaten a fair amount of the strange concoction.

  Then his mother was there, washing dishes in the sink, telling him everything was going to be okay but that he must never tell anyone about this. Some people might not understand that he had a condition that made him do things while he was asleep. They might think he was crazy. The police won’t understand, he heard Raquel say, but no, that was a different memory, a different time.

  “Or maybe before,” Lance said. “I’m not really sure. The first time I hurt someone when I was asleep was at school. To be fair, he was a bully, and he probably had it coming to him. Anyway, I have no conscious memory of the event. When I woke up, I was leaning over him with an aching fist and he lay there on the ground, his face bloodied.”

  “You’re a somnambulist,” Garvey said, “a sleepwalker.” Garvey set down his pen and rubbed his temple. There was a heavy sigh as he considered this new information.

  Lance had never told anyone about this before, and he thought of his mother’s words.

  “You think I’m crazy,” Lance said.

  “What I think doesn’t matter,” Garvey said. “It’s what a jury thinks that matters.”

  It was that day outside the headmaster’s office all over again, only this time it would be far worse than expulsion. They would send him to jail. He would lose his job. They might lose the house. Hell, Caitlin would probably leave him, and he couldn’t really blame her at all. Lance pressed the backs of his hands to his forehead and buried his face in his wrists.

  “Did the police say how badly he was hurt?” Lance asked. “I didn’t mean to do it. He must have tried to wake me up or something.”

  “Who?” Garvey asked.

  Lance pulled his arms away from his face.

  “Pinochet,” Lance said. “Whoever the hell he is. They’re going to send me to jail, aren’t they?”

  “For an assault?” Garvey asked. “A first offense? I doubt it. From what I can tell, the guy hasn’t even pressed charges.”

  Lance waited for relief, but it never came. Maybe it had something to do with the way Garvey was looking at him.

  “But that isn’t what we’re talking about here, is it?”

  “I don’t understand,” Lance said.

  “Lance, did you ever hurt your son? Did you ever hurt Adam when you were asleep?”

  Lance’s mind went immediately to the other morning. The day he awoke in Adam’s room, his hands around his son’s neck. He could feel his heart racing as he relived the awful experience. What would have happened if he hadn’t woken up when he did? No, he couldn’t bear to think about that.

  He looked up. Garvey was still waiting for an answer.

  “I would never hurt Adam,” Lance said.

  “Intentionally,” Garvey added. “I understand. Look, here’s what we’re going to do.” He picked his pen back up. “You’re going to walk me through everything that happened today, starting with when you got out of bed. Can you do that?”

  Lance began by describing getting up and going into their bathroom to get ready.

  “Your wife didn’t wake up when you got out of bed?” Garvey asked.

  “Caitlin’s a very sound sleeper,” Lance said. “She takes these sleeping pills.”

  Garvey jotted this information down.

  “Go on,” Garvey instructed.

  Lance described getting dressed, then heading down the hallway and poking his head into Adam’s room to see that the boy was still asleep in bed, but even as he described this, he felt uncertainty. His schedule was so similar from one day to the next that sometimes the days blended together. Was that this morning he had stuck his head into Adam’s room, or was that yesterday? He remembered he had been in a hurry. He had to get to that meeting, the one that was cancelled. Maybe he hadn’t wasted time checking on Adam because he was worried about being late.

  “And that was the last time you saw Adam?” Garvey asked.

  The finality of the sentence bot
hered Lance, but that wasn’t the only thing. He wasn’t even positive he had seen Adam at all that day.

  27

  Caitlin stepped into her bedroom. Luanne was right behind her. Caitlin wanted to escape the tense scene in the living room and appease her mother, who insisted she go to sleep, but Luanne apparently wanted to make sure Caitlin really was going to try to sleep.

  Lance still hadn’t returned from the police station, and Caitlin didn’t like it. She should have gone with him. When the cop had shown up at the front door, she was sure it was to say they found Adam and everything was going to be okay. At least, that’s what she wanted to hear. Instead she had been waiting anxiously to learn whatever development had been significant enough to require him to go down to the police station.

  “I can understand that you don’t feel tired,” Luanne said. “I mean, I know I can hardly think about sleep at a time like this, but you agree it’s probably the best thing, right?”

  “What if it’s too late?” Caitlin asked.

  “No, no, don’t talk like that,” Luanne said. Caitlin sat on the edge of the bed, and Luanne stroked her hair. “Do you have any Tylenol PM or Benadryl or something? Maybe that would help.”

  Caitlin wasn’t about to explain that drugs were what had gotten her into this predicament in the first place. If it wasn’t for Pacifcleon, she probably would have had a dream about this. She probably would have had some useful information to give to the police, which was when she remembered she did have useful information for the police. She stood up from the bed.

  “I have to go to the police station,” Caitlin said.

  “Sweetie, Lance is fine,” Luanne said.

  “No, it’s not that,” Caitlin said. “There’s something I need to tell the police. Something I just remembered.”

  “Something you dreamed?” Luanne asked, but Caitlin didn’t answer her as she headed down the hall. “I’m coming with you.”

  The reception desk was empty when Caitlin and Luanne stepped into the police station. Caitlin craned her neck to try to see someone in the office area.