I walk through the hospital encouraged by Anna’s prognosis and return my focus to finding Taylor.
I plan to think about every bit of information I’ve gathered so far—or at least the ones I can remember—on the drive back to Sandcastle, but I fall asleep in Merrill’s passenger seat before we’re out of the Sacred Heart parking lot.
Still, my subconscious does the very thing my conscious mind had planned to—and probably far more efficiently.
It comes with a price, however.
My dreams, some of which can only be described as nightmares, are nonsensical, chaotic, and disturbing.
And even one of my recurring dreams is transformed into something it has never been before—something disconcerting, unsettling.
The last of the setting sun streaks the blue horizon with neon pink and splatters the emerald green waters of the Gulf with giant orange splotches like scoops of sherbet in an art deco bowl.
A fitting finale for a perfect Florida day.
Taylor, my daughter, who looks to be around four, though it’s hard to tell since in dreams we all seem ageless—runs up from the water’s edge, her face red with sun and heat, her hands sticky with wet sand, and asks me to join her for one last swim.
She looks up at me with her mother’s brown eyes, open and honest as possible, and smiles her sweetest smile as she begins to beg.
“Please, Daddy,” she says. “Please.”
“We need to go,” I say. “It’ll be dark soon. And I’m supposed to take your mom out on a date tonight.”
“Please, Daddy,” she repeats as if I have not spoken, and now she takes the edge of my swimming trunks in her tiny, sandy hand and tugs.
I look down at her, moved by her openness, purity, and beauty.
She knows she’s got me then.
“Yes,” she says, releasing my shorts to clench her fist and pull it toward her in a gesture of victory. Then she begins to jump up and down.
I drop the keys and the towels and the bottles of sunscreen wrapped in them, kick off my flip-flops, and pause just a moment to take it all in—her, the sand, the sea, the sun.
“I love you, Dad,” she says with the ease and unashamed openness only a safe and secure child can.
“I love you.”
I take her hand in mine, and we walk down to the end of her world as the sun sets and the breeze cools off the day.
I look down and she is gone, her tiny, sandy hand no longer in my own.
I spin around and look for her, searching in every direction.
In the far distance I see a small figure that might be her.
I race toward her.
But no matter how hard or fast I run I can’t gain any ground, can’t make up any of the distance between us.
And then she is gone.
Suddenly the beach breeze brings with it shrieks and cries, and I can’t determine if they are hers or the gulls gliding in the air over sea and shore.
I wake groggily and discombobulated as my phone vibrates incessantly in my pocket.
I withdraw it and squint to read the name on the display.
It’s Roderick.
“Just got a call from the ME,” he says. “Prelim autopsy shows no signs of sexual assault or violence.”
“Thank God for that,” I say, thinking not only of Magdalene but where Taylor might be right now and what might be being done to her.
“The body had been frozen shortly after death just as we had suspected,” he says. “And she estimates the body, which has been cleaned, had been out of the freezer less than sixteen hours or so.”
I’m doing my best to focus on what he’s saying and to add it to the other information that I’ve acquired so far, but my mind keeps trying to break in with the thought that I already know who did it.
“But the biggest revelation came from the rushed drug screenings,” he says. “Like so many in the media and online have theorized, she did die of a drug overdose—and it was sleeping medication. Something called chloral hydrate. Evidently it’s pretty common.”
I sit for a long moment taking it all in, adding it to everything else I know, and allowing the thought that I already know who did it to fully form within my conscious mind.
“You there?” he says eventually.
“I think I know who did it,” I say. “You mind if I try something unconventional?”