The water yanked her under. She saw a swirling mass of bubbles as she struggled beneath the surface, flailing her arms in an attempt to find air. She couldn’t tell which way was up, and as she became turned around by the rushing water, she only became more disoriented. The swirling current meant she couldn’t stop herself long enough to figure out which way to go. Her lungs began to burn.
Then a weight pressed down on her—a hand, she realized. It was a hand holding her down. Oh God, it was Lance. It had to be. She tried to break free from his grasp, but her strength was fading. She felt weak and feeble. He dragged her, pulling her deeper into the creek. Suddenly everything grew instantly colder, and she sputtered as she sucked in water, but it wasn’t water. It was air—sweet, beautiful air. Even as her teeth chattered, she greedily sucked in more of the welcome air.
He still grasped her, but her strength was starting to return, and she fought to free herself.
“Lance,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Lance, let me go.”
He continued to hold on to her, but she noticed he was dragging her not down into the creek but back to the shore.
“Not Lance,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Lance is . . . I’m sorry. We couldn’t save him. The current was too strong.”
Caitlin cried out.
“I’m sorry,” the man pulling her to the shore said. “We tried, but . . .”
“My son!” she screamed. “He had my son!”
“Adam’s okay,” he promised her. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
As they crested the embankment, she saw Adam right away. His little face peered out of the big gray fireman’s blanket he was wrapped in. She ran to him and grabbed him up in her arms as someone draped another blanket over her own shoulders. Tears rushed down her face.
When she found her voice again, she said to Adam, “I’m sorry Daddy tried to hurt you, but he won’t hurt you anymore.”
“Daddy saved us,” Adam said. She assumed he was confused, like she had been when her rescuer helped pull her from the creek.
“Oh, honey,” Caitlin said. “He was a bad man.”
“No, he’s right,” a woman said, and Caitlin looked past Adam to see a woman also wrapped up in a gray blanket. “Lance was the one who saved us.”
The words made fresh tears run down Caitlin’s face. Someone shouted her name, and when she turned around, she saw her mother. Luanne ran over and clutched Adam and Caitlin in what became a three-person hug. Caitlin spied movement out of the corner of her eye and saw her mother-in-law hurrying toward the creek.
A police officer caught Raquel before she could foolishly climb down the embankment like Caitlin had done, and Tucker came up beside her, pressed his hand on her shoulder and steered her back to him. He embraced her. Caitlin watched her mother-in-law’s shoulders heave with her tears. Apparently the police officer had told her about Lance, or else she had already known, through the peculiar ways of a mother’s intuition.
41
By two in the afternoon, the rain had stopped, the floodwaters had receded, and Detective Sage Dorian could no longer remember what sleep felt like. He sat in the station’s interview room across from Phelicity Green. She was dressed in a department-issue sweatshirt and sweatpants that were too big for her.
“Had you met Adam Walker before yesterday?” Sage asked her.
“Yes, he was having nightmares,” Phelicity said. “His father thought they were just bad dreams, but I knew they were real. He’s got the gift. He’s psychic.”
Sage tensed up. He thought of Brighton and his affair with the psychic girl’s mother. He thought of that sketch artist drawing, which still made no sense to him.
“He told you this was going to happen?” Sage asked, waving his arm around the little interview room.
“He had a dream about me, a dream about me and my sister,” Phelicity said. “He could see that night, that awful night. He was the only one who could tell me what happened.”
“But you were there that night,” Sage said. “You saw what happened.”
Phelicity shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut tight. It was several seconds before she reopened them.
“I can’t remember anything,” she said. “I can’t remember that night at all. Do you know what it’s like to not know what happened to your own sister?”
The remark made Sage look up in alarm. Had Phelicity been looking into his past, or was this her so-called gift?
“Do you know how he found you?” Sage asked. “How did Lance Walker track you down?”
“Oh, that was fate,” Phelicity said. “Fate’s an amazing thing. That’s what brought Adam back to me.”
“Who brought Adam to you?” Sage asked.
“Fate,” Phelicity said. “Something, some nudge from the universe, made me pull into the parking lot of the closed pharmacy. Why on earth would I go in there? And then there he was waiting for me.”
“He was in the parking lot?” Sage asked. He remembered driving to the pharmacy the day before. It had been an out-of-the-way spot. No way the kid could have just wandered over there from somewhere.
“Yes, he was just sitting there in his car waiting for me,” Phelicity said.
Sage blinked exhaustion out of his eyes as he took in what she was saying.
“You took him out of the car?” Sage said.
“Well, I had to,” Phelicity said. “I was meant to. That’s why he was there.”
“He was there because his mother was picking up something at the pharmacy,” Sage said.
Phelicity politely shook her head.
“He was there to lead me to the truth.”
“And what is the truth?” Sage asked. That was the thing he wanted more than anything—the truth—but would he kidnap a child to get it? No, he didn’t think so.
“The truth was that the dark lord took my sister that night,” Phelicity said.
“The dark lord?”
“You might know him as the devil,” Phelicity said. “That’s what Adam told me. He said the bad man had killed my sister. That’s his words for the dark lord. He has many names.”
“Couldn’t it also be his way of saying that a bad man killed your sister?” Sage asked.
Phelicity frowned at this, as if what Sage had just suggested was absurd.
“But there was no man there,” Phelicity said. “The dark lord has us under his control.”
“Okay, that’s one theory, but hear me out: Lance Walker, the man whose son you kidnapped—because, Phelicity, that’s what it’s called when you take a child who isn’t yours out of his car and run off with him—he used to live near you when he was a child. Do you remember him?”
Phelicity stared at him blankly, then shook her head. He couldn’t tell if she was following him or not. There was a spacey sort of look to her eyes. He didn’t know if that was the ordeal she had been through or if she always looked that way.
“When Lance Walker was a child, he used to sleepwalk. When he was very young, he killed his father when he was sleepwalking, and when he was a little bit older, he killed your sister when he was sleepwalking. He didn’t know what he was doing, not consciously, but—”
“That’s what I told you. It was the dark lord. He had us under his spell.”
“Right,” Sage said. “The dark lord.”
He excused himself and stepped out into the hall. He rubbed his forehead, then yawned. All he wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep for days.
“What’s going on with her?” Rayanne asked. “We handing her over to the FBI?”
By rights, he knew he should. She had kidnapped Adam Walker. On the other hand, what good would it do? She was unwell, but she wasn’t a threat to anyone. Hadn’t she endured enough difficulty in her life? Because when a sleepwalking Lance Walker had killed Lily Esposito, he robbed young Jade of her future as well. That trauma had turned her into the sad, broken woman she was today.
Sage looked out over the squad room. Steve Arlo was putting his jacket on and getting ready to
clock out after a long, grueling day. Steve had declined to charge a five-year-old with manslaughter, and then protected Lance Walker when he had murdered Lily. Steve’s motives hadn’t been purely altruistic, but Sage wasn’t sure he could fault him for his judgment call. Steve had done what he thought was best for the boy and best for everyone.
“I think we have to understand that any testimony she gives is tainted by the fact that she suffers from delusions and doesn’t have a strong grasp on reality,” Sage said.
Rayanne raised one eyebrow. “Okay?” she said, turning the word into a skeptical question.
“What she needs is counseling and medication,” Sage said. “I think the county facility might be able to provide her with the help she needs.” Rayanne nodded but didn’t say anything, so Sage continued, “She isn’t a threat to anyone. When she took the boy out to the creek, she wasn’t aware of the flash flood warning. She didn’t mean to put him or herself in danger.”
“Detective, I agree with you,” Rayanne said. “You don’t need to convince me.”
Maybe the one he needed to convince was himself. He looked through the door’s window at Phelicity sitting there at the desk. What he hadn’t told anyone was that he felt a kinship with this woman. Both of them had sisters who had been murdered, but while Phelicity, in her own reckless unstable way, had tried to find the truth, he had not set foot outside his comfort zone to find his sister’s killer. Phelicity was a better person than he was. He would make sure she received the psychiatric treatment she needed, and he vowed to do whatever it took to find out the truth about his sister’s murder.
42
Caitlin awoke to dim early morning light. Though it had been a month since she had last taken a Pacifcleon she still marveled at how amazing and restful she felt after a good night’s sleep. She couldn’t believe she had been missing out on that feeling all these years.
She looked over at the empty space beside her. The other thing she was still working on getting used to was the fact that Lance was dead. How many times a day did she pick up her phone to give him a quick call or shoot him a text before she remembered he was gone? Someday, Raquel had assured her, her pain and grief would become tolerable, but it would take a while. She might have bristled at her mother-in-law’s advice, but then she remembered Raquel had been about her age when she lost her first husband suddenly.
They had a few heart-to-hearts—Raquel and Caitlin—in the long days following Lance’s death. Raquel told her about the sleepwalking episodes that Lance had suffered from since he was a boy.
“He couldn’t help it,” Raquel assured her. “If anyone disturbed him while he was in the throes of an episode, he became violent. I was so frightened when he announced that you were getting married. I feared something awful would happen.”
“But I never posed a risk of waking him,” Caitlin said, “because of the pills I took. I slept like a rock.”
“Maybe if I had put him on some sort of medication,” Raquel mused. “I should have taken him to a doctor right away.”
“They probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything,” Caitlin said. She didn’t know if this was true, but she felt the need to reassure her distressed mother-in-law.
“Instead I tried to hide it, and made him ashamed of it,” Raquel said. “He must have thought I was ashamed of him.”
That he had been asleep when he killed that little girl made it easier for Caitlin to bear. Since realizing the truth about her husband, she had struggled to reconcile the sweet, caring man she knew with the monster she had seen in her dream. How could Lance have done such a thing? But though it had been Lance’s twelve-year-old body that had carried out the horrible act, something beyond his control had been at work. She of all people could understand the helplessness of a sleeping disorder.
To think that for all these years both of them had been suffering and hiding their shameful secrets. It made her want to travel back in time, to hold her husband and tell him that it was all right, that he didn’t have to be ashamed. She wanted to confess to him about the dreams she had banished from her life and regretted so much never sharing this with him when he was alive. Maybe if they had both been a little braver, they could have helped each other.
Now she had to be brave for Adam. She heard him stir in his bedroom, and then a minute or so later, she heard his feet pad down the hall to her room. He peeked his head in the open doorway, and when he saw she was awake, he bounded into the room and jumped up on the bed.
“Mommy, I had a dream!” he declared.
She felt herself stiffen. She had resolved, when Adam was a little older, to tell him all about the psychic dreams she had experienced when she was a kid. She didn’t want him to ever feel like his dreams were something abnormal or something to be ashamed of.
“What was your dream about?” she asked cautiously.
“I could fly,” he announced. “And I had a flying dog, who was purple with green ears, and there were balloons in the air that tasted like gummy bears.”
She smiled at his description of the perfectly harmless dream. Since she had started having dreams again, she found them to be pleasant nonsense. She had forgotten what strange things dreams could be.
“It sounds like a good dream,” she said. “Where did you fly to?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Can we have gummy bears for breakfast?”
“How about some pancakes instead?”
He gave her a little-boy sigh and said, “Okay.”
She tousled his hair and looked over the top of her head to give her husband a smile before she remembered Lance wasn’t there. Instead, she glanced up toward the ceiling and silently blew a kiss heavenward.
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A woman is found murdered in Culver Creek and as Sage Dorian investigates the crime he finds disturbing connections to his own sister’s murder. Meanwhile a young journalist fears she might be over her head when she goes undercover at the Everluster Paint Factory as she looks into a series of mysterious deaths. Will she wind up the next victim? And will Sage track down his sister’s killer? Find out in Factory Girls the second book in the Culver Creek Series.
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About the Author
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Alissa Grosso is the author of several books for adults and teens. When she's not busy writing she's probably hanging out with her boyfriend Ron or perhaps she’s creating some new digital illustrations. Originally from New Jersey, she now resides in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
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