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.
The news report was over too quickly and contained frustratingly little information. If they were raiding a car at a Pennsylvania rest area, then maybe they had picked up some sort of trail in Culver Creek, but had she waited too long to come forward with the information that she had driven Adam out there?
She looked over at her mother for confirmation, and her mother knew what she was asking without Caitlin having to say a word. Luanne nodded. Standing here watching useless news reports wasn’t going to bring her son home. There was only one thing she could do that would have any hope of saving Adam, and she knew she must do it now.
“I’m going to bed,” she announced.