As she stared out the window on the drive back, she had come up with her own logical explanation. Lance had gone and slept on the library couch, but he had woken before she did and decided to go for an early morning stroll on the beach. It was probably peaceful at that hour. It was weird that he hadn’t told her about that, but maybe he didn’t want her to get upset that he had gone on the promised beach stroll without her. Of course, she could have cleared all this up with a simple question, but she didn’t ask and never told him she had seen him wandering around outside.
Even on a half-deflated air mattress, Caitlin had slept through the night thanks to her miracle pills. For all she knew, Lance could have been throwing wild parties in their bedroom every night. She knew he wasn’t, but wasn’t it entirely possible he could have been slipping out of the house to carry on affairs? How many other women had there been over the years?
She shook her head. Lance was kind and attentive, he wouldn’t cheat on her. People fall out of love, a little voice whispered in her head. She thought of that awful night in the motel when her mother and Officer Brighton were sharing the bed beside hers. Her relationship with Lance had definitely changed over the years. They were both busy with work, and of course, Adam, despite all the joy he brought to them, had changed things as well.
Adam. Just the thought of her sweet boy made her heart break all over again. Where was he? Was he scared? Was he hurt? She would give anything to hold him in her arms. She would give her life if it meant he would be safe.
Deflating air mattresses and wild parties might not have been able to disturb her sleep, but there was something that could. More than once, Adam’s nightmare-induced wails had woken her from the deepest of slumbers. They were one thing that could rouse her from Pacifcleon-sleep. She had never made the connection before, but now that she did, she wondered how she hadn’t seen it before—Lance’s strange insistence on locking their bedroom door was a sure sign he was up to something, wasn’t it?
He didn’t want Adam to barge in there and wake her up because that meant she would discover Lance was nowhere to be found. He wanted to keep his midnight dalliances a secret from her, and Adam threatened that.
Something gnawed at the back of her head, an itch she couldn’t quite scratch. In her confused and chaotic mental state, though, she couldn’t see the faultiness of her own thinking.
30
“There’s been a development!” Stu shouted. “Turn on the television!”
Lance ran out to the living room and grabbed the remote for the TV. He flipped through the stations until he saw a reporter standing in a highway rest area parking lot, a battalion of police cars behind her. Lance heard footsteps on the stairs and looked up to see Caitlin coming down.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“The police think they’ve located Adam!” Stu said excited. “Everything’s going to be okay!”
Lance looked around at the tense expressions in the room. Stu seemed to be the only one assured that this was good news.
“Where are they?” Luanne asked. “Does it say where this is?”
“Wait, I recognize that place,” Tucker said, pointing at the television. “That’s that rest area along the way home. It’s about halfway between here and Atkins.”
Raquel nodded in agreement, but her face was grim. She turned and caught Lance’s eye, and there seemed to be a question in her expression that he couldn’t read.
Caitlin came over and stood near him, but not next to him. He reached to hold her hand, but she shied away from him, her eyes riveted to the image on the television screen. It seemed like everyone in the room was holding their breath. Without warning, the image cut back to the television studio, where a newscaster said, “We’ll update you with any developments, but now let’s go to chief meteorologist Stan Dorsey, who has all the details on a major thunderstorm moving into the area.”
Oblivious to their plight, Stan Dorsey launched into an excited description of the major weather event, which brought with it the potential for flash flooding.
Caitlin voiced the question that was on everyone’s minds. “What’s going on?”
Lance pressed his hand to his chest, where his heart felt like it was going to explode at any second.
“Thank God the doc gave me a clean bill of health at my last checkup,” he said, “or else I would be worried about following in my father’s footsteps.”
“What? Falling down the stairs?” Tucker asked.
Lance made a face at him. His stepfather could, at times, be full of wisdom. However, he also had the tendency to be a big buffoon. This was a buffoon moment.
“I meant how he died,” Lance explained. “He had a heart attack when I was five years old.”
“Heart attack?” Tucker said. “He broke his neck falling backwards down the stairs in the middle of the night.”
“I think you’re a bit confused,” Lance said.
“Not in the slightest,” Tucker said. “That was back when your mother was working for me. You don’t forget a story like that.”
Lance silently agreed that it would be pretty hard to forget a story like that. The problem was that he had never heard that story. He looked at his mother, who gave him what seemed to be a sheepish smile.
“Is it true?” he asked her.
“I might have let you think it was a heart attack because that’s more common, and not really preventable,” she said. “I didn’t want you to grow up with a fear of stairs.”
“No, instead I grew up thinking I had a family history of heart disease!” Lance roared. He couldn’t help the outburst. “I’ve been getting an annual stress test every year since my early twenties!”
“Is that such a bad thing?” Raquel asked.
“I just can’t believe you never told me the truth,” he said.
“I’m telling you now,” Raquel said defensively.
Caitlin rested her hand on his arm. Sure, now she wanted to be near him. He knew she was just attempting to comfort him and calm him down, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be calm.
“Come in the kitchen with me a sec,” she said.
Lance looked toward the television, which had cut to a car commercial.
“I’ll shout if there’s more news,” Stu said.
In the kitchen, Lance took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water, but before he took a sip, he set it back down on the counter. It wasn’t quite a slam, but it was hard enough for the glass to make a ringing sound as it met the granite.
“Can you believe that?” Lance asked. “My whole life she’s told me my father died of a heart attack, and now, now I learn that he fell down the fucking stairs and broke his neck? Jesus.”
“It’s awful,” Caitlin agreed in a murmur. “Lance, there’s something I need—”
He didn’t let her finish. He couldn’t get over his mother’s sudden revelation.
“What other bullshit stories has she been feeding me my whole life?” he asked.
“She was probably just trying to protect you,” Caitlin said. “Like when Adam has a nightmare.”
“That’s different,” Lance said. “It’s not like we’re lying to him.”
Caitlin’s expression grew pained, and she looked away from him. He knew she was probably thinking about Adam. Could they really have found him at that rest area? Why hadn’t the police called them about it? Shouldn’t they be the first to know?
He wrapped his arms around Caitlin and pressed her head to his chest as he stroked her hair.
“He’s going to be okay,” he promised her, and he wondered if lying to loved ones was something he was genetically predisposed to, unlike heart disease.
He remembered he and his mother in their old bathroom with the peeling wallpaper, and the worry in his mother’s voice as she said, “The police aren’t going to understand.” It all made more sense now. It hadn’t made much sense when he thought his dad died of a heart attack, but breaking your neck falling down the stairs—backwards, no les
s—well, that was freakish, wasn’t it? It did seem a bit odd, and maybe even suspicious.
Well, crap. If the police suspected him of somehow kidnapping his own son because of a few bad mistakes on his part, they must have had some suspicions about his mother when her husband died in such a bizarre way.
As he consoled his tearful wife, he realized he had some suspicions of his own. Why had his mother lied to him about his father’s death for years? To protect him from a fear of stairs? I mean, okay, maybe when he was too young to understand, but certainly at some point she should have told him the truth. He thought of how peculiar she acted right after Lily was killed and the police were canvassing the neighborhood. He thought she had been freaked out that a neighborhood kid had been murdered, but what if she was worried they would somehow find out she murdered her husband? Wasn’t it strange how his mother barely talked about his dad unless he prompted her? Maybe he had been abusive and she had pushed him down the stairs in self defense.
The police won’t understand, he heard her words in his head. He saw that old, ugly bathroom with the peeling wallpaper, and he saw the two of them reflected in the mirror. He gasped.
Caitlin froze and looked up at him.
“What is it?” she asked. “Did you hear something from the television?”
She was silent, her head cocked to hear from the other room, but they were only reporting the scores of hockey games.
“That couldn’t have been when my father died,” Lance said aloud.
“He didn’t die when you were five years old?” Caitlin asked.
“No, he did,” Lance said. “It’s just something my mom said to me. I always thought it was right after my father died, but it couldn’t have been, because I was older. Much older. It must have been right before I went to Ryerson.”
And it was like that one realization opened a floodgate, because memories suddenly rushed at him. The night his father died, he remembered finding his dad at the bottom of the stairs. Dear God, what an awful, traumatic thing to go through at any age, but especially at five years old. He remembered touching his dad’s face, and it was cold. The memory must have been buried all these years, and no wonder. It was frightening and dreadful.
Then something else, he remembered being in Mrs. Drummond’s kitchen. Mrs. Drummond was the old lady who lived next door to him. She babysat him sometimes when his parents went out. Probably his mom had sent him over there while the police came to the house. That would make sense, except, no, he could remember very clearly sitting at Mrs. Drummond’s kitchen table eating those cookies that were shaped like windmills while she talked to two police officers.
Well, of course, he reasoned, they would want to interview her. They must have already suspected his mother, right? So they were probably asking Mrs. Drummond if she suspected Raquel was capable of such an act. Maybe they wanted to know if she had ever witnessed any arguments between his parents. That sort of thing.
And his mother? Where was she in all this? Why was his mother absent from all his memories of his father’s death? Was there something else he had buried? Something he buried far deeper than his memory of finding his father dead? Maybe he had heard them quarrel, or worse, maybe he had actually witnessed her shove him down the stairs.
“How long have you been cheating on me?”
He heard the question faintly, like it was coming from another dimension. He returned to the present day, to his kitchen, to Caitlin looking at him like she barely recognized him.
“What?” he asked.
“How many women have there been, Lance? Be honest,” she said.
“One,” he said.
“Who is she?” Caitlin asked. Tears ran down her face.
“No, I mean there’s only one woman for me. You’re the only one for me,” he said. “I told you, the only reason I went out to Culver Creek was to take Adam to that damn dream whisperer. I’m so sorry. It was a dumb thing to do. I just felt so helpless. God, what if this is all my fault?”
“No,” Caitlin said. “It’s all my fault. I should have seen this coming.” Her trickle of tears turned into a torrent.
“This is because of what your mother said? Look, if I’ve learned one thing tonight, it’s that maybe listening to our mothers isn’t the best thing.”
Caitlin shook her head and wiped at her tear-streaked face with the back of her sleeve.
“Lance,” she said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
31
Caitlin took a deep breath before she began. She wanted to tell Lance the truth, but she didn’t want him to think she was crazy. She realized it might be too late for that.
“I used to have these dreams,” Caitlin told Lance.
“You?” he asked. “You never have dreams.”
She held up a hand to silence him. This wasn’t easy to do. She wasn’t sure she would be able to get the words out if he kept interrupting her.
“I used to have nightmares like Adam, but mine came true,” she said. He frowned, but she was grateful he didn’t say anything. “It was usually about people I knew or people who had crossed my path at some point, and the scary dreams were about something bad that was going to happen to them. Once I dreamed about a little girl who was killed. In college I had a dream about a woman who was attacked. I went to the campus security office, but they didn’t take me seriously. They failed to stop the attack, and the woman was killed. That’s when I decided I couldn’t go on like that. The dreams were too much of a burden.”
Lance took in all that she had just said.
“Caitlin,” he said, “I’m sorry. I never knew—”
She held up her hand again because she wasn’t done.
“I experimented with some different sleep aids, until I discovered Pacifcleon. It worked like magic. I slept through the night, and I never had nightmares or any dreams at all. It changed my life. I felt like I could finally be a normal, functioning human.”
“You haven’t had a dream since college,” Lance murmured.
She nodded to confirm this was true.
“I never really saw this as a bad thing until now,” she said.
“You can’t possibly think that a dream would have changed anything,” Lance said.
“It would!” Caitlin insisted. “The campus police might not have listened to me, but I would have listened to myself.”
“You don’t even know that you would have had a dream about Adam,” Lance pointed out.
“Of course I would have,” Caitlin said.
Lance seemed unconvinced, but that was her fault. If she hadn’t been taking those pills all these years, there would have been other dreams over the years, other portents that she could have warned him or others about, and then he would see that when those things she dreamed about really did come true, that this was a gift she had. Like her fender bender the other day. She would have dreamed about that, and maybe she would have been extra alert and avoided it. Of course, she wouldn’t have had the fender bender if she wasn’t taking her pills, because that was what caused it in the first place.
“There’s another reason I’m to blame,” she said.
“Would you stop saying that?” Lance said. “This is not your fault.”
“It is,” she insisted. “Because the whole reason I drove out to Culver Creek was because of Pacifcleon. I went out there to buy more.”
“They stopped making it years ago,” Lance said.
“There was a pharmacy out there that had gone out of business. The old woman I spoke to said she had a case of the stuff in their unsold inventory, but she was mistaken.” The thought that she had caused all of this filled her with such dread and horror. The fact that Lance didn’t seem to hold her responsible bothered her. She slapped her hands on his chest to make her point. “I drove all the way out there to buy some drug, and now Adam is gone.”
Lance grabbed hold of her hands and once again did his best to comfort her, but she didn’t feel like she deserved to be comforted.
“Do you know it’s where I’m from?” Lance asked.
“What is?” Caitlin asked.
She stepped away from him and went to the refrigerator. The doors were filled with snapshots. Adam was in most of them, and her heart broke again looking at his cherubic face.
“Culver Creek,” Lance said.
She frowned and looked at her husband. If this was his weird way of trying to comfort her, she didn’t understand it.
“You’re from Atkins,” she said.
“Well, not originally,” Lance said. “Before my mom got married to Tucker, we lived in Culver Creek. That’s where we lived when my dad died.”
This information surprised her. She supposed she vaguely knew Lance and his mother had lived somewhere before moving into Tucker’s palatial home, but in her mind it was just somewhere else in Atkins. His mother met Tucker while working for him, and in her head that all happened in the same town, but if Lance had actually grown up in Culver Creek, then that would have meant he lived there when Lily Esposito was killed. Lance was barely two years older than Caitlin. The town wasn’t that large. He might even have known Lily.
“Lance, did you ever—” Caitlin began, but she didn’t get to finish.
“Come quick, the news is on!”
Caitlin and Lance turned to see Luanne in the doorway, waving them back out to the living room. They followed her, and on the screen was more footage from the rest area. The reporter now stood under an umbrella as rain fell around her.
“We’ve learned that a police raid on a vehicle in this parking lot earlier this evening was in conjunction with the kidnapping of Adam Walker, the four-year-old child who was reported missing earlier this afternoon. Unfortunately, the police have said the raid was a false alarm, and that they have not located Adam. The public is urged to call this hotline if you see young Adam.” A hotline number flashed on the screen along with the snapshot Caitlin had emailed to the police earlier.
Up the Creek Page 20