Caitlin sat in the stiff chair in the police station waiting area. Lance had been in the little meeting room with the police for what felt like forever, but when she pulled out her phone to check it, she saw it hadn’t yet been ten minutes. Time no longer had any meaning.
Caitlin tried to deal with her racing heart and the all-over ache of her body by exhaling loudly through her mouth. She had a memory of watching breathing exercise videos on YouTube when she was pregnant with Adam. Thinking about her pregnancy sent a fresh wave of pain through her. Where was her baby? Where was her baby boy?
She had told the police everything she could remember about her stupid convenience store stop. Well, almost everything. The stuff that was relevant, she reasoned.
What she said was that she had to go out and run some errands, that Adam had fallen asleep in the car, and she had forgotten him when she made a quick stop at the convenience store. When she realized her error, she ran outside, but it was too late. He was already gone.
“I couldn’t have been in the store more than a minute,” she said.
“Two minutes, twenty-five seconds,” that smartass Marley had said. They had security camera footage of her in the store, but how stupid was this? They could see her plain as day shopping, but those cameras hadn’t picked up the sick psycho who had kidnapped Adam from the back of the car.
“What’s the point of the cameras?” Caitlin asked in frustration. “How is that even legal?”
Her question did not get an answer. Instead Officer Young said, “Tell me about the energy drinks, Ms. Walker.”
“What?” She couldn’t believe that was what he was going to focus on. “I have a big project I’m working on,” she said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. “I needed to stay up late to work on it.”
As she sat in the waiting area chair, Caitlin played back over the whole exchange in her head. They suspected her, she was sure of it. Well, that was how it was a lot of times in these cases. She had seen the news stories.
It convinced her that she had done the right thing in not telling them about driving out to Pennsylvania. That would have looked weird and suspicious, and how would she have explained it? She imagined herself saying she drove out there to pick up some discontinued sleeping pills, what were technically illegal drugs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the fact that she had nothing to show for her travels. How suspicious would it have been to tell them she went out there to buy some discontinued medication but had come back empty-handed? Plus, they would have relayed all that to Lance, and he would have lost his shit for sure. As it was, what were they telling Lance in that little meeting room? She pulled out her phone again to check, astounded to see that only two more minutes had elapsed.
She stood up, surprised at how wobbly and unsteady her legs felt. She steadied herself against the wall before walking in the direction of that little meeting room. She wasn’t going in, but maybe if she stood close enough to the door, she would be able to overhear.
“You can’t be back here,” a female employee in plain clothes said as she approached and steered Caitlin back toward the waiting area.
“I need to talk to my husband,” Caitlin said, nodding toward the door. “Can you interrupt them for a moment.”
The secretary or whoever she was glanced toward the closed door.
“I can take a message down.” She grabbed a pad and pen from one of the desks and looked at Caitlin expectantly.
Caitlin didn’t actually have a message planned out, so she said, “Just tell him I went back to the house to wait for any calls.”
It was a lame excuse. They had discontinued their landline two years ago, but it wasn’t as if this secretary was going to know this. If it came to it, Caitlin figured she could always use the excuse that she had left her charger at home, and her phone’s battery was dying. At last check, it had been at about thirty percent, so this wasn’t really a lie.
Caitlin stepped outside into the cool, late afternoon air, and for a moment she remembered how to breathe. She was relieved to be outside that awful building. It was only the second police station she had ever been in. She would be happy if she never visited another one for as long as she lived.
Memories of the interview room at the Culver Creek police station flooded back. How strange that twice in one day that awful place would be so present in her mind. She felt that cursed town looming over her as she walked to her car, and of course, she remembered that night in the motel room.
She had been asleep, but the unfamiliar bed and her mother’s insistence on keeping the television on meant Caitlin didn’t sleep well. That, and a part of her was afraid she would have that dream about little Lily again. That wasn’t usually how it worked, but she had spent the whole day trying to recall the details of the dream, so she feared it would repeat itself in her head that night.
Caitlin had awoken with a start, her heart racing as she tried to figure out where she was, then the slightly musty odor and the sound of the television reminded her that she was still in the Culver Creek motel room. Would they finally go home tomorrow? Her mother hadn’t given her a definitive answer, but they had talked to the police and told them everything, so why would they need to stay here anymore? Maybe it already was tomorrow. Caitlin rolled over to get a look at the room’s window, but she saw only darkness beyond the heavy plaid curtains.
She saw her mother’s body squirming around beneath the covers on her bed. Apparently, Caitlin wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep. Her mother said something, and Caitlin quickly shut her eyes and rolled over, feigning sleep. The last thing she wanted was for Luanne to start pestering her about her dreams. Caitlin did her best to mimic sleep, breathing as she lay there listening to the voices on the television show her mother wasn’t watching. She heard her mother giggle, and then a man on the TV said, “You’ve been a bad girl. Don’t make me use my handcuffs.”
The voice was louder than the others and vaguely familiar, and Caitlin risked getting caught awake to take a look at the show on the television. She was staring at the screen when she heard the man’s voice again, only this time she realized it hadn’t come from the TV at all. She looked over at her mother’s bed and saw the covers slip off to reveal a man’s broad, bare back. In the dim light she recognized Officer Brighton’s haircut, and before she could look away, she saw her mother pull the police officer’s face toward hers, pressing her lips to his. From what Caitlin could see, her mother didn’t have any clothes on either.
She had seen more than enough. She was old enough to know exactly what was going on between her mother and the policeman, and it disgusted her. She burrowed beneath her covers, even though she was too warm, and tried to shut out the noises coming from the bed beside hers, to no avail.
Caitlin blinked away the awful memory as she sat behind the wheel of her SUV. Out of habit, she glanced at the rearview mirror, and her heart leapt. Adam was here! He had been here all along, it was all some terrible mistake. She spun around, but even before she grabbed hold of the blanket, she realized her mistake. The car seat was empty. Her mind was playing tricks on her.
Still clutching the blanket, she turned back around. She buried her face in the folds of the soft cloth and inhaled deeply. The blanket smelled of juice, Cheerios, slightly sour yogurt and fabric softener. It smelled like Adam. Tears ran down her face, and she mopped at them with the blanket.
She thought of the first time she laid eyes on her infant son. His tiny body looked so fragile. She remembered holding him to her chest, silently promising to take care of him and keep him safe, but now she had broken that promise. How many times had she read of some tragic news story about a young child and wondered how the parents could have ever let such a thing happen? How many times had she faulted her own mother for being horrible and selfish? A vision of her naked mother locking lips with Officer Brighton in a motel bed flashed into her head before she could stop it.
The thing about that night in the motel room that had always bothered Caitlin was not that her mother cared so little for her father that she would break her marriage vows and have sex with some man she barely knew, but that her mother was so self-centered that she didn’t even think of her daughter sleeping in the next bed. Certainly Luanne and Officer Brighton had not worried much about keeping the noise levels of their lovemaking in check. Her mother had forgotten all about her daughter during her night of passion. Had she even spared a passing thought for Caitlin’s safety? What if Brighton had turned out to be some dangerous psycho?
Maybe Caitlin wasn’t shacking up with random men in seedy motel rooms, but she knew she was to blame for her son’s disappearance. It was her self-centered actions that had led to this. She had been so worried about her own nightmares and so desperate to avoid them that she had forgotten entirely about Adam as she ran into the convenience store for her energy drink shopping spree. The truth was, she was no better than Luanne.
Luanne. Shit. She had to call her mother. She set Adam’s blanket on the seat beside her and pulled out her phone. Luanne sounded giddy, though she was hard to hear over the sound of slot machines and music in the background.
“Mom, something’s happened,” Caitlin managed to get out before she broke down sobbing.
Luanne’s voice turned suddenly serious. Through sobs Caitlin told the whole, ugly story. The same one she had told the police, anyway.
“I’m on my way,” Luanne said. “We’ll be on the next flight.”