He saw the policemen standing in Mrs. Drummond’s kitchen, their sopping wet jackets dripping onto her linoleum floor. They left damp footprints as they walked back to the door. Mrs. Drummond followed behind them to let them out.
“We’re on sandbag patrol,” one of the police officers said, and Lance remembered thinking the police were playing with those little beanbags they had in his preschool classroom, but the other policeman said something about the creek flooding.
This seemed to be important, but Lance couldn’t figure out why at first. After she had seen the policemen out, Mrs. Drummond came into the kitchen. She mopped up the puddles with an old dish towel.
“Don’t worry, Lance,” she said. “Your mother is on her way home. She’ll be here as soon as she can, but it’s a long drive and the weather isn’t very good.”
A long drive? As Lance played the memory back in his mind, it didn’t make any sense. A long drive from where? Lance had assumed his mother was at the police station or maybe at their house, but neither one of those places qualified as a long drive. The police hadn’t even mentioned his mother. They were off to go deal with the creek.
Lance had a sudden flash of inspiration. The police had taken down a statement from Mrs. Drummond. That meant there had to be some sort of official police report on his father’s death. Surely that would be able to supply the information his memory was lacking.
He made a mad dash through the pouring rain to the front door of the police station. It was only as he gratefully entered the dry vestibule that it occurred to him it was a strange and suspicious hour to be going to a police station to get information on a death that had occurred twenty-six years ago.
So he wasn’t surprised that the officer on his way out of the building paused to give Lance a strange look. The cop was dressed in plain clothes with a flimsy windbreaker that would be no match for the downpour outside, but Lance could tell straightaway that he was law enforcement. He had that look.
“Can I help you?” the cop asked.
“I need to get a copy of a police report.” Lance hadn’t even considered what he was wearing, and he glanced down, relieved to see that he was at least in clothes and not pajamas. His khakis and shirt were beyond rumpled, but his short run to the police station had left him so drenched he doubted it mattered.
“You’ll need to go see the clerk at the window,” the cop said. He held the door for Lance but narrowed his eyes at him. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”
Lance had a panicked thought—had the police already found out he was missing from the house? Caitlin hadn’t taken any sleeping pills before bed. It was possible she had woken, found her car and her husband missing, and called the police. They might have been posting his photo along with Adam’s on all the news stories.
“Don’t think so,” Lance said, and then for good measure, “I’m not from around here.”
The cop shrugged it off. He seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere, and Lance proceeded down a narrow hallway to a window with a little counter attached to it and one of those little speaking grates, but when he glanced back, he noticed the cop was still in the vestibule, a frown visible on his face. He nodded at Lance before turning to head out into the deluge.
The clerk at the window didn’t seem too troubled by Lance’s appearance or his early morning request. Unfortunately she was also unable to help him.
“Anything more than a year old is in our archives,” she said. “You have to go fill out a request at the courthouse for that, but the records office doesn’t open until ten.” She jotted down the address on a piece of paper and passed it through the little opening in the bottom of the window.
“Thanks,” Lance said. “Do you know how quickly I would be able to get that? Like would they be able to give it to me today?”
The clerk laughed at this. “Two to three weeks, if you’re lucky. That’s if they even have it. About ten years ago, some of the archives were lost in a big flood.”
Lance’s heart sank. He doubted he would even bother to make a request at the courthouse. The best thing to do would be to head home.
“You know they’re saying the creek might flood today,” the clerk said.
Lance got the impression that this shift didn’t give her the chance to talk to many people, and she was probably glad for the company.
“Is that so?” Lance didn’t really care about the creek, but he was doing his best to be polite and not arouse suspicion.
He remembered the police officers in Mrs. Drummond’s kitchen talking about sandbag duty. Had the creek flooded that night?
Lance felt dizzy as another memory came back to him. He had been sitting with his dad on the couch in their old living room, watching a show on the television. Lance didn’t quite remember the show, something with car chases and explosions that his mom never would have let him watch.
“Our little secret,” his dad had said to him with a wink.
The memory was fuzzy, but he had the vague sense that his mother had gone away for the weekend. Had she gone to his aunt’s house in Connecticut maybe? Or on a trip with some of her old school friends? He seemed to remember something like that happening when he was a kid. What he remembered was that it was just him and his dad.
“A boys’ weekend,” his dad had said. They had eaten French toast with sausage for dinner, and his dad hadn’t cared when he flooded his meal in a sea of syrup.
A loud sound drowned out the explosions on the TV, and a yellow banner started to scroll across the bottom of the screen.
“What’s it say, Daddy?” asked Lance, who was old enough to recognize the look of letters, but who hadn’t yet mastered putting them together to form words.
“Says there’s a flash flood warning in effect,” his dad said. “But don’t worry, kiddo, we’re far enough from the creek here that it won’t be an issue.”
“I moved a bunch of stuff upstairs.”
Lance looked up with a start. For a moment he had forgotten he was still inside the police station talking with the clerk.
“What’s that?” Lance asked.
“My place is less than a block from the creek,” the clerk said, “so I always end up moving the important stuff upstairs when we get a lot of rain, just in case.”
Lance nodded and thanked her again for the courthouse information.
“Hopefully it doesn’t flood,” he said as he backed away from the window and headed toward the exit door.
Something she had said had made him uneasy, but he was too distracted to place what it was until he got back in the car. He turned on the car and blasted the heat to try to dry himself off, but the car had been sitting too long and the chilly air that blew on him made him shiver.
She had been talking about stairs, and that was how his father had died. He fell down the stairs backwards Tucker had said, and now Lance was very sure of something. The night his father died, his mother hadn’t been home. It had been their boys’ weekend. She was away somewhere. That was why Mrs. Drummond said it would take her a while to get back.
So if his mother hadn’t been around that weekend, then that only left two explanations for his father’s strange and terrible death. The first was that somehow his father had accidentally stumbled backward down the stairs. It seemed such an unlikely scenario. Could his father have been very drunk? But Lance had no recollection of this. Sometimes his dad had a beer or two with dinner, but he had no memory of his dad stumbling around in a drunken way. Still, he was so young, would he have even recognized drunkenness? he wondered. Then there was the second possibility, the one that really frightened him—that his father’s death was not entirely an accident, that he had shoved his father down the stairs. Why would he do that when he loved his dad? A more recent memory came to Lance, the morning he awoke to find his hands around his son’s neck. He wasn’t the same person when he was sleepwalking, and when someone tried to rouse him, he turned violent. He knew this from his incident at Ryerson. Jacob Pinochet had been on the end
of one of his sleepwalking attacks, and so maybe had his own father.
The thought left him so numb and bewildered, he didn’t know what to do. He remembered his plan to drive straight home. He pulled out onto the road, but when he came to the first intersection, he didn’t make a right and head out to the highway. Instead he drove through his hometown as thoughts tumbled through is head.
His mother had known, hadn’t she? When had he first started sleepwalking? He must have started very young. She knew better than to try to wake him, he supposed, but his father didn’t know that secret, maybe, or else Raquel had warned him, but like her rules about no violent TV shows and not too much syrup, he had decided to ignore her instructions.
That was why Raquel always said his father died of a heart attack. She wasn’t trying to protect him from a fear of stairs. She wanted to protect him from remembering that he had, in a sleeping state, killed his own father. He thought of how distant she had seemed to him as a child, and it made so much sense. She loved him, because he was her son, but she must have been fearful of him and considered him to be something of a monster. It was why she had sent him away to Ryerson, wasn’t it? She wasn’t worried about a neighborhood bogeyman. He was the bogeyman she feared. Certainly she must have lived with the knowledge that any night he might break into her bedroom and strangle her in his sleep.
His heart was heavy as he drove down half-familiar streets. The elementary school building looked unchanged from when he was a kid, but there was a newer townhome development just down the block from it that he didn’t think had been there before. He let memory guide him and was surprised how easily he found his way back to his old house. The old asbestos siding had been replaced by modern vinyl siding in a tasteful taupe, but otherwise the little house looked just the way he remembered it.
He idled at the curb as he stared at the house and the secrets it kept hidden in its walls. If only there was some way he could go back there and save his family from that tragic night.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he whispered to the empty car as he wept. “I’m so sorry.”
A light flicked on in the house, and he remembered it was still early morning, and he was an unfamiliar car on a residential street and drove away as the rain and his tears continued to fall.
34
Sage stepped out of the police station into the pouring rain. The icy cold water did little to revive him. It had been a long, sleepless night and everything had a fuzzy, surreal feeling. He glanced back over his shoulder at the guy he had passed in the hallway. He was pretty sure he knew him from somewhere. It could have been his sleep-deprived mind playing tricks on him. Most likely he just worked somewhere local, but Sage couldn’t place him.
He jogged through the rain to his car and was drenched by the time he sat down behind the steering wheel. Water dripped onto the upholstery as he leaned his head back against the headrest while the events of the hectic night passed through his mind.
The FBI field agents had shown up shortly after Sage scoped out the shuttered pharmacy. The feds commandeered the squad breakroom as their field office, much to the annoyance of the Culver Creek police force. Sage reported to Henderson on the closed-up pharmacy, though Henderson had barely seemed interested in what he had to say.
Sage stared at the photo that had been taped to the pillar in the room—the allegedly kidnapped little boy, Adam Walker. The kid was from New Jersey. What would he have been doing all the way out here? It was probably just a coincidence, but Sage had to say something.
“Walker,” Sage said. “Are his parents from here? Is that why they were out here today? There were Walkers that used to live over near the creek—”
“Atkins,” Henderson snapped without bothering to look up from his phone screen.
“What?” Sage asked.
“The father’s from Atkins,” Henderson said.
“It’s just I’m working on this cold case, and there was a Walker family that used to live—”
“It’s a common name,” Henderson said. “You got a Starbucks in this shithole town or what?”
“There’s a coffee shop on Main Street that’s pretty decent,” Sage said.
“Cool, do me a favor and grab me a mochaccino,” Henderson said. “Two sugars. Biggest size they got.”
Which was how Sage went from liaison to glorified gofer. It had been a very long night.
As dawn spread its rosy fingers through the grimy squad room windows, Sage had come around to sharing the Culver Creek police force’s low opinion of the FBI, and that was before they had curtly told him his services would no longer be needed as they were shifting the focus of their investigation.
“The kid’s not here,” Henderson said. “He was never here.”
“Are you sure?” Sage asked. “You haven’t even—”
“Trust me, we’ve got everything under control, Officer Dorian.”
“Detective,” Sage corrected before storming out of the building.
Sage shivered as he sat dripping in his car. What he should do was go home and go to sleep, but he felt too wired to sleep, and it seemed a shame to waste this restless energy. He could take another look through the Lily Esposito files. There had to be something he was missing. Except he had left the files he needed back in the squad room. The thought of going back out in that pouring rain filled him with dread. Lily Esposito had been dead for years. What difference did a few more hours make either way?
He had been hanging around Agent Henderson too long. That wasn’t how he worked. Besides, he was already soaked to the bone anyway.
The other officers didn’t hear him come in. They were too busy flipping through the folder from the Lily Esposito case that he had left on his desk. Well, Steve Arlo flipped through it while the two other officers peered over his shoulders. Sage thought Henderson had beat too hasty a retreat. The way the Culver Creek police force shirked their duties, it was very likely a little boy could have been kidnapped here in broad daylight. It was a small miracle there wasn’t an epidemic of kidnappings.
Sage was about to clear his throat to get their attention when he heard Steve say his name and instead eavesdropped in silence.
“He’s just running around talking to loonies,” Steve said. “It’s a fucking waste of taxpayer dollars.”
Sage thought that was ironic considering how hard at work Steve and the other two officers were at that very moment.
“I saw him in the coffee shop one day interviewing that crazy lady that works at the grocery store,” Steve continued.
“The one with the blue hair and all the tattoos?” one of the officers asked.
“Nah, the older one. She’s always going to that psychic place,” Steve said.
Sage thought of Brighton and his affair with the psychic girl’s mother. Something tingled at the back of Sage’s mind. He tried to focus on it, but it evaporated before he could even grasp it.
“What psychic?” the other officer asked.
“You know,” Steve said, “the whatchamacallit, dream whisperer. She’s always going over there, bringing her offerings of food. She’s a total weirdo. These are the sort of people this nitwit is going around questioning.”
This time it was more than a tingle. A jolt of inspiration hit Sage.
Left where? Maura had said that afternoon in the coffee shop before she caught herself. What if all this time Jade had been right here under his nose? He had a dream whisperer to visit.
35
Caitlin awoke, and the feeling of being completely refreshed was so foreign it was disorienting. There was something vaguely familiar about this feeling. This was what it was supposed to feel like when you woke from a deep sleep. Normally she awoke in a groggy state, and it was only after a couple of cups of coffee and a hot shower that she finally began to feel human. To feel exceptionally human on waking was a joyous occasion, but the moment was fleeting.
With wakefulness came consciousness and the memory that her son was out there somewhere. She needed to find him, a
nd she lay there trying to remember if she had dreamed last night. She was so out of practice that maybe she wouldn’t even have remembered how to dream, but she caught the glimpse of something at the corner of her memory. The dream was elusive, but she fought to relax her mind, and the all-too-familiar details of the dream bubbled up to the surface of her consciousness.
“No!” she screamed as she sat up with a start. She looked over to see if she had woken Lance, but he wasn’t in bed.
Instead of giving her answers about Adam, her subconscious mind had forced her to relive a dream she had relived far too many times already. Last night she had her old Culver Creek nightmare again. Details had morphed and twisted in the intervening years, with some aspects of her present life working their way into the old dream, but it was still the dream about the murder of a long-dead little girl. Adam hadn’t been in the dream at all, and she still had no idea where to find him.
She climbed out of bed. It was after nine, and she could hear movement and voices downstairs. Probably she was the last one up. She pulled a sweatshirt over her T-shirt and decided the yoga pants she had slept in were presentable enough for a family breakfast.
Caitlin moved quietly down the stairs and paused outside the kitchen when she heard Luanne and Raquel talking.
“What we should do,” Luanne was saying, “is hold a press conference. Ask the public for information. Remind everyone they should be looking for Adam. Caitlin could say a few words and hold up a picture of him.”
“I don’t see any reason in making a spectacle of our grief,” Raquel said. “Besides, do you even think Caitlin is up for talking to a bunch of news cameras?”
Caitlin was reminded of her run-in with the press outside the police station the previous day. She doubted she was up for talking to the press, but she was still annoyed that Raquel didn’t think she was capable.
“Well, if she doesn’t want to talk, I can do it,” Luanne said.
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