With Brian asleep in the backseat and Chris riding shotgun, Michael tried to call his father as they raced across Central Oregon in the dark. The Senator’s phone dumped into voice mail.
“Damn it!” He tried calling his parents’ landline at their home, and his mother sleepily answered.
“Michael?”
“Sorry, Mom. I’m trying to reach Dad. It’s important.”
“Is it about Daniel?” Her voice was instantly alert.
“Uh…” His mind went blank. He wasn’t ready to tell her about Chris. And Chris had asked to do it himself. “Not really. They’ve identified one of the female bodies from that pit as Katy Darby, remember her?”
Cecilia sucked in her breath. “Oh, that poor girl. We always wondered what happened to her. I had a gut feeling it wasn’t good. She had such a zest for life, and she loved working with your father. She was really going places. I knew she didn’t just run off.”
“The police want to ask Dad some more questions about her. He’s not answering his cell. Can I talk to him?”
“He’s not here, Michael. He and Phillip are leaving first thing in the morning for Japan. He’s staying at Phillip’s tonight.”
“At the governor’s mansion? That’s farther away from the airport.”
“They’re flying privately out of Salem to LA, meeting up with some other officials, and then flying out of LAX, I believe.”
“How early are they going?”
“I don’t know. He thought it was easier to stay down there than leave from here, so I had the impression it was a crack-of-dawn type flight.”
“I guess I’ll see if I can catch them before they go. I’m actually headed to Salem, but I’m several hours away.”
Michael glanced at Chris as he ended the call. “Feel like seeing The Senator today?”
Chris stared back at him.
“Better get your story ready.”
See the senator, thought Chris. In a few hours?
His life had completely turned upside down and inside out in a matter of hours. He’d put the senator and Cecilia out of his head years ago. It was the only way to keep his sanity.
He leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, a dizziness settling in his brain. For a few years as a kid, he’d fantasized about his reunion with his real parents, but he’d always felt a shadow watching over him, waiting for him to make one wrong move that would signal the Ghostman to kill them and Michael. So he’d stopped thinking about them, forcing himself to look at the Jacobses as his real parents, and he embraced Jamie as his sister.
But now it was time to own up to the truth.
His stomach churned, and he swallowed hard. He didn’t want a repeat performance of the scene in the alley.
“They’re gonna stop him, right? He’s not going to hurt anyone else.” He didn’t clarify whom to Michael.
“If the police don’t stop him, I will. They’ll spot that car on the highway, and I’m not going to stop until I know what he’s done with Jamie.”
Chris opened his eyes and studied his brother in the dim light. Even though it’d been twenty years, he knew the determined set of that stubborn jaw. When Michael had his mind set on something, he didn’t rest until he achieved it. Right now that obsession was Jamie.
He noted his brother didn’t say “when I get Jamie back.”
There was a very good chance his sister was dead.
Chris took a series of deep breaths. Everything was coming to a head. He was caught in the nightmare he’d been trying to prevent for twenty years. A killer had his sister.
He turned in his seat to check on Brian. The boy looked at ease with his head tipped back in the corner of a seat, his mouth slightly opened, deep in the sleep of childhood.
Brian was safe.
He might be able to put an end to his nightmares tonight. If he knew the Ghostman was behind bars, he’d be able to sleep.
Why him?
He’d asked that question for twenty years. Why had the Ghostman threatened his family and no one else’s? Obviously, he’d kept Daniel and the real Chris alive the longest because he’d had a taste for young boys. How much longer would they have survived? The real Chris wouldn’t have lasted another month. Maybe even a week.
“I still don’t know why he took us,” Chris told Michael. “We all asked him several times why he had to take all the kids from the bus. He never said why.”
“How did it happen?” asked Michael. “I never understood how someone could make a whole group of people and a vehicle vanish the way he did.”
“We were all back on the bus after touring the capitol building. The younger kids were getting whiny. It was a long day for them. I loved going there, you knew that. I loved visiting Dad’s office, and Uncle Phillip’s new representative office wasn’t too far away. Other kids weren’t excited about politics the way I was.”
Michael snorted. “Politics suck.”
“I wanted to be president one day.”
“I remember,” Michael laughed. “I was so fucking jealous of you. The Senator gave you so much more attention because you wanted to follow in his footsteps.”
“No, I was jealous of you. You could do sports and didn’t care what other people thought of you. Your mindset was always independent and cool. I wanted to be like that.”
The two men locked gazes for a split second. Chris saw shock in Michael’s eyes.
“Bullshit.” Michael broke the moment. “You had nothing to be jealous of. Mom and The Senator thought you were perfect.”
“Doesn’t mean I thought I was. I wanted to be more like you.”
“Jesus Christ. Once I realized you probably weren’t coming back, I tried to turn myself into you. Tried to show more interest in The Senator’s job, tried to make my schoolteachers happy. That lasted about a month.
“I had so much guilt. Did you know I lied about being sick to get out of that field trip? For years, I blamed myself for you getting taken. If I’d been there, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe I could have talked him into releasing you and taking me instead. Fuck. I figured Mom and The Senator hated me because you were gone and they were stuck with me. The lazy kid, the school skipper and skateboarder who nearly flunked out of math. How many times do you think they said, ‘If only Michael had vanished instead of Daniel’?”
“They never said that!”
“They did in my brain. I believed they were too polite to say it out loud.”
Chris stared at his brother. He’d often wondered how Michael had handled being left behind. As a kid, he’d figured his brother probably missed him on one level but cheered that he was an only child on another.
The Ghostman had wreaked havoc on everyone.
“I had no idea,” Chris said quietly. “You know those are probably normal thoughts for a kid who experienced what you went through, but Mom and The Senator always loved you. They didn’t wish you were gone.”
Michael shrugged. “You have to love your own kid.”
“No sane person wishes for their kid to be harmed.”
“I couldn’t keep the thoughts from occurring.”
“Did you ever talk to someone?”
“A therapist? Yeah, I did that a few times. They wanted me to talk about my feelings too damned much. I just wanted them to help certain thoughts go away. I shoulda seen a hypnotist instead.”
An overwhelming affection for his brother touched Chris. Michael had been in pain, too. They shouldn’t have hurt alone.
He should have told the truth twenty years ago.
“You didn’t finish your story,” Michael prodded. “What happened to Sylvia Vasquez, the driver?”
“Oh.” Chris struggled to focus. He was still thinking about Michael, young teenage Michael wishing he was dead instead of his brother.
“Sylvia coordinated the whole tour. She was a lot more than just a driver.”
“I remember. She seemed to do a little bit of everything at the school.”
“Well, we’d all gotten back on the bus and were starting to leave the parking lot when the Ghostman flagged us down. He was waving a jacket at us, like one of us had left something behind during the tour. And he was shouting her name like he was familiar with her.”
“So maybe he knew her?”
“I saw her face. I don’t think she knew him. But he got her attention, and she stopped the bus. When she opened the door for him, he said that one of us had left behind a coat, and he stepped on the bus.”
“What were the kids doing?”
“Everyone sorta looked at each other, waiting to see who admitted leaving a coat. Sylvia turned in her seat to look at us, and that’s when he crouched down and revealed the gun wrapped in the coat. He pointed it at Sylvia and told her to drive.”
“Holy crap. And she just did what he said?”
“He eventually pointed the gun at Kendall, who was in the front seat. That made Sylvia drive.”
“No one saw the bus leave,” said Michael. “They asked for tips all over the city, and no one came forward to say they’d seen the bus. How in the hell did it just vanish?”
Chris shook his head. “We drove right through plenty of traffic. A million times, I wanted to flag someone and say we needed help, but he watched us like a hawk. Kendall was crying. He had the gun on her the whole way. Most of the kids were crying at one point or another. He kept saying he just needed a ride, and if we’d take him where he needed to go, he’d let us go safely.
“The first thing he did when we got to the woods was shoot Sylvia Vasquez. Then threaten to do the same to everyone else if we didn’t obey him.”
Michael was silent as he drove.
Chris looked out the window. How many times had he relived that bus ride? If he’d flagged another motorist. If he’d tackled the Ghostman as his attention waned for a second. His life and everyone else’s could have been different.
“You were only a kid,” Michael said. “Nothing you could have done would have made a difference.”
Mind reader.
Chris wiped at his cheek. One day he might actually believe that.