“I’m going with you,” his father said.
“I’ll go in the other direction.” He took off running and calling, “Rene! Rene! Come on, stop playing.”
She had to be pulling one over on them. Something she’d done before.
She was famous for hiding in the house and waiting to be found.
Maybe she’d done it again and was going to have a good laugh over it all. Something to get him in trouble.
After racing to the end of the street, turning another, and then calling with no reply, he ran back to the rented cabin.
He’d search in there for her. He’d be the one to find her and give her hell for scaring them all. They’d laugh about it later. Like a month from now when he was over being grounded.
That had to be it. A way for him to get in trouble for not doing what was asked of him.
“You had one job,”she often said to him, imitating their parents, then she’d burst out laughing.
But she was nowhere in the cabin. He checked every nook, every cubby, and every cabinet she could sneak into. Not even under the screened-in porch where some water toys were stored.
The back door opened, his parents returning, their faces showing exhaustion, shock, and more than a touch of fear.
“I’m calling the police,” his father said. “And if she’s pulling one of her little stunts with us, there will be hell to pay. For both of you.”
“I’m sure she is,” he said. “I just checked around here but didn’t find her.”
Two hours later, she’d been found, her lifeless body dumped in some bushes five minutes away from their cabin.
On her way back to him, but she never made it.
1
BECOME HIS MISSION
Fifteen Years Later
“Rory, stop being a dickhead.”
“You’re a dickhead,” he said, giving her a playful shove.
She’d aged some in his dreams, but not much. It was like his brain couldn’t process she would have turned thirty months ago.
She still had straight brown hair down the middle of her back. Sometimes she was sporting a ponytail, other times, braids, this time it was straight and flowing. The stretchy jeans she had on were ripped in the knees, her T-shirt baggy and cut off at her waist, her feet bare.
“I can’t be a dickhead if I don’t have a dick,” she said, flopping on his bed. His sister always sat on his bed when he was dreaming, if she wasn’t walking around his room.
It drove him insane that he couldn’t dream of her anywhere else other than talking to him in his bedroom while he was sleeping, as if his subconscious had to anchor him, reminding him this was only a dream and not proof he was losing his mind. The way he’d feared for years.
Maybe he wouldn’t mind seeing her outside walking, or riding a bike, going on a hike, even drawing on the deck. All those things she’d enjoyed.
Nope, had to be a bedroom conversation, like the last one they had before he never saw her alive again.
It wasn’t as if he’d ever admitted to anyone that he’d been dreaming of his dead sister for more than a decade. The dreams hadn’t even started right away, which, in hindsight, was probably a good thing.
They began after college. When he was in the police academy.
Finding his sister’s killer had become his mission. Solving the crime no one else could had been his purpose in life. The one thing that kept him going when everything else crumbled.
But five years on the force had taught him one hard truth. He didn’t belong there.
