“So you’re thinking…what? This might not have been a sleepwalking thing? She might have been murdered?”
“At the moment, I’d say that was unlikely. But, yes, it’s a possibility. Maybe she was killed while she was sleepwalking. Maybe she was killed after she woke up—on her way home.”
“But there would still be a body.”
He nodded. “One would think so. And we certainly found no one who would seem to have any reason to want her dead. She didn’t have enemies. No one in her address book, none of her clients. None of your neighbors. You didn’t want her dead. Paige didn’t want her dead. Your dad didn’t want her dead. I mean…people loved her. All of you loved her.”
I opened the cabinet under the sink where I suspected there would be a kitchen garbage can. There was. I tossed my lemonade cup into it. Then I stood up and asked another of the hard, horrible questions that had been gnawing at me as a woman. “Okay, here’s another gruesome question: Are you investigating if she was raped? A random thing? She was outside alone at night and someone attacked her?”
“So she was raped and murdered? Yes. But so far that track hasn’t gone anywhere.”
“Have you ever had a case like this?”
“I haven’t. And I’ve been doing this twelve years.”
Instantly I did the math in my head. I supposed he was thirty-three, a dozen years my senior. My mom was forty-seven. That meant she was fourteen years older than he was. My mom had been forty-two when they met, and he had been twenty-eight.
“It’s baffling,” he was saying. “But you do this long enough, you get a case like this. Every cop does. Sometimes you solve them. And sometimes you don’t. They just grow cold.”
“God,” I murmured. “If only I’d slept on my dad’s side of the bed that night.”
“Yeah, but that still assumes you might have woken up. This isn’t your fault, Lianna. Your mom worried if something ever happened to her you’d feel this way. But she never wanted you to feel even a twinge of guilt.”
“She talked about something happening to her?”
“Of course she did. You pulled her off a bridge, for God’s sake.”
“Did she think she’d go back there?”
“She was more afraid she’d set the house on fire. She was more afraid she’d accidentally hurt you or your sister.”
“Is that why you asked me about her dreams the day she disappeared?”
“Not really. There’s only the most mundane association between sleepwalking and dreams. They occur in different parts of the sleep cycle. It’s not like a sleepwalker is acting out a dream.”
“Then why?”
“They tell us a bit about a person’s inner life, don’t you think? And in your mom’s case? Plane crashes. Dead bodies.”
“She was scared of leaving people behind?”
“Possibly.”
“Lucky guess.”
“But her dreams may not mean that at all. A lot of shrinks will tell you a plane crash dream is about failure. Nothing more. You’re not achieving your goals.”
“Or maybe you’re out of control?”
“Maybe. And your mom did remember more than a lot of sleepwalkers. She sure as hell remembered more than I ever did. Most of us have amnesia. But not your mom. At least not precisely. She would remember a detail here and there, and sometimes she’d think it was a dream. She’d actually hope it was a dream.”
“Where did you two used to go to talk?”
“You should be the detective.”
It was getting late in the afternoon now, and I felt a chill on my stomach. I went ahead and untied my shirt and then buttoned the three lower buttons. “That’s not an answer.”
“No, it’s not. Sometimes we went to the coffee shop near the hospital and the hotel they use for their sleep studies. Sometimes we’d head downtown. We’d go to that bakery across the street from the library on College Street.”
“My mom did love their cupcakes.”
“And their coffee. Decaf, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Did you inherit her love of cupcakes?”
“I did.”
“Ever have the time to come to Burlington?”
I chuckled. “These days I have nothing but time.”
“The bakery has more than cupcakes. They have pretty good sandwiches. Want to come to lunch on Monday? It’s one of my days off this week.”
His voice was casual, but once more the room shifted. I wanted to see him again, but I needed reassurance that he and my mother had never been romantically involved. I met his eyes: “You swear that you and my mom were not having an affair?”
He raised his right hand. “I swear. It was never, ever like that. She loved your dad. And I was dating someone else back then, too.”
“What happened?”
“She moved to Boston. We grew apart.”
“And you’re not, I don’t know, crossing some ethical line as a detective?”
“By taking you to lunch?” He smiled. “Arguably.”