Caitlin looked down at the blanket in her hands. She remembered the dizzying moment when she had come out of the police station and sat down in her car, how for a second she looked into the rearview mirror and saw Adam asleep in the backseat. Of course, what she had seen was only his blanket draped over the empty car seat.
What if that was all she had been seeing on her drive back from Pennsylvania? No, she had seen him in the backseat. She had definitely seen him, hadn’t she? She thought of Lance prattling on and on about Pacifcleon’s side effects. No, she wasn’t having hallucinations. She wasn’t crazy.
She tried to play back what had happened in her mind, but her head was a jumbled mess and it was hard to focus on her memory. Mental confusion was a Pacifcleon side effect according to Lance, but she had a feeling her own mushy mind was a direct result of her child having been kidnapped.
She shut her eyes and tried to focus her thoughts. What she remembered was stepping out of the little drug store. Her Pacifcleon search had proved fruitless, and it had left her feeling frantic and desperate, but the first thing she had done when she got to the car was check on Adam, and not in the rearview mirror, either. She had gone straight to the back door. A memory of patting his little head, of pulling the blanket up to his chin, came back to her. But had that really happened? As she recalled events, she didn’t think she had opened the back door. She hadn’t wanted to wake him. Still, she had seen him through the back window. She wouldn’t have made the mistake she made looking in the rearview mirror. In her head, she saw Adam sound asleep in his car seat.
“He was there,” Caitlin said aloud, her voice barely more than a whisper. She felt like speaking the words would make it real, but she heard the uncertainty in her tone.
“What?” Lance asked.
Caitlin waved away his question.
Adam asked for ice cream. That proved he had been there. No, wait, he had asked for ice cream before they got to the pharmacy. He had been sound asleep the whole ride home. He hadn’t said a word.
That had been strange, hadn’t it? It was a long ride, and Adam barely napped anymore. Maybe if he had a cold or the flu or something, but despite what Caitlin had told Adam’s teacher, her son was perfectly healthy. He might have dozed off for a couple of minutes here and there, but there was no way he would have been so sound asleep that he wouldn’t have made a single noise on a ride that lasted nearly an hour and a half.
“No,” Caitlin said as she realized her mistake. Adam hadn’t gone missing here in New Jersey like she told the police. He had been kidnapped out in Pennsylvania, that wretched, awful Culver Creek.
“No, what?” Lance stared at her as if she was a lunatic, and she had to admit she was feeling a bit crazed right then.
She needed to call the police. She had to tell them to search for Adam out in Pennsylvania. But wait, was she sure of this? That memory of seeing Adam sleeping in the backseat was so real. She closed her eyes and saw him through the window resting peacefully, but even as she stared at him, the scene shifted. His shirt changed colors, then the blanket was draped over the whole seat so that she couldn’t see his face. What had she actually seen? She realized she had no idea.
What would she tell the police? If she told them she thought Adam might have been kidnapped while she was out in Pennsylvania, they were going to want to know why she hadn’t told them about being all the way out there. They would ask her how she could have driven the whole way back without realizing Adam was not in the backseat. She would have to tell them the truth, that she was a terrible mother—the worst.
She felt in her jeans’ back pocket for her phone, but it wasn’t there. It was upstairs plugged into the charger beside the bed. That was the first thing she had done when she came home. It was just as well, she couldn’t make the call with Lance standing here. The police weren’t going to understand why she hadn’t told them about driving to Culver Creek, but Lance would flip out for sure.
“I have to get my phone,” she told him, and ran up the stairs.
“Caitlin, what’s going on?” Lance called after her. “Talk to me!”
She unplugged her phone from the charger and stood there staring at the bed. How stupid and selfish she had been. If she hadn’t run away from her gift, Adam would be here with her right now. She would have had a dream about him being kidnapped, and she could have done everything in her power to make sure it didn’t happen. But no, she had spent her entire adulthood running away from the inconvenience of a few bad dreams, and now she was paying the price.
What’s worse was she had been telling Adam to ignore his dreams, teaching him they weren’t real. What if he had a dream that warned him? Maybe he could have kept himself safe if Caitlin hadn’t steered him in the wrong direction.
But he did have a dream, didn’t he? Caitlin recalled listening with horror as Adam described a dream that seemed so much like the nightmare she had all those years ago. She had mistaken it for a repeat of her dream, but what if that wasn’t what it was at all? Something else bubbled up from her jumbled thoughts. Adam asking for ice cream as they drove through Culver Creek. She hadn’t understood how he could have known what the ice cream parlor was, but what if he recognized it from his dream?
She ran out the bedroom door and straight into Lance coming down the hallway. He attempted to hug her again, but she pushed him away. Couldn’t he see she didn’t have time for that?
She ran into Adam’s room. The other day he had been drawing a picture of one of his nightmares. There might be a clue there. There might be other drawings. She flipped through a stack of papers on his little desk, discarding rockets, dinosaurs and octopi. Where was the nightmare drawing? There was another stack of papers on the floor, and she grabbed it and began to flip through it. The subjects were more realistic, and it was possible these were drawings based on his dreams.
“What are you doing?” Lance asked. “Maybe you should lie down for a few minutes.”
“Our son is missing, and you want me to lie down?” she asked, as she shuffled frantically through the papers looking for vital clues.
“Well, it might make a little more sense than whatever the hell this is,” he said, waving a hand at her and the room that now was in a serious state of disarray, crayon-colored pieces of paper littering the floor.
“Adam had a dream about this,” Caitlin said. “He knew this was going to happen!”
Her voice had reached a frantic pitch. She still hadn’t found the paper she was looking for, but she spotted Adam’s school bag hung on his closet door and grabbed it, dumping the contents on the ground.
“Caitlin, please,” Lance said.
“He wanted ice cream,” Caitlin said, jabbing a finger in Lance’s direction. “He recognized the ice cream place.”
Lance shook his head because, of course, he didn’t understand, but she didn’t have time to explain things to him. She moved papers around on the floor until at last she found it. She recognized the familiar scene right away: the creek, the fallen body, the spurting blood.
Of course, she had assumed the injured child was Lily Esposito, but what if it wasn’t at all? What if it was some new victim? What if the same man who had killed Lily was about to kill again? Then a sickening realization hit Caitlin. Her son had a dream about a child being killed in a vicious murder in Culver Creek, and now her son had been kidnapped near that same town. What if the child he had dreamed about was himself? Caitlin fell to her knees.
This was all her fault. She had silenced her dreams, and she had told Adam to ignore his own. She let out a yell that sounded like it came from an injured animal. Lance came over to her and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Please,” he said, “come lie down.”
He gently removed the drawing from her hand. The nightmare vision floated harmlessly to the ground, but Caitlin noticed the way her husband’s eyes flicked to the frightening illustration.
“We have to give that to the police,” Caitlin said.
A moment later, Lance jerked his head away from Adam’s artwork, his expression unreadable.
“They don’t want that,” he assured her. He helped her to her feet and began to lead her toward their bedroom. “Shh, let’s go lay down. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.